God’s impassibility and knowledge of sin.
It is a difficult but ultimately unavoidable question: How God knows sin when God is ontologically simple, absolutely sovereign, perfectly good, and the universal cause of everything else that exists. Tensions arise between these commitments, forcing us to discern where the fallacies lie, and demonstrate, if we can, that we can, everything Classical Theists need. Namely that God is in complete control and (yet, somehow) does not cause sin. Further, that human beings enjoy true, libertarian freedom.
Aside: What follows are common sense data points and conclusions of philosophy and deliverances of revelation. 1) That God is subsistent goodness itself and does not cause sin. 2) That human beings are substantially free. 3) That at least some grace can be resisted. 4) That God causes whatever exists in anything which exists aside Himself, and 5) that secondary and instrumental causes are indeed real, and 6) so is the doctrine of divine concurrence. (For example, God causes whatever exists in Fire X heating a Pot Y, and this preserves and is compatible with the fact that Fire X really does heat Pot Y; just as God causes whatever exists in Person X freely choosing Candy Y , and this preserves and is compatible with the fact that Person X freely chooses Candy Y.)
In recent years, objections pertaining to God’s contingent knowledge have been directed at undercutting the doctrines of divine simplicity, immutability, and impassibility. Specifically, how can God’s knowledge change and yet God remain utterly, essentially the same? It too is a serious question, and deserves a serious answer. Fortunately, I believe all objections concerning contingent predication and God can be resolved simultaneously by focusing on the most paradigmatically difficult case, which is how to reconcile God’s impassibility and knowledge of sin. Why so? Because a creature’s sin is a piece of contingent knowledge, presumably; it need not have been but apparently is. Furthermore, this instance of contingent predication forces us to grapple with a particularly problematic feature of reality, which is moral evil.
Aside: Throughout this article I will be drawing — either directly or through influential osmosis — upon work from W. Matthews Grant (Free Will and God’s Universal Causality), Bernard Lonergan (Insight & Grace and Freedom), Jacques Maritain (Existence and The Existent & God and The Permission of Evil), Marin-Sola and Dr. Michael Torre (Do Not Resist the Spirit’s Call), and Dr. Ed Feser (5 Proofs).
Everything so far considered bears significantly on the mystery of predestination, as well. Which means we should probably start there, because a common mistake when attempting to resolve the difficulties in the predestination debate is to maintain – either explicitly or implicitly – that the transition from our being defectible (naturally fallible) to being defective (sinning) is because of God’s infallible will and (as I’m presently to argue) an inaccurate (or at least incomplete) understanding of God’s knowledge. Apologies for the parentheticals. (But as I was saying!) This error is especially ghastly because it ruins divine goodness and makes God the (at least indirect, or per accidens) cause of sin.
The mistake of which I speak is the central horrifying failure of the Banezian school and is inherently bound up in their deployment of the term “permission,” since it is held by Banezians that if God permits our failure then our failure inevitably, infallibly occurs. Critics of this position — including Michael Torre — argue otherwise, saying God’s permission of sin entails only the possibility of sin, not its inevitable occurrence, because permission means only that God wills neither (x) nor not-(x), and so whether we actually we fail morally is ultimately up to us.
Perhaps we can think of it this way. If a person has fallen off a cliff and we refuse to throw them a rope, that person will infallibly fall. We have “permitted it” in our refusal to throw the rope but there was no way they could not have fallen. Even if they retained some potency to be saved, that potency is a meaningless acknowledgement — a distinction that makes no significant, moral difference — because there is nothing IN FACT that could have prevented their falling if we permitted it by refusing to throw them the rope. But the Banezian school, as Torre has emphasized, is worse than my analogy lets on, for it would be even more accurate to say that the person falling — who is otherwise created good and only able to fall in virtue of being naturally fallible — in fact BEGINS falling because God no longer conserved the ground beneath their feet. Not only is no rope extended, but their initial descent is due to a non-conservation on the part of God; though the non-conservation of which we speak pertains to an inner moral structure, not some extrinsic foothold. Once again, it would make no meaningful difference to say that such a person retained a potency to be saved if God infallibly “permitted” them to fall (moved infallibly on the side of God, but contingently on the side of the creature, as it is sometimes described), because though that may be technically defensible, it is no more than a mere verbal subterfuge, and does not alleviate the absurd consequence that it is God who is ultimately responsible for the creature IN FACT falling and then NOT being saved.
