Just in time for the Feast of the Incarnation, the New York Times published an opinion piece written by Professor of Philosophy Peter Atterton that purposes to refute the idea of “deity most Westerners accept” because it is not coherent. His approach is the same approach is the same tri-lemma that was the topic of a recent post: pitting God’s omnipotence, omnibenevolence and omniscience against each other. It is worthwhile to examine his argument, well at least part of it, not because it is particularly compelling, but because it was featured in one of the country’s largest fish wraps. In fact, his argument overall falls rather flat as we will see.
A Stone too Large, Really?
First he experiments with the “stone too large to lift argument” to attack God’s omnipotence. This seems rather easy to resolve once we define what we mean when we say that God’s omnipotence allows Him to do any thing and not anything. Provided that the thing is an actual thing, that is something that could be done, then God can do it. The rock too heavy to lift is a sophist word game because it is simply a logical contradiction akin to saying that God can also square a circle or make right left (which everyone knows only Lightning McQueen can do). This is a classic attack (the author even cites Aquinas who addressed it) but it really stems from a misunderstanding of God’s nature. Those who posit such a thing normally think of the voluntarist God of the Calvinists and Muslims rather than the God Who is Reason and has revealed Himself in the Logos or Word that became flesh.
Professor Atterton may have been trying to set up an attack on God’s omnibenevolence by even mentioning the ersatz dilemma of the stone that can’t be lifted. He seems to think that a world in which evil does not exist, at least from the Christian point of view, is among those logical impossibilities. That is certainly not something that Christians believe. God could have made (and even possibly did) such a world, but for reasons we may not understand (because we are not God) He chose not to. The point however is that He could have done otherwise, but had a reason for doing it the way He did.
As far as this part of the tri-lemma, I will refer the reader to the aforementioned post that deals with God and the Problem of Evil. The part of the argument that bears the most attention is the “conundrum” of omniscience. In short, his argument is that “if God knows all there is to know, then He knows at least as much as we know. But if He knows what we know, then this would appear to detract from His perfection… if God knows all that is knowable, then God must know things that we do, like lust and envy. But one cannot know lust and envy unless one has experienced them. But to have had feelings of lust and envy is to have sinned, in which case God cannot be morally perfect…Therefore, God doesn’t know what it is like to be human. In that case He doesn’t know what we know. But if God doesn’t know what we know, God is not all knowing, and the concept of God is contradictory. God cannot be both omniscient and morally perfect. Hence, God could not exist.”
God’s Omniscience
One must first admit that this has a diabolical ring to it, “for you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (c.f. Gn 3:5) and so we should immediately intuit that it contains a falsehood. The diabolical delusion is unmasked once we challenge the Professor’s contention that “if God knows all there is to know, then He knows at least as much as we know.”
The problem is not that it is wrong, but that he is equivocating on the term “knows”. The way we know things is vastly different from the way God knows things. In truth, God knows only one thing—Himself—and this knowledge of Himself embraces everything actual and possible. Our knowledge comes piecemeal and only after discursion. His knowledge embraces all things at once without any reasoning out all the possible details of each individual thing. His knowledge is eternal and unchanging and thus He must come to know all things in light of their cause, Himself. If this were not so, then there would be an imperfection in God, namely that His knowledge would depend on created things.
God’s knowledge is not determined and measured by things like ours, but is the cause of things. God’s knowledge in relation to things then is a creative knowledge that gives existence to things. Ours is an experiential or connatural knowledge. This point seems to be missed when the Professor speaks of God having to know “lust and envy.” This train of thought is important because it keeps the Professor’s moral argument from leaving the station.
Evil is foreign to God, but, according to St. Thomas, God can still know evil “through the good of which it is a privation, as darkness is known by light.” His point is that evil, like darkness, can only be known in contrast to the thing that is lacking. God is not the cause of the lack, but man is, even if God has permitted it. In other words, God can know about evil, but only because it is affront to the good of which He has creative knowledge. But St. Thomas goes even further when he says that “He would not know good things perfectly unless He also knew evil things” (ST I, q.14 a.10). His point is that to speak of “full” knowledge is to imply degree. In short, to have full knowledge means one must also be able to know when it is lacking.
In recent years the New York Times has come under intense scrutiny for its lack of journalistic integrity and a decidedly partisan slant with little regard for truth. They seem to now be setting their sights on Truth Himself. Of course, if they are going to succeed in placing God in the Dock, they are going to have to find better arguments than Professor Atterton’s elementary attempt. Maybe some news isn’t really fit to print.