Is God pro-Western?

A while ago I had a conversation with a Chinese friend who is not a Christian about Christianity, and one thing she felt was that Christianity seems to be a mainly Western religion, and we discussed whether most people in heaven will be Westerners. Western people throughout history seem to have had the best chance to hear the gospel and therefore perhaps an implication is that God prefers Westerners?

There are various ways that one could take to answer this point. For instance, in Revelation 7:9 God emphasises His inclusiveness:

After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands.

But I think it is interesting to reflect on how the future may be very different to the past. It's possible that by the time Jesus returns, Christianity will have become a much more significant presence in the East and South of the world compared to its North and West. Some statistics on its growth in the East-South from here say:

"In 1900, Europe and North America accounted for about 85 percent of the world's Christians. By 2050, that number will have shrunk to about 25 percent.

During the same period, he said the number of Christians in Africa have, well, skyrocketed seems too tame a word. In 1900, there were 10 million; in 2000, 363 million. By 2015, Jenkins expects 500 million. And, by 2050, he predicted that Africa would become the first continent to have 1 billion Christians. Put another way: One of every three Christians in the world will be African - and that's not counting the Africans who will have moved to the United States or Europe."

…"But by 2025, as Europe continues down the road of secularism, "Africa and Latin America will be jostling each other for (that) title," Jenkins said."

And from here:

"By 1949, out of an estimated population of 450 million, there were just over 500,000 baptized Protestant Christians. Anonymous internet columnist Spengler speculated in 2007 that Christianity could "become a Sino-centric religion two generations from now."
The current number of Christians in China is disputed. The most recent official census enumerated 4 million Roman Catholics and 10 million ‎Protestants. However, independent estimates have ranged from 40 million to 130 million Christians."

As this is happening, Christianity is suffering in the West. When people from non-Western cultures come to the West they sometimes assume that everyone is Christian or that the West is essentially a Christian society. This impression is way off base, although somewhat less off base with America which is quite a religious society. The West is now a post-Christian culture where church attendance and rates of serious Christian belief is dropping overall. From here:

"Ireland is not an exception. Every major religion except Islam is declining in Western Europe, according to the Center for the Study on Global Christianity at the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Mass. The drop is most evident in France, Sweden and the Netherlands, where church attendance is less than 10% in some areas."

So I would say that there is evidence that the proportion of non-Westerners versus Westerners who are Christian is steadily growing, so much so that some commentators say that Christianity will become a mainly non-Western religion within our lifetimes.

A second important point on this is that it's only recently in human history that there have been billions of people living at any one time. See this chart.

In 1000 AD there were 275 million people alive, in 1650 - 500 million, in 1800 - 1 billion, at 1930 - 2 billion, which has skyrocketed to 7 billion now, with 9 billion people expected to be alive in 2025.

This matters because, to use a thought experiment, if 90% of Christians are Western in AD 1000 when there are 275 million people in the world, but 60% of Christians are non-Western in AD 2100 when there are 9+ billion people in the world, then which group has more Christians when you compare the two times? Obviously, the non-Western group would have more Christians by a massive margin, even though 60% is less impressive than 90%.

This indicates that if the population of the world keeps getting larger, and Christianity completes the shift from a very Western-associated religion to a South or Eastern-associated religion, then more non-Westerners will have been Christian in history. Evidence from demographic changes can support this general view.

So, in conclusion, it doesn't matter what the proportion of non-Western versus Western Christians are because, according to the Bible, God 'does not show favouritism' (Romans 2:11). And someone from every ethnic/cultural/linguistic group will go to heaven (Rev 7:9). But I think you can reasonably believe that at the end of history Christianity will not be considered a mainly Western religion.

Why should we worship God?

A question that people who aren't Christian often ask is why should we worship God? What right does God have to legitimately want worship from us? Isn't God a megalomaniac for making heaven involve praising Him?

There's an analogy I've started to use a lot to explain why I would want to worship God that borrows from everyday life.

Let's say you have a friend who is an amazingly good person. They are 100% genuine, kind, respectful, trustworthy, dependable, etc. They are generous to a fault, and are a very kind husband/wife who works very hard to support their family. They sacrifice a lot to help others, even people who aren't their friends or relatives.

Now, you would, I suppose, respect them a lot, and this would just be a natural reaction to the truth of the situation.

Now, what if God is perfectly loving (and not just perfectly good but also can't be tempted otherwise), infinite in abilities and knowledge, and is the creator of everything? Then respecting God and putting God at the centre of one's life is not anything different from one's presumed reaction to that friend - it would just be a natural reaction to the truth.

And we say, as Christians, that God really is all those good things, and so worshipping God is a natural reaction to the truth of the situation like respecting that friend is a reaction to the truth.

The gospel for people who are really, really nice

Sometimes it can be a bit hard to talk about Jesus to some people because in most of the situations they are in every day, they do the right thing. So when people hear from let's say, a fiery preacher that they are 'liars', 'haters', 'coveters' and other negative stuff they may think 'Well that may apply to some people but not really me'.

How should one think about presenting the gospel to a non-Christian who is an extremely nice, loving, self-sacrificial person who almost always looks out for the interests of others? I believe it has an added degree of difficulty that is not present if you are talking to someone who has done some really awful stuff in their life.

Here are a couple of important points to think about on this issue.

The first is that there are some people who are good enough to do the right thing in most of the situations which they are in every day. But this does not mean that they would do the right thing in really, really challenging situations. So when God looks at such a person, He sees not only that they would do the right thing on most days, but also that if they were put in a really challenging situation that they would fall short and do the wrong thing.

