Divine attributes

In previous posts I’ve noted piecemeal that standard definitions of omniscience and omnipotence are incomplete. God’s omnipotence isn’t just that God knows everything—it has to be that he knows it certainly and consciously. We might even say: with maximal certainty and vividness. God’s omnipotence isn’t just that God can do everything—he does it all effortlessly.

It has now occurred to me that both devotionally and philosophically it is fruitful to think about divine attributes by asking what is left out by the rather thin and colorless analytic accounts of them.

Take a flat account of God’s moral perfection as saying that God always does the morally right thing. Well, first, we have to add: and for the right reasons (indeed all the right reasons). Second, we should add that God does this with the perfect attitude—with the appropriate alacrity, without inappropriate regrets, etc.

Or consider the account of God’s being a creator on which God creates everything other than himself. We probably should minimally add that he does this with perfect freedom.

At the moment, this is all I have in the way of clear examples. But I think it’s a worthwhile avenue for exploration and devotion.

Backwards causation, the A-theory and God

Suppose:

1. There are tensed facts.

2. If F is a contingent fact solely about physical reality that does not depend on creaturely free choice, then God can effectually will an exact duplicate of F.

Assumption (1) is a central claim of the A-theory of time, in fact form. Assumption (2) is a hedged consequence of omnipotence, formulated to take into account the possibility of uncreatable Platonic entities and the essentiality of origins.

Add:

3. Backwards causation is impossible.

We now have a problem. Let B be the tensed fact that the Big Bang occurred billions of years ago. This is a contingent fact solely about physical reality that does not depend on creaturely free choice. So, by (2), God can effectually will an exact duplicate of B. But an exact duplicate of B would still be a tensed fact about what happened billions of years ago. And to will such a fact about the past would be backwards causation, contrary to (3).

Note how the problem disappears if we don’t have tensed facts. For then all we have is an untensed fact such as that the Big Bang occurs at t₀, and God can will that without backwards causation, whether God is in time (e.g., he can then will it at t₀) or outside time.

I personally don’t have a problem with backwards causation. But a lot of A-theorists do.

I suppose what the A-theorist should do is to replace (2) with:

4. If F is a contingent fact solely about physical reality that does not depend on creaturely free choice, then God can effectually will a perhaps re-tensed exact duplicate of F.

An omnipotence principle from Aquinas

Aquinas believes that it follows from omnipotence that:

1. Any being that depends on creatures can be created by God without its depending on creatures.

But, plausibly:

2. If x and y are a couple z, then z depends on x and y.

3. If x and y are a couple z, then necessarily if z exists, z depends on x and y.

4. Jill and Joe Biden are a couple.

5. Jill and Joe Biden are creatures.

But this leads to a contradiction. By (4), we have a couple, call it “the Bidens”, consisting by Jill and Joe Biden, and by (2) that couple depends on Jill and Joe Biden. By (1) and (5), God can create the Bidens without either Jill or Joe Biden. But that contradicts (3).

So, Aquinas’ principle (1) implies that there are no couples. More generally, it implies that there are no beings that necessarily depend on other creatures. All our artifacts would be like that: they would depend on parts. Thus, Aquinas’ principle implies there are no artifacts.

Thomists are sometimes tempted to say that artifacts, heaps and the like are accidental beings. But the above argument shows that that won’t do. God’s power extends to all being, and whatever being creatures can bestow, God can bestow absent the creatures. If the accidental beings are beings, God can create them without their parts. But a universe with a heap and yet nothing heaped is absurd. So, I think, we need to deny the existence of accidental beings.

If we lean on (1) further, we get an argument for survivalism. Either Socrates depends on his body or not. If Socrates does not depend on his body, he can surely survive without his body after death. But if Socrates does depend on his body, then by (1) God can create Socrates disembodied, since Socrates’ body is a creature. But if God can create Socrates disembodied, surely God can sustain Socrates disembodied, and so Socrates can survive without his body. In fact, the argument does not apply merely to humans but to every embodied being: bacteria, trees and wolves can all survive death if God so pleases.

Things get even stranger once we get to the compositional structure of substances. Socrates presumably depends on his act of being. But Socrates’ act of being is itself a creature. Thus, by (1), God could create Socrates without creating Socrates’ act of being. Then Socrates would exist without having any existence.

I like the sound of (1), but the last conclusion seems disastrous. Perhaps, though, the lesson we get from this is that the esse of Socrates isn’t an entity? Or perhaps we need to reject (1)?

