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.

Beyond metaphysical immutability

For years I was convinced that the extrinsic constitution model of divine knowledge, which theists who accept divine simplicity must accept, solves the problem of divine immutability in an A-theoretic world where truth changes. The idea was that God’s knowledge of contingent facts is constituted by God’s unchanging essential features (which given simplicity are God himself) together with the changing contingent realities that God knows, that God’s gaze extends to. (This idea is not original to me. Aquinas already had it and probably many contemporary people have independently found it.)

But I now think that this was too quick. For let’s take the idea seriously. The point of the idea is that an unchanging God can have changing knowledge. But now notice that God’s knowledge is conscious. The language of “God’s gaze” that I used above (and which Boethius also uses in his famous discussion of divine knowledge of free actions) itself suggests this—God sees the changing reality. At one time God sees Adam sinless. At another time God sees Adam sinful. This is a difference in conscious state. Granted, this difference in conscious state is entirely metaphysically constituted by the changing reality. But it still means that God’s conscious state changes. It changes in virtue of its extrinsic constituent, but it is still true that God at t₁ is conscious of one thing and God at t₂ is conscious of something else instead. And I submit that that is incompatible with divine immutability.

I think there are two responses the classical theist who believes in changing truths can give. The first is to deny that God is conscious of the changes. I think this is unacceptable. The more vivid and the more vision-like knowledge is, the more perfect it is. The idea that God has merely unconscious knowledge of contingents does not do justice to the perfection of omniscience.

The second response is to bite the bullet and say that God’s conscious state changes but this is compatible with immutability as long as this does not involve an intrinsic change in God. I think this is untenable. That God’s conscious state does not change is, I think, a central part of the content of immutability, regardless of whether this conscious state is intrinsically or extrinsically constituted. For a non-physical being, change of conscious mental state is a paradigmatically central kind of change—regardless of the metaphysics of how that change of conscious state comes about. When God says in Malachi 3:6 that he does not change, it seems very implausible to think that the listener is supposed to say: “Sure, but sometimes God has one conscious state and sometimes another, and because this change is grounded extrinsically, that’s OK.” Malachi isn’t doing heavy-duty scholastic/analytic metaphysics. Similarly, when the early Church Fathers say that God is unchanging I doubt they would tolerate the idea that God’s conscious state changes. The extrinsic constitution story is an explanation of what makes God’s conscious state change, and I expect the Church Fathers wouldn’t have cared what the explanation would be—they would just deny the change.

Jumping from the Church Fathers to the modern period, Calvin says that God “cannot be touched with repentance, and his heart cannot undergo changes. To imagine such a thing would be impiety.” But if God’s conscious states are extrinsically constituted and can change, there would be nothing to prevent the idea of God’s “heart” undergoing changes: when people behave well, God feels pleased; when people behave badly and deserve vengeance, God feels vengeful. The differences in God’s feeling would be, one could imagine, constituted by the differences in human behavior and divine response to it. But it would be implausible to think that Calvin would say “Well, as long as the change is extrinsically constituted, it’s OK.” We then wouldn’t need Calvin’s famous story—itself going back to the Church Fathers—of the accommodation of divine speech to our needs. When Calvin insists that God’s heart cannot undergo changes, he isn’t just concerned about divine metaphysics. He is rightly concerned about a picture of a God with a changing mental life. And here at least, Calvin is with the mainstream of the Christian tradition.

If I am right in the above, there is a disanalogy between how God’s mental state behaves across possible worlds and across times. We have to say that in different possible worlds God has different (extrinsically constituted according to divine simplicity) conscious states. But we cannot say that God has different conscious states at different times.

Some thinkers, especially open theists, want the doctrine of divine immutability not to be about metaphysics but about the constancy of God’s character, purposes and promises. I think they are wrong: the doctrine of immutability really does include what we might call metaphysical immutability, that God has no intrinsic change. But metaphysical immutability is not enough. A mental and especially conscious immutability is also central to how we understand divine immutability.

