Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?”
God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you.’” Exodus 3:13-14
Why did God tell Moses his name is “I Am Who I Am?” No one knows completely and for sure. God’s nature is infinite; our understanding is finite. So, just like counting to infinity, we can approach an answer, but we can never expect to arrive at a full and complete one. Nevertheless, a true, partial answer is still progress from no answer at all. In this article series I offer a partial answer.
In Part 1 of this series, I introduced the philosophical tradition of natural theology, which is the study of what can be known about God by reasoning backwards from creation (nature) to the being that created it. In Part 2 of this series, we examined Aristotle’s Argument from Motion, which is a particular chain of reasoning from nature to the existence of an Unmoved Mover. In this third and final part to the series we will see that the Unmoved Mover is the being we know of as “God,” and in doing so we will shed some light on the name God gave to Moses: I AM.
From Unmoved Mover to I AM – A Description of God
We must be very careful before we judge that something is God. To call any being less than the greatest being in the universe “God” has always been considered idolatry in Christian history. If I want to show that the Unmoved Mover is God, I must at least show that he has three central characteristics: (1) omnipotence,1 (2) omniscience,2 and (3) moral perfection. In what follows, I will argue that the Unmoved Mover does indeed exhibit all three of these characteristics, plus a few more. Let’s take them in turn:
This one is the most straightforward. Remember from Part 2 that the Unmoved Mover is a being of pure, unrestrained actuality. This is just another way of saying it has all powers to the maximum degree, because to lack in any way is to contain potential. In other words, the Unmoved Mover is omnipotent.3
We can break this property into two: Intelligent and all-knowing.
Intelligence is a power, so this being has intelligence to the maximal degree. It has to be to the maximal degree because if a power could be greater, than it is potentially greater, and the Unmoved Mover has no potentials.
Notice also that learning is a type of change. A fact is in potency to us if we do not know it. By learning we actualize our knowledge of it. It follows that the unmoved mover knows everything.
We say something is good insofar as it has actualized some virtue or skill. The unmoved mover is pure act, so it must actualize all virtues to a maximal degree and cannot be said to be bad or deficient in any way.
But wouldn’t it follow that the Unmoved Mover also actualizes all vices as well as virtues? It would if vices were something that really exist. In classical ethics, wickedness and evil are not considered to be existing things, rather, they are what we call a “privation.” Ask yourself, does a hole in a wall exist? In a certain sense it does – we can see it after all – but in the truest sense it does not exist, because what really exists is a wall, and the hole is just a part of it that is missing. In the same way, vice is the just a failure to live up to perfect virtue. This is the “privation theory of evil.”
Now, there are good reasons to believe in the privation theory of evil outside of scripture.4 However, for Christian readers, there are also good reasons from scripture to believe in the theory. In Genesis Chapter 1 God says of everything after creating it that “it is good.” Since God is the creator of everything, at face value this suggests that everything that exists is good. But then we might ask, from whence evil? The privation theory is the only answer.
So now we have shown that the Unmoved Mover is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect. For many, this is enough to demonstrate he is God. However, to understand God being the I AM we need to deduce a few more.
Could there be more than one Unmoved Mover? Perhaps one to terminate every causal chain? No. Suppose that there are two unmoved movers. What trait differentiates them? Whatever trait one has to differentiate itself from the other, that trait must be something the other could potentially have. But the Unmoved Mover cannot posses any potentials. Therefore, there can be nothing to differentiate one Unmoved Mover from another. If it is not possible to differentiate the Unmoved Mover from another instance of its kind, then there can only be one Unmoved Mover.
And here is, finally, where we get to the point I have been teasing. This one always gives me the chills. In philosophy, we call a thing “contingent” if its something that could exist but also could not exist. In other words, it’s a being for whom existence is a potential. The unmoved mover is pure, unbound act. There is no potential for it to exist or not exist, it just is existence. In other words, its essence is “to be.”
