Plantinga's Point

 Alvin Plantinga 

In a little-discussed paper of Alvin Plantinga’s, ‘Divine Knowledge,’ (in Christian Perspectives on Religious Knowledge, edited by C. Stephen Evans and Merold Westphal (Eerdmans, 1993)), he discusses and defends the thesis that it is no objection to accepting the truth of God knows that p that We do not know how God knows that p. That we do not know how God knows some matter is a fragment of negative or apophatic theology. Accepting this fragment entails that when we refer to God’s knowledge this bears no  better than an analogical relation to our own knowledge: the two possess points in common, which make each a case of knowledge; and have points of difference, (the negative theological fragment), which together ensure that the knowledge in question is either a case of our knowledge, or of God’s.  

Such reserve with respect to God’s knowledge seems entirely biblical. Writing of the extent of God’s knowledge including his knowledge of his thoughts ‘from afar’ the Psalmist (Psalm 139) exclaims that ‘Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it’. (v.6)

I shall try to offer an abbreviated account of part of what Plantinga says here, but then suggest that this is not a very stable outlook; that is, if our knowledge of God's knowledge is only analogical, and our knowledge of the other aspects of the mind is likewise analogical, this  cannot be confined to the actual cases that Plantinga discusses.  Plantinga’s point cannot be restricted to ameliorating those claims about God’s knowledge that we happen to accept or approve of, but it applies equally well to those clams that we disapprove of. For what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. It has implications all over the place; it is not stable.

Plantinga begins by discussing the counterfactuals of creaturely freedom (as part of Molinism), and the frequently advanced objection to their existence  that it is impossible to say what grounds their truth. (49) The objection to such counterfactual statements, that they cannot answer the grounding objection, boils down to ‘We cannot see how God knows them, [the counterfactuals of freedom] so there cannot be any’. Plantinga’s point is that the fact that we are ignorant of how God can know such counterfactuals of creaturely freedom does not affect their truth. Indeed there are good reasons why we are ignorant. There are such counterfactuals, he claims, and we can assume, from his omniscience, that God knows them. End of story.

He goes on to discuss the view of Richard Swinburne (in his The Coherence of Theism) that God cannot allow himself to know future free actions, since such knowledge would impede or render impossible genuine freedom and so, Swinburne holds, God averts his gaze from such propositions in order to shield our freedom. (49) Thus God does not know future contingencies.

But, asks Plantinga, why can’t God know these propositions? Why do philosophers like Swinburne take a position that is not very attractive? (45)

The fundamental answer, [underlying Swinburne’s modification of the scope of divine omniscience} I think, is that we can’t see how they could be known. How could God know a thing like that, a thing about the future, or about some counterfactual situation that, as far as logic goes, could go either way?.....

I think we must agree that we don’t or can’t see how God could know a thing like that. He can’t know a future free choice by taking advantage of causal laws and causal regularities, for example, because the action in question would be by hypothesis free; therefore causal laws and antecedent conditions determine neither that the action would take place nor that it would fail to take place. So he couldn’t know that action will occur by knowing causal laws and present or hypothesized conditions and extrapolating either to the action‘s taking place or to its failing to take place. (45)

Plantinga proceeds, after briefly discussing and giving his reasons why an appeal to God’s simplicity won’t help things,  to offer a reason why God we cannot know how God knows.  It is because he is the Creator, our Creator, for we are made in accordance with his design plan for us, but no one and no thing has or could have designed the way in which God knows. His mind is uncreated. Or, to indulge in a little old-speak,  we must have in mind the difference is between God’s archetypal knowledge and our creaturely ectypal knowledge. Maybe our own cognitive states and activities provide us with analogies: maybe our intuitive beliefs, or the idea of non-propositional beliefs, approximate somewhat to how God knows, but these still fall far short of proving the materials for understanding how God knows. (Plantinga explores these analogies at length.)

It may be thought from this, and particularly from the range of examples that Plantinga uses, that appealing to our ignorance of God’s ways of knowing in some way helps ease the  lives of believers in libertarian freedom if they take certain instances of some types of propositions about future free actions to be true. It may be thought that if we believe that God’s knowledge includes knowledge of indeterministically free human actions and/or of counterfactuals of (indeterministic) freedom then the fact that we fail to know how God knows these don’t spoil the party. For all that we know is that God is omniscient, that  for any proposition p God believes p if and only if p is true. And since (presumably) we do not what it is like for God to believe a proposition, we haven't advanced things by very much.