An example of this kind of possibility can be found from the Stanford prison experiment (link). When people do the wrong thing, it's often not that they are 'bad apples' as much as apples that have been put into 'bad barrels'. In the prison experiment, the professor got a group of normal college students together and gave some of them great power over the rest. The nasty results showed what can happen when people are put into extraordinary situations. A similar thing might be going on with the goodness we have every day versus what goodness we would have under a lot of pressure.

So when God looks at us He sees our failures in situations that haven't occurred yet, and which may never occur, but which still apply to us because it's how we would act. We shouldn't be willing to do the wrong thing in these not-yet-occurring situations, but we are. Thus, if you hate someone, you are a murderer in a situation where you have absolute power. If you lust after people other than your spouse, you are an adulterer in a possible situation. If you are tempted to lie, you are a liar in a possible situation. So God sees these potential sins, and thus we can be sinners in a pretty big way but about potential stuff rather than actual stuff.

A second point to remember is that one way you can talk about the gospel is that we are all horrible sinners and so on, but another way is a lot gentler. The point of the gospel was ultimately to get humans to hang out with God and be perfectly happy forever. Happiness in heaven is about experiencing the happiness of God. See Psalm 16:11; 36:8-9, and Romans 14:17 which says: "For the kingdom of God is not food and drink, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit." If someone isn't willing to meet God's standards then it's hard to see how they could have access to God's happiness in the Holy Spirit. It would be hard for that person to live with the Holy Spirit, and for God to live with that person, if they don't want to meet God's standards. So the deal is: not being willing to meet God's standards = you can't experience God's happiness through the Holy Spirit, and so you can't go to eternal life.

God's standard is perfection as shown by the life of Jesus (not our own idea of perfection), and the only way to meet that standard is to accept that you can't meet it and that you need God's help. When Jesus died for us "our old self was put to death on the cross with him" (Rom 6:6a) and "It is no longer I who [faces situations where I cannot avoid sinning] but Christ ... living in me [who faces those situations and will always do the right thing]" (Gal 2:20a). Thus, anyone can meet God's standards because Jesus can do everything related to meeting God's standards in someone who accepts him, and so they don't have to worry about it at all as long as they genuinely trust Jesus.

So the gospel doesn't have to be about how everyone is a horrible, horrible sinner necessarily. Although I think that we usually overestimate how good we are, so maybe we are worse sinners than we think, even the really, really nice non-Christian. Presenting the gospel can be more like, "Well I know you're a really, really nice person, but getting to heaven isn't about being really nice. It's about being willing to meet God's standards, which is a perfect standard. Because eternal life consists in experiencing God's happiness in the Holy Spirit. And you can't experience God's happiness in the Holy Spirit if you aren't willing to meet God's standards, because the conflict between you two will be too great (or something like that). However nice you are, this is a situation that can't be gotten around. So to make it to eternal life you either need to meet God's standard, or accept you can't meet it and that Jesus took all of our wrongful intentions towards others onto himself on the cross."

Are religious beliefs childlike and simplistic?

People sometimes consider reason and rationality to be overall a more 'advanced' characteristic than emotion. When writers imagine future civilizations, they often imagine them to be rational, calm, not emotional, very, very intelligent, and so on (based on my anecdotal experience with science fiction). Belief in a Deistic God, who has no feelings, who is a supreme intelligence that created the universe, is often considered more 'advanced' in some ways than believing in 'a loving Father in heaven'. Consider this quote by Albert Einstein:

"I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings."

Compare that with a description of God in the Christian Bible (Luke 15):

"But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him. The son said to him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.' But the father said to his servants, 'Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let's have a feast and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.'

Meanwhile, the older son was in the field. When he came near the house, he heard music and dancing. So he called one of the servants and asked him what was going on. 'Your brother has come,' he replied, 'and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has him back safe and sound.'

The older brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out and pleaded with him. But he answered his father, 'Look! All these years I've been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!'

'My son,' the father said, 'you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.'"

Isn't it obvious that Albert Einstein had a much more mature, well thought out, intelligent belief in God in this aspect?

How might a believer account for some people seeing things that way?

According to the Bible, our intellectual reason wasn't made in God's image. Isaiah 55:8 says 'my thoughts are not your thoughts' (see also Romans 11:34). So we have nothing in common with God in terms of our intellectual reason. But we do have something in common with God when it comes to our personality, love, good emotions generally, practical reason, free will and moral sense, because those things *were* made in God's image (picture of this relationship).

So no wonder our intellectual reason has an awkward, uncomfortable relationship with love, emotions more generally, and the world of 'doing and choosing'. It's not made in God's image, so it relates to the stuff that *was* made in God's image in a generally problematic way.

When we prioritise reason we naturally tend to make our ideal of a person, or our ideal of an advanced alien civilization into cold, calm, calculating persons. Just like when we prioritise reason we make our idea of God into a cold, calm, collected, maybe amoral or without-feeling God (Deism).

The truth is that the God in the Father passage above is actually what God is like. We are pushed away from this ideal when we imagine intellectual reason, which isn't made in the image of God, to be something that God has like *we* do. But God's reasoning is actually a kind of reasoning more like our emotion, if that were possible (actually, we can't even imagine what it is like to have intellectual thoughts like God's intellectual thoughts, because our intellectual faculty wasn't made in His image so we don't have His version of it).

Understanding Suffering (Short Version)

Note: this article is only trying to defend Christianity to those who say that it doesn't make any sense, and doesn't go beyond that and argue for its Christian assumptions... Read a longer version here, and I've recorded a podcast of it here.

How did God make us in His image (Gen 1:27)? Did God make creatures in His image by giving them reason?

