Rationality

The problem of God’s omniscience was incidentally brought up in my metaphysics class and we had a brief discussion about how the arguments might be symbolized in modal logic.  This spurred my interest in spelling out the notion of free will in terms of possible worlds.

My first thought was that if I am free, for example, to go to class or not, then the presence of that choice spawns two possible worlds before me (metaphorically, that is, I’m not a modal realist) – one in which I go to class and one in which I don’t.  However, this seems insufficient since even objects that we agree have no free will can have possible worlds branching in their future in exactly the same way (i.e., a stone may roll down the hill on one side or the other, so there are two such possible worlds in the stone’s future).

It doesn’t help matters to say that I freely choose to go to class in one possible world and freely choose not to in another, since “freely” is just what I am trying to explain.

My second thought was that freedom must have something to do with one’s power to actualize a possibility.  In addition to there being two possible worlds branching ahead of me, if I have free will, it is within my power to actualize one or the other (i.e., to make either one of them the actual world).

In formulating the problem of God’s omniscience we have the following:  God is omniscient.  God’s omniscience entails that he knows everything, including what will happen in my future in the actual world.  So let’s say, for example, God knows that I will go to class today.

On my theory, if I have free will I should be able to actualize the possible world in which I don’t go to class today.  But since this would contradict God’s knowledge, I have no such power and therefore no free will.  We can conclude that I will go to class today in the actual world as a matter of fact.

One might be inclined to say that there is a possible world in which I stay home, in which God foreknows that I stay home – but it seems no such possible world can exist.  The reason is that God’s omniscience requires that there is only one possible world (I’ll expand on this below).  Consequently it is trivially true that I will go to class in all possible worlds and so it is a necessary truth in that sense.

When I say my attending class becomes a matter of fact, what I mean is that “Andrew goes to class on August 31st 2010″ is a true statement in the same way that “Andrew was born in March 1982″ is a true statement.  If God is omniscient and my view is right, then my future is unchangeable, that is to say determined, in the same way that my past is unchangeable.

To complete the picture, as it turns out, we have to say that everything is determined – everything about the way the world is, was, and will be, may be stated as facts and could not have been (be, or turn out to be) any different.  Since God knows every fact about the world, those facts are determined (unchangeable).  For example, if God knows that the stone will roll down the left side of the hill, it cannot possibly happen any other way.  The only possible world is therefore the actual one.

A weak objection that pops into mind is that one might argue God knows all possibilities and that he knows which possibility I will freely choose to actualize.  This response doesn’t get us anywhere since the one he knows I will actualize, in virtue of his knowing it, is the only possible world.  Thus the claim that God knows all possibilities just amounts to the claim that God knows what will actually happen.

Things are complicated by the fact that we think God, being all powerful, should be able to create any possible world.  Keeping this in mind, the problem of God’s omniscience becomes deeper than it initially appears – it exposes a conceptual inconsistency in the properties traditionally attributed to God.  That is, if God knows what he will do, then he cannot do otherwise.  If he knows now (in the absolute sense, viz., perfect knowledge) that he will eat pizza for lunch tomorrow, then if he chooses to eat sardines instead he will have contradicted his omniscience.  So if he knows he’ll eat pizza, he cannot eat sardines instead.  But if he cannot choose to eat the sardines, then he is not all powerful.  Either way he doesn’t fit into our traditional conception of God.

P.S. The king of France is bald.

P.P.S. I think asserting that God exists outside of time doesn’t solve the problem, since if that is the only way out of the predicament, it follows that God cannot exist in time, which contradicts his omnipotence.  Not to worry though, it’s not anyone’s fault, it’s just that omnipotence is an incoherent concept.

I recently stumbled across a version of the problem of evil (given by Peter Singer – though he is not the first to point it out, it is an especially important matter for him) that strikes me as especially problematic for the Judeo-Christian concept of God.  In case you don’t know the basic version, it may be presented as follows:

1. God is omnipotent.
2. God is omni-benevolent.
3. God is omniscient.
4. Evil exists.

The problem is that while each of these propositions are individually acceptable, they appear to be inconsistent – that is, it appears that they cannot all be true at the same time.  Virtually no one will deny (4), that evil exists in the world.  However, if (1)-(3) are also true, then God knows about the evil, he has the power to do away with it, and being all-good he should want to do away with it – yet evil still exists.

Of course, as I said, it may be argued that these propositions merely appear to be inconsistent and that, in fact, they are not.  Some of the typical (and most effective) Christian responses are that evil is the result of (i) free-will, (ii) original sin, or (iii) the fact that evil is necessary in order for us to learn life-lessons but for which evil we are eventually repaid in the afterlife.  I find these answers to be prima facie plausible and consistent with Christian teachings.

The problem of animal suffering, however, cannot be resolved by any of the typical responses.  We can take the same set of propositions as before, but replace (4) with (4a): Animals suffer needlessly.  Once again, God knows about their suffering, he could stop it, and he should want to stop it – yet they still suffer.  Virtually no one will deny (4a); it seems clear that animals feel pain.  Animals have nervous systems conducive to their feeling pain and they clearly behave as if they feel pain.  Anyone who has had a dog , cat, or other animal as a friend surely believes animals can suffer and that we, as moral beings, have some kind of obligation to prevent their suffering.

However, the typical Christian responses to the problem of evil will no longer apply.  As for (i), Christianity clearly does not teach that animals have free-will, since free-will is a unique gift afforded to human beings.  Regarding (ii), it is equally clear that animals do not suffer due to original sin, since they have no relation to Adam and Eve (and it’s called the fall of man after all, not the fall of animals [although I suppose by this reasoning women would not suffer due to original sin either, so let's call it the fall of humankind {and don't you hate it when I start using nested parentheses!  I blame this on my spending too many hours playing with logic proofs}]).  Last, it cannot be the case that, as in (iii), animals suffer in order to teach human beings life-lessons; this is evinced by the fact that animals have endured much suffering over the many millions of years that they existed on an Earth devoid of human life.  But even today, animals face all kinds of suffering that has nothing to do with human activities (regular things like drought, famine, or being eaten by a tiger); and to top it all off, the animals would get no recompense in an afterlife (since, sadly, all dogs don’t go to heaven).  Without appealing to ‘mysterious ways’, the ‘best possible world’ argument, or pleading ignorance in some other fashion, I’m at a loss as to what a reasonable response would be.