Earlier we noticed that the Psalmist in Psalm 139 wonders at the extent of God’s knowledge. Later on in the Psalm he extends his wonder to the whole range of God’s activity; to God’s omnipresence, to his causal activity, his leading, his forming.

So take a different and conflicting hypothesis to the claim of the consistency of God’s knowledge and future human indeterministic choices, or of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom. Consider, for example, the the anti-Molinism claim that ‘God’s ordaining of all that come to pass is consistent with him not being the author of sin’. ‘Will’ or ‘ordain’ are fraught with the same difficulties that  interested Plantinga in the case of ‘God knows’. How often has it been said that God cannot ordain or will the actions of human beings other than by being a programmer, or a hypnotist or a drug-pusher? But why? If humans ordain or will in accordance with their creator’s design plan for them, and if they would if they ordain what a fellow-creature will do, they might well in those circumstances have to be brainwashers or something similar. But why think that the Creator is himself hedged in by the limitations and constraints of that same design plan? Who designed the design plan of the Creator?

If so, then the defender of such a view, faced with the prima facie objection, how can God ordain creaturely actions, including evil actions, without himself being the author of sin, may appeal to our ignorance of the way in which God knows his own mind and gives effect to his purposes. Plantinga’s basic point, that God is our Creator and that we are designed and created in accordance with his design plan, applies every bit as much to his ordaining as to his knowledge. How God wills is also beyond our ken, presumably. If we cannot understand how God wills in such a way as to preserve his holiness and purity, this does not in any way infringe God’s ordaining of all events being consistent with his holiness and purity. To conclude this would require that we believe that it is impossible that God can have a holy and pure ordination of evil, and the prospect of showing such a thing seems remote.

The unanswerability of ‘How does God know?’ removes constraints that would otherwise lie on the Molinist. He can accept that God has middle knowledge, even though we do not know how God has such knowledge. But it has a parallel effect on the Augustinian of Calvinist: that we cannot see how God, while pure and holy, nevertheless ordains the impure and unholy actions of his creatures, ought not to surprise us, given that our ignorance stretches beyond how God know, to how God ordains.  Augustine called God’s willing permission of particular evil actions ‘unspeakably strange and wonderful’ (Enchiridion Ch. C)) This  ‘author of sin’ objection, which is routinely produced by opponents of God’s ordaining of all that comes to pass,  cannot count as a serious objection to Augustinianism, so long as Plantinga’s point holds. Indeed one might even prefer the Augustinian position to Molinism simply on the grounds of simplicity, if for no other reason, thus rendering the Molinist hypothesis otiose.

November

In the second of two posts on epistemological issues I take a look at a little commented-on paper of Alvin Plantinga's in which he defends an analogical account of God's knowledge. The paper,  ‘Divine Knowledge,’ is to be found in Christian Perspectives on Religious Knowledge, edited by C. Stephen Evans and Merold Westphal, (Eerdmans, 1993).

It may well be that Plantinga is correct in what he claims about divine knowledge, about our own ignorance of how God knows what he knows. But if we are ignorant to the extent that Plantinga claims, then this fact makes drawing conclusions about what God knows more tentative than would otherwise be the case. I shall suggest that the how of God's knowledge, and the what  of it, are often connected in significant ways.

So conclusions  about what God can and cannot know, which we may otherwise confidently draw, or equally confidently dismiss, may have to be drawn with greater caution than if our talk about what God is always univocal. As Peter Geach once said, using logical argument is not like travelling in a taxi-cab. We cannot abandon the argument when we like, as we can pay off the taxi-driver when it is convenient for us to do so. We have to go the whole way, to the end of the road, to wherever the argument leads. 

It may be worth thinking a bit more about the use of negative and analogical language about God, and I hope to post a brief discussion about this following  the post on Plantinga. 

Pascal and scepticism

Blaise Pascal (1623 – 1662)

We distinguish between two kinds as assurance, (or doubt). One is of one's own personal standing before God, the danger of hypocrisy, the occurrence of unwarranted doubt, the thought that Christ would not be the Saviour of a sinner such as me. There is need therefore to make one's calling and election sure. The other concerns the objective standing of the Christian faith, with doubt as to the reliability of the Gospel message. Or doubt about the reality of the whole.  Each can be assailed by scepticism. In the case of the second kind of doubt, the following can occur:

A Christian person, stepping back, and finding himself in a sceptical mood which he has not sought or indulged, may ask (or find himself asking):

Can it really be true that there is deliverance from evil by means of God taking the form of man and being hung on a cross, that this can provide deliverance for countless multitudes of people from the their sin, and they are granted a new nature and in time a resurrected body through which they will enjoy unalloyed holy bliss without end?