And this is not compatible with the A-theory of time, given omniscience. Which is too bad. While I myself am a B-theorist, the reasoning in yesterday’s post was giving me the hope that we could detach the A- and B-theoretic debate from theism, so that the theist wouldn’t need to take a stand on it. But, alas, I think a stand needs to be taken.

Could a being in time be eternal in Boethius' sense?

Famously, Boethius says that an eternal being, unlike a merely temporally everlasting being, embraces all of its infinite life at once, “possess[ing] the whole fulness of unending life at once”. What’s that mean?

Our life is strung out across time. Sitting right now I as I am I do not embrace the past and future portions of my life where I am lying down or standing up. If I fully and vividly knew my past and my future, I would be a little closer to being eternal, but it would still not be true that I possess the fullness of that life at once. For it would still be true that I now only possess the property of being seated and not the property of lying down or of standing up. So I think epistemic things are not enough for eternity. And this seems intuitively right—eternity is not an epistemic matter. (Could you have an eternal being that isn’t minded? I don’t see why not.) A necessary condition for being eternal is being unchanging.

But being unchanging is not sufficient. Suppose I were everlastingly frozen sitting in front of my laptop. It would still be true that in addition to the present part of my life there is the future part and the past part, and further subdivisions of these, even if they happen to be boringly all alike. The life of an eternal being does not have temporal divisions, even boring ones. It is all at once.

Here is a weird thought experiment. Imagine you are an everlasting point-sized being with a rich and changing mental life. Suppose all your life is spent at the one spatial location (x₀,y₀,z₀). But now imagine that you get infinitely multilocated across all time, in such a way that your numerically same life occurs at every x-coordinate. Thus, you live your everlasting and rich mental life (x,y₀,z₀) for every possible value of x, and it’s the very same life. Your life isn’t spatially divided. The life at x-coordinate  − 7.0 is not merely qualitatively but numerically the same life as the one at x-coordinate  + 99.4.

Now, one more step. Your life is within a four-dimensional spacetime. Assume that spacetime is Galilean or Minkowskian. Now imagine rotating your life in the four-dimensional spacetime in such a way that what was previously along the x-axis is along the t-axis and vice versa. So now your rich and temporally varied mental life becomes temporally unchanging, but all the variation is now strung out spatially along the x-axis. Furthermore, whereas previously due to multilocation you had your life wholly at every x-coordinate, now you have your life wholly—and the numerically same life—at every t-coordinate. Thus, you have an infinite life all at once at every time for everlasting time. Your life isn’t temporally divided: tomorrow’s life is not simply just like today’s, but it is the numerically same as today’s, because your life is fully multilocated at all the different times.

Here is an interesting thing to note about this. This “sideways life”, varying along the x-axis, satisfies the Boethian definition of eternity even though the life is found in time—indeed at every time. If this is right, then having an eternal life in the Boethian sense is compatible with being in time!

Of course, God is not like you are in my weird story. In my story, your life includes different instances of consciousness strung out along the x-axis, though not along the t-axis. Still this kind of inner division is contrary to the undividedness of the divine mind. An eternal God would not have such divisions either. Nor would he be spatial. Perhaps an argument can be made that if God possesses Boethian eternity, then he has to be timeless. But I think that’s not going to be an easy argument to make.

If this is right, then I have overcome an obstacle to combining classical theism with the A-theory of time. I am convinced that an omniscient being has to be in time if the A-theory is true. But if a being can be in time and yet eternal in the Boethian sense, then a classical theist may be able to accept the A-theory of time. After all, Boethius is paradigmatically a classical theist.

That said, my own view is that the above argument just shows that Boethius has not given us a fully satisfactory characterization of eternity. And I have other reasons to reject the A-theory besides theistic ones.

Towards quantifying the good of success

Yesterday, I argued that the good of success contributes to one’s well-being at the time of one’s striving for success rather than at the time of the success itself.