We're not made in the image of God because we can reason, since computers and calculators can reason in a sense and aren't made in the image of God. So when God made us in His image He gave us something more than reason...

Let's look at the God who made us. God is infinite. How can anything finite be made in the image of the infinite? You cannot get anything more different than the finite and the infinite. If God is infinite, then how can we have anything in common with God?

And yet to say that humans are infinite like God would put us on God's level. Also, we're obviously not infinitely smart.

I think that we are made in the image of God because God puts some infinity in us, but we're not completely infinite like Him. In this way we have something in common with God, and have inferior reasoning and knowledge. See Ecc 3:11 "God has set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end".

But why wouldn't God make us completely infinite? Because only God can be completely infinite (Deu 6:4). God 'encompasses every infinity in His being', and that means that there can be only one God; God cannot make another God.

Because only God can be completely infinite, God has to make us out of finite stuff (like the brain) as well as infinite stuff. In practice, this means that we must have finite reasoning and knowledge (Matt 24:36).

We borrow from this infinite God whatever we have in common with God, like feeling, love, morality, free will and so on. What every person has borrowed from God is called their 'soul' (John 10:34).

The fact that our soul is infinite means that we can never understand it fully. Why? Because the logic of the infinite world is really different to the logic of the finite world, and we can only reason using the logic of the finite world.

Here's an example (more here): try giving infinity a value. Let's say that infinity equals the undefined value 'X'. In finite reasoning X + X must equal 2X. But infinity always remains infinity. So if we say that infinity = 'X', then X + X equals 2X... but X + X also equals X (because we're dealing with infinity). That would imply that 1 = 2.

OK, so why is this relevant to the problem of suffering?

Without our soul (something from the infinite world) there would be nobody 'in there' to feel stuff (animals also have souls but not understanding Job 39:13-17). So although we suffer because of problems like hurricanes, diseases and earthquakes, we also suffer because we have a soul that we borrow from God.

So no wonder we can't completely understand why we suffer, because we suffer through an infinite object, i.e. we suffer because of what goes on in the world of the soul (Rom 5:12-14)... creatures with finite reasoning just can't understand that stuff.

So the problem of suffering shouldn't be seen as a problem just because we don't know the answer in a way that would explain everything. We should feel able to rely on what the Bible says about it because it's impossible to get close to the answer using finite reasoning any other way.

Four Paradoxes of Free Will

Four Paradoxes of Free Will

I've put one of my essays on what free will really is at the beginning of this article so that people will know what I'm referring to. If you've already read this, or read this, then skip to section two.

First off, some philosophical background to know where I'm coming from. Like many Christians, I believe that God is infinite. Not infinitely good, or infinitely wise, but an *actual* infinity. God is infinity, and infinity happens to wear a crown, so to speak. That is, infinity happens to be conscious, to feel emotions, love, pain, and so on, and this infinite being is everywhere and rules forever and ever. Bit of a big assumption from a non-religious point of view, but this is religious talk here.

Contents:
1: What is free will? (short version)
2: Four paradoxes of 'infinite' free will, and how this view of freedom answers four common objections to Christianity
Paradox 1: God knows how we're going to choose, but we have free will
Paradox 2: God ensured everything that has happened or will happen by making the world the way he did, but the way things have turned out isn't his responsibility; it's the responsibility of creatures
Paradox 3: God can't just make the saved
Paradox 4: With free will, something can be possible every second of every day, and yet will never happen over an infinite length of time

1: What is free will? (short version)

Now on to free will.

I'd say that none of our attempts to define free will 'feel' right. If we say that our actions are caused then we should blame the laws of physics when someone does something wrong. On the other hand, if we say that our actions are *not* caused then it sounds like they happen randomly, because the only alternative to stuff being caused that we can imagine is randomness. That would make doing the right thing a matter of chance.

I think that a good solution involves imagining two 'worlds' out there: a finite world and an infinite world.

Humans see the finite world. In the finite world, everything is a matter of cause and effect. In the finite world A causes B, which causes C, which causes D, and so on. People are determined in the finite world.

In the infinite world people are not determined, but that doesn't mean that they act randomly. The concepts of 'causation' and 'randomness' don't apply in the infinite world. It's a whole different 'ball game', where everything, including causality, is totally different. God lives in the infinite world, because God is infinite. Free will comes from the infinite world, and that's the only place where it can exist.

This situation explains why humans can't understand free will. We can't understand free will because it's very hard to use finite reasoning to understand the infinite.

OK, that might explain how free will can exist even though we don't understand it, but doesn't this mean that only God has free will? After all, only God is infinite. Or am I saying that humans are infinite? But that would put us on God's level.

My view is that humans are partly infinite and partly finite. Only God can be fully infinite, because God 'encompasses all possible infinities' in his being. That's why God can't make another God. But he can go 'halfway'. That is, God can make people partly infinite without making another God.

We get an infinite part of ourselves from God. This is our soul, and it is what makes us a child of God, a thing made in God's image, because nothing finite is made in God's image. We get free will, consciousness, and morality from our soul. But everything else about us *has* to be made finite, including our reasoning, knowledge, and body, because we cannot be all-infinite like God (by the way, animals also have a soul but not understanding - Job 39:13-17.)

This is how I see free will 'working': our physical bodies and soul together make up our personality. We get free will through our soul, and through our bodies we get something to express our choices with as well as reasoning and knowledge. The body sometimes appears to do what the soul does, so for instance, we have an emotional part of the brain, but only because the soul needs something to work with when God empowers it to interact with the body-brain. So we get 'brainy stuff'. But the brain never achieves what the soul does, it only appears to because God wants our brain and soul to interact, and the soul uses 'brainy stuff' to do so.

