God has to submit to the
logical law of contradiction, and He cannot, according to the
theologians, cause two and two to make either more or less than four.
Either the law of necessity is above Him or He Himself is the law of
necessity. And in the moral order the question arises whether falsehood,
or homicide, or adultery, are wrong because He has so decreed it, or
whether He has so decreed it because they are wrong. If the former, then
God is a capricious and unreasonable God, who decrees one law when He
might equally well have decreed another, or, if the latter, He obeys an
intrinsic nature and essence which exists in things themselves
independently of Him--that is to say, independently of His sovereign
will; and if this is the case, if He obeys the innate reason of things,
this reason, if we could but know it, would suffice us without any
further need of God, and since we do not know it, God explains nothing.
This reason would be above God. Neither is it of any avail to say that
this reason is God Himself, the supreme reason of things. A reason of
this kind, a necessary reason, is not a personal something. It is will
that gives personality. And it is because of this problem of the
relations between God's reason, necessarily necessary, and His will,
necessarily free, that the logical and Aristotelian God will always be a
contradictory God.
The scholastic theologians never succeeded in disentangling themselves
from the difficulties in which they found themselves involved when they
attempted to reconcile human liberty with divine prescience and with the
knowledge that God possesses of the free and contingent future; and that
is strictly the reason why the rational God is wholly inapplicable to
the contingent, for the notion of contingency is fundamentally the same
as the notion of irrationality.
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