Post Edited (TGB) : 10/13/2005 8:35:50 AM (GMT-5)

Tom: By “mode” I’m guessing you mean whether necessary knowledge of necessary truths is temporal or atemporal. And I agree. Simply knowing that such a sentient being (knower) exists and that such a knower necessarily knows doesn’t itself whether that knower is eternally temporal or atemporal sans creation. Could be either I suppose. Big deal.

Jeff:  No, not temporality.  My intuition of time is such that I cannot conceive of time as anything but eternal.  To my mind, finite and infinite are correlative notions.  I don't know how to get my mind around INFINITE time that was created.  The notion seems non-sensical, to me.

By mode, I mean HOW does God know what He knows, pre-creation.  Maybe God has something akin to regulative categories like we have.  Maybe not.  Maybe God generates His own propositions like we do.  Maybe not.  The only way I know to even address these questions is to ask, "What MUST be true to account for creation and scripture?"  Outside of that, I'm open and non-dogmatic, choosing to stick with what seems the most analogous or parsimonious.l

What we DO have reason to believe is that God has ALWAYS been intellectually active, somehow or some way.  Because otherwise, we're back to the problem of how things "get off the dime," to even get going.  And that is the ONLY reason that I can see why we need to suppose that God has ALWAYS been intellectually active.  Otherwise, we could assume God was unconscious and then all of sudden became conscious and somehow generated all His knowledge.  Not an attractive alternative, to say the least.

Tom:  But "extent"? Well, it would be very reasonable to say that a being who knows SOME necessary truths because such knowledge is entailed in that being’s knowing him/herself  would know ALL necessary truths equally entailed in such self-knowledge or self-awareness.

Jeff:  Here is were you are declaring the MODE by which you believe God knows, pre-creation.  I would say that an intelligent being that thinks according to regulative categories may not even HAVE absolute and exhaustive knowledge of His own nature.  The nature, both intellectual and sentient, of the Father may be caused or conditioned by the Holy Spirit.  If so, it is conceivable that God may not know the total explanation of why His sensibilities are what they are, any more than I understand how my spirit causes my sensibilities to be what they are. 

The explicability of my actual BEHAVIOR (intellectual and otherwise)  does not require my knowledge of HOW my spirit conditions my nature.  For that level of explicability is beyond the epistemologically warranted quest.  The same may apply for God.  There may be some things we are just silly to ask questions about, because there is NO WAY to answer them, given our categorical constraints.  

But assuming God DOES have absolute and exhaustive self-knowledge prior to creation, it doesn't follow that God CHOOSES TO RELATE (to use your phrase) all conceivable relations that are entailed in that class of knowledge.  Contingencies are a class of relations that can truly be conceived to be ENTAILED in God's nature, but they need not be INTELLECTUALLY and  VOLITIONALLY RELATED.  It is the LATTER that constitutes epistemologically grounded KNOWLEDGE.

And that gets back to an earlier point I've made.  Our minds are to some degree teleological, and seemingly God's mind is also.  But God's mind may be COMPLETELY teleological.  I.e., maybe God doesn't freely associate, day dream, etc, AT ALL.  And if God only CHOOSES (volitionally) to relate, it might very well be that God does so about contingencies, in time.  Just like we CHOOSE to relate certain things WHEN our teleological designs impel us to.

Tom:  A) ...Do you have good reasons for believing that God, a necessarily sentient being, doesn’t possess full and infallible knowledge of his own being and nature?

Jeff:  No, but I don't have good reasons to think He MUST have full and infallible knowledge of His own being and nature, for the reasons I stated above.  What does it mean to say we have good reasons?  For me, as I've said, the ONLY reason to take a side in the matter is because the hypothesis explains something that MUST be true to account for creation or scripture, or at least that it does so more plausibly (i.e., parsimoniously, analogously, etc).  I can't see how the attribute-proposition hypothesis fits that bill.

Tom:  You’re supposing that belief that God knows himself fully and infallibly is on equal par with the view that he’s ignorant about an infinite number of necessary truths that he himself grounds?

Jeff:  Yes, on equal par in the sense that I am agnostic about the matter until I see what problem it solves as opposed to a dynamic, relational view of God's pre-creation existence that allows for God having new thoughts.  Now, this dynamic idea may very well be falsifiable, so if it is, feel free to explain why.  'Cause then I'll understand your need to hold the view you do.

Tom:  B) you can mount a plausible argument for why we should believe propositions positing future contingencies are not necessary truths, then you’d have good reason to doubt that God’s knowing necessary truths would entail his knowing sans creational truths about future contingents (since such truths wouldn't exit sans creation).

