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Humphrey Bogart
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| Posted 8/11/2006 10:18 AM (GMT -6) |   | Here are some of my thoughts on Alan's blog, having just come across it. Re. vagueness: I like the semantic view. But that's a long story. It sounds like Alan wants to make vagueness a metaphysical phenomenon and I suspect he's tending towards fuzzy logic.
I have one criticism re the following statement:
Alan's blog said...
To say that LEM ought to hold always and everywhere is tantamount to saying that reality is perfectly sharp and determinate all the way down and that vagueness is always merely epistemic, a function of the inexactness of our language and of our concepts.
The problem is that this confounds two different views of vagueness, the epistemic and the semantic. I am not an epistemicist, but I think that vagueness does relate to the inexactness of our language. That's the semantic view.
Regarding the continuum issue, I'm not convinced. As Alan notes, the continuum can be regarded as an infinite collection of infinitesmal points. But, as I understand it, he wants to say that this is all mathematically well and good, but it's not "metaphysically basic". I would argue for the opposite position. I'm not convinced that the concept of a continuum is intelligible without the attendant concept of both infinity and the infinitesmal. I'm thinking aloud here, but when we abstract from specific instances of phenomenal experiences of particular continua of, say, spatial colour, it seems to me that it is the finite span (say of spatial colour) that we treat as indefinite for the purposes of abstraction. But in taking it to be indefinite, we automatically introduce in principle the idea of unlimited variation in respect to what we are treating as indefinite - indeed, that is what abstracting is (in my humble phenomenological opinion). The only constraints we can introduce on the variation must be inherent to the thing itself, but in the case of the continuum, it doesn't seem that there are inherent constraints. That is, it doesn't seem that the continuum by virtue of its phenomenal nature must be made up of finite and discrete components. So it seems that even to abstract the idea of a continuum presupposes or brings with it the idea of infinite variation and the infinitesmal. Indeed, all this leads me to believe that perhaps the infinite and the infinitesmal are the most basic of all logical categories, the abstractions on which all other abstractions depend.
I've been thinking about the continuum issue for quite a while - indeed, I am thinking of doing my MA thesis on it - and I've actually switched from an earlier position of finitism to kind of the opposite pole. You can divide philosophers up, roughly speaking, into those who regard the finite as being basic, and the infinite as just an abstraction from the finite - e.g. Hume, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, those who regard the infinite as basic and the finite as just a construction from the infinite - e.g. Spinoza. I've gone to the priority of the infinite position. This has massive and interesting metaphysical implications. I think it might actually yield interesting arguments for the existence of God - although the nature of the God it yields might be somewhat non-classical. Also, as always I tend to gravitate in an idealist direction, so that puts a different spin on things and enables an argument for the existence of God that may not be possible for a realist, who is more likely to end up with an infinite universe than an infinite mind (or both, as in Spinoza).
In short: metaphysical priority of the infinite + idealism = God (an infinite mind)
From the blog, there are two ways to interpret Alan. He could be taking the priority of the finite position, and just taking the continuum as something finite. Or he could be trying for a third position that regards the continuum as something distinct from both the finite and the infinite. Either position seems to me fraught with difficulties, but I'd have to know exactly what he holds before being more specific.
Alan, are you there?
 Post Edited (Humphrey Bogart) : 8/11/2006 10:51:20 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Humphrey Bogart
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| Posted 8/11/2006 10:58 AM (GMT -6) | | jefscott said...
Hey HB, a lot of this thinking came up from the contemplation of omniscience. Dig down in the blog for the omniscience posts and in the safe haven and you'll see more about that. It had to do, basically, with whether God could consciously know an infinite set of discrete "facts" simultaneously.
I seem to have vague recollections of these discussions myself. I'm still hung up about the way in which God knows. I'm kind of the opposite to much analytic philosophy in that I think that the "ideal" type of knowledge is knowledge by aquaintance, and that propositional knowledge is both derivative from this, and much less adequate. Language is, in my view, a poor substitute for experience (hey, there's a good catchcry). Hence my concern with omniscience is mainly focussed on knowledge by aquaintance; this in turn largely frees me from all the worries about how God can know everything if open theism is true, since the whole discussion presupposes propositional omniscience, which I am not even sure is a coherent concept.