So free will can make sense, if you say that there's a mysterious 'infinite world' where there can be free will in a way that we can't understand. We get to have this freedom because God made us partly infinite, although we can't understand our infinite selves because our reasoning had to be made finite. We borrow our infinite soul from the infinity of God, and the soul and the body working together create our personality.

This is a dualism of the infinite and the finite, rather than soul and matter.

2: Four paradoxes of 'infinite' free will, and how this view of freedom answers four common objections to Christianity

Because free will comes from the infinite world, you can't use finite thinking to understand it without sacrificing the way things really are. This is because you're dealing with something that is infinite, not finite, so trying to understand free will with finite reasoning is going to lead to paradoxes and contradictions.

This point can be illustrated by three paradoxes, applying generally to the idea of infinity.

Take the paradox of the Grand Hotel by David Hilbert. In theory, you should be able to put a guest in every room of a hotel. But what if the hotel is an infinite hotel? If it's an infinite hotel, then you can never fill it with any finite number of guests. No matter how many guests go to the hotel, there will always be room, because the person in room 1 can move to room 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 4, and so on ad infinitum. Like you can't think of a 'highest' number (someone could beat you by adding a zero on the end of your number.) You would need an infinite number of guests to fill an infinite hotel.

This shows how the finite is an entirely different kind of number to the infinite, or different concept. The finite deals with the finite and can never interact with the infinite without help from the infinite. The infinite deals with the infinite, and through God's power can interact with the finite. They're very different concepts; the infinite isn't just 'much bigger' than the finite, but a different kind of thing. A difference of quality rather than quantity.

Another example of an infinite paradox is the paradox of the circle. Suppose you have a circle and a line to every point of the circle. You need an actually infinite number of lines to go to every point of the circle, because otherwise there'll be gaps when you zoom in closer and closer. OK, suppose you've drawn that circle and the lines. Now draw a much larger circle around that circle. And make the lines you previously drew go out to that even bigger circle. Now, according to finite logic, when you look at those lines in enough depth, there should be tiny gaps when they go out to the much larger circle, because that circle is, well, much larger. But that's not the case. No gaps will ever appear between the lines that have been extended out to the much larger circle, no matter how much you zoom in, because infinity is always infinity. This is a rather counterintuitive mystery of infinity.

You can also use infinity to show that 1 = 2.

Let's assign infinity some value. Like X. Let's say that infinity = X.

OK, now let's add infinity to infinity. What does infinity + infinity equal? Surely two infinities (using finite logic). So if we say that infinity equals X, then infinity plus infinity must equal 2X.

But infinity always has the same value. So infinity plus infinity remains infinity. That means that if we assign a value to infinity then we can show that numbers that are inherently different are the same.

So infinity = X. Infinity + infinity = 2X. But infinity is always the same, so infinity + infinity = X. But this means that 2X = X. That would imply that 1 = 2.

So infinity can be used to show that 1 = 2. This shows that there are clearly 'issues' with using our reasoning to understand infinity, to say the least.

(Visualization of the difference between infinity and finiteness below, click to enlarge)



We find infinity so hard to understand because God really 'messed up' our reasoning when he made us. He did this so that he *could* make us (that is, because only God can be fully infinite, we had to have finite reasoning). No matter how smart we get we'll still think in finite terms and use finite reasoning, even if everyone had an IQ of six billion. You can't be smart enough to understand these things and still be finite. If we could understand them, then we'd be God. No angel or human will ever understand these issues (it reminds me of Matt 24:36 "But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, but My Father only".)

All this means that we can probably expect to find 'true contradictions' whenever we analyse free will using finite language. We should expect to find truths about free will that seem to make no sense, but which are still truths - they are mysteries of infinity.

With this expectation in hand, lets look at four common 'paradoxes' of free will, which are often recast as objections to Christianity, and how the 'infinite' idea of free will resolves them.

Paradox 1: God knows how we're going to choose, but we have free will

Because free will cannot be comprehended with finite reasoning - not even with God's help - we have to mangle the concept of free will very badly whenever we intellectually 'establish' how free will works.

This mangled idea of free will - which is usually deterministic, but can be random - is then used to prove that God doesn't exist, which it does successfully within its domain in the finite world.  When you think about it, this isn't surprising, because God is as far from being finite as anything can get.

The most common 'repackaging' of free will in finite terms draws on deterministic logic.  Christian and secular philosophers won't necessarily say 'I believe in a deterministic idea of free will', where people's actions are determined, but this kind of thinking is implicit in the way both Christians and secular philosophers tend to understand free will.

Whenever someone says 'I can't have free will if God knows what I'm going to do, because I can't make God wrong, and so I have to do what God thinks that I'll do' they're drawing on deterministic logic, because that statement draws on deterministic logic to work.

For instance, if I drop a ball from a great height, then I can know that it will fall to the ground.  I am making a prediction about it falling to the ground with a high degree of certainty.  How can I make this confident prediction?  Because there's a force that will ensure that my prediction will come about - gravity.  People get the ability to predict things by knowing that something will ensure that they are right.

Similarly, if I predict that Tom will give me a million dollars tomorrow, and this isn't just me making stuff up, but involves actual knowledge, then something must ensure that I will be right.  My ability to know that Tom will give me a million dollars tomorrow must be correlated with some kind of 'guarantee' that he will do so.  Some possible guarantees are threats to Tom, the use of force, or even a mind control device that I've put in Tom's head, which will ensure that Tom will give me a million dollars tomorrow.