Understanding I AM – The Conclusion
Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?”
What is a name? A name is a term meant to single out one instance of a kind. There are many human beings in the world, so if you wanted to refer to the human being who authored this article you would use my name: Tate Williams.
As we’ve seen above, God is the only instance of his kind. He is a singular entity, wholly unique. So, God doesn’t need a name in the way we do; to name God we would only need to describe what he is, what in philosophy we call his essence. We’ve also shown from the Argument from Motion that God’s essence is to exist. He is pure actuality, totally unbounded and unlimited existence. In the simplest words: God is to be. Change “to be” from third person to first person, as God was speaking to Moses, and it is “I AM!”
And that is it! That is the breakthrough. To summarize, what we have shown in this article is that, If Aristotle’s Argument from Motion is correct, then it makes sense that God would name himself to Moses as I AM. If we reason backwards from nature to the source of all nature, we arrive at a being for whom the name I AM is a most true and profound description.
I don’t know whether this discovery will seem important to you, but I can testify to the feeling of amazement and wonder it gives me. That a handful of ancient Athenian thinkers could discover an unknown God. He had never spoken to them. They did not know He struck Ancient Egypt with the plagues, that He wrote His commandments to Moses on the mountain, that He would become a man to redeem the world, but they knew that He existed and explains all existence. If they could know all that two and a half millennia ago, what excuse do we have?
1 Meaning “all-powerful”
2 Meaning “all-knowing”
3 This is one of the areas that gets jumbled in the simplification. Someone might ask on the contrary, if potencies are powers, and this being has no potencies, doesn’t it have no powers? A fuller presentation of this argument would distinguish between what we call active potencies and passive potencies. Active potencies are powers to act. Passive potencies are the potential to be acted on. The Unmoved Mover is a being where all passive potencies are fully actualized. This would entail that if have all active potencies to the maximum degree, because the potential to improve a power is a passive potency.
4 The privation theory is closely woven with several contentious issues in meta-ethics and metaphysics, so it would be too much to summarize such reasons here. For an introduction and defense of the metaphysical doctrine of Essentialism which necessitates this theory, see Edward Feser’s Scholastic Metaphysics, Chapter 4.
Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?”
God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you.’” Exodus 3:13-14
Why did God tell Moses his name is “I Am Who I Am?” No one knows completely and for sure. God’s nature is infinite; our understanding is finite. So, just like counting to infinity, we can approach an answer, but we can never expect to arrive at a full and complete one. Nevertheless, a true, partial answer is still progress from no answer at all. In this article series I offer a partial answer.
In Part 1 of this series, I introduced the philosophical tradition of natural theology, which is the study of what can be known about God by reasoning backwards from creation (nature) to the being that created it. This tradition predates Christianity, and is, I think, what Paul himself referred to in the opening to his epistle to Rome. The perhaps surprising conclusion from this is that the classical Greek and Roman world knew of God – the I Am; the Creator of Heaven and Earth – even while they were still Pagan. In this article, Part 2 of the series, I sketch how it is that they discovered God through nature, called the Argument from Motion.
On Whether God Exists – The Argument from Motion
In the natural theology tradition, there are many arguments for the existence of God. The term “argument” is not actually a combative term; this wasn’t the crux of an academic fight or “culture war” like it is today. Rather, “argument” just means a syllogism, that is, it’s a chain of reasoning anyone can follow, like an equation or deduction. While there are many such arguments for God that have been put forward, the Argument from Motion is distinguished as the oldest and most influential in philosophical history.1
The argument from motion begins with a simple, undeniable observation about nature: some things move. The term “move” here is actually a technical term which designates all kinds of change. If I walk to the kitchen and put the kettle on I moved to the kitchen, but Aristotle and co. would also say that the water in the kettle “moves” by changing from cold to hot. So, we can translate this to:
(P1) Change occurs.