But my view does have its problems, and in particular, I struggle with the idea of divine language at all (that is, my view tends to imply that language is a poor substitute adopted by finite creatures to compensate for their inability to know everything directly). But that seems hard to reconcile with scripture. Unless all God's speech kind of "piggybacks" on ours, so that God kind of goes, well these poor creatures are using speech, so I'll figure out a way to kind of reveal some truth to them through their speech, even though in doing so I'm "dumbing down" the truth.
Frankly I can't see how an omniscient being - in the sense of one who was directly acquainted with everything - would speak. What would there be to say that wouldn't be presented to them more clearly directly in their consciousness? But on the other hand, that kind of makes God a bit remote and impersonal.
As for the question of infinite discrete "facts", I'm not sure what you have in mind. If you mean, roughly, "things" or "stuff", I can't see any reason God couldn't apprehend them all simultaneously. God would have to apprehend infinite complexity, once it is granted that the infinite is ontologically basic. My view even seems to demand an idealistic form of modal realism, if God is to be omniscient: he must apprehend every possibility as well and in the same manner as any actuality, which dissolves the distinction and makes everything actual in the mind of God. But apprehending "facts", if it means propositions - well that is a different story.Post Edited (Humphrey Bogart) : 8/11/2006 11:12:54 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Humphrey Bogart
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| Posted 8/11/2006 11:16 AM (GMT -6) | | You make good points, jefscott. Sorry for editting my post while you were responding to it! I'll try not to do that again.
Anyway, that's where the kind of idealistic modal realism comes into play. God has to apprehend everything, so he must apprehend all future possibilites also, which means they must be actual. Indeed, there is a weird way in which the idea of divine immutability (shock, horror) seems to have re-emerged in my thinking - God surveys everything that might have been, is, and might be. In this sense, God is "outside of time" - in relation to possibility. | | Back to Top | | |
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Humphrey Bogart
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| Posted 8/11/2006 11:20 AM (GMT -6) | | So how does the world we are in relate to all this? Everything is actual with respect to God, but not everything is actual with respect to us. Our finiteness is actually a bounding or a limiting of consciousness, and that partitions off an actual world (within our consciousness) from possible worlds (outside our consciousness).
We change, nothing else changes.
Man, I'm starting to sound like an Eastern guru or something spouting this off. | | Back to Top | | |
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Humphrey Bogart
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| Posted 8/11/2006 11:33 AM (GMT -6) | | Tom said...
Hi HB. Check out Alan's Thursday, July 20th post titled "Further Thoughts on Excluded Middle." I think the two of you are in agreement. Vagueness is semantic (due to inexactness of language). I'd agree too, except I think that once the terms of my language are clear, the terms of some proposition the meaning of which depends upon MY semantic investment, then there's no 'inexactness' either (at least nothing that leads to vague meanings).
Thanks Tom! Yes, Alan does seem to be on a similar track to me there. But I think I would diverge in one respect. I agree that there is a proposition/reality or abstraction/reality gulf. But I would want to say that some abstractions and words arise "naturally" from reality whereas others arise by trading on other abstractions. That is, I don't think there is a complete disconnection between the two domains. I think I would want to say that the LEM arises directly from abstractions that are "natural" and hence does reflect something fundamental about reality, whereas say, fuzzy logic, does not arise naturally but trades on abstracting from abstractions. But I need to think about this more. But I wholly agree with Alan that we can't just assume that our abstractions reflect reality, that is something we have to demonstrate. | | Back to Top | | |
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Humphrey Bogart
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| Posted 8/11/2006 11:39 AM (GMT -6) | | Alan said...
A transcendent, omniscient being, however, wouldn't know reality in bits and pieces or from any particular perspective but rather all-at-once. Such a being would have, I think, a non-abstract representation of the maximal state-of-affairs that is reality. If such a being is so much as possible, then propositions (understood simply as representations of conceivable states-of-affairs) are not necessarly abstract.
I agree with Alan here, and I think he is basically saying what I said above, with one exception noted below. But I am not sure how Alan would then deal with the jefscott problem, that is, how does God think about the future etc.
There is another difference, namely, that Alan still speaks of a (non-abstract) "representation" of reality in the mind of God. This raises all the problems all over again, since all representations must be abstractions in some sense i.e. they must lack some feature of that which they represent, even if that feature is identity. I think he has to ditch representational knowledge and embrace fully-fledged direct apprehension, even if that brings in panentheistic notions. But representation has too many problems.