My position, broadly inline with Maritain, Marin-Sola, and Michael Torre, is that we fall (morally fail) simply because we did not do what we were sufficiently empowered to — more specifically, because we can resist interior grace, or “de-activate” under the divine impulse — and that God not only does not affect the transition from our being naturally able to fall to actually falling (only we do!) but that God extends a salvific rope to every and all who begin to fall, even if God permits our refusal to grab hold and return to him. (Why God would permit our refusal or non-cooperation is something I explore here and here.)
Maritain describes the issue for the Banezian as follows, “… The theory which, while positing as a principle that God is in nowise the cause of moral evil, nevertheless has recourse, in order to explain how He knows this evil, to divine causality itself modestly concealed under dialectical contrivances, and invents antecedent permissive decrees by means of which God knows the sin of the creature because — oh, it’s purely negative, He is careful not to cause anything! — He Himself has decided not to do what without which the sin in question will certainly take place…” (Permission of Evil, pg. 68.)
On the surface, it appears as if there is every reason to adopt Torre’s position and not the Banezian one, because who would ever want to make God — the Subsistent Good(!) who only ever orders things toward Himself(!)– the cause of sin, if only indirectly, by entailing the metaphysically absurd conclusion that God is infallibly ordaining people toward eternal reprobation? Rash as it may seem, there is actually a rather fundamental and quite understandable reason the Banezian position has been embraced, which is this. It is often thought that if God doesn’t know all created acts infallibly because they happen infallibly by virtue of His antecedent will, including moral evil then God becomes passive and is informed/changed by the knowledge of sin. In other words, if – if, if, if! – a creature’s sin is introduced solely by the creature’s fallible liberty and not God, then divine simplicity, sovereignty, and impassibility are all impugned.
Here, then, we have the perennial issue surrounding the predestination debate of how to safeguard BOTH divine innocence AND divine sovereignty. I maintain the Banezian impugns divine innocence by making God the cause of sin, but the Banezian would maintain the position I propose impugns divine sovereignty by making God passive — changed by something on the side of the creature — which is strictly incompatible with the philosophical demonstration that God is pure act, and in no way comprised of potency. But if God is “informed” by something on the side of the creature, have we not put a potency within God to be actualized?
To all this I say the Banezian holds a fair but false concern, for the following reasons.
Intrinsic vs Extrinsic Predication and Real vs Cambridge Change
First, we must draw a distinction between intrinsic vs. extrinsic predication, because — importantly! — not all changes in predication are threatening to divine simplicity, sovereignty, impassibility, and so on.
For example, “Corn Pop is a bad dude” is an intrinsic predication. “Corn Pop is no friend of Joe Biden” is an extrinsic predication. What makes a predication intrinsic is if its truth is grounded solely in the object itself, whereas a predication is made extrinsic when it is made true at least partly in things beyond the object itself. Hence to affirm that Corn Pop is no friend of Joe Biden, we must look beyond Corn Pop – specifically to Joe Biden and the relation between him and Corn Pop – for affirmation.
Another example. “Joe Biden believes that Corn Pop is a bad dude” is an intrinsic predication, whereas “Joe Biden knows Corn Pop is a bad dude” is an extrinsic predication. Why? Because the first can be grounded in Joe Biden alone (it doesn’t depend on some external fact; Biden could just be having an hallucinatory episode), whereas the second, assuming knowledge involves true belief, must go beyond Joe Biden and find affirmative grounds in Corn Pop. Talk of knowledge, then, can be, and often is, extrinsically predicated, meaning the truth-value of that predication can change without the object itself changing.
Here’s the thing to remember. The truth of an intrinsic predication cannot change without the object itself changing, whereas the truth of extrinsic predications can change (and sometimes does) without the object itself changing. All this is explained in W. Matthews Grants’ defense of what he calls The Extrinsic Model of divine simplicity. (See Human Freedom and God’s Universal Causality.)