A complication in the stone argument

Consider:

1. If God can create a stone he can’t lift, there is something he can’t do—namely, lift the stone.

2. If God cannot create a stone he can’t lift, there is something he can’t do—namely, create the stone.

3. So, there is something God can’t do.

4. So, there is no omnipotent God.

A standard way out of this, which I think is basically right, is that (3) is compatible with God’s being omnipotent as long as the thing God can’t do is metaphysically impossible.

But I want to note a rarely noted thing about the argument, which annoys me when I teach the argument to undergraduates because it is a red herring, but one that complicates the presentation.

The following is plausible:

4. If God were to create a stone he can’t lift, there would be something he couldn’t do—namely, lift the stone.

But (1) does not follow from (4) without further assumptions.

One way to get around this issue is to weaken the conclusion of the argument to the claim that possibly there is something God can’t do. That might create trouble for God’s essential omnipotence. Of course, I do accept that God is essentially omnipotent. But it still weakens the conclusion. And it’s a nuisance in teaching to have to get into essential omnipotence when dealing with the argument.

Omniscience, omnipotence and perfection

Recently, I’ve been worried about arguments like this:

1. It is always more perfect to be able to do more things.

2. Being able to do impossible things is a way of being able to do more things.

3. So, a perfect being can do impossible things.

But I really don’t want to embrace 3.

It’s just occurred to me, though, that the argument 1-3 is parallel to the clearly silly argument:

4. It is always more perfect to know more things.

5. Knowing falsehoods is a way of knowing more things.

6. So, a perfect being knows falsehoods.

Once we realize that among “more things” there could be falsehoods, it becomes clear that 4 as it stands is false, but needs to be restricted to the truths. But arguably what truths are to knowledge, that possibles are to power (I think this may be a Jon Kvanvig point, actually). So we should restrict 1 to the possibles.

What Galileo should have said

The big theological problem that Galileo's opponents had for Galileo wasn't the (not very convincing) biblical arguments that the sun moves and the earth stands still, but a theological objection to Galileo's inference from (a) the greater simplicity of the Copernican hypothesis over its competitors and (b) the fact that the hypothesis fits the data to (c) the truth of the Copernican hypothesis. The theological objection, as I understand it, was that Galileo was endangering the doctrine of divine omnipotence, since if there is an omnipotent God, he can just as easily have made true one of the less simple hypotheses that fit the data. (And, indeed, an earth-centered system can be made to fit the data just as well as a sun-centered one if one has enough epicycles.)

What Galileo should have said is that his argument does not, of course, establish the Copernican hypothesis with certainty, but only as highly probable, and that his argument had the form of the well-established theological argument ex convenientia, or from fittingness: "It was fitting for God to do it, God was able to do it, so (likely) God did it." Such arguments were widely given in the Middle Ages for theological views such as the immaculate conception of Mary. The application is that it is fitting for God to do things in the more elegant Copernican fashion, an omnipotent God was able to do things in such wise, and so (likely) God did it. Not only would the argument form have been one that Galileo's interlocutors would have been familiar with and friendly towards, but Galileo would have the dialectical advantage that he could not be reasonably said to be challenging divine omnipotence if his own argument depended on it. (Maybe Galileo did say something like this. I've seen the use of the argumentum ex convenientia in astronomy attributed to Kepler. Maybe Kepler got it from Galileo.)

And, to be honest, I think that all science is essentially founded on arguments ex convenientia. Which are good arguments.

Mysterious thy ways

Imagine an ordinary decent person who is omniscient. Her actions are going to be rather different from what we expect. She would take what would to us be big risks for the sake of small gains, simply because for her there is no risk at all. He stock portfolio is apt to be undiversified and quite strange. If we live in a chaotic world, then she might from time to time be doing some really odd things, like hopping on one leg in order to prevent an earthquake a thousand years hence. There would be bad things she would refrain from preventing because she saw further than we into the consequences, and good things she would avoid for similar reasons.

Now add to this that the person is omnipotent. And morally perfect. These additions would presumably only make the person stranger to us in behavior.

Yet another account of omnipotence

The following account of omnipotence runs into the McEar objection:

1. x is omnipotent iff x can do anything whose doing is consistent with the nature of x.

For suppose McEar has the essential property of doing nothing other than scratching his ear, and suppose he can scratch his ear. Then (1) counts McEar as omnipotent. That's no good.

The Pearce-Pruss account of omnipotence escapes this. But so does this minor twist on (1):

2. x is omnipotent iff x can do anything whose doing is consistent with the nature of a perfect being.

There are things consistent with the nature of a perfect being that McEar can't do, say create a pebble.

Perhaps, though, there is a circularity problem. For a perfect being has all perfections. And one of the perfections is omnipotence. However, I do not know that this is fatal. Compare:

3. a fully self-knowledgeable person is one who knows all her mental attributes.