To put this another way: If God is ontologically distinct from creation, how does he know it (i.e the creation)? If he knows it directly by apprehension, then it is hard to avoid the conclusion that it exists, in some sense, in God or in his mind (panentheism). On the other hand, if he has a perfect representation of reality in his mind and not reality itself, then (a) what distinguishes the representation from the reality and (b) what ensures that the two are always "in sync"?Post Edited (Humphrey Bogart) : 8/11/2006 11:42:58 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Similitude
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| Posted 8/11/2006 11:48 AM (GMT -6) | | | Just what is Alan's concern about the LEM. Isn't the LEM just an attempt to express the relation of the Law of non-contradiction to propositions? I don't see what it has to do with continuity vs. discreteness, per se. Or omniscience, for that matter.
(LEM) For any proposition p, either p is true or p is not-true.
One thing that's fuzzy from the above, though, is that a proposition stating something about a future state of affairs can be necessarily unknowable, per OT. So OT would imply that it is not strictly true that such a proposition is true or false. Because is has the present tense. And the future is intrinsically indeterminate as of the present in some respects, per OT, right?
Post Edited (jefscott) : 8/11/2006 11:56:09 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Humphrey Bogart
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| Posted 8/11/2006 11:50 AM (GMT -6) | | Important disclaimer: All this is simply my present speculations and seems beset with significant difficulties that I have not resolved. I am just trying to pursue a certain line of thought consistently to where it leads. I put it out there to stimulate thought and not to elevate to the level of doctrine or whatever.
Just thought I had better clear that up in case my pastor saw this ... | | Back to Top | | |
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Similitude
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| Posted 8/11/2006 11:57 AM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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Similitude
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| Posted 8/11/2006 12:06 PM (GMT -6) | | | How does the continuum create a problem for the LEM, exactly? I can't follow Alan's train of thought, there. I can see how the fuzziness of propositions creates problems. But the LEM was probably intended to apply to clear propositions when it was conceived. It was probably intended to say something about the Law of non-contradiction, only.
Alan: Continuity is another issue where LEM naturally comes into question. Our natural conception of space, time, and motion is that they are smoothly continuous and that points, lines, events, and such are interruptions of sorts in an already existing continuum. The arithmetization program in mathematics, however, proposes to analyze such continua into sets of discrete points. If we adopt this latter course as being the metaphysical truth of the matter, then we can apply LEM to such continua all the way down. But this is a large metaphysical assumption to make. It essentially amounts to saying that continua are not metaphysically basic and can, therefore, be reductively analyzed in terms of discrete non-continua (i.e., points).
Jeff: It is the last sentence that I don't understand. A line entails its points. So how is one more basic than the other. They are correlative in human thought--one cannot be conceived in such a way to exclude the other. It's like finite and infinite. One knows finitely before (in time) conceiving the infinite as its corollary. But one is not, therefore, more basic than the other. To say that correlative ideas are heirarchical ontologically makes no sense to me.
Post Edited (jefscott) : 8/11/2006 12:20:45 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Alan Rhoda
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| Posted 8/11/2006 2:12 PM (GMT -6) | | Hey guys,
You raise a lot of interesting ideas, but I only have time right now to comment on a couple:
HB: Alan still speaks of a (non-abstract) "representation" of reality in the mind of God. This raises all the problems all over again, since all representations must be abstractions in some sense i.e. they must lack some feature of that which they represent, even if that feature is identity. I think he has to ditch representational knowledge and embrace fully-fledged direct apprehension, even if that brings in panentheistic notions. But representation has too many problems.
Alan: Frankly, I hadn't explicitly thought about the issue of what could distinguish God's perfect representation of reality from reality itself. Here's more-or-less where I'm coming from on this: (1) Suppose (as I do) that God is infinitely intelligent and therefore can contemplate all possibilities as though they were actual before deciding to realize one of those possibilities as the intial state of creation (in the chessmaster analogy this is akin to surveying all possible game sequences before deciding on his first move). (2) If God is capable of contemplating all possibilities, then he is capable of contemplating all world-possibilities (all possible worlds), prior to actualizing anything. (3) As omniscient, God's knowledge is necessarily exhaustive. Hence, his understanding of each world-possibility is complete and leaves nothing out. (4) Therefore, God must be capable of having something like a complete "representation" of each world-possibility, including of course the one that is actual, independently of whether that world-possibility obtains. (5) It follows, then, that what distinguishes the initial actual world-possibility from all other world-possibilities cannot be anything internal to God's representation of it, but something external. (6) My suggestion is that this external something is an act of God's will - he deliberately posits one of the world-possibilities ("Let there be ... and there was" . In the case of OT, the supposition is that God posits a world-possibility that has internal degrees of freedom, such that there is more than one successor world-possibility that it could give rise to. (Of course, how God is able to create such a world is a difficult question, but it does seem to be the sort of world we live in nonetheless.)