Let’s unpack this premise. What Aristotle observed is that for anything to change it must be the kind of thing that can change, that is, it must have the power to change, then it must actually exercise that power.2 This is the distinction between what we now call “act” and “potency.” A potency being from the root word of our English words “power,” and “potential.” Act is from the root word of English words like “actual” or “action.”
The whole argument depends on understanding this distinction, so let’s look at an example. I am laying down; I stand up and walk to the kitchen. While I am laying down “walking” is in me only in potency. When I stand up and move my legs, walking is actualized. Notice that what is in me in potency are the powers I have but am not exercising. I am human, so I have the power to walk, eat, jump, speak, and so on, and I can do these things even if I am not currently doing them. These are potencies I can actualize. I cannot, however, fly, read minds, shoot webs from my hands, etc. These are potencies which I do not have.
With this distinction we can add the second premise:
(P2) Every change is the actualization of a potency.
I’ll also give you premise three:
(P3) Potencies can only be actualized by something that is already actual.
Why should we believe this premise? Well… because it is obvious. My walking is actualized by the movement of my actual legs not my potential legs. A human with only potential legs (a fetus perhaps) cannot walk.3
Putting these three premises together leads to the following conclusion:
(P4) Therefore, every change entails something actual to actualize it.
So, I have proven that in order to actually walk I need to have actual legs. This is hardly a monumental discovery of philosophy! But notice that we still have not explained my moving to the kitchen. My walking is caused not by my legs (that only explains the potential to walk), but by the movement of my legs. We have only exchanged one movement for another (or one change for another). Ultimately, the movement of my legs will need to be explained by something else actual, perhaps the chemical processes of my muscles, which is just another instance of change! Now we have a regress. This regress can only terminate with something that can change other things without itself changing in the process.4 In other words, an unmoved mover, or unchanged changer. Without a being like this existing, change cannot happen. Of course, change does happen, so an unmoved mover must exist.
So, we’ve proven the existence of an unmoved mover. Is the unmoved mover God? The simple answer is yes, it is. Once we understand what kind of thing an unmoved mover must be we’ll see that it is what everyone understands to be God, the I Am. However, that part of the argument must wait for part 3 of this series.
To finish off this this article I want to consider a common objection to the part of the argument from motion we’ve seen so far. The objection is this, I’ve said that to terminate the regress of moved movers we need an unmoved mover, but couldn’t it just be that there is no end? What if its just moved movers for infinity? Why does the chain need to end at all?
Perhaps an infinite chain of causes is possible (I don’t really know). However, if it is possible, we can be certain that it isn’t possible for this particular chain of causes. This is because what needs to be explained isn’t each instance of motion in the chain, but the entire presence of motion in the entire chain.
To illustrate this, suppose you see an illuminated lamp, but it seems to have no cord. You will be puzzled. Lamps have the potential to make light only if actualized by electricity. You investigate the lamp to see if it has batteries. It does, and you are satisfied, because batteries are a source of electricity. Suppose now that there were no batteries. Then there must be a cord that is hidden from view. You find a cord, but this is still not enough. Cords carry electricity, they do not generate it. You follow the cord to an outlet and are satisfied. But why? Outlets are themselves just cords. Suppose someone said that the copper wire in the outlet went on for infinity and never connected to a generator, would that explain the light in your lamp? No. Because what needs to be explained is not the chain that passes electricity to the lamp, but the presence of electricity itself, and that will only be explained by something which can generate electricity. It’s the same with change/motion. An infinite regress of moved movers is like an infinite line of copper wire. It needs to terminate in a source which explains the presence of actuality in the chain, ie. we need something which can generate actuality.
Check back next month for the final part of this series where we will explore how an understanding of the concept of an unmoved mover sheds light on God’s name, the I Am.
