Deconstructing Bishop Baron’s Case for Christianity
Thomism, religious analogies, and the Church’s bait-and-switch
How would one of the leading Christian communicators explain what God’s supposed to be?
Bishop Robert Baron provides his answer in a popular podcast, turning to Thomas Aquinas’s metaphysical abstraction of a necessary being to set God apart from everything in the universe.
Christianity and the philosopher’s metaphysical deity
“Anything in the world,” Baron says, “would be a being of some type or an event of some type, some particular mode of existence. And God is not an entity in the world.”
Indeed, he adds, “that’s one of the fundamental mistakes that atheists old and new make all the time. They think of God as a big being. When Aquinas says that God is not any genus, even the genus of being, it’s one of the strangest remarks in the whole tradition…You’d say at the very least God must be a being, and Aquinas’s answer is no, he’s not in the genus of being. So, we talk about being beyond being.” Again, “what God is is the same as God’s act of to be.”
Mind you, Baron soon enough corrects himself, realizing that if atheists err in this conception of God, it’s only because they’re following most…