Now, as Grant notes, the term “merely Cambridge change” has been introduced into the philosophical lexicon “to name those cases in which a predication comes to be or ceases to be true of an object in virtue of a change in that object’s relations to other things without the object itself changing or ceasing to exist.” (Grant, pg. 54.) This is important, because advocates of divine simplicity can and should allow for “merely Cambridge changes,” since these changes of relation do not require any real or essential change in God. Thus, God can undergo any number of Cambridge Changes (God being the creator of the world, for example) while remaining essentially, entitatively the same across all possible worlds. (Aside: I understand Thomists don’t always like possible world semantics, but here I think it can still be helpful.) Divine simplicity is thus preserved when the changes are “merely Cambridge.”
Moving on.
God’s knowledge of creatures (including their sin) is grounded extrinsically to God because of its natural “factivity.” That is, because some facts which pertain to certain instances of knowledge are extrinsic to the knower, such predication can change without any intrinsic (in the case of God, real or essential) change in the object itself. For example, I am funny to Peter is a statement of knowledge made true, not in virtue of what I believe about myself, but in virtue of Peter and how he currently exists. Peter can change – thus altering the truth value of that extrinsic predication – while I remain essentially the same. More relevantly, the fact of there being a cat on the mat is made true by there actually being a cat on the mat, which then corresponds to, or “confirms,” some possibility God sees in knowing himself God and consequently all the ways His supreme existence can be participated in. Thus, God “knowing” there is a cat on a mat is grounded extrinsically. It could be otherwise, or not at all, without any real or essential change in God.
Aside: It is also critical for us to remember that God doesn’t know things by going out and exploring the world. Given divine simplicity, we don’t say God has knowledge like we have knowledge. We say God has something like knowledge as we experience it (but infinitely higher), and God has something like power as we experience it (but infinitely higher), and whatever God’s knowledge is just is whatever God’s power is, and whatever God’s love is, etc. Because divine simplicity entails whatever is in God, is God. This is a critical distinction that cannot be overlooked, and concerns the principle of analogy. Aside from knowledge of Himself, God’s knows things by causing them to exist; typically, that is not how knowledge works in us, so we must be mindful of this difference moving forward, because two of the more common mistakes made when thinking about God concern 1) picture-thinking, and 2) anthropomorphizing.
To borrow again from Matthews Grant, we might imagine the following Possible World scenarios.
In the first scenario, there is just G (God). And no existing cat. God is all there is.
In the second scenario, there is just G, E (the effect of the cat on the mat), and E’s dependence-relation on G. And that is all that’s required to ground “God knowing there is a cat on the mat,” and thus no real or essential change comes about in God, whether the cat exists or doesn’t exist, by way of God’s causal influence. To re-iterate, God’s knowledge *just is* E and E’s dependence-relation on God, which is an extrinsic predication and therefore a “merely Cambridge change.” So far, so good. Divine simplicity is not impugned whether God creates E or Y or not-E or not-Y, etc.
But to make the extrinsic model of divine simplicity more explicit as it pertains to God’s knowledge of contingent things, we should briefly consider what Grant calls the agency model of divine knowing (explored both in this article and his free will book), in which he states, “the key to this model – the agency model – is the idea that God’s activity is inherently cognitional; God directly and immediately knows what he is doing in the doing of it, what he is bringing about in the act of bringing it about. As Barry Miller puts it, ‘God knows Socrates in the very act of creating him.’ As McCann states, ‘God’s knowing the universe and his creating it constitute one and the same act.’”
To reiterate, God knowing E *just is* God causing E – all extrinsic, which means the predication can change while God remains essentially the same. For Grant explains that “If God knows contingent objects in the act of intentionally bringing them about and if, as EM maintains, God’s intentionally bringing an entity about does not involve anything intrinsic to God that would not exist were God not bringing that entity about, then God can know contingent objects without there being any intrinsic accidents in God… For God’s act of knowing a contingent object is the same as his act of bringing that object about. But, given EM, his act of bringing it about consists essentially in that object together with its relation of dependence on God.”