It seems, then, that the longer you are striving, the longer the amount of time that you are having the good of success. Is that right?

We do think that way. You work on a book for five years. Success is sweeter than if you work on a book for one year.

But only other things being equal. It’s not really the length of time by itself. It’s something like your total personal investment in the project, to which time is only one contribution. Gently churning butter for an hour while multitasking other things (using a pedal-powered churn, for instance) does not get you more good of success than churning butter with maximum effort for fifteen minutes, if the outputs are the same.

We might imagine—I am not sure this is right—that the good of success is variably spread out over the time of striving in proportion to the degree of striving at any given time.

What else goes into the value of success besides total personal investment? Another ingredient is the actual value of the product. If you’ve decided to count the hairs on your toes, success is worth very little. Furthermore, the actual value of the product needs to be reduced in proportion to the degree to which you contributed.

Thus, if Alice and Bob both churned butter and produced n pounds, the value of the output is something like bn, where b is the value of butter per pound. If the investments put in by Alice and Bob are I_A and I_B, then Alice’s share of the value is bnI_A/(I_A+I_B). But since the value of success is proportional also to the absolute investment, I think that the considerations given thus far yield a formula for the value of success for Alice proportional to:

• bnI_A²/(I_A+I_B).

Next note that one way to think about the degree to which you contributed is to think as above—what fraction of the total investment is yours. However, even if you are the only person working on the project, the degree of your contribution may be low. Let’s say that you have moved into a house with a mint bush. Mint bushes are aggressive. They grow well with little care (or so we’ve found). But you do water it. The mint bush added half a pound to its weight at the end of the season. You don’t, however, get credit for all of that pound, since even if you hadn’t watered it, it would likely have grown, just not as much. So you only get credit for the portion of the output that is “yours”. Moreover, sometimes things work probabilistically. If the success is mostly a matter of chance given your investment, I think you only get good-of-success credit in proportion to the chance of success—but I am not completely sure of this.

But here is something that makes me a little uncertain of the above reasoning. Suppose that you have some process where the output is linearly dependent on the investment of effort. You invest I, and you get something of value cI for some proportionality constant c. By the above account, to get the value of success, you should multiply this by I again, since the value of success is proportional to both the value of the output and the effort put in. Thus, you get cI². But is it really the case that when you double the effort you quadruple the value of the success? Maybe. That would be interesting! Or are we double-counting I?

Another question. When we talk about the value of the output, is that the objective value, or the value you put on it, or some combination of the two? Counting the hairs on your toes has little objective value, but what if you think it has significant value? Doesn’t success then have significant value? I suspect not.

But what about activities where the value comes only from your pursuit, such as when you try to win at solitaire or run a mile as fast as you can? In those cases it’s harder to separate the value of the output from the value you put on it. My guess is that in those cases there is still an objective value of the output, but this objective value is imposed by your exercise of normative power—by pursuing certain kinds of goals we can make the goal have value.

Let’s come back to counting hairs on toes. If you’re doing it solely for the sake of the value of knowledge, this has (in typical circumstances) little objective value. But if your hobby is counting difficult to count things, then maybe there is additional value, beyond that of trivial knowledge, in the result.

I suspect there are further complications. Human normativity is messy.

And don’t ask me how this applies to God. On the one hand, it takes no effort for God to produce any effect. On the other hand, by divine simplicity God is perfectly invested in everything he does. But since my metaethics is kind-relative, I am happy with the idea that this will go very differently for God than for us.

From three or four problems of omniscience down to one

The three most influential problems of omniscience are:

1. Boethius’ problem of foreknowledge: What is known is necessarily so, and thus if God knows what you will do, you will necessarily do it.

2. Pike’s problem of foreknowledge: If you can act otherwise, you can thereby make it be that either God didn’t exist or that God wasn’t omniscient or that God had believed otherwise than God actually did, and you just can’t do that.

