Archive for July, 2010

Here is yet another post inspired by a spirited conversation with the scrappy Lutheran known as John Fraiser. We recently engaged in a philosophical kerfluffle over whether God knows what it’s like to be Napoleon (or a bat, or a pimp, or the present king of France, or Schrödinger’s cat, or anyone God does not happen to be). The debate arose after jointly considering Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument against materialism in the philosophy of mind, but the topic soon led to whether any such arguments could be applied to God’s knowledge.

I affirmed that God did indeed know what it is like to be Napoleon. John gave a negative answer, and the contest commenced. Although this important question is clearly pressing on the hearts of many Americans during these troubled times, the goal of this post is not to give an answer but to clarify what the arguments are and where the disagreement lies. After explaining the arguments, I will address some tentative reasons for why I take the (clearly) correct position.

Here is John’s argument, reconstructed as I understand it:

(1) It is a necessary condition of having a full knowledge of what it is like to be Napoleon that one believe he is Napoleon.
(2) God believes no falsehoods, so God does not believe He is Napoleon.
(3) Therefore God does not have a full knowledge of what it is like to be Napoleon.

The first premise is the hinge on which John’s argument turns. According to this premise, one can reasonably imagine what it is like to have some of Napoleon’s experiences. For example, one can imagine what it is like to stand on a hill in Waterloo and order your cannons to fire on Wellington’s cavalry, or what it is like to be short, or what it is like to keep your hand in your coat while posing for a portrait. Although we are limited in what we can imagine of Napoleon’s experiences and properties, God can imagine what it is like to have all of Napoleon’s experiences and properties. However, this act of imagining (on our part or God’s) does not deliver a complete knowledge of what it is like to be Napoleon, for to have that one must also believe that he is Napoleon. In other words, having a first person perspective on what it is like to be Napoleon is a requirement if one wants to truly know what it is fully like to be Napoleon. So in addition to imagining having the various experiences and properties of Napoleon, one must imagine that he believes that he is Napoleon. This is something of a contradiction, since in the very attempt to imagine one is acknowledging that he is not Napoleon at all. Hence only Napoleon knows what it is like to be him, since only he possesses a first person perspective.

This has strange consequences when we apply it to God. God certaintly doesn’t believe He is Napoleon, for He believes no falsehoods. But if premise (1) is true, then God is forever separated from what it is fully like to be any human other than Jesus Christ. This means that, in a very significant sense, God doesn’t know what it’s like to be me. He simply cannot imagine in the most important sense what it is like when I kiss my wife, or wrestle with my children on the living room floor, or even what it is like when I pray to Him or worship Him.

This seemed problematic to me, so I offered two counterarguments. Here is the first:

(4) God’s omniscience entails that He knows all truths that are possibly known.
(5) “What it is like to be Napoleon” is a truth that is possibly known.
(6) Therefore God knows what it is like to be Napoleon.

This seemed a bit ambiguous, so I issued a second argument, adjusted for clarity:

(7) Since God is both omniscient and omnipotent, He can perform any mental task that does not involve a logical contradiction.
(8) “Knowing what it is like to be Napoleon” is a mental task that does not involve a logical contradiction.
(9) Therefore God can know what it is like to be Napoleon.

Implicit in (8) is a rejection of John’s premise (1). I rejected (1) because it seems arbitrarily limited by human experience. Of course you and I can’t imagine what it is like to be Napoleon or what it is like to believe that we are Napoleon, but it doesn’t seem right to say that it would be logically impossible for God. God’s powers of imagination aren’t limited. He possesses unlimited cognitive capacity. Further, He created the cognitive environment in which human beings think, believe, and experience, and thus has privileged access to that cognitive environment and the types of things therein. If I create characters for a novel I am writing, I am in complete control over the mental world in which they live, and I have access to that mental world in ways my characters do not. This way of rejecting premise (1) needs to be worked out in more detail, but I think it is the defender of (1) that bears the burden of proof. It just doesn’t seem intuitively plausible that no mind could ever completely grasp what it is like to be Napoleon without accepting the Napoleon identity.