Basically, to have the ability to predict stuff perfectly, and not just be making stuff up, but to actually *know* the future with absolute certainty, requires us to obtain 'guarantees' of the future.  With guarantees of some kind we can predict that balls in the air will fall to the ground (with the 'guarantee' of gravity) and we can predict that people will do stuff (with the 'guarantee' of threats or mind control devices or stuff like that.)

All of this, obviously, uses a deterministic logic.  If something is up to chance then you cannot 'know' that it will happen. Therefore, to 'know' that something will happen you need a guarantee that it will happen. A guarantee removes chance. The removal of chance equals determinism.

This means that if God knows what we're going to choose then there must be some kind of 'guarantee' that God will be right.  Yet free will seems to require leaving things to chance.  Therefore, God's guarantee must remove chance. And this means that we don't really have free will according to the finite-reasoning philosopher.

The problem is, that's not free will.

What philosophers have done here is 'repackaged' their instinctual knowledge that we have free will into finite terms that can be understood.  This repackaging was then used to analyse God's ability to predict our choices in the Bible.  Philosophers have in this process hammered the square peg of free will into the round hole of finite reasoning; thought of free will in deterministic terms; visualised or imagined God's knowledge 'forcing' our choices to conform to his predictions.  There's been a bifurcation of free will into determinism or randomness/probability, forced on philosophers by the finite nature of our reasoning, when in reality there's a third option operating in the infinite world.  No one can intellectualise this third option but we make use of it in the part of us that's infinite (our soul).

This third option is the 'true' option, and if we understood it then we'd know that God's ability to predict our (and his own) choices is completely compatible with everyone having genuine free will.

To really understand what's going on with free will we must resist putting it into a finite 'box'.  Once we stop trying to intellectualise free will with our finite reasoning, then we can learn to embrace the paradoxes and ironically through ignorance get closer to the truth.  By embracing these philosophical paradoxes, by making it clear what humans can and can never know, we can learn something about God, the infinite world that he lives in and the nature of our own free will that we share with God.

Once we embrace these paradoxes as mysteries of infinity we can accept more readily, on the one hand, God having the power to predict our choices, and on the other hand, humans being genuinely free.

Paradox 2: God ensured everything that has happened or will happen by making the world the way he did, but the way things have turned out isn't his responsibility; it's the responsibility of creatures

In the Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus pointed out a common thought that causes many Christians to stumble over the idea that God made everything. If God made everything then isn't he ultimately responsible for what will happen? If God knew how everything would turn out when he made the world, that Adam and Eve would sin, that there would be horrible wars and so on, who would be saved and who lost, etc. then isn't it his responsibility the way things have turned out? Isn't the state of the world God's fault much like when someone pushes a boulder off a hill, they're responsible for what the boulder does on the way down?

As we saw earlier with the view that God's knowledge contradicts free will, the root of these types of theological problems comes from forcing free will into a 'deterministic' framework, when the reality is quite different.

I think that the basic argument structure borrows from the argument against free will in the first paradox. Basically, because God ultimately started everything off knowing what would happen, and because his foreknowledge takes away our freedom (according to the finite reasoning I talked about earlier), then God is responsible for all the evil in the world; all the bad choices.

The answer to it is that due to the nature of infinite free will, that we can't understand using our reason (we can't *ever* understand), we're completely responsible for our bad choices even though God puts us in situations where he knows we'll choose a certain way.

Because in the infinite world we have a choice; we have a sovereign free will. So ultimately, what we do is up to us.

The paradox is that in general terms, you can put someone in a situation where you know that they will do the wrong thing, and yet you are not responsible for their choice.

But how to explain that using finite reasoning? It can't be done. You can never know this intellectually like you can know that 2 + 2 = 4.

This wouldn't entirely excuse God if the situation he put us in were unfair, I should note. There are fair and unfair situations. But if the situation is fair, then it's not God's fault if we do the wrong thing, even though he knew that we would.

Paradox 3: God can't just make the saved

A third paradox of free will is that God couldn't only make people who would decide to come to Christ (Matt 13:24-29). This needs to explained in a theology where some people never choose to go to heaven.

One objection to Christianity is that if hell is such a nasty place, then God should have avoided making the unsaved. If God could have avoided making the unsaved, then why not avoid making them?

An all powerful God should be able to do a lot of stuff. He should be able to make only those people who decide to make certain choices. So what's going on?

It's important to remember that free will isn't determined or random/probabilistic, but involves a 'third option' in the infinite world. Even though this is the case, I'm going to use an analogy between free will and finite concepts to account for this third paradox.

In one respect, free will is a little like randomness (although the metaphor shouldn't be carried too far and people think that free will is affected by randomness, because randomness isn't a good thing in people.)

I think that in some respects, although it involves a completely different process (an infinite one), creating a person is kind of like triggering an event with a random outcome. Creating a person is kind of like flipping a coin, with a completely random 50/50 outcome, even for God.

If a coin toss is random then you can't make it go heads or tails - it could go either way. We cannot affect the outcome, and we cannot predict it either.

This is similar to God making a person, in that God cannot just make people who would go a certain way (i.e. have certain personalities), but he *can* still predict us. Whereas for human randomness, if anything's random you cannot make it go a certain way *and* you cannot predict it.

So when God creates people he hopes that they're going to turn out well, but it's *like* a random process as to whether they will... so God can't make sure that all the people he makes will make the best choices. But the other half of the paradox is that even though making a person is like a random process in this aspect, God still knows how we're going to choose, so free will isn't actually a random process. To even use the word 'random' is kind of a misnomer, because the infinite world 'third option' isn't determined or random at all.