3. The simplicity and knowledge of contingents problem: If the world had been different, God’s beliefs would have been different, which implies that God’s beliefs are accidents of God, contrary to divine simplicity.

Of these, (1) is fully solved by Boethius/Aquinas by distinguishing between necessity of consequence and necessity of consequent. The problem in (1) is just a simple matter of a fallacy of modal scope ambiguity. It’s a non-problem.

I now want to argue that the most widely accepted solution to (3) also solves (2).

This solution, likely already known to Aquinas, is that God’s belief in contingent facts is partly extrinsically constituted by creatures, and all the contingency is on the created side. For instance, God’s belief that there are zebras is grounded in essential facts about God that do not vary between possible worlds and the actual existence of zebras, which only obtains in some possible worlds.

Suppose we apply this solution to (3). Then God’s belief that you will ϕ at t is partly grounded in your ϕing at t and partly in essential facts about God. At this point it is obvious that:

4. If you were not to ϕ at t, God wouldn’t have believed you would ϕ at t.

For the contingent part of the grounds of God’s believing that you would ϕ at t is your actually ϕing at t, so when you take that away, God’s belief goes away. And if instead you ψ at t, your action thereby constitutes the contingent part of the grounds of God’s believing that you would ψ at t, and so:

5. If you were to ψ at t, God would have believe you would ψ at t.

If God’s past belief is partly constituted by our actions, it is no surprise that there is counterfactual dependence between our actions and God’s past belief. In other words, the classical theist who accepts divine simplicity has a way out of Pike’s argument that is motivated completely independently of considerations of time and freedom, namely by embracing counterfactuals like (4) and (5) that Pike considers absurd.

Of course the extrinsic constitution of divine beliefs is somewhat hard to swallow, notwithstanding excellent work by people like W. Matthews Grant to make it more plausible (I myself have swallowed it). But once we do that, problem (2) is gone, and problem (1) was never there as it was based on a fallacy.

There is a fourth problem, a more recondite one, which is about the incompatibility between God’s knowledge of what time is objectively present (assuming the A-theory of time) and divine immutability. Probably the most extensive pressing of this problem is in Richard Gale’s On the Nature and Existence of God. But Aquinas (according to the very plausible interpretation by Miriam Pritschet in an excellent paper I heard yesterday at the ACPA) responds to the fourth problem precisely by using the extrinsic constitution of God’s knowledge of continent facts (indeed this is why I said that the solution to the simplicity problem was likely known to Aquinas). So even that fourth problem reduces to the third—or just doesn’t get off the ground if the B-theory of time is true.

Aquinas on God's knowledge of propositions

Does God know that the sky is blue?

That seems like a silly question. It’s not like we’re asking whether God knows future contingents, or counterfactuals of freedom. That the sky is blue is something that it is utterly unproblematic for God to know.

Except that it is tempting to say that God has no propositional knowledge, and knowing that the sky is blue is knowing a proposition.

It seems that Aquinas answers the question in Summa Theologiae I.14.14: “God knows all the propositions that can be formulated” (that’s in Freddoso’s translation; the older Dominican translation talks of “enunciable things”, but I think that doesn’t affect what I am going to say). It seems that God does have propositional knowledge, albeit not in the divided or successive way that we do.

But what he is up to in I.14.14 is not what it initially sounds like to the analytic philosopher’s ear.

For consider Thomas’s argument in I.14.14 that God knows all formulable propositions:

Since (a) to formulate propositions lies within the power of our intellect, and since (b), as was explained above (a. 9), God knows whatever lies within either His own power or the power of a creature, it must be the case that God knows all the propositions that can be formulated.

But now notice an ambiguity in “God knows the proposition that the sky is blue.” In one sense, which I will call “alethic”, this just means God knows that the sky is blue. In another sense, the “objectual”, it means that God knows a certain abstract object, the proposition that the sky is blue. In the objectual sense, God also knows the proposition that the sky is green—God fully knows that proposition, just as he knows other objects, like the person Socrates. But God does not, of course, have the alethic knowledge here—God does not know that the sky is green, because the sky is not green.