1 In Thomas Aquinas’s famous five ways, the Argument from Motion is the first, because it is, in his words, “the most manifest” by which he meant the most evident or obvious. Aquinas did not invent the argument, but rather inherited it from Aristotle, the genius Athenian philosopher and tutor to Alexander the Great. But Aristotle did not invent it either. He no doubt learned it from Plato, his own teacher, who is the closest we can get to a true originator of the argument, however, its form of arguing back to a single, ultimate explanation predates even him and is likely what animated much of pre-Socratic philosophy (see God and Greek Philosophy by Lloyd Gerson). All of this is to say, that the argument from motion is practically as old as western philosophy itself, it is a landmark at the very beginning of recorded inquiry.
2 Every instance of change is defined by this general formula: x changes into y if and only if x could be y, and x becomes y. In technical jargon, if x could be y, we say that x is potentially y, or, x has y in potency (notice the root word potency means both “power” and “possibility;” this is important). When x becomes y we say in technical jargon that y becomes actual, that y is actualized, or, that x has y in act.
3 No one I know of challenges (P3), but I will give a defense of it all the same because it is helpful for understanding a move in the argument further on. Act and potency are more than just the mechanisms of change, they are also modes of existing. Altogether, there are three ways one can relate to existence. First, one can “not-exist,” and then, of course, one can “exist.” In between these two is the intermediate of “potentially exist.” If we do not allow this intermediate we run into all sorts of metaphysical problems which I will not go into. The material point here is that potencies cannot actualize anything because they do not fully exist. They are on their way to existing but have not arrived.
4 To see this, suppose the actualization of A is caused by B. We know that A is something that is a mix of potency and act. It is actual enough to be acted on, but potential enough to change. What about B? There are three options: (i) B is pure potential, with no act; (ii) B is a mix of potency and act; or (iii) B is pure act, with no potential. Now we have already ruled out (i), since something that is pure potential cannot cause anything. If it is (ii) then we have only replaced one motion for another and punted the problem. The only option remaining is (iii), that there exists something that is pure act which that can actualize potencies without itself being actualized by anything.
Part 1
Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?”
God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you.’” Exodus 3:13-14
Why did God tell Moses his name is “I Am Who I Am?” No one knows completely and for sure. God’s nature is infinite; our understanding is finite. So, just like counting to infinity, we can approach an answer, but we can never expect to arrive at a full and complete one. Nevertheless, a true, partial answer is still progress from no answer at all. In this article series I offer a partial answer.
On the way we will touch on an ancient tradition of study called Natural Theology and (I think) a compelling reason to believe that God exists. I hope this series can be uplifting to readers who have faith in God, but also challenging to readers who are atheist. I will settle for just educational.
What is Natural Theology?
When Paul wrote his letter to the infant church in Rome he began by writing this:
The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. (Emphasis added).
I’ve heard some people interpret this passage to mean that everyone knows God exists deep down somewhere; that there are no honest to God atheists. I don’t think that is what it means. In my opinion, what it means is much more mundane than that. Quite simply, belief in God – capital “G” God, creator of heaven and earth – was the academic consensus of the time, and Paul was merely referencing this well-known fact.
Belief in God (called “Theism” by philosophers) was the foundation of two of the largest and most prestigious schools of thought in the Greco-Roman world: Platonism and Stoicism. But weren’t the Greeks and Romans polytheist pagans? Yes, they were. As strange as it may seem, Polytheism (belief in many gods) and Theism (belief in the one God) are perfectly compatible, and both were the paradigm in the time of Paul.
They no more contradict each other as believing that many rocks exist and believing that The Rock (as in the actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) exists.1 See, the capitals really matter, its what turns a common noun into a proper noun. For the Greeks and Romans, the term “god” referred to a spiritual being much nobler and more powerful than a human being, basically what the Hebrews and Christians would call an angel or a demon. By contrast, the term “God” used as a proper noun, referred to a being postulated by philosophers to have created everything that exists; the ultimate explanation of everything.
Of course, before the Apostles arrived no Greek or Roman philosopher that we know of had met God or knew anything about him besides that he existed. As far as we know God never revealed himself to them. To them he was truly The Unknown God (Acts 17:23).