This seems a perfectly reasonable definition, even if one of the mental attributes of such a person is being fully self-knowledgeable.

Limiting God to solve the problem of evil

Long ago, I remember reading with great curiosity Rabbi Kushner's Why Bad Things Happen to Good People? How disappointing that Kushner's intellectual answer seemed to be that God isn't omnipotent. (His practical answer not to worry about the question but just to do good is much better.) The idea of limiting divine attributes in part to answer the problem of evil has recently had some defense (e.g., here and in the work of open theists), so I guess it's time to blog the objection to Kushner—which applies to the others as well—that I had when I read him, with some elaboration.

Basically, the objection is that as long as God remains pretty good, pretty smart (he was smart enough to create us!) and powerful enough to communicate with us (Kushner at least accepts this), then serious cases of the Problem of Evil remain. Moreover, these cases do not seem significantly easier to solve than the cases of the Problem of Evil that were removed. Consequently, the intellectual benefit with regard to the Problem of Evil is small. And the intellectual loss with regard to the simplicity of the theory is great—the theory that God has all perfections is far simpler.

Start by considering a deity whose goodness is unlimited but whose knowledge and power are fairly limited.

Consider, first, the problem of polio. This is certainly a horrendous evil. And the limited deity could have alleviated a significant portion of the problem hundreds of years earlier simply by whispering into some people's ears how to make a vaccine—surely any deity smart enough to create this world would be smart enough to figure out how to make vaccines. Maybe the limited deity couldn't have prevented all cases, in the way that an unlimited God could. But given that neither did the wholesale prevention happen nor did the partial prevention by vaccines happen as early as it could have.

Consider, second, the many cases where innocent people suffered horrendously at the hands of attackers, where the attack could have been prevented if the people had been warned. Even a deity of limited power and knowledge should be able to see, for instance, that the Gestapo are talking about heading for such-and-such a house, and could then warn the occupants. (I am not saying that such warnings were never given—for all I know, they were in a number of cases. But I am saying that there are many cases where apparently they were not.)

Moreover, even if one limits the goodness of the deity, and only claims that he is pretty good, the problem remains. For unless the deity had a very serious reason not to tell people about vaccines and not to warn the innocent victims of horrendous attacks, it seems plausible that the deity did something quite bad in refraining from helping, so bad as to be incompatible with being pretty good. (If the deity had a reason that fell a little short of justifying the refraining, then that might be compatible with being pretty good; but a reason would have to be pretty serious for it to fall only a little short of justifying the refraining when the evils are so horrendous.) So even if one thinks that the deity has limited power and knowledge and is only pretty good, the problem of finding very serious reasons for the deity's non-interference remains.

Granted, the problem is diminished, especially if one has decreased the belief in divine goodness. But notice that the decrease in belief in divine goodness is the most religiously troubling aspect of a limited God doctrine. And even that does not make the problem go away.

Moreover, the sorts of things one can then plausibly say about the remaining problems of evil are things that, I suspect, the traditional theist can say as well about this and many other cases. Perhaps God does not prevent all attacks on innocent people (for all we know, he prevents many) because he wants humans to have effective freedom of will. Perhaps he wants to give victims opportunities for forgiveness of their aggressors in an afterlife. Perhaps God does not prevent disease because he wants us to help our neighbor and to develop medical science to this purpose. Or to give us an opportunity to join him on the cross in redeeming humankind. Or perhaps God prevents many evils, but his purposes do not allow him to prevent all, and some arbitrary line-drawing is needed. I am not saying that these answers are sufficient (though I think some contain a kernel of something right), but only that they can be equally used in the case of a limited and unlimited God, and in the case of an unlimited God such answers may well have rather general applicability.

Effortlessness and omnipotence

All of the extant definitions of omnipotence are missing what seems to me to be an important ingredient. A typical definition says something like: "God can do anything that's logically possible." But that's not quite enough. One needs to specify that God can do everything effortlessly. This is an easy emendation, of course, but an important one.

The problem of the stone

I like to use the stone argument as a warm-up in a philosophy of religion class. But it's actually kind of tricky to use. Here's a natural way to put it:

1. Either God can or cannot make a stone he can't lift.
2. If God cannot make such a stone, then there is something God can't do.
3. If God can make such a stone, then there is something God can't do, namely lift the stone.
4. So, there is something God can't do.