And also, even though free will is *like* being random in this way, it's still a great thing to have. You'd think that being even slightly random would be a terrible thing for a person, because you'd end up doing crazy stuff that you didn't want to do, because you'd act randomly. I'm not saying that free will is random, I'm saying that it can be *compared* to random in certain aspects, in a superficial way when looked at through finite reasoning. Actually, the 'third option' that we can't intellectually understand is a genuine, great kind of freedom.

Paradox 4: With free will, something can be possible every second of every day, and yet will never happen over an infinite length of time

Possibility and probability go hand in hand in the normal view. If something is possible, then it has a probability. If something is impossible, then the probability of it happening is zero.

The fourth paradox of free will is that when it comes to free will, possibility has absolutely nothing to do with what's probable and what's improbable. Something can be possible again and again, every hour of every day for an infinite length of time, and yet will never happen.

Traditionally we say this about free will: if you have free will, then you can choose to do anything within your physical power, at any time. So it's *possible* for you to do anything within your physical power at any time.

According to finite reasoning, the fact that it's possible for you to do something *should* create a relationship with probability. There should be some kind of probability that you can assign to whether you will do something that it's possible for you to do.

For example, if it's possible that Jimmy will take a cookie from the cookie jar, then you should be able to assign an e.g. 70% probability that he will take it. You should be able to assign a probability to whether someone will go and see a certain movie, or marry a certain person.

But, if free will is a matter of probability, and we can do anything within our physical power at any time, then over an infinite length of time everyone would do everything.

The reason why everyone would do everything over an infinite length of time if free will can be analysed in terms of probability, is that in probability theory, if an event is possible, then it has *some* chance of happening. Even if the chance is absolutely miniscule.

And if any event has *some* chance of happening, then if that chance gets repeated again and again an infinite number of times, then the chance *must* come up eventually and the event happen.

For example, suppose that the universe is continually remade in the Big Bang, and that every time the universe is recreated there's a chance that a life form would evolve and write Hamlet. Over an infinite length of time, someone *has* to write Hamlet.

So if you lived for an eternity with probabilistic free will, then eventually you would choose to build a spacecraft with wood, or drive your car deliberately into a ditch repeatedly, because it's possible that you can do it.

And you would have no choice about it. As long as there's any probability of trying to make a spacecraft out of wood, then over an eternity you'll decide to do that. You simply cannot get out of it in the probability view of free will.

But this view is completely counterintuitive. Assuming I live forever, why should I be forced by probability to build a spacecraft out of wood? Why should I be forced to recreate the Great Wall of China in Alaska using books written about the American Civil War?

The conclusion is that when it comes to free will, possibility doesn't have anything to do with probability. It would if free will were finite, but in the infinite world, a different set of rules apply. In the infinite idea of free will you don't have to do everything that you can physically do. You can do what you want to do within your physical power. And if you never want to build a Great Wall of China out of books written about the American Civil War, then don't.

If you're a Christian, there's a second reason to defend the idea that you can be free to choose something every second of every day, and yet never choose it over an infinite length of time. And that reason comes from our concept of heaven.

Let's talk about heaven. According to Christianity, the people in heaven will be able to be perfect forever, but only because we'll all choose to accept God's grace forever (Rev 7:17). We'll still have the same old personality that has chosen to find doing the wrong thing attractive, but we won't act wrongly any more, because we'll be perfect through the work of the Holy Spirit dwelling inside us. Once anyone accepts the Holy Spirit, God can perform a miracle that will make them perfect as long as they accept the Spirit.

But no human can accept the Holy Spirit on their own. No one is good enough to genuinely know what it means to be perfect, and to want to be perfect, otherwise they already would be ("All have sinned" - Rom 3:23). So God performs a miracle on anybody who hears the gospel that allows them to genuinely accept what living a perfect life really means. For an idea of what we'll be like forever in heaven, look at 1 Cor 13:4-7. We'll be infinitely close to that, which as you can tell might be hard to live out in practice, and a hard transformation for sinful people to want forever. So through a miracle God can take away the character flaws that prevent every one of us from wanting to be perfect, so that we can accept the Spirit of grace. And God extends this miracle to everyone who hears the gospel, to allow everyone to accept his grace, although not everyone does. And through another miracle God can make us perfect as long as we continue to accept his Spirit.

Whether we'll go to heaven depends on our willingness to accept God's grace for an actually infinite length of time. On our own we're still not perfect, even though the Holy Spirit who dwells inside us will help us be perfect through a miracle. Without the Spirit, we're still people who chose desires that made doing wrong things the most attractive option. And we'll have free will in heaven. So it's possible for us to want to go back to being our old selves and reject the Spirit of grace in heaven. If someone would do this after a million years then they cannot go into heaven; someone cannot go into heaven if they would reject grace after a googol years. You can only go to heaven if you're willing to choose to accept God's grace forever and ever, and some people won't. Why? Because even though God performs a miracle so that our imperfect works and imperfect character traits don't prevent us from coming to Christ, we're still our old selves apart from God's miracles and are free to reject God's grace at any time in heaven. The only people who will be in heaven are those who want to put themselves under grace, suppressing any temptation against accepting it forever and ever.

Accepting God's grace for an actually infinite length of time is the only thing that protects us from hell. Hell does not occur because God does anything, rather it is an automatic process that happens when any soul sins (John 3:17). Because infinite souls must have a certain nature, sin kills souls (James 1:15). It's only through our spirit becoming one with Christ's Spirit that the atonement can have any effect to help us. If this doesn't happen then we die spiritually (Gen 2:17). Our soul doesn't have to be in hell for this to happen, a person could be anywhere and still be in hell. Hell is merely a process of sin killing a soul, which is either like life on earth if you're good, or much more painful if you're evil. In a sense, we're already in hell because suffering on earth occurs because of sin (Rom 5:12-14), and later on the scenery changes. It's also true that a righteous God will not allow sin into his presence, being a righteous God, and will cast those who reject his grace out of heaven. But even if God did allow those who reject his grace into heaven, then no sinners would be happy in heaven, because they would be killed by sin while they were in heaven, which would make heaven a hell for them.