Jeff:  Here we're back to the MODE issue.  There is a difference between saying

1) that we can CONCEIVE of contingencies that are entailed in God's nature, and

2) that propositions exist INDEPENDENTLY of a mind CONCEIVING or PROPOSING them.

That is the mode problem.  We only use words like "entail" BECAUSE we think discursively, in time.  Apart from OUR mode of thinking (analyzing/synthesizing), we don't even know what "entail" means.   But you are saying that God doesn't RELATE in time.  So HOW can He see what relations are ENTAILED in any class of propositions?  For "SEE" is a verb, which implies a time relation by definition.  You've cut us off from thinking about the problem in any meaningful way.  And that's fine, so long as your willing to allow Spen to posit non-meaningful EDF, also.  Spen CONCEDES that his belief in EDF is supra-intuitive.

But if you want to just POSIT that EVERY conceivable (by us) CLASS of propositions that could be discursively justified (by us) from the knowledge of God's nature simply EXIST as necessary beings, independent of God's intellectual production, eternally, I say fine.   But I want to know WHY that should be posited.  Is it because the dynamic view I'm proposing as possible is really IMpossible?  What does it solve?  What epistemologically-compelled question does it answer?  To me, it is IDENTICAL to positing an ungrounded EDF until you explain to me WHY it's necessary to believe it.  NEITHER position explains anything that needs to be accounted for, as far as I can tell. 

Jeff: And it is beyond me how we could know that contingencies are NECESSARY truths. Necessary for what?

Tom: Not necessary FOR what, Jeff. See, that tells me you and I aren’t really on the same page with regard to what a necessary truth is. Necessary truths don’t get their necessity FOR anything. They get it FROM something.

Jeff:  It is inconceivable how BEINGS (propositions that you say EXIST) can GET something without positing an EVENT in time.  It's the verb problem, Tom.  Which is inevitably related to the mode problem.

Tom:  And it’s really “beyond” you how a person could plausibly believe the propositions positing future contingencies are necessarily true? You have no idea of any reason why this might be thought to be the case? If that’s the case…

then I SUCK at this board-stuff and I'm frickin givin up!

Seriously.

Jeff:  Not at all, Tom.  NO ONE can do what you're trying to do because VERBS convey ACTIVITY, which implies TIME relations.  You're doing as well as ANYONE could, attempting the impossible. 

Tom: I don’t conclude that God knows some necessary truths (those you agree he necessarily knows) because knowledge of such truths makes God's trinitarian life and self-relating possible.

Jeff:  I worded that poorly.  I meant what does positing the eternal, independent existence of ALL attributes explain or account for, PERIOD?  Unless of course all ALTERNATIVE views have fatal flaws.  But if so, what are those flaws?  THAT'S the subject we should probably be discussing.

Tom:  I conclude that God knows “I [God] exist” because he relates meaningfully to himself. His trinitarian self-awareness is logically NECESSARY TO the truth of the proposition “I [God] exist” rather than the other way around.

Jeff:  I absolutely agree.  Because you're using verbs.  You're talking intellectual activity (relating), IN TIME, which is precisely what I'm claiming is meaningful.

Jeff: But CONTINGENCIES? Why would I feel compelled to believe the knowledge of them is eternal?

Tom: Because a) they are by definition eternal (I argued that a while ago and you agreed!),

Jeff:  There are two senses in which we use the idea of "relation."  There is the sense in which we say there is an objective reality which is related in various ways, independent of our knowing those relations.  But then there is the sense in which "relation" refers to those specific relations that we categorically apprehend the world by (time relations, space relations, causality, means/ends, more/less, sentience, etc.).  The former is only known by us because of the latter.  It is the correspondence of these two ideas, prior to creation, that needs to be explicated.  Because, apart from creation, no "objective reality" exists except God. 

So if we say that God CHOOSES TO RELATE (which implies time), we are saying that God's APPREHENSION of any relations conceivably entailed by His nature are OBTAINED in time--i.e, they are CONCEIVED in time.  That can be done continuously or at some "point" in time.  That is a logical possibility as far as I can tell.  Is it to you?  Even a logical possibility?  Whether it's the most aesthetically attractive to you, or not?

If, on the other hand, we say attributes exist, necessarily, unproduced by God's CHOOSING TO RELATE, then we have to account for how He KNOWS them to be true, without that extra STEP of evaluating the "objective" relation of the independently-existing propositions to His own nature.  This is what I say we can't explain without an event or continuous events in time.  So if it's true, and we can't assume the time relation to make it explicable, it's beyond our comprehension, just like EDF.

Tom:   b) their truth is grounded in the same self-awareness that grounds the proposition “I [God] exist,”

Jeff:  That's fine if it means God is choosing to relate, which implies time.