By all this we are simply denying that God knowing some contingent truth implies there is some entity intrinsic to God that would not exist if God were not knowing that contingent truth.
At this point it is worth a moment to reflect upon the traditional Eternity Solution often offered by classical theists in defense against objections of God’s infallible knowledge of free future contingents. For if God knows infallibly what will occur in the future — including all free future contingents — how can we call such actions free if they are to infallibly occur? Here, the traditional response is to focus on God’s being eternal which entails that God does not not “look ahead,” as it were, and rather that all points in time are eternally present before Him. Thus, God’s knowledge of what a person will do just is God knowing presently that such a person is doing it, and it is, of course, rather trivial to say that someone presently doing some action (x) is incompatible with them presently doing not-(x), though it is not incompatible with the possibility of them having done otherwise.
For reasons that will hopefully become increasingly relevant, Matthews Grant supplements the traditional Eternity Solution with his Dual Sources account of libertarian freedom and Extrinsic Model of divine simplicity as follows, “On Dual Sources, God’s knowledge of my free acts is ultimately up to me, just as it is on the conventional Eternity Solution. But the conventional Eternity Solution operates according to the prevailing assumption that if God’s knowledge of my free acts is ultimately up to me, then it cannot also be ultimately up to God. The assumption is false… God’s knowledge of my free acts is up to God, since God knows my free acts in his acts of bringing them about, which are up to God. Yet God’s knowledge of my free acts is also up to me, since I have counterfactual power over God’s bringing about my free acts: God brings about (and thus knows) my free acts only with my concurrent co-operation, when I could have done otherwise all antecedent conditions remaining the same. We could say, then, that God’s knowledge of our free acts has dual sources, both God and us.” (pg. 153.)
I will not spend time elaborating Grant’s Dual Sources account or defense of libertarian human freedom — that investigation I leave to the reader, who can find Grant’s full defense in his book (specifically chapter 4) — but relevant to our conversation, if, presumably, we have counterfactual power over God in virtue of having genuine libertarian freedom, would this not render God passible?
Grant argues the presumption is false given that we have already established the extrinsic models of divine simplicity, agency, and knowledge. “Notice, finally, that the claim that we have counterfactual power over God’s act of causing and knowing our free actions poses no threat to the doctrine of divine aseity nor to the doctrine that God is pure act. The doctrine of divine aseity denies that God exists in dependence on other things. The doctrine that God is pure act denies that there is any potentiality in God for ceasing to exist or existing differently. But, on the extrinsic models of divine agency and knowing, God’s acts of causing and knowing our free acts are not God nor are they even intrinsic features of God. Thus, even though it is not possible, say, that God’s act of causing and knowing my act A exists without my performing A when I could have done otherwise all antecedent conditions remaining the same, it does not follow that it is not possible for God to exist, or for any intrinsic feature of God to exist, without my performing A when I could have done otherwise. My counterfactual power over certain of God’s acts does not make God himself exist in dependence on me nor does it suggest any potentiality in God to cease to exist or to exist different than he does.” (Pg. 154.)
This stage setting has been necessary, for the connection to how God knows sin is now ready to be made.
As for how God knows sin (privations) specifically, He knows them IN THE CREATURE, by 1) knowing what perfections are due to the things God creates, and 2) what perfection any given created thing actually has, including moral agents.
Sin is thus known via the supposition of the creature – known in and through the creature – which means it is grounded extrinsically with all other contingent facts. Therefore, God’s contingent knowledge of sin is no threat to divine simplicity, impassibility, or universal causality, because that knowledge is grounded extrinsically, even after we appreciate that sin is not a created reality in the first place, but a due good gone missing. Thus, whether sin occurs or not, and whether God knows sin through the creature or not, God remains essentially the same.