For those of us who heard the gospel and held on to God no matter what, no matter the testings, trials and doubts, God has developed in us a character that is willing to accept his grace forever. That's why and how Jesus came to save that which was lost (Matt 18:11). We started off graceless, choosing to reject God, and we will join God in a state of grace after we are helped through testing and trials to want it so much that we'll want it forever (Luke 15:11-32.) (Note: I think that children and others outside accountability very likely go to heaven, so actually more people are saved than not saved. But exactly what's going on with this is ambiguous.) Through testings and trials, we will be brought to choose grace forever and ever as our deepest desire, against any contrary thought, and thus we will have chosen to be perfect in heaven forever. The parable of the loaves is that no one who could have been brought to accept grace forever will be lost (John 6:12, Mark 8:17-21). All the souls who could have been brought to accept grace forever have been allocated into history facing the kinds of tests especially helpful for them in choosing to accept God's grace forever, so that when they pass those tests, they have created a character in themselves that will choose God's grace forever instead of being graceless (Rev 1:19-3:22). Those whom God knows can never be brought to accept his grace whatever God does (the 'cursed' - Matt 25:41-46) have been allocated into history according to God's knowledge of how they will choose in every situation, so that everything they do will ultimately help those who are being brought to accept grace forever accept it forever (Rom 9:19-25, 1 Cor 10:13, Heb 12:11).

The finite idea of free will criticises this view quite severely.

If you adopt the determinist idea of free will, then we are saved or lost depending on how God chose to make us. In this idea of free will, God made some of us follow him, and some of us not follow him. We only act out our predetermined desires.

If you adopt the probability idea of free will (a competitor), then we would eventually choose to sin in heaven over an eternity. Rejecting the Spirit in heaven is a possible choice. So if free will is a matter of probability, then everyone in heaven will eventually reject the Spirit over an infinite length of time. This would disprove the Christian idea of heaven.

And the random idea of free will runs completely counter to any reasonable idea of what free will is, because being forced to act in a random way is not a good thing.

As hopefully I've laid out, we should reject all of these finite world understandings of free will. Free will is neither determinist, nor probabilistic, nor random. So we can be in heaven forever and ever, and always choose to follow God's will forever, and never sin because we will accept God's grace forever, but still have free will all this time. This is the promise of heaven (Rev 7:17).

To sum up this article, when we think in finite terms we bifurcate free will into determinism or randomness, or a hybrid of both, probabilistic free will. But none of these ideas reflect the idea of free will in our intuitions, or rather, the idea of free will sensed through our infinite soul.

This situation leads to the four paradoxes I've just outlined, that defy intellectual understanding and have to be taken on faith, faith both in an infinite God and that this infinite God made us in his image, giving us access through the infinite world to this thing called a soul.

If I'm right about free will being given to us through an actually infinite object - our soul - then perhaps by understanding all of these paradoxes about infinite free will we can get a better grasp of what an actual infinite is like, which could be interesting.

If I'm right about God being infinite and humans being partly infinite and partly finite, then if you applied finite reasoning to God, or to the things in humans that are infinite - free will, consciousness, morality, and many of our intuitions, which philosophers do, then you'd be using the wrong terms, asking the wrong questions, speaking the wrong language.

The Problem of Hell

The Problem of Hell
Will G

Summary. This is intended to be a shorter article explaining my views on hell, offering a coherent solution to many of its problems. Basically, I argue that hell is based on a choice, the choice to accept or reject Jesus. But this choice must follow an important principle: it has to be made knowing the consequences. And no atheist finds it plausible that a person could knowingly choose to go to hell. My solution is to redefine heaven and hell so that heaven involves joining part of ourselves to God in order to do perfect good over an eternity, and hell involves either just exclusion from God or a finite amount of pain (finite despite it lasting forever.) I also argue that people's choice to go to such a heaven or hell defines whether or not they are a Christian in this life.

A good view of how this theology fits in with a greater picture is provided here.

Edited 12/17/07
12/19/07

Introduction

The problem of hell is regarded by those skeptical of Christianity as a very significant difficulty in Christian views on salvation. Rather than go on about the difficulties in Christian views on salvation, I will simply state a revised philosophical perspective on the issue that I think is conceptually clarifying and makes a great deal of sense.

Why Hell is a Choice

Christian views on salvation have always maintained that hell is a result of judgement. That is true. However since everyone allegedly has the ability to accept Jesus Christ and from then on face no judgement whatsoever, it is not just about judgement. It is about judgement, but there is something more to it than that. It is a specific judgement, relating not just to someone's sins, but to someone's refusal to do anything about those sins. In other words, it is not just about sin, it is also about accepting Jesus Christ. It is also about choice.

Two Key Principles of Choice

Since we are about to discuss choice, it is important to discuss two principles of choice that are involved in the choice to go to hell. The first principle is the principle that if you choose something, you are responsible for that choice. This principle supports the idea that people can be condemned for rejecting Jesus Christ. The second principle is that for a choice to be a real choice, it has to be made knowing the consequences. This is the area which atheists object makes the idea of choice regarding hell nonsensical.