To sum up: God does have a representation of reality in his mind. In relation to God's will this representation is abstract since as a representation it is a mere possibility, not an actuality. But in relation to everything else it is not abstract, but reflects matters fully and without omission. The distinction between the representation and what it represents, therefore, consists in the one thing that the latter includes and the former lacks - God's volitional concurrence. | | Back to Top | | |
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Alan Rhoda
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| Posted 8/11/2006 2:14 PM (GMT -6) | | Jeff: A line entails its points. So how is one more basic than the other?
Alan: No set of points entails a line. | | Back to Top | | |
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Similitude
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| Posted 8/11/2006 3:54 PM (GMT -6) | | |
Alan: To sum up: God does have a representation of reality in his mind. In relation to God's will this representation is abstract since as a representation it is a mere possibility, not an actuality. But in relation to everything else it is not abstract, but reflects matters fully and without omission.
Jeff: Tom, it looks like Alan is agreeing with me that abstraction is necessary for knowledge about the future. If we're correct, that gets us back to our very first discussion about omniscience. You had claimed that God apprehends an infinite set of abstracta with zero duration.
I read something in Porter a couple of weeks ago that clarified why that seems problematic to me. Porter says it's inconceivable to be conscious for zero duration. Zero duration for a conscious state is like a zero diameter for a circle. It makes no sense. But on the other hand, I can't imagine an act of apprehension being an unconscious act. Therefore, I can't imagine an act of apprehension having zero duration. So this brings me right back to the problem of trying to account for God's apprehension of abstracta in zero time.
I think Aquinas had it right (if what I've read of him is true)--we are under no obligation to model God's attributes precisely since He might very well be beyond our comprehension in certain respects. At least this is what I've read was Aquinas' opinion.
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Humphrey Bogart
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| Posted 8/12/2006 8:57 AM (GMT -6) | | Alan said...
God does have a representation of reality in his mind. In relation to God's will this representation is abstract since as a representation it is a mere possibility, not an actuality. But in relation to everything else it is not abstract, but reflects matters fully and without omission. The distinction between the representation and what it represents, therefore, consists in the one thing that the latter includes and the former lacks - God's volitional concurrence.
But it seems to me that this doesn't escape the problem.
Firstly, the statement that the representation in relation to everything else "reflects" matters fully and without ommission, just hides the problem in the word "reflects". What do you mean by "reflects"? Is the reflection identical to what it reflects, so that reality is, so to speak, duplicated in the mind of God (which seems a weird thing to believe: that there are two absolutely identical parallel universes, one existing in God's mind and the other outside of it, but the two always synchronized so that whatever happens in one happens in the other). Or do you mean "reflects" in a weaker sense - in which case you're back to abstract representation again.
Secondly, even if we take "reflects" in the strong sense of absolute identity, at least one of the relational properties of the representation would still be different to the reality. The lack of a property is as much an aspect of something as its presence, so if reality lacks God's volitional concurrence when the representation has it, then the representation can't constitute perfect knowledge per se. God would have to abstract from it, i.e., say something like, "reality is like what I am now perceiving except that it doesn't have my volitional concurrence", which involves God in an abstraction. Only that abstraction would be perfectly accurate knowledge with respect to volitional concurrence, not the representation itself; but it seems to me that knowledge is then split into two components in God's mind, and therefore something is still missing, an appreciation of their unity. That is, God would know the world as it is with volitional concurrence added in, and he would know abstractly that the world does not involve his volitional concurrence, but he wouldn't know the world concretely as it is without his volitional concurrence. This seems to me to be a lack in knowledge.