Tom:  and c) because knowledge of such propositions would be available to God IN THE SAME trinitarian self-awareness that you agree requires us to conclude God necessarily knows “I [God] exist.”

Jeff:  Ditto.  If you are allowing for God to USE what is AVAILABLE to Him, we're right back to using verbs, which imply time relations.  I agree with that.  Otherwise, I say, "What sense does it make to say something is AVAILABLE, if it is not USED, intellectually?"

Tom:  I might ask you how a God who knows himself perfectly could AVOID knowing future contingencies. Such contingencies exist BECAUSE God is a thinking, self-relating being.

Jeff:  The same way we do--it is not avoidance, per se.  If God is a teleological thinker, He CHOOSES to relate, in time.  It doesn't seem necessary to me that God is ALWAYS purposing EVERY conceivable purpose He is capable of making.  Thus, I have NO WAY of knowing WHEN He apprehends conceivable relationships in those matters which may be teleologically "contemplated" in time for His own PURPOSES. 

Jeff: Assuming that something about creation or scripture necessitates the postulation of God's pre-creation foreknowledge of contingencies, it is conceivable that God might have obtained such knowledge by an act of deduction from what He knew He was about to create.

Tom: That seems to be out of the question too, as you already conceded! Are you forgetting our agreeing that “truths” or “true propositions” don’t exist at all apart from some sentient being apprehending them? No language—no meaning. No meaning—no propositions. No propositions—no truths. If God doesn’t necessarily know props describing future contingencies sans creation (and God is the only sentient anything around to give 'meaning' to anything) then such props don’t exist, period and THAT is a very counter intuitive leap in my opinion.

Jeff:  You're overlooking that fact that WE can GENERATE propositions.  I have no a-priori reason to assume that God can't do the same.  Tom, if you really think hard, I think you can come up with a way to articulate WHY eternal propositions MUST exist.  I'm not saying they don't.  Obviously, it's reasonable to believe SOME propositions have been in existence all along.  But to say EVERY conceivable proposition has eternal, independent existence is another thing, altogether. 

I'm saying I don't see how they can be epistemologically grounded apart from an evaluation IN TIME.  But if there is some REASON why it must be true, I'll embrace it.  Just like I'll embrace inexplicable EDF if someone can explain to me why it HAS to be true to account for creation or scripture. 

In fact, I suspect there probably ARE some aspects of God's intelligence that are supra-intuitive.  But I don't see how we could know them as RELATED to the reality we apprehend BY our intuitions.  Precisely because the only RELATIONS we know are those entailed in our categories.  And, consequently, understanding such aspects of God's intelligence is probably unnecessary to the human mind.  They are probably beyond the epistemologically warranted quest.

Jeff: And again, it seems like SOMETHING must have ENTERED God's mind to even account for His decision to create in the first place.

Tom: Read Wolterstorff. Sometimes I lay awake in bed on Saturday morning for some time contemplating my getting up. Eventually, I “just” get up. Yes, “just” get up, without any “extra” bit of knowledge being “deduced” to justify my getting out of bed at 10:03 which I did not also know 10:02 or any time earlier. I just decide to get up. That's all.

Jeff:  Well, you know as well as I do that all events have causes.  Nothing JUST happens.  The pertinent question is, was God's creative activity VOLITIONAL, or merely IMPULSIVE?  If the former, it needs accounting for.  For we don't act volitionally apart from some contemplation of how the proposed END will affect our sensibilites (granted, this contemplation can be done almost instantaneously, in some cases).  To say God does otherwise seems a bit bizarre.  It would mean that even His volition is significantly non-analogous to ours, also. 

We can only carry the non-analogous claims so far, though; at some point, we will have effectively de-personalized God, per our definition of a person.  And that's why I would like to make the analogical work as far as possible.  In the final analysis, it may be that analogous explanations are the only possible ones because of the constraints of our categories.  All else may necessarily be inexplicable speculation, just like EDF.

Post Edited (jefscott) : 10/14/2005 8:11:11 AM (GMT-5)

Hey Jeff. Just flew into Brussels today for a week (finishing up a class). Gonna be really busy, and I can’t believe the school I’m at had wireless installed! Yay. I wrote this in the airport and on the plane coming over and was sure I’d have to wait a week before posting it. But let me post it and then disappear again! Sorry for the length.

Jeff:  No, not temporality. My intuition of time is such that I cannot conceive of time as anything but eternal. I don't know how to get my mind around INFINITE time that was created.

Tom: Neither do I. “Infinite” time couldn’t also be “created” time. Time can be potentially infinite with respect to the future. No problem there. But if time is infinite with respect to the past, then you have an actual, not a potential, infinite, in which case time could not have been created. If time was 'created' it couldn't also be infinite with respect to the past.

