When chatting with Matt I brought up the issue of procedure in philosophy of God. Namely, whether someone is on the hunt for the ultimate explanation or the ultimate person can lead to many (I think, unnecessary) debates concerning the nature of God and His relation to the world. See the video for the full context (starting around 43 minutes); I think it’s an important point.
But procedure also bears on how one deals with coherency of theism issues. The example of omniscience is a good one. For the classical metaphysician arrives at God being omniscient through the causal-explanatory hunt, realizing God is the ultimate cause of the existence of things, and knows what exists in virtue of being the cause of such existing things, and that God’s (exemplar) knowledge is part of that explanation. This gives us what I call a thin view of omniscience—namely, that God knows everything that exists in virtue of bringing it about, and that God, in knowing himself, knows everything that could exist and himself as cause of those things which do exist. The rest is analogical: that is, God’s mode of knowing, we say, is obviously radically different than ours. Hence, we are still just one-click away from agnosticism with respect to God, because God radically transcends us. Really, we can say God is omniscient, but we must qualify that in God there is *something like* knowledge as we experience it (whether propositional or otherwise), and admit that we do not – and, in fact cannot – fully comprehend God’s knowledge (including God’s mode of knowledge), because we cannot fully comprehend God. This gives us an agnostic cushion, if you will; a way to avoid issues related to contemporary debates surround the coherence of theism based on a philosophy of God that does not admit these things: namely, that what we know about God is 1) apophatic (striking away categories that do not apply to God) and 2) analogic (using stretch concepts; admitting similarity in difference, and strongly emphasizing the difference).
There is benefit to this procedure. Because the CT view of omniscience is restricted (namely, we don’t say “God knows everything!” full stop) we can avoid unnecessary puzzles or conundrums that arise if we think instead of God’s omniscience as being something of a straightforward extension of creaturely (namely, human) knowing, only without its regular imperfections or limitations. God knows in a way quite like how we know, certain contemporary theists assume, only God knows more (say, all propositions) and only true things. Contrariwise, for the classical theist, God is the cause of the things that makes certain propositions true, not that he grasps all true propositions as something that stand independently of him (either as abstractly existing entities or grounded by contingent realities somehow not casually produced by God).
But what about this? Does God know what it is like to taste strawberry ice cream? If not, then is God omniscient? The short answer is this mode of knowledge (namely, human) is not required of the classical theistic view of omniscience; because God is immaterial and does not have taste buds, obviously God’s knowledge of tasting strawberry is not going to be like ours, but that is no imperfection of God. Still, whatever is in the effect must in some way be in the total cause, either formally or virtually or eminently, and so we can still say that God must have “something like” the knowledge of tasting strawberry ice cream, though how God knows that (assuming we count tasting strawberry ice cream a form of knowledge in the first place; we can leave that debate aside) is radically and infinitely higher than our way of knowing the taste of strawberry ice cream. Things that we experience or know that God does not experience or know AS WE EXPERIENCE OR KNOW THEM are only thus because they are less perfect than the way God experiences and knows (after all, you only experience/know the taste of strawberry because God is causing you to experience/know the taste of strawberry!) – we have finite participations; God is infinite qualitative splendor – and that’s enough to secure omniscience while still maintaining an infinite difference between us, the creature, and God, the Creator.
Another way to think about it. To have the knowledge/experience of tasting strawberry ice cream is to have some actuality present in the world – admittedly finite and restricted – caused by God. But God is pure actuality with no finitude, restrictions or boundaries, so from that we can see that God does not lack a perfection because he does not know or experience things as we do – that is, in some limited, infinite, restricted way – but rather it is us who lack the perfections of God, precisely because we are limited, rather than pure, actuality. Whatever is pure actuality is not limited actuality and so God’s knowledge and experience is unbounded, infinitely higher than ours and radically transcendent. Only one thing is for certain at this point: God’s strawberry ice cream experience (however that is experienced) blows ours out of the water.
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