So now we get to the important question: how did they know God existed without revelation or prophets? Well, we can find out by reading the writings of someone like Plato, still preserved today but the short version is it was exactly how Paul says it happened in Romans 1. That is, they reasoned backwards from what has been made (nature) to understand the being that made it. By the Middle Ages, Christian scholars came to call this kind of reasoning Natural Theology, the study of God through nature, which was in contrast to the much more valuable Revealed Theology, the study of God through his revelation.
Today, regrettably, Natural Theology is not well known or studied, especially in the Churches of Christ. I have found in it much comfort for my faith, and I hope to share a piece of that with you by examining what it potentially reveals about God’s name I Am That I Am. I will do that in the following parts of this series
To end this part of the series, it is perhaps useful for me to address some common questions on Natural Theology that are likely to trouble some readers. In particular, can Natural Theology add to Revealed Theology? That is, does it go beyond it? If it does, should we not be suspicious of any claim to go beyond what God has directly told us? And on the other hand, if it does not, then what is the point? What purpose could it possibly serve? We will answer these questions in order.
Can Natural Theology add to Revealed Theology? This is a very grand question for a very meagre theologian. To answer it I would need to know exhaustively everything that can possibly be known about God through the study of nature and through the study of scripture, then see if there is anything in the first category that is not in the second. I obviously can not do that, but I can say that I am open to the possibility of Natural Theology adding to Revealed Theology. I do not think that would threaten Revealed Theology in the least.
To see why, think of the search for Truth as like a murder investigation. Natural Theology is the kind of investigation Sherlock Holmes would do. It is examining the facts and making deductions and inferences to the best explanation. By contrast Revealed Theology is like a signed confession from the murderer. Perhaps Sherlock Holmes could deduce some details about the murder not included in the confession and thus we could say he added to the case. But once the trial is underway, those details would be unimportant compared to the signed confession which clinches the verdict. Likewise, God’s revelation is the deciding truth on which we depend, and nothing that Natural Theology teaches us can possibly threaten that.2
So then, what is the point of Natural Theology? My answer is that natural theology helps in understanding what we believe through faith. See, there is a long distance between (A) believing something is true because you are told and (B) understanding why what you believed is true. There is much wisdom to be gained in the journey from A to B, and Natural Theology is a part of that journey.
If you are skeptical, follow me in this series to see an example of what I mean.
1 Some readers may object to this comparison on the grounds that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is only a “rock” in an analogical sense, that is, because he exhibits rock-lock qualities, not because he is actually a kind of rock. However, the same holds between “gods” and “God” in classical Greeco-Roman philosophy. It is a result of their view that God is only a “god” analogically, that is, because he exhibits the god-like qualities of being an immaterial person much nobler and more powerful than human beings. He is NOT actually a kind of god though. In this worldview, God has as much in common with gods as The Rock has with rocks. Actually, he has much less in common, because at the very least both rocks and The Rock are creatures. God is the only being that is not created, and this means there is a very wide ontological gulf between him and every other existing thing.
2 What I hope this analogy illustrates is (1) the different methods of acceptance involved in each kind of theology and (2) that the two kinds of theology are not in conflict with each other. On (1), notice that Natural Theology is the study of God indirectly; it examines his works and reasons towards his character. By contrast, Revealed Theology studies God directly; it examines his own words and one can respond either by believing what he says or disbelieving what he says (i.e. through faith). On (2), God’s words and his actions will never contradict each other, so we need never worry that the two methods of theology will conflict. Sometimes the two kinds of theology are called “the book of nature” and “the book of God’s word” to emphasize that they are both from God, and thus cannot contradict. I avoid this cliché only because I want to emphasize Revealed Theology’s unique position as God’s direct speech to us. Ultimately, scripture is the only book of God’s word. Nature is from God in that it is his work, and we can learn a lot from studying his works, but it is not his word. Salvation is found through faith in his word.