But in this formulation, (3) can be easily rejected. It does not follow follow from God's merely being able to make such a stone that there is something God can't do, just as it doesn't follow from God's being able to make a unicorn that there is a unicorn. The correct conditional is:

5. If God does make such a stone, then there is something God can't do, namely lift the stone.

But if we replace (3) by (5) in the argument, the argument ceases to be valid.

This means that the stone argument isn't actually an argument against omnipotence. If all that was in view was omnipotence, one could say: "Sure, God can create such a stone. Were he to create it, he wouldn't be omnipotent. But he hasn't created such a stone and he is omnipotent." Rather, we should take the stone argument as an argument against essential omnipotence. And that makes the argument a little less suited for warm-up classroom use, because one has to introduce the notion of an essential property.

What I actually did in class today is I gave the argument in the invalid form. Alas, nobody caught the invalidity. Though, interestingly, one student was unsure of disjunction-elimination in general.

I also emphasized that the stone wasn't really a problem for omnipotence, but for particular attempts to define omnipotence. I think it's important to to distinguish those atheological arguments that are problems for theism from those that are problems for particular ways of defining theism. The inductive problem of evil is an argument against theism; the stone argument is only an argument against particular formulations.

Omnipotence and omniscience

1. Every omnipotent being is perfectly free.
2. Every perfectly free being knows every fact and is not wrong about anything.
3. Therefore, every omnipotent being knows every fact and is not wrong about anything.

Premise (1) is, I think, very plausible. What about (2)? Well, perfect freedom requires perfect rationality and a lack of "imaginative constraints". Imaginative constraints are cases where one cannot will something because one can't think of it. For instance, Cleopatra couldn't will to speak Esperanto, because she didn't have the concept of speaking Esperanto. A lack of imaginative constraints requires quite a bit of knowledge—one has to know the whole space of possible actions. But not only must one know the whole space of possible actions, one must also know everything relevant to evaluating the reasons for or against these actions. But, plausibly, every fact will be relevant to evaluating the reasons for or against some action. Consider this fact, supposing it is a fact: tomorrow there will occur an even number of mosquito bites in Australia. This is a pretty boring fact, but it would be relevant to evaluating the reasons for or against announcing that tomorrow there will occur an even number of mosquito bites in Australia. If this is right, then perfect freedom requires complete knowledge of everything.

In particular, open theists can't take God to be omnipotent.  There is another route to that conclusion.  If open theism is true, God can't now know whether tomorrow I will mow my lawn.  But if God couldn't now know what I will write in my next sentence, then he can't intentionally bring it about that right now (open theists need to accept absolute simultaneity, of course) on Pluto there exists a piece of paper saying what my next freely produced sentence will be.  But to be unable to do that would surely be a limitation of God's power.

Ontological arguments

Continuing my project of reading my hitherto unread reading assigned for the medieval comp, I've been reading Anselm's replies to Gaunilo. As it happens, I never read all of it. When I assigned the text for class, I assigned only an abridged version which at one point says "Anselm continues as some length, but much of what he says seems repetitive". Well, maybe it seems that way to the translator, but the full text is really good stuff. I haven't digested it all, but I think there may be more to Anselm's ontological argument than has caught my eye before. It's at least as good as the S5 ontological argument.

That said, here's another ontological argument, inspired, if memory serves, by a humorous remark my wife made to me once.

1. (Premise) To be incapable of existing is a great impotence.
2. (Premise) Necessarily, anything that is all powerful lacks all impotence.
3. (Premise) A being that exists and is all powerful in one world must exist in all other worlds.
4. (Premise) God is essentially all powerful.
5. God lacks all impotence. (2 and 4)
6. Possibly God exists. (1 and 5)
7. There is a world at which God exists and is all powerful. (4 and 6)
8. God exists in all worlds. (3, 7 and S5)
9. God exists and is omnipotent. (4 and 8)

Step 3 gets a subsidiary argument. More than one comes to mind. But here is one:

10. (Premise for reductio) Suppose x exists and is all powerful at w but does not exist at w*.
11. (Premise) Necessarily, to be unable to be an efficient cause of any sort (remote or immediate, full or contributing, etc.) of a possible but non-necessary state of affairs is an impotence.
12. (Premise) Necessarily, nothing is able to be an efficient cause of any sort of its own failure to ever exist.
13. x's failure to ever exist is a possible but non-necessary state of affairs. (10)
14. It is true at w that x is unable to be an efficient cause of any sort of its failing to ever exist. (12)
15. It is true at w that x is not all powerful. (2, 11, 14) Which absurdly contradicts (10).
16. So if x exists and is all powerful at w, it must exist at every other world w*.

I don't know how seriously this argument is to be taken. By the way, it reminds me of something I heard attributed to Scotus.