Jeff: By mode, I mean HOW does God know what He knows, pre-creation. Maybe God has something akin to regulative categories like we have. Maybe not. Maybe God generates His own propositions like we do. Maybe not. The only way I know to even address these questions is to ask, "What MUST be true to account for creation and scripture?”

Tom: It doesn’t seem to me that you really stick to this all the time, though. You hold to it when you’re disagreeing with me for example! But when you want to dismiss the notion of “infinite time that’s created” (above) you conclude with some certainty (and so you should) that such a thing is incoherent, and that without the certainty being required to make sense of some explicit biblical data. So it seems to me that sometimes you reason in ways that are not strictly required to make sense of the Bible. What does require it then? Well, reason does. Just plain philosophical/rational consistency. And so it should. This is where I think you’re too minimalistic. You don’t want to be dogmatic about anything unless the dogmatism is directly required by affirming some explicit biblical claim. That’s just too minimalisitc for me. I guess I’m a philosophical theologian. I think we can and should feel confident in concluding to be true more than than merely that which is strictly required to be true in order to affirm some biblical data. When you put all the biblical data together, I think sometimes there's an overall picture that makes it difficult if not impossible to avoid some philosophical conclusions. Why should philosophical consistency not inform theology? We are rational creatures after all. [I'm wording this poorly.]

We just have different starting points, I guess. From the overall presentation of God in the Bible (if even not from any one particular verse that makes the claim explicitly), I don’t know how to avoid concluding that God really is the greatest being there is, that he’s never ignorant of the truth (about himself or the world), that his evaluation of truth is exhaustive, loving, and infallible. You on the other hand, as a matter of methodology, don’t recognize the truth of any ‘overall impression’ that is not specifically spelled out in some verse or passage. So unless there’s a specific verse that says, “God is omniscient; he knows all truths,” you won’t ‘affirm’ this. I think that leaves us (well, it certainly leaves INTPs like me!) a bit impoverished intellectually speaking.

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Jeff: What we DO have reason to believe is that God has ALWAYS been intellectually active, somehow or some way. Because otherwise, we're back to the problem of how things "get off the dime," to even get going. And that is the ONLY reason that I can see why we need to suppose that God has ALWAYS been intellectually active.

Tom: Exactly. But here’s the thing. For me, it’s not JUST the logic of God’s being necessarily ‘sentient’ that encourages me to affirm this. I have to admit that I’ve got intuitions working there too. Sentient existence is greater than non-sentient existence. To be a sentient/thinking being is intrinsically a better and more valuable mode of existence than, say, that sort of existence had by a rock or a chair. And if you ask me to PROVE this I can’t help but feel there’s something wrong with you, though I think some argument can be put forward. I guess that’s the intuition of it.

Moreover, some expressions of sentient existence are intrinsically more valuable than other expressions of sentient existence. Humans, for example, are more valuable than cows or dogs, though the latter have some cognitive capabilities. In addition to just possessing cognitive capabilities, we feel, relate personally and rationally, and make judgment calls of a higher order.

In my view, the overall biblical picture of God is that he fulfills and exemplifies these intuitions—God is the most knowledgeable, powerful, motivated, personal, wise being there is, or that can be conceived. Somehow it just rakes across these gut intuitions to say, “Ah-a-a, I’m not going to say God knows all truths because the Bible doesn’t explicitly require that I do so.”

If we ONLY had our intuition, I admit, we’d be in some trouble. Our intuitions aren’t infallible truth indicators. But when a claim like “God knows all truths” presents itself as consistent with what the Bible DOES say AND has good philosophical support, I think it’s way too minimalistic to require absolute proof. So when you say I can’t “prove” that God knows all truths I just scratch my head. I’m working on a maximalist’s approach to what can be reasonably affirmed as true.

Jeff: Otherwise, we could assume God was unconscious and then all of sudden became conscious and somehow generated all His knowledge. Not an attractive alternative, to say the least.

Tom: Less than unattractive, dude.

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Tom:  But "extent"? Well, it would be very reasonable to say that a being who knows SOME necessary truths because such knowledge is entailed in that being’s knowing him/herself would know ALL necessary truths equally entailed in such self-knowledge or self-awareness.

Jeff:  Here is were you are declaring the MODE by which you believe God knows, pre-creation.

Tom: There simply is no other sans-creational alternative reality, Jeff; nothing else to account for divine knowledge of any truth at all. There’s just God. If God is not the ground of sans-creational truth, there is no ground and there are no truths. So yes, if you admit that God is necessarily sentient, and that God is the ONLY necessary being, then some things are logically entailed in this, and God’s own self-reflecting cognition is the only explanation around.

