The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

20 The Idea of God
unifying principle that accounts for the fact that the list contains the
particular items it does and no others?; secondly, to what degree, if any,
is the list (and the accounts I shall give of each of its members) as we
might say open to negotiation?
The list that can be obtained by the method I propose is a rich one.
In my view, it contains the following properties. God is, first,
—a person.
By a person, I mean a being who may be, in the most straightforward
and literal sense, addressed—a being whom one may call ‘thou’. (Of
course a non-person like a flower in the crannied wall or an urn or a city
may be addressed in a non-straightforward and non-literal sense. When
we do that, we call it personification.) In saying this, I do not mean
to be offering an analysis of the concept of a person—whatever exactly
‘analysis’ may mean. I mean only to fix the concept of a person, to make
it plain which of our available concepts I am using the word to express,
rather as one might say: By ‘knowledge’ I shall mean propositional
knowledge rather than knowledge by acquaintance; and not as one
might say, By ‘knowledge’ I shall mean undefeated justified true belief.
If I were to venture a guess as to how the concept of a person should
be analyzed, I should say something very lengthy that would like start
this: a person is a conscious being having beliefs and desires and values,
capable of abstract thought ... and so on. But I should regard any
such analysis of ‘person’ as provisional, as liable to require revision in
just the way ‘Knowledge is justified true belief ’ turned out to require
revision. Nothing in this lecture or the remaining lectures in this series
is going to turn on any particular analysis of personhood. I include this
attribute in my list (and it is really redundant, for most of the attributes
in the list could belong only to a person) simply to make it plain that I
regard it as part of the concept of God—as do all Jews, Christians, and
Muslims—that he cannot possibly be thought of as impersonal, like
Brahman or the Tao or the Absolute Idea or the Dialectic of History or,
to descend to a rather more popular level, the Force.
Some of my theologically sophisticated colleagues in the Notre Dame
Philosophy Department regard the idea that God is a person as rather
crude, as perhaps even wrong. And I’m not talking about disguised
atheists, like the theologian I quoted a moment ago—I’m talking about
pious, perfectly orthodox Thomists (or at least people with a pretty high
blood-Thomism level). But I’ve never been able to understand why.