Further, I argued that the vagaries of human experience means that even Napoleon doesn’t know what it is like to be Napoleon, at least in the fullest sense. The human psyche is a deep and mysterious well. We all have questions about who we are and we are often aware that mysterious forces drive our choices and contribute to our own sense of personal identity. God, however, knows everything about Napoleon. He understands the deep reasons for his internal drive to conquer Europe, and so on. There are no deep psychological mysteries to the Ancient of Days.

These are only starting points for a response, but I think I’m on the right track. The key issue is how God’s imagination can overcome the third person perspective that seems to limit one’s ability to fully imagine what it is like to be another person. This challenge is significant, but to say that God can fully imagine what it is like to be Napoleon without believing He is Napoleoon does not seem to be on the same level as saying that God can make 2 and 2 equal 5. He can’t make 2 and 2 equal 5, but this is no limitation on His sovereignty or His power, for it is no true limitation to say that God can’t perform nonsense. It just isn’t clear that having a full knowledge of what it is like to be Napoleon is logically contradictory or nonsensical in the same way.

Here is a continuing rumination on a conversation I had the other day with the erudite John Fraiser about the new atheism. For the most part, I abhor the new atheism. I think it is a cheap, irrational, and culturally unhealthy movement marked by the ironic combination of poor argumentation and philosophical triumphalism. The new atheists pair terrible arguments with preening braggadocio and hateful rhetoric, spawning legions of internet fanboys who mimic their poisonous style. If I want my faith challenged, I’d much rather read Hume or Ayer or Mackie. They actually force me into serious reflection on my faith, and I don’t have to suffer continual Dawkinsian-style insults. The new atheist movement is not a good one, and I think it’s a shame that they’ve been able to wield such cultural influence.

Nevertheless, there are things I like about the movement. Or perhaps I should say that the new atheism may have unintended consequences that I like. Here is a review for a new book that apparently makes the argument that at least one way Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, et al serve Christendom is by holding believers’ feet to the fire in regard to intellectual honesty. This is true and valuable, because I think many Christians tend to be intellectually lazy. From their perspective, they’re already in possession of “truth with a capital T”, and therefore they don’t think they need to think very much about their faith. When the new atheists point out that religious believers don’t have a solid intellectual foundation for their faith, they are partially correct. There are unfortunately very many Christians who are utterly incapable of giving a coherent reason for why they believe in Christianity (a fact that has no bearing on whether Christianity is true or rationally acceptable, however, a point I made to Uncle Skeptic on my old blog).

When an intellectually shallow Christian encounters the arguments of the new atheists, he must either (1) reevaluate the epistemic foundations of his faith and think critically about Christianity in a way he hasn’t done before, (2) stick his head in the sand and ignore their arguments, or (3) accept their arguments, leading to a crisis of faith and possibly unbelief. The new atheists want the results of their efforts to be (3), but I think they miscalculate that many Christians will take option (1). New atheist arguments, febrile as I find them to be, can have a strengthening effect on the church by driving individual Christians to a stronger and more rational intellectual position.

Likewise, although it’s certainly tragic when someone takes option (3) and apostasizes, it’s probably better for the church. Those who leave the faith because they read Richard Dawkins or develop an obsessive fascination with the mountain of atheist polemics online probably never had a very strong faith to begin with. If I read one more “deconversion” story where someone says they were a believer for 20 years but then started reading infidels.org and “realized” God was just a fantasy drilled into their head by pastors and Sunday School teachers, I just might puke. If your faith is this shallow and your cognitive capacities so susceptible to cheap rhetoric passing for logic, you probably have no business being in a church anyway. That’s not to say that there aren’t intelligent Christians who honestly wrestle with their faith and eventually leave it behind for intellectually respectable reasons (see here for a tragic and heartbreaking example), but there are plenty of gullible churchgoers who accept their newfound atheism for reasons that are probably just as unwarranted as the reasons they accepted Christianity to begin with. Hence the new atheism gives the church a bonus by separating the sheep from the goats.