Jeff: I would say that an intelligent being that thinks according to regulative categories may not even HAVE absolute and exhaustive knowledge of His own nature. The nature, both intellectual and sentient, of the Father may be caused or conditioned by the Holy Spirit. If so, it is conceivable that God may not know the total explanation of why His sensibilities are what they are, any more than I understand how my spirit causes my sensibilities to be what they are.

Tom: Your minimalism leaves me speechless and stupefied. It’s very hard to argue with an approach that will ONLY affirm as true about God that which is required by explicit biblical data.

Jeff: The explicability of my actual BEHAVIOR (intellectual and otherwise) does not require my knowledge of HOW my spirit conditions my nature. For that level of explicability is beyond the epistemologically warranted quest. The same may apply for God. There may be some things we are just silly to ask questions about, because there is NO WAY to answer them, given our categorical constraints.

Tom: I’m not suggesting we can lift off the cover on God’s inner dealings with Godself and observe the firing of synapses and trace the journey of thought and emotion. We can’t sit inside of God and watch God do God. But that doesn’t mean we can reason our own way through to concluding that some such activity exists (which you seem to have admitted now), and that if some such activity exists, knowledge GROUNDED in such activity would BE KNOWN.

Very different starting points and assumptions going on here. Very different!

Jeff: But assuming God DOES have absolute and exhaustive self-knowledge prior to creation, it doesn't follow that God CHOOSES TO RELATE (to use your phrase) all conceivable relations that are entailed in that class of knowledge.

Tom: Then what entails them, Jeff? We’re talking about necessary truths; truths grounded in God’s own cognition or knowing, not grounded in some other divine reality outside of God’s actually knowing. If they’re not grounded there then they flat out don’t exist. If God doesn’t know them sans creation then they don’t exist.

Jeff: Contingencies are a class of relations that can truly be conceived to be ENTAILED in God's nature, but they need not be INTELLECTUALLY and VOLITIONALLY RELATED.

Tom: (1) I don’t think necessary truths are ‘volitionally’ related by God. In fact, I don’t think ANY of God’s knowledge is ‘volitionally’ related. That is, I don't think God "chooses" to know this or that truth. Nor do I think he "deduces" or "infers." I think God’s knowledge is intuitive, not inferential. (2) If you can conceive of the existence of “truth” that is not known by SOME sentient being, then conceive it for me, because I can’t conceive of it. Truth is a meaningful notion, and meaning is a function of cognition. The existence of truth implies the existence of cognition. If you can account for the ‘existence’ of sans-creation, necessary truths apart from their ‘being known’ by God, then let’s see an accounting of it.

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Tom:  A) ...Do you have good reasons for believing that God, a necessarily sentient being, doesn’t possess full and infallible knowledge of his own being and nature?

Jeff:  No, but I don't have good reasons to think He MUST have full and infallible knowledge of His own being and nature, for the reasons I stated above.

Tom (with a blank stare on his face, tilts his head slightly sideways and gazes down the empty corridor of Concourse C in the airport he’s sitting in writing this): You have no good reasons for believing God knows all there is to know about himself? An unspeakably wonderful God of unfathomable knowledge and wisdom, a greater than which cannot possibly exist or be imagined, who knows all there is to know about himself? You actually feel the evidence FOR such a God is equal to the evidence AGAINST such a God? It’s just a toss up for you?

Jeff: What does it mean to say we have good reasons?

Tom: I’m sure I no longer know! And whatever I answered it wouldn’t tilt the scales in your mind. They seem to be locked on 50/50, even-even.  

Jeff: For me, as I've said, the ONLY reason to take a side in the matter is because the hypothesis explains something that MUST be true to account for creation or scripture…

Tom: And for me, I couldn’t possibly function on such a minimalist’s approach to truth.

Jeff: I can't see how the attribute-proposition hypothesis fits that bill.

Tom: Give me an example of knowledge which is NOT an attribute, Jeff. If you can’t (and you can’t), then stop pretending that I’m unique in viewing God’s knowledge as an attribute. All knowledge is an attribute of the knower.

Jeff: But you are saying that God doesn't RELATE in time.

Tom: When did I say that? I’ve specifically said the question of time is completely irrelevant to this discussion. But anyhow, how could I say God doesn’t relate in time and be an open theist? How could I say it and believe God knows temporal truths?

Jeff: So HOW can He see what relations are ENTAILED in any class of propositions?

Tom: Maybe this is the crux of it. You see God’s knowledge as inferential. I see it as intuitive. I don’t think God ever concludes that a proposition is true by reasoning his way from the truth of some other proposition. God doesn't "figure truth out" and so move from ignorance to knowledge in this fashion.