Another quote from Grant to round the section off, “Privations are contingent, but in Chapter 6 I insisted that God does not cause the privations in virtue of which sinful acts are sinful. So, it looks like not all contingent objects of knowledge can be known by God in God’s act of causing them…. The solution, I think, is to maintain that when it comes to privations, God does not know them directly, in acts of causing them, but rather indirectly, by knowing, first, what contingent entities ought to exist relative to a given subject in specified circumstances, and, second, what contingent entities actually exist, which God knows in acts of bringing them about. For example, if I tell a lie, God knows the lack of conformity to the moral standard in which the sinfulness of my act consists by knowing the act of sin (which he knows in bringing it about) and the moral standard to which this act lacks conformity and to which all human acts should conform.” (Pg. 149.)
For what it’s worth, Bernard Lonergan offers a similar approach to Grant, it would seem, when he states “… every contingent predication concerning God also is an extrinsic denomination. In other words, God is intrinsically the same whether he understands, affirms, wills, causes this or that universe to be. If he does not, then God exists and nothing else exists. If he does, God exists and the universe in question exists; the two existences suffice for the truth of the judgments that God understands, affirms, wills, effects the universe; for God is unlimited in perfection, and what is unlimited in perfection must understand, affirm, will, effect whatever else is.” (Insight, chapter 19.)
With the preceding in mind, here’s the upshot to the question of predestination and God’s permission of sin.
Understanding that God’s knowledge *just is* God’s power (given divine simplicity), this means God’s causing something *just is* God’s “knowing it into existence” – or, put differently, God’s knowing something (other than Himself) *just is* that something existing; and again, the truth of that contingent predication is grounded extrinsically to God and can change (or not be at all) without any real or essential change in God Himself. This covers not just anything which exists extrinsic to God but also anything which does not exist (like God knowing there are no unicorns, or that He is not the creator of unicorns, etc.)
Aside: Grant is not the only one who has defended this “extrinsic” model of divine simplicity; as already hinted, Bernard Lonergan has articulated this position, as well (more below). Furthermore, Grant contend this is authentically Aquinas’s position, as well, at least insofar as one appreciates 1) the doctrine of divine simplicity, 2) the principle of analogy, and 3) that God is only rationally, but not really, related to creatures. The point to emphasize is this model is by no means ad hoc, but what naturally results from these prior commitments. (See section 4.3 in Grants’ book for a more detailed explanation.)
Furthermore, God knows creatures as they are physically present to him from his eternal NOW (See Maritain’s Permission of Evil for further explanation.) He knows Himself, but also everything to which his power extends; God knows all that exists in whatever exists in virtue of being the cause of all positive ontological attributes aside Himself, and thereby knowing what is absent from the term of His creative and infinitely good will, which – again, I must emphasize – is grounded extrinsically (recall! even the contingent predication of “God knows this thing does not exist” is still extrinsic to God in virtue of the fact of there not being that thing), and can thus be otherwise or not at all without any real or essential change in God. Once we add to this that God need not “wait” to see the free moral failures of the supposed creature, because God is eternal and knows everything at once according to His mode of Being, this alleviates any remaining concern of change or passivity in God.
Again, so far, so good. The takeaway being that God knows sin by knowing his creature directly as eternally present and not — definitely not! — by willing the actual defection of the creature, rather than willing a creature which is naturally detectible.
The question then is whether God is responsible for the absence of being in the defective creature and not merely its possibility: did the creature fail only because God failed to supply it?
Here again the answer is no – of course not! That absence is due to the creature alone, and it’s ability to “shatter” the motions God has given it toward the moral good (because, as Catholic teaching affirms, not all motions God gives to fallible creatures are infallible. Hence the distinction between operative and co-operate grace, found in Aquinas but also defended by Lonergan), to “nihilate” or “sterilize” the motion God sends into the libertarian free region, to “non-act,” as Maritain points it, and so introduce a “surd” or “objective falsity” into reality: i.e. nothingness. And what is missing, exactly? Simply a consideration of the moral rule that ought have applied to some free creaturely judgment or act. Alas, I have neither the time nore the space to re-introduce and defend the famous Maritainian distinction between “the line of good” and “the line of evil,” though I have articulated it elsewhere, including here. (See also Maritain’s Existence and Existent, God and the Permission of Evil, Lonergan’s Grace and Freedom, Torre’s Do Not Resist the Spirit’s Call, and Grant’s book.) The short of it is that we to fail to do what we could have done under the impetus of God.