If it was the alethic sense that Thomas was after, his argument would be invalid. For in article 9, the discussion clearly concerns objectual knowledge. Exactly the same argument establishes that God knows the proposition that the sky is green as that he knows the proposition that the sky is blue. Furthermore, the Biblical quote Thomas gives in support of his view is “The Lord knows the thoughts of men” (Psalm 93:11). But the Lord doesn’t know all of them to be true, doesn’t know all of them alethically, because not all of the thoughts of humans are true.

Furthermore, if it was alethic knowledge that Aquinas was after, it would be inaccurate to say God knows all propositions. For only “half” of the propositions can be known alethically—the true ones!

All that said, I think we can still bootstrap from the objectual to the alethic knowledge. God’s knowledge of objects is perfect (Aquinas relies on this perfection multiple times in Question 14) and hence complete. If God knows something, God also knows all of its properties, intrinsic and relational. Thus, if God knows a proposition objectually, and that proposition has a truth value, God knows that truth value. In particular, if that proposition is true, God knows that it is true. And that seems to suffice for counting as knowing the proposition alethically.

So, it looks like Aquinas is committed to God objectually knowing both the propositions that the sky is green and that the sky is blue, and also knowing that the former is false and the latter is true—which seems to be enough for God to count as knowing that the sky is blue. (Though I could see this last point getting questioned.)

Freedom: a problem for presentism and growing block

A number of people have told me that they have the intuition that a four-dimensional picture of reality like that in the B-theory undercuts free will.

I want to suggest that there is one way in which it is a presentist picture of temporal reality that undercuts free will. (A similar argument applies to growing block, but curiously enough not to shrinking block.)

Assume that open future views are false: there are always determinate facts about contingent future events. (If your reason for thinking that four-dimensional theories undercut free will is because you are an open futurist, then you won’t be impressed by what I say.) Suppose it is a fact that tomorrow morning I will have oatmeal for breakfast. On presentism, this fact can only be grounded in what is present, since on presentism, what is present is all there is. Maybe it’s grounded in the present existence of a future-tensed fact or maybe it’s grounded in my having a future-tensed property of being such that I will eat oatmeal in nine hours. But in any case, things right now are already such as to ground and guarantee that I will have oatmeal for breakfast. Moreover, this was already true five minutes ago—five minutes ago, things were also already such as to ground and guarantee that I will have oatmeal for breakfast tomorrow. This sure feels like it should undercut free will! It seems pretty intuitive that freedom isn’t compatible with there existing grounds that guarantee the action prior to the choice.

On the other hand, on a four-dimensional view while it is a fact that I will eat oatmeal for breakfast tomorrow, the grounds of this fact are not located in the present—and were never located in the past. Rather, the grounds of this fact are where they should be—at tomorrow morning. How things are on the present slice of reality, or on past slices, does not determine (assuming indeterminism) what I will have for breakfast tomorrow. That’s left for tomorrow.

The neatest way out for the presentist is to deny with Merricks that contingent truths about the future and past have any grounds. But that’s also costly.

After writing the above, I came across this related paper by Hunt. No time to revise right now to see what similarities or differences there are.

The good of success is not at the time of success

It’s good for one to succeed, at least if the thing one succeeds in is good. And the good of succeeding at a good task is something over and beyond the good of the task’s good end, since the good end might be good for someone other than the agent, while the good of success is good for the agent.

Here’s a question I’ve wondered about, and now I think I’ve come to a fairly settled view. When does success contribute to one’s well-being? The obvious answer is: when the success happens! But the obvious answer is wrong for multiple reasons, and so we should embrace what seems the main alternative, namely that success is good for us when we are striving for the end.