Jeff: For "SEE" is a verb, which implies a time relation by definition.

Tom: So you’ve said many times. ;o)

Jeff: You've cut us off from thinking about the problem in any meaningful way.

Tom: There are people who think meaningfully about ‘timelessness’, who don’t find the very notion itself meaningless. I’m not saying God is timeless. I don’t think he is. But I’m able at least to ‘conceive’ of the notion.

Jeff: And that's fine, so long as your willing to allow Spen to posit non-meaningful EDF, also. Spen CONCEDES that his belief in EDF is supra-intuitive.

Tom: Who said EDF is not meaningful? Not me. I find the notion perfectly meaningful and consistent. Show me it’s not meaningful. Of course it is. What’s not meaningful is EDF conjoined with reality of creaturely LFW.

Jeff: But if you want to just POSIT that EVERY conceivable (by us) CLASS of propositions that could be discursively justified (by us) from the knowledge of God's nature simply EXIST as necessary beings, independent of God's intellectual production, eternally, I say fine.

Tom: I wouldn’t posit this because I don’t believe it and have never argued it. I’ve specifically argued a contrary position. But I have no more hope of being understood, so I’ll not say again that (a) I think God’s knowledge is intuitive not inferential, that (b) I don’t believe there can exist sans-creational necessary truths which are not necessarily known, (c) I don’t think such truths are grounded in God’s nature at some location where his cognition could not apprehend it. I identify the grounding reality of such truth TO BE GOD’S COGNITION.

Jeff: But I want to know WHY that should be posited.

Tom: Because in positing it I posit a greater and more valuable God than otherwise.

Jeff: Is it because the dynamic view I'm proposing as possible is really IMpossible?

Tom: By positing omniscience sans creation you don’t necessarily get a cosmic stuffed shirt. I’m not arguing for a static vs a dynamic God.

Jeff: What does it solve?

Tom: For me it solves the problem faced in attempting to worship a God a greater than which I can easily conceive. I’d rather worship the greater God. In fact, if it’s worship I’m to offer, I wouldn't know how to worship the lesser God.

Perhaps you have no such difficulties. I understand. Or perhaps your view of God IS the greatest YOU can imagine. I don’t know. And yes we may have different assumptions about what makes for a great-making property or whether the intuition that tells us this is a good way to think at all ought to be heeded of dismissed. If you don’t need it, don’t heed it. I can’t deny these intuitions and embrace in worship a God a greater than which I can imagine.

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Tom: Not necessary FOR what, Jeff. See, that tells me you and I aren’t really on the same page with regard to what a necessary truth is. Necessary truths don’t get their necessity FOR anything. They get it FROM something.

Jeff:  It is inconceivable how BEINGS (propositions that you say EXIST) can GET something without positing an EVENT in time.

Tom: I have no such problem. Logic is, strictly speaking, an atemporal affair. Logical relations are not temporal relations, so far as I can tell.

Jeff:  Not at all, Tom. NO ONE can do what you're trying to do because VERBS convey ACTIVITY, which implies TIME relations.  You're doing as well as ANYONE could, attempting the impossible.

Tom: Jeff, Jeff, Jeff. YOU ALREADY ADMIT THE NECESSARY APPREHENSION BY GOD OF NECESSARY TRUTHS, and you use real English verbs to express this knowledge! You just don’t want to admit God knows ALL necessary truths. Fine. But you admit some. And the some you admit means that even IF God is temporally eternal, it doesn’t “take time” for God to apprehend those necessary truths you admit he necessarily knows. So time itself doesn’t (and in fact cannot) explain the necessary knowledge of anything. And it only takes admitting ONE such case to show that we HAVE proved what you think is impossible to do.

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Tom: I don’t conclude that God knows some necessary truths (those you agree he necessarily knows) because knowledge of such truths makes God's trinitarian life and self-relating possible.

Jeff:  I worded that poorly.  I meant what does positing the eternal, independent existence of ALL attributes explain or account for, PERIOD?

Tom: I don’t posit the “independent” existence of any proposition or truth either.

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Tom:  I conclude that God knows “I [God] exist” because he relates meaningfully to himself. His trinitarian self-awareness is logically NECESSARY TO the truth of the proposition “I [God] exist” rather than the other way around.

Jeff:  I absolutely agree. Because you're using verbs the way the rest of us do. You're talking intellectual activity, IN TIME, which is precisely what I'm claiming is meaningful.