Aside: Here is a reductio for those who want to maintain that God moves fallibly creatures entirely through infallible motions. If that is the case, how then do we explain the occurrence of sin? For such a position would entail that no grace can per se be impeded and that God always accomplishes the end of ANY divine motion. But we shouldn’t want to say this, because then we are stuck explaining sin via a withdrawal of God’s helping hand — a sort of moral “non-conservation,” as it were — which is as absurd to think would happen as God’s no longer conserving the world in existence. Even if it were allegedly within God’s absolute power to do so, it is surely not within God’s ordained power: that is, not in accord with God’s goodness, wisdom, or justice. We must remember that God moves things according to their mode of being IN THE GENERAL RUN (we can grant exception cases, of course, just as we can grant miracles) and because we are, by metaphysical necessity, fallibly free, God moves us with motions which can be impeded — or “shattered,” to use the language of Maritain — and so fail to fructify, by our free non-act. Furthermore, it does not mean the motions which are shatterable frustrate the will of God, because God WILLS shatterable motions!
For more, see my brief post on the “Soft Free Will Defense.”
At this point, all we need is in place to free ourselves from the absurd position which implies God causes (again, at least indirectly or accidentally) a creature’s sin, while still fully preserving divine simplicity and impassibility.
In summary, then.
God knows all possibilities of being (along with all possible ways of things not to be, their negations) in knowing Himself. If He wills creatures of fallible freedom, it is then on THEM (the fallible free creature) whether or not they actually defect, and if they do so their existence will always and inevitably conform to possibilities God sees in knowing Himself — possibilities God can, of course be ready to accommodate to secure a robust providence — but what makes it knowledge is still grounded EXTRINSICALLY and can change (be otherwise or not be at all) without any REAL or ESSENTIAL change in God. God sees to what his creative power extends and to what it does not, and so he knows sin by the supposition of his fallibly free creature. He does not determine his creature, and permission does not entail the transition from naturally defectible to actually defective. Permission is simply God’s neither willing (x) nor (not-x). And so any transition from naturally defectible to actually defective is caused solely by the creature when failing to consider the moral rule (which God gave him every power to do) which ought to apply to a particular judgment (like not driving while drunk). The creature can introduce one reality only: absurdity, nothingness. Objective falsity. And because that one thing is not really “a thing” at all and holds no positive ontological status, we do not violate divine universal causality, because there is “no thing” to be caused.
– Pat
PS – A few additional Insights from Lonergan on the issue. (For more, see my post Safeguarding Divine Simplicity with Bernard Lonergan. )
“… though the extrinsic denominator is temporal, the contingent predication concerning God can be eternal. For an eternal act is timeless; in it all instants are one and the same instant; and so what is true at any instant is true at every instant. Hence, if at any instant it is true that God understands, affirms, wills the existence of Alexander’s horse Bucephalus, then the metaphysical conditions of the truth are the existence of God and the existence of Bucephalus; moreover, though Bucephalus exists only for a short period, still God eternally understands, affirms, and wills Bucephalus to exist for that short period.”
“It is impossible for it to be true that God understands, affirms, wills, effects anything to exist or occur without it being true that the thing exists or the event occurs exactly as God understands, affirms, or wills it. For one and the same metaphysical condition is needed for the truth of both propositions, namely, the relevant contingent existence or occurrence…
“… the fourth corollary is inverse to the third, namely, that divine efficacy does not impose necessity upon its consequents. In the light of divine efficacy is it quite true that if God understands or affirms or wills or effects this or that to exist or occur, then it is impossible for the this or that not to exist or not to occur. Still, the existence or occurrence is a metaphysical condition of the truth of the antecedent, and so the consequence merely enunciates the principle of identity, namely, if there is the existence or occurrence, then there is the existence or occurrence.”
I cannot emphasize how important it is to revisit that paragraph until it is fully understood. Once grasped, you should see how this resolves (in part) the tension between God’s infallible will and the occurrence of sin.
See also
Chik-Fil-A, Predestination, and Human Freedom with Fr. Gregory Pine
The Mystery of Evil, Providence, and Human Freedom with Dr. Michael Torre