I'm increasingly coming to the view that is somewhat similar to Jeff's, namely, that these problems are just not solvable with our conceptual apparatus. I am interested in developing things in a kind of neo-Kantian sceptical direction, i.e. that our whole reasoning framework, including, for instance, the LEM, are inextricably bound to our phenomenal consciousness, and that we can't "think outside the box of our mind" and understand the noumenal world of things in themselves. This means that we can't understand God or how he knows or his relation to creation or anything else by philosophical means because our conceptual categories are inadequate. It would involve a rejection of natural theology altogether. God can reveal himself using language, and this is where the difficulty lies that I want to develop my thinking about. God sort of "hijacks" our language that arises from our phenomenal consciousness, and makes genuine revelations about the noumenal world, by combining our abstractions in ways that are novel and unexpected from a phenomenal point of view - perhaps paradoxical. Indeed, I am developing sympathies with Kierkegaard's idea that divine revelation must be paradoxical. But this is all another story. Perhaps we need to strictly demarcate between philosophy and revelated theology; the former being concerned with analysis of the phenomenal world and the conceptual apparatus that arises from it, and the latter being concerned with expressing truths about the noumenal world in language that has arisen from the phenomenal world. Perhaps our knowledge of God (on this side of heaven) can only be in language, and we can't make our theology conceptually concrete - indeed, maybe this explains God's ban on the making of graven images. This also involves a rejection of classical theism.
All this leads me to a fideistic, nominalist view in the tradition of Ockham. Indeed, it might actually cause me to move from the open view to Arminianism, in the sense that time itself is a conceptual category that arises from phenomenal consciousness, and therefore perhaps cannot be extended to the noumenal world. In this case, it would be reasonable to say that we are truly counter-causally free but that God also knows what we will do in future - but that this will be an unresolvable paradox and contradiction expressed in our phenomenally-derived language and our conceptual schemes. This would not mean, however, that God was atemporal - since atemporality is just a phenomenally derived abstraction, like temporality. It would mean he was neither temporal nor atemporal (the LEM being phenomenally derived and not appropriate to revelations of the noumenal), and what he is we cannot know. All we could know is that from our perspective, he may (I leave this an open issue) be able to speak truth to our future choices, without this entailing that they are causally determined in any way. It would just be a mystery how this could be so. Both open theism and Calvinism on this view (insofar as they are maintained on philosophical grounds) would therefore be inappropriate extensions of phenomenally derived concepts like time and causation to the noumenal.
This would free up the discussion about foreknowledge completely from philosophical arguments and leave it purely a matter of scriptural exegesis. Arguments about whether or not open theism is compatible with omniscience, or Calvinism is compatible with moral responsibility, or Arminianism is internally consistent, would all be ruled inadmissable from the outset. The only question would be, what does scripture actually say that God knows? and what does scripture say about human freedom?Post Edited (Humphrey Bogart) : 8/12/2006 9:33:37 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
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| Posted 8/12/2006 10:31 AM (GMT -6) | | |
Jeff: Tom, it looks like Alan is agreeing with me that abstraction is necessary for knowledge about the future.
Tom: That such abstraction is necessary for knowledge about the future sounds right to me. But Alan earlier denied that abstract/propositional knowledge was ever necessary to God. So I’m not sure where he is on this.
Jeff: If we're correct, that gets us back to our very first discussion about omniscience. You had claimed that God apprehends an infinite set of abstracta with zero duration.
Tom: Well, not exactly. What I meant to say was there’s never a time at which all abstracta are not comprehended. If this implies temporal process, so be it. God’s eternally temporal. I’m cool with that. I never meant to suggest that God is atemporal. But the necessity of temporal process for conscious apprehension doesn’t imply ‘times at which God is ignorant of some truths’, so it wouldn’t undermine omniscience. Not all abstract truth is “deduced” from other truths. It’s just this latter sort of knowledge I’d like to deny God. I don’t think God abstracts by why of ‘deduction’ from other abstract truths.
Jeff: Porter says it's inconceivable to be conscious for zero duration. Zero duration for a conscious state is like a zero diameter for a circle. It makes no sense. But on the other hand, I can't imagine an act of apprehension being an unconscious act. Therefore, I can't imagine an act of apprehension having zero duration. So this brings me right back to the problem of trying to account for God's apprehension of abstracta in zero time.
Tom: So dump zero-time apprehension. It won't accommodate conscious apprehension. Hey, get Whitehead’s Modes of Thought (used it’s only like $10). He gets into this a bit.
Jeff: I think Aquinas had it right (if what I've read of him is true)--we are under no obligation to model God's attributes precisely since He might very well be beyond our comprehension in certain respects.