Tom: No I’m not. The logical entailment I mentioned doesn’t “take time” to obtain and God doesn’t “take time” to apprehend the truth of his own existence. That would mean there’s some time at which he fails to apprehend such truth. God may be eternally temporal, Jeff, but that’s irrelevant really since you agree that he NECESSARILY knows “I [God] exist.” If he necessarily knows this, then there never was a time he didn’t know it, in which case he didn’t and doesn’t “take time” to know or discover its truth or reason his way into such truth by inference or deduction. Time is irrelevant to a necessary being’s necessarily knowing anything that’s necessarily true. It can only be intuitive knowledge.

Once you admit ONE such instance of necessary knowledge, your entire “But you used the verb ‘knows’ and that implies time, deduction, and cause and effect” is entirely, absolutely, and utterly deeeeeemooooolished.

Jeff: So if we say that God CHOOSES TO RELATE (which implies time), we are saying that God's APPREHENSION of any relations conceivably entailed by His nature are OBTAINED in time.

Tom: Maybe so, but this wouldn’t mean, and in fact couldn’t mean, God comes (in time) to apprehend necessary truths he formerly did not know. Time’s irrelevant to the necessary knowledge of necessary truths. Time may in fact exist. But it wouldn’t mean such knowledge was preceded by ignorance of what’s known. Time can’t explain how what is necessarily true is necessarily known.

Jeff: That can be done eternally or at some "point" in time. That is a logical possibility as far as I can tell. Is it to you?

Tom: Absolutely. That’s what I’m saying. But you've just argued something about the MODE of God’s knowledge, which you criticize me any time I try to do it. In any event, even if God is eternally temporal, it’s still the case that God is necessarily sentient and so necessarily knows. What does he necessarily know? Well, whatever it is, it’s by definition necessary true. That means the set of necessary truths are the only truths God may necessarily know. And he knows them by virtue of BEING NECESSARILY SELF-REFLECTING AND SENTIENT. And you say you have no good reasons for thinking God necessarily knows necessary truth?

Now, YOU want to carve up the set of necessary truths into the set of necessary truths God necessarily knows and the set of necessary truths God contingently knows. I'm saying that the second sub-set is a logically impossible set. As well, separating out necessary truths this way seems nothing but arbitrary to me. Now, you could try to dismiss propositions positing future contingents as contingently true propositions and so remove them from the class of necessary truths. If you wanna try, I'm all ears.

Jeff: If, on the other hand, we say attributes exist, necessarily, unproduced by God's CHOOSING TO RELATE, then we have to account for how He KNOWS them to be true, without that extra STEP of evaluating the "objective" relation of the independently-existing propositions to His own nature.

Tom: Inuitive knowledge, Jeff. Consider it.

And don't say you DO agree there are some necessary truths God necessarily knows if necessary knowledge has to be "produced" by an act of deduction.  I’m not saying you have to embrace divine timelessness to affirm such divine knowledge. You don’t. I don’t. But to say he “necessarily knows” is to say what is necessarily known is not temporally “produced” or “known after having not known” since that would be contradictory to its being necessarily known. We CAN say God necessarily knows things to be true without having to account for just how he knows them, though I think ‘intuitive’ knowledge perfectly fits the bill. If God’s knowledge is intuitive and not inferential your problems evaporate.

Jeff: If God is a teleological thinker, He CHOOSES to relate, in time. It doesn't seem necessary to me that God is ALWAYS purposing EVERY conceivable purpose He is capable of making.

Tom: That would be logically impossible, for some possible purposes God may embrace are contrary to others.

Jeff:  You're overlooking that fact that WE can GENERATE propositions. I have no a-priori reason to assume that God can't do the same.

Tom: We cannot necessarily know, since we are contingent beings. God, we agree, does…must…necessarily know.

Jeff: Tom, if you really think hard…

Tom: That’s Alan’s job!

Jeff: …I think you can come up with a way to articulate WHY eternal propositions MUST exist.

Tom: That’s easy. They must exist because God necessarily exists and is necessarily a sentient being. God necessarily knows, something he can’t do if there are no truths to know. So there must be SOME necessary truths. Otherwise God isn't necessarily sentient. And of course "eternal truths" by defintion are necessarily known. An "eternal truth that is not eternally known" is a contradiction of terms.

Jeff: I'm not saying they don't. Obviously, it's reasonable to believe SOME propositions have been in existence all along.

Tom: Then THIS knowledge cannot come into existence at some point in time. So they aren’t temporally produced in that sense, though they don’t require atemporal existence either.

Jeff: But to say EVERY conceivable proposition has eternal, independent existence is another thing, altogether.

Tom: Ugh. Oh to be understood. That would be nice. OK, first, I’ve never claimed every conceivable proposition is eternal. “Tom is now sitting in the airport” is not eternally true. The only possible propositions that are candidates for being necessarily known by God are necessary truths. Secondly, I’ve explicitly argued that propositions (truths) cannot exist independent of SOME sentient being’s knowing them. Propositions are meaningful assertions. “Meaningful assertions” can only be apprehended by a sentient knower. Rocks neither make nor apprehend meaningful assertions. No sentient apprehension of a proposition—no proposition exists.