Two ontological arguments

The following arguments are sound, but I am not vouching for them being good.

1. (Premise) Possibly, there is an essentially omnipotent being.
2. (Premise) Necessarily, if a is a possible state of affairs and x is an omnipotent being, then x could be at least a remote cause of a.
3. (Premise) It is impossible to be a cause, remote or not, of one's own never having existed.
4. Therefore, necessarily, if x is an essentially omnipotent being, then x exists in all worlds. (2 and 3)
5. Therefore, there is an essentially and necessarily existing omnipotent being. (1, 4 and S5)

6. (Premise) Possibly, there is an essentially robustly omniscient being.
7. (Premise) Necessarily, a robustly omniscient being could know every proposition that is possibly true.
8. (Premise) Nobody could know himself to not exist.
9. Therefore, necessarily, if a robustly omniscient being exists, it exists necessarily. (7 and 8)
10. Therefore, an essentially robustly omniscient being exists. (9 and S5)

[Minor editing - July 12, 2012]

Means-end reasoning

It is very plausible, and rarely disputed except by way of minor qualification (e.g., adding a knowledge condition), that:

1. If one has a reason to pursue an end e, and m is a means to e, then one has a reason to pursue m.

(Of course, the reason to pursue m may not be an all-things-considered reason.) Now here is a philosophical puzzle. Why is (1) true? How does the fact that I have reason to pursue e give me reason to pursue m, just because if I achieve m, I will also achieve e?

Maybe (1) as it stands is false. After all, there is reason to eliminate educationally useless courses at a university. One means to doing this is to shut down the university. But does that mean that one has even a prima facie reason to shut down a university just because there are some educationally useless courses there? Speaking more generally, suppose there are two incompatible means, m₁ and m₂, each of which is a means to e. It is plausible that this gives me a reason for the disjunctive pursuit of m₁ or m₂, but why should it give me a reason for pursuing m₁?

I think (1) can still be held up in the light of the above criticisms, but perhaps what these criticism push one to is accepting:

2. If one has a reason to pursue an end e, and there are some means to e, then one has reason to pursue at least one of the means to e.

If m₁ and m₂ are the only means to e, then one has reason to pursue at least one of m₁ and m₂, but perhaps one does not have reason to pursue specifically m₁ (or specifically m₂). However, pursuing m₁ (or m₂) satisfies the disjunctive reason.[note 1]

Oddly enough, I think (2) can still be questioned. Suppose you are capable of achieving e directly, in addition to an indirect way. For instance, let's say that e is having one's arm be raised. Well, one can do this directly—one just raises one's arm.[note 2] But one can also bring it about that one's arm is raised by building a Rube Goldberg contraption that raises one's arm. Does one's reason to have one's arm be raised give one reason to build the contraption? I think it is rather plausible that it does not. And if not, then (2) is problematic in the same way that (1) was. Perhaps a clearer way to see this is to imagine a being like God who can act directly.

But something of (2) can survive. Let us say that m is a necessary means to e provided that e cannot be achieved but through m. The "cannot" can have different amounts of modal force, but I am not going to worry about this. Then:

3. If m is a necessary means to e, and one has reason to pursue e, then one has reason to pursue m.

We get (2) out of (3) in those cases where e cannot be achieved directly, since then the disjunction of all means is a necessary means (here I think of a means as the whole intermediate process from action to end; one needs to be more precise in general, but not for the purposes of this post).

But whether what we accept is (1), (2) or (3), the question of why it is true remains. Here is one approach to a solution. Sometimes one has reason to pursue something solely by a particular means. Thus, ideals of sportsmanship give the Olympic runner reason to win by means of training and hard work, and give her no reason to win by means of drugs, disabling opponents, vel caetera, since a victory achieved by such means would not be a victory that satisfies the reasons of sportsmanship. (On the other hand, reasons of financial gain give one reason to win by any means possible that does not preclude the financial gain.) If this is right, then sometimes a reason to pursue an end includes in itself a specification of the appropriate means.

But we can simplify this. Rather than talking of the reason as including a specification of the ends, we can include the means in the end. Sportsmanship thus gives one reason to achieve victory by means of training and hard work.

Now what if we say that the means is always included in the end? Then some ends are of the form victory by any means or directly, others are of the form victory by any means, or directly, as long as this is compatible with one's survival, and so on. And then, I think, the mystery about why reason to pursue the end gives a reason to pursue the means is somewhat dispelled. If the end one has reason to pursue always carries a specification of how that end is to be achieved, then it seems plausible that doing anything that falls under that specification is doing something one has reason to do, or at least is doing something that satisfies a reason one has.