Such scepticism does not take the form of doubts about elements of the faith such as, How can there one a person who is both God and man? Can this body be raised again from the dead, incorruptible? It is not as if there is some doubt about an essential doctrine of the Christian faith, with all other doctrines remaining the same.  To such a person it may be obvious that the human sickness is deep and dreadful. The law of God may seem to be perfect. And so on. It is not this or that element that falls under suspicion, but the whole edifice that suddenly appears fantastic. So the fact that archaeologists can show that the walls of Jericho once behaved in a peculiar fashion, probably some millennia ago, does not help either. The  problem is that the whole fabric or texture of the faith, standing back from it and considering it as a unity, seems utterly incredible, paper-thin. Like a fairy tale. Changing this or that part of the tale will not help much, and may cause further difficulties, because the faith in total, in all its familiarity, seems to be a tightly woven web, insubstantial, floating in air rather like a Chinese balloon – white or pale blue - made of tissue paper.

Incidentally, nether The Narnia Chronicles nor The Lord of the Rings  nor any other Christianity-shaped fairy tale are not likely to be of any help in bringing such moods out of the tail spin of scepticism and permitting a recovery of faith. If in such an attack the Gospel seems to be like an idle tale, then no number of other idle tales, however well they are presented,  will help.

Nor (I think) is such scepticism a matter of the sheer improbability of the Christian story. Not at any rate, the improbability of there being divine redemption from sin. After all, assigning probabilities to a story is a matter of the probability of background beliefs, in the light of which one can and assign probabilities to the story. So how does one begin to assess the probability of the extraordinary singularity that is the Christian story? Yet some of the scepticism may be fed by something close to improbability, the ‘incongruity’ (let’s call it) of death on a cross being a part of this story of redeeming grace, what Paul refers to as the ‘foolishness’ of the thing preached.

If this occurs, what is a person to do? What can be do?

Pascal’s Wager

At such a point it may be that Pascal’s remarks on faith and reason on the Pensées will be of help. He famously wrote

‘Either God is, or He is not’. But which side shall we take? Reason can decide nothing here; there is an infinite chaos between us. A game is on, at the other side of this infinite distance, and the coin will fall, heads or tails. Which will you gamble on; According to reason you cannot gamble on either; according to reason you cannot defend either choice……

Yes, but you must bet. There is no option, you have embarked on the business. Which will you choose, then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which will profit you less. You have two things to lose: truth and good, and two things to stake: your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness. And your nature has two things to avoid: error and misery. Since you must necessarily choose, it is no more unreasonable to make one choice than the other. That is one point cleared up. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and loss in calling heads, that God exists. Let us estimate the two chances; If you win, you win everything; if you lose, you lose nothing. Do not hesitate then; gamble on His existence.*

The standard riposte to this invitation to choose is that the situation is more complex that this: Either God and then bliss, or nothing and then nothing. There are, as Paul says, gods many and lords many, and so umpteen alternatives to the ‘God (the God of Christian theism, let us suppose) exists and then bliss’ alternative immediately suggest themselves.

But the existence of a multitude of possibilities each of which could be wagered is not likely to dilute the appeal of a Pascal-type wager to the Christian in the grip of scepticism. For what overcomes him is not some version of Christianity. The very features which make for the offence of the Cross are what make it attractive to him, and winsome. What afflicts him is a sudden, unannounced doubt about the reality of the whole. A sceptical attack. The features which make the gospel both an offence and attractive are the very same features that feed that attack, and make the Gospel suddenly seem incredible. What Tertullian called the ‘impossible’ is but a hairsbreadth from the literally unbelievable. A less offensive gospel, with the sharp edges shaved down and the corners rounded, would be of no help.

So for all the vulnerability of Pascal’s Wager to certain logical objections, it may still provide help for the sceptical Christian who is faced with a stark choice akin to (but not identical with) the choice made famous in the Wager. How? For the Christian afflicted by this kind of doubt, the alternatives are stark, ether the wonderful account of God’s grace through Jesus Christ, or nothing.

  

So such scepticism may be staved off, or starved, by a ‘leap of faith’. Or better, by the resolve to hold on by one’s fingernails until the attack passes. Then, in retrospect, such a leap may be seen to have been enabled by God’s grace, a ‘hope against hope’ of Abramic proportions. Intellectualism may suffice day to day, but in extremis, fideism - the will - may come to the rescue.

* These passages are from Pascal The Pensées trans J. M. Cohen, (Penguin, 1961) from pages 156-7