Tom: That sounds right too. The attribution of this or that to God is always analogous. It can’t be univocal, but there has to be some fundamental likeness upon which our language supervenes truthfully. For me this just means that though God is always MORE than we (truthfully) conceive of him, he’s never LESS than or OTHER than (viz., contradictory to what) we (truthfully) conceive of him to be. (An aside: But this is true of EVERYTHING we aim our language at; there’s always more to realities than we are able to experience or apprehend.)
HB: Firstly, the statement that the representation in relation to everything else "reflects" matters fully and without ommission, just hides the problem in the word "reflects". What do you mean by "reflects"?
Tom: To my mind it just means that for every discrete reality (or better, for every actual occasion including its relations) there is a corresponding sentient apprehension of it that is God. But the reflection can’t be “identical” to what it reflects if that means “tautological.” There’s only ONE me, not two. God perfectly apprehends me, but omniscience (it would seem) would include God’s knowing the difference between the actual me and his apprehension of me. So it doesn’t really matter whether or not we posit or avoid positing necessary abstraction in God’s knowledge. We have to say God knows the difference between the knower/knowing and the known, and in saying that, it seems to follow, we deny that God’s knowledge of me reproduces a tautology of me.
HB: Secondly, even if we take "reflects" in the strong sense of absolute identity, at least one of the relational properties of the representation would still be different to the reality. The lack of a property is as much an aspect of something as its presence, so if reality lacks God's volitional concurrence when the representation has it, then the representation can't constitute perfect knowledge per se.
Tom: Just a word about “perfect” here. Perfect knowledge cannot mean tautological reproduction of the known. That would double the number of actualities—two Tom’s, two Jeff’s, etc. Who wants THAT!
Tom
Post Edited (TGB) : 8/12/2006 10:37:44 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Humphrey Bogart
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| Posted 8/13/2006 10:39 AM (GMT -6) | | Tom said...
That sounds right too. The attribution of this or that to God is always analogous. It can’t be univocal, but there has to be some fundamental likeness upon which our language supervenes truthfully. For me this just means that though God is always MORE than we (truthfully) conceive of him, he’s never LESS than or OTHER than (viz., contradictory to what) we (truthfully) conceive of him to be. (An aside: But this is true of EVERYTHING we aim our language at; there’s always more to realities than we are able to experience or apprehend.)
But perhaps there is another way to put this. Perhaps we can can only speak of God's attributes abstractly - and at the highest level of abstraction, i.e. propositions - and not conceptualize them concretely. This is because his attributes are revealed to us "from above" and not derived from our experience. This would also mean that there can be no analogies to divine attributes. Perhaps any kind of philosophical/metaphysical concretization of God actually constitutes an image or likeness of God just as much as making a golden calf does.
Tom said...
To my mind it just means that for every discrete reality (or better, for every actual occasion including its relations) there is a corresponding sentient apprehension of it that is God. But the reflection can’t be “identical” to what it reflects if that means “tautological.” There’s only ONE me, not two. God perfectly apprehends me, but omniscience (it would seem) would include God’s knowing the difference between the actual me and his apprehension of me. So it doesn’t really matter whether or not we posit or avoid positing necessary abstraction in God’s knowledge. We have to say God knows the difference between the knower/knowing and the known, and in saying that, it seems to follow, we deny that God’s knowledge of me reproduces a tautology of me.
The problem I have, though, is that I can't see how if the reflection is not identical - what you call "tautological" - how it can constitute perfect knowledge and qualify God as truly omniscient. It's a long story to explain the reasons for this, but take the following illustrative example. Suppose I knew every true proposition about Africa, and had multiple fully accurate abstract representations of Africa in my mind (that is, in relation to everything that they represented they were accurate), but I had never actually been to Africa or seen it. It seems that there would be still something deficient in my knowledge about Africa. In breaking something up into its abstract components, something is still lost in the process. Every abstraction loses something - that is how it becomes an abstraction. This can be compensated for by another abstraction, but then the knowledge is "split" over two or more abstractions instead of being held in a unity, so something is still lost.
Tom said...
Just a word about “perfect” here. Perfect knowledge cannot mean tautological reproduction of the known. That would double the number of actualities—two Tom’s, two Jeff’s, etc. Who wants THAT!