Before getting to the positive arguments for why the good of success doesn’t apply to us at the time of success, let me say something about one consideration in favor of that view. Obviously, we often celebrate when success happens. However, notice that we also often celebrate when success becomes inevitable. Let’s now move to the positive arguments.

First, success at good tasks would still be good for one even if there were no afterlife. But some important projects have posthumous success—and such success is clearly a part of one’s well-being. And it seems implausible to respond that posthumous success only contributes to our well-being because as a matter of fact we do have an afterlife. Note, too, that in order to locate the good of success at the time of success, we would not just need an afterlife, but an afterlife that begins right at death. For instance, views on which we cease to exist at death and then come back into existence later at the resurrection of the dead (as corruptionist Christians hold) won’t solve the problem, because the success may happen during the gap time. I believe in an afterlife that begins right at death, but it doesn’t seem like I should have to in order to account for the good of success. Furthermore, note that to use the afterlife to save posthumous success, we need a correlation between the timeline the dead are in and the timeline the living are in, and even for those of us who believe in an afterlife right at death, this is unclear.

Second, suppose your project is ensure that some disease does not return before the year 2200. When is your success? Only in 2200. But suppose your project is even more grandiose: the future is infinite and you strive to ensure that the disease never returns. When is your success? Well, “after all of time”. But there is no time after all of time. So although it may be true that you are successful, that success does not happen at any given time. At any given time, there is infinite project-time to go. So if you get the good of success at the time of success, you never get the good of success here. Even an afterlife won’t help here.

Third, consider Special Relativity. You work in mission control on earth to make sure that astronauts on Mars accomplish some task. You are part of the team, but the last part of the team’s work is theirs. But since light can take up to 22 minutes (depending on orbital positions) to travel between Earth and Mars, the question of at what exact you-time the astronauts accomplished their task depends on the reference frame, with a range of variation in the possible answers of up to 22 minutes. But whether you are happy at some moment should not depend on the reference frame. (You might say that it depends on what your reference frame is. But there is no unambiguous such thing as “your” reference frame in general, say if you are shaking your head so your brain is moving in one direction and the rest of your body in another.)

Here is an interesting corollary of the view: the future is not open (by open, I mean the thesis that there are no facts about how future contingents will go). For if the future is open, often it is only at the time of success that there will be a fact about success, so there won’t be a fact of your having been better off for the success when you were striving earlier for the success. That said, the open-futurist cannot accept the third argument, and is likely to be somewhat dubious of the second.

More on A-theory and divine timelessness

Argument One:

1. If from x’s point of view there is an objective fact about what time it presently is, then x is in time.

2. If x knows an objective fact about something, then from x’s point of view there is an objective fact about it.

3. If the A-theory of time is true, then there is an objective fact about what time it presently is.

4. God knows all objective facts.

5. So, if the A-theory of time is true, then God knows an objective fact about what time it presently is. (3 and 4)

6. So, if the A-theory of time is true, from God’s point of view there is an objective fact about time it presently is. (2 and 5)

7. So, if the A-theory of time is true, God is in time. (1 and 6)

Note that no claim is made that if the A-theory of time is true, God changes.

Argument Two:

1. God is actual.

2. Everything actual is in the actual world.

3. If the A-theory of time is true, the actual world is a temporally-centered world (one where there is a fact as to what time is present).

4. Anything that is in a temporally-centered world is in time.

5. So, if the A-theory of time is true, God is in time.

Many will dispute 3, but if we think of worlds as ways for everything to be, then I think it is hard to dispute 3.

I wonder if a classical theist who is an A-theorist might be able to respond that, yes, God is in time but God is not a temporal being. Compare that by doctrine of omnipresence, God is in space, but God is not a spatial being. Still, I think there is a difference. For as the above arguments show, the claim that God is in time is more limiting than the claim that God is spatially omnipresent—it is a claim that God is at the one objectively present point of time (he was and will be at others, of course).