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Jeff:  Well, you know as well as I do that all events have causes.

Tom: I don’t know that. Why should that be true? All contingent events have a cause, sure. But necessary events? I don't see how they can have causes in the sense of something bringing them into existence. But anyhow, my getting out of bed is contingent and does have a cause. It's ME. I'm self-determining. I do choose to get up. What I'm saying is that there’s no specific ‘cause’ that accounts for WHY I CHOOSE to get out of bed at 10:03 as opposed to 10:02 or 9:59, given my laying there awake for 20 minutes able to equally rise at any time. That's what I take libertarian free will to be.

Jeff: Nothing JUST happens.

Tom: Then nothing necessarily exists. What cause brought God into existence?

Jeff: The pertinent question is, was God's creative activity VOLITIONAL, or merely IMPULSIVE?

Tom: Why is that the pertinent question?

Tom

Post Edited (TGB) : 10/15/2005 2:01:30 PM (GMT-5)

Tom, I don't have time to even finish READING your post this weekend, much less responding to all of it.  So let me respond to the extracts below, which are at the heart of the matter.

Jeff: What does it solve?

Tom: For me it solves the problem faced in attempting to worship a God a greater than which I can easily conceive. I’d rather worship the greater God. In fact, if it’s worship I’m to offer, I wouldn't know how to worship the lesser God.

Jeff:  My claim is that I CANNOT conceive of your kind of God.  If time is eternal, and it is in my mind since finite and infinite are correlative notions in my mind, the ONLY way I can account for epistemologically GROUNDED eternal foreknowledge is by assuming that God is CONTINUOUSLY evaluating the implications of His self knowledge or that God evaluated those implications and some point(s) of time.  But would the former be greater than the latter?  I can't see how?   Greater with respect to what or who?  

Tom:  Perhaps you have no such difficulties. I understand. Or perhaps your view of God IS the greatest YOU can imagine. I don’t know.

Jeff:  It depends on what you mean by imagine.  I can, in a mere pictoral sense, imagine something popping into existence.  I could pretend that it popped into existence out of nothing.  But the minute I reflect on that, I know that it popped into existence OUT OF MY MIND.  I.e., it was caused by an agent. 

This is what I say you are doing.  You are making assertions that sound OK superficially.  But the minute the verbs in your sentences are given any meaningful import, the incoherence of those sentences is apparent to me.   So that brings me back to seeing ETERNAL ATTRIBUTE foreknowledge as ungrounded, just like EDF. 

That, to me is the issue.  I don't care if you need to believe in attribute foreknowledge to worship God.  I don't care if Spen needs to be believe in EDF to worship God.  All I'm saying is, I don't see how either of you could prove that other was wrong.  Your both adhering to what you NEED to believe.  I, personally, am perfectly comfortable with the idea that God's being may entail relations that ONLY God can apprehend.  In the meanwhile, the relations that I CAN conceive Him by are quite sufficient to account for Rom. 1, which says that MERELY what can be known of His intelligence and power implied in the design of the creation obligates us to THANK and GLORIFY Him.

Tom:   And yes we may have different assumptions about what makes for a great-making property or whether the intuition that tells us this is a good way to think at all ought to be heeded of dismissed. If you don’t need it, don’t heed it. I can’t deny these intuitions and embrace in worship a God a greater than which I can imagine.

Jeff:  The creation of the finite universe applies a greatness beyond our wildest imagination.  And YET that doesn't imply foreknowledge of LFW events.  Greatness doesn't imply EVERY imaginable possibility.  One could imagine that God has EDF by relations utterly incomprehendible to the human mind.  But that imagination STILL is not implied by the mere fact that God is the greatest existing BEING.  I'm just trying to distinguish between what we can KNOW and what is speculation. 

Tom: I have no such problem. Logic is, strictly speaking, an atemporal affair. Logical relations are not temporal relations, so far as I can tell.

Jeff:  No it's not an atemporal affair.  Because propositions contain verbs.  And verbs have time relations.  You can't articulate ANY argument about ANYTHING without at LEAST using state-of-being verbs.  And even THEY have time relations.  The world, which entails these categorical relations, IS a being which is truly causal, and hence temporal.  We can't even KNOW it apart from causality.

There is a sense in which we can think about logical relations without emphasizing that the very objective reality, which entails them, has duration.  But relations imply BEINGS.  And beings EXIST.  And EXIST is a verb.  Hence, EVEN logical relations are correlative with time, ultimately.