It seems to me that perfect knowledge absolutely demands tautological reproduction of the known - that is, if you want to stick with representation. This is one of several severe problems with representation (another one being how the representation and the reality are kept "in sync" ). There is another alternative, though - direct apprehension of the known. But that leads to panentheism rather than theism. Perhaps the best alternative is simply to say that we can understand the statement "God knows all things" only phenomenologically by statements like "God can communicate to us the correct answer to any question we ask". The statement "God is omniscient" can only be comprehended by us on the phenomenal side - whatever we ask God, he tells us the right answer. But as to how he knows things in himself, we cannot know or even begin to comprehend. It defies all our conceptualizations. That's where I'm headed now.
By the way, a point of clarification. While I may ultimately shift to Arminianism, the philosophical treatment of openness which you hold to may still be true at a phenomenological level. That is, the whole X might/X will square of opposition and so forth may all be perfectly philosophically valid - but I just am not sure it can be extended beyond the phenomenology of consciousness to ultimate reality. To put this another way, because I have split philosophy from theology completely, I can hold to openness in regards to philosophy (the phenomenal world), but an Arminian incomprehensible position in relation to theology (the noumenal world).Post Edited (Humphrey Bogart) : 8/13/2006 10:55:42 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Similitude
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| Posted 8/13/2006 12:57 PM (GMT -6) | | | HB: While I may ultimately shift to Arminianism, the philosophical treatment of openness which you hold to may still be true at a phenomenological level.
Jeff: This is one of the topics we've been discussing. If our categories of thought do not have any relevance outside of creation, it would seem that there's a lot we cannot know about God. But even more than that, consider the position that beings can come into existence without causal agency. There are theists who hold to that. But if that's true, then it seems we could conclude that a being that is just as wise and powerful as God, but purely malevolent, could pop into existence and frustrate God's purposes. Is there any scriptural claim that nothing can come into existence apart from the direct of indirect causal agency of God?
It seems like there are real ontological issues concerning the true meaning of our categories and whether they have relevance outside of creation. And as far as scripture is concerned, I can't get divine omniscience from it. But I'm not sure that is problematic. Because it may be that the content and mode of God's knowledge is beyond us, anyway. In that case, all supra-scriptural attributes of God would be irrelevant to our volitional life.
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Humphrey Bogart
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| Posted 8/14/2006 9:23 AM (GMT -6) | | jefscott said...
This is one of the topics we've been discussing. If our categories of thought do not have any relevance outside of creation, it would seem that there's a lot we cannot know about God. But even more than that, consider the position that beings can come into existence without causal agency. There are theists who hold to that. But if that's true, then it seems we could conclude that a being that is just as wise and powerful as God, but purely malevolent, could pop into existence and frustrate God's purposes. Is there any scriptural claim that nothing can come into existence apart from the direct of indirect causal agency of God?
But there are two problems:
(a) It is very hard to make sense of causation anyway. I tend to resort to a Humean view that what we call causation is merely constant conjunction, and that the reason for these constant conjunctions (the "true causation" behind "apparent causation" ) is something that our reason cannot come to terms with.
(b) Applying causation to God causes (excuse the pun) all sorts of problems anyway. For example, there is the problem of who created the causal nexus. Obviously, some causal relationships are a part of creation and contingent and everybody agrees that God created them. But classical theism implies that there is also a part of the causal nexus that lies outside creation. For example, in creating X, God willing X to be causes X to be. So there is a causal link between God's will and what it wills to be that renders God's willing efficacious. Now this causal link cannot have been created by God because that would be circular. God would have to will the causal link to be, and then by the causal link, the causal link would come into being (God could not be omnipotent by virtue of his omnipotently willing himself to be omnipotent). Classical theism must presuppose a part of the causal nexus to be necessary and uncreated. That, it seems to me, is very problematic. We have to ditch causation from our account of omnipotence.
I would suggest that we treat causation purely in terms of how it appears to us, and not try to extend it to the noumenal world of things-in-themselves. I think this ties in nicely with Genesis 1 where God says "let there be X", and then there was X. We can understand divine causation purely phenomenologically in this way - it just means that whenever God says, "let there be X", X will occur. There is a constant conjunction of the two. The mechanism behind that might remain forever beyond our conceptual categorization.
In short, I think we should redefine the attributes of God phenomenologically, like this:
(a) Omniscience: This means to us just that whatever question God is asked, he can correctly answer. HOW he can do this remains a mystery.
(b) Omnipotence: This means to us that whenever God says "let there be X", then X will certainly come into being. HOW this can be remains a mystery.
And so forth.Post Edited (Humphrey Bogart) : 8/14/2006 9:29:08 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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