Divine speech acts

Suppose random quantum processes result in deep marks on a stone that spell out:

• Thou shalt not eat goat. – God

What would need to be true for it to be the case that God said (or wrote) that, thereby forbidding us to eat goat?

I assume that God always cooperates with creaturely causation, so divine causation is involved in the above production. However, such divine cooperation with the production of something that looks like an inscription or sounds like an utterance does not suffice to make it be the case that God said the thing. Imagine that a cult leader makes the above inscription. God is still cooperating with the cult leader’s causality, but we don’t want to attribute the inscription to God’s authorship.

One obvious answer is by analogy to our language. A part of what makes a performance a speech act of a particular sort is a certain kind of intention, e.g., that the performance be taken to be that sort of speech act. So maybe it just depends on God’s intentions. If God merely intends cooperation with quantum processes, there is no inscription, just random marks on stone that happen to look like an inscription. But if God intends the marks to be taken to be an inscription, they are an inscription.

This solution, however, is unhelpful given divine simplicity. The intention is a contingent feature of God, and on divine simplicity the contingency of contingent divine features is always grounded in some contingent arrangement of creatures. There cannot be two worlds that are exactly alike in their created aspects but where God has different intentions in the two worlds. So given divine simplicity, there has to be a characterization of what makes the marks a divine command in terms of what creation is like. (My view of divine intentions is, roughly, that God intends F in doing A iff intending F would be a good reason for God to do A. This presupposes divine omnirationality.)

Here is one possibility.

1. Something that looks or sounds like a speech act is a divine speech act if and only if it was directly produced by God without secondary causes.

But this seems mistaken. Imagine that in the sight of a tribe, God created a stone and a stylus ex nihilo, and then miraculously moved the stylus in such a way as to inscribe the prohibition on eating goat. Then, surely, the members of the tribe upon seeing the stylus moving through the air and gouging clear text in the stone would be right to attribute the message to God. But the inscription was not directly produced by God: it was produced by means of a stylus.

Perhaps:

2. Something that looks or sounds like a speech act is a divine speech act if and only if it was a deterministic result of something done by God without secondary causes.

This still seems a bit too restrictive. Imagine that while God used the stylus to inscribe the stone in our previous story, he nonetheless allowed for ordinary quantum randomness in the interaction between the hard stylus and the softer stone, which randomness ensured that there was a tiny probability that no inscription would result—that, say, stylus atoms would quantum tunnel through the stone atoms.

One might replace “deterministic” with “extremely probable”. But just how probable would it have to be?

Here is a different suggestion that seems to me more promising.

3. Something that looks or sounds like a speech act is a divine speech act to humans if and only if a normal human who knew all the metaphysical and physical facts about the production of this act, as well as the human social context of the production, would reasonably take it to be a divine speech act.

This suggestion allows for the possibility that a normal human would be mistaken about whether something is a divine speech act—but the mistake would then be traced back to a mistake about the relevant metaphysical, physical and social facts.

The applicability of (3) is still difficult. Take the initial example where the apparent divine prohibition on eating goat appears from quantum randomness. Would a reasonable and normal human who knew it to have appeared from quantum randomness with ordinary divine cooperation of the sort found in all creaturely causation think it to be a divine speech act? I don’t know. I don’t know that I am a reasonable and normal human, and I don’t actually know what to think about this.