The first principle of choice is that if you genuinely choose something, then the results of that choice cannot, really, be laid on someone else. If I choose to shoot myself, then who has the blame? Unless I was forced into it, I do, because I chose to do it. Similarly, if I go and join the army, and I get sent into a combat zone because there is a war on, then whose fault is it that I am in danger? It is mine, because I knew when I joined the army that I could be sent into danger. So if I go to hell, then whose fault is it, if I freely and fully chose to go there? Granted, hell is terrible. But the principle of choice has overriding power. Even though hell is really, really bad, if I freely choose to go there, it is all my fault, not God's. Hence if hell cannot be freely chosen, then hell can never be justified. But if hell can be freely chosen, then hell can be completely justified. That is how powerful the principle of choice is; properly employed it can justify hell. So if people freely choose to reject Jesus, then they deserve to be punished and to go to hell. If that choice is freely and fully made, then, logically, there is no problem with hell.

Now it is important to note the second principle that needs to be followed for a choice to be genuinely made. This principle needs to be followed for the above principle to work, and is the principle atheists say has been violated in the choice to go to hell (and that, hence, hell is unjustified). This principle is, that if I freely choose to do something, then it can only be genuinely be called a choice if I know what the consequences of my choice are. For example, suppose I give a tropical islander who has never seen a gun before a firearm. Suppose they then point it at another islander and pull the trigger, killing them. Did that person freely choose to shoot his fellow islander? Obviously not, because he did not know if he pulled the trigger, the person would die. So, the doctrine of hell makes no sense if people who go to hell do not choose to go there, and they can only freely choose to go there if they choose to go to hell knowing the consequences. So our doctrine of hell must show how people who go to hell freely choose to go there knowing the consequences of their choice.

Because atheists don't believe they reject Jesus because they want to go to hell, rather, they choose to reject Jesus because they see no evidence of Christianity, no atheist would agree that the concept of choice makes sense when applied to hell. To be sure, the concept of choice COULD theoretically justify hell, but it doesn't, as non-Christians would say, because non-Christians don't knowingly choose to go to hell.

How Hell Can Be a Choice

So does the Christian view of hell make sense given the atheist's objection? Christians have always maintained that when a person goes to hell, it is of their own free choice. But why would anyone choose to go to hell, really? Would a perfectly sane and healthy man, suffering no depression at all, leave his loving wife and kids and choose to jump off a cliff for no reason? It doesn't make sense. And, sad to say, many an atheist would say that the standard doctrine of hell makes about as much sense as that. Atheists may dislike God, or hate God, but why on earth would they choose to go to hell if they will get tortured there forever?

My modification to this position is to modify what heaven and hell actually are, from a Christian perspective, so that it is possible for some people to knowingly choose to go to hell.

On hell, it is true that hell will consist of suffering, but that suffering has been considerably over-emphasised. It is not necessary for an idea of an eternity of pain for that pain to be infinite. Let's say one day I break my leg. Let's say that every second I suffer 10 units of pain, hence over a minute I suffer 600 units of pain. That is why I do not wish to break my leg. But let's say time was stopped the moment my leg was broken. If so, then I would suffer 10 units of pain forever. That kind of thing is what hell could be. Or perhaps, as some argue (see here) it consists of no suffering at all, just the pain and shame from exclusion from God. This means if heaven involved a sufficient cost, some people could freely choose to go to hell.

And I argue that heaven also involves a large cost, one big enough to make an eternity of limbo a reasonable option for some people. While our souls and bodies will remain separate, our spirit will become one with God's Holy Spirit, as part of the perfection process where we will do good over an eternity. This means that we partly become part of God, and lose some of our 'self'. Of course, one may object this is not such a large cost. But what this choice is, what it really involves, is something we cannot really imagine. This may involve a considerable loss of self, to become partly part of God and/or lose a significant amount of autonomy and individuality. I find it difficult to conceptualise this, but I think that the extent to which we lose autonomy and individuality is the extent to which we would have to in order to have a lot of people choose willingly to go to hell/limbo. So some people will freely choose to go to hell.

Why do I think you have to join with God to go to heaven? In another area of my theology I have outlined (see here) I believe the only way to be completely morally perfect, or perfect in any respect, is to be God, because only God can, by definition, by perfect. Everything that is perfect is God, everything that is not God is not perfect, although it may be incredibly good. Total perfection is something only God can have. To be sure, God can create things outside of himself that are very good, extremely good, but not 100% perfect. So when God creates beings outside of himself, in order to create and love something apart from himself, the creatures he creates are extremely good, but not completely perfect. This is why the Fall occurred, because any being outside of God cannot do perfect good over an eternity, only God has that power. This explains why God did not create everyone perfect, and how everyone will be perfect in heaven. The way God will make everyone perfect in heaven is by joining our spirits with His Holy Spirit, so we will be able to do only perfect good over an eternity, using God's Holy Spirit to do so (I feel this is a good position to adopt because it also explains why there must be moral evil in the universe.) God has to do this otherwise we get eternally cut off from him due to our (necessary) imperfection.

How this Choice Can Show the World we See

Alright, so some people can freely choose to go to heaven, and some people can freely choose to go to hell. But that doesn't explain the world we see. It still doesn't defeat the problem that atheists don't knowingly choose to go to hell. Because even if it is a choice that can be rationally made in favour of hell, atheists and those who reject Christianity don't get to make it in this life, because no atheists and non-Christians know about the Christian hell in this life.

But as I argue, God is omniscient, and since he knows everything, he doesn't have to offer us this choice in this life. Instead, God knows which among us will choose to go to heaven, and who will choose to go to hell, if faced with that choice. So God doesn't have to offer us this choice right now in order to determine who will reject Jesus Christ. He knows who will reject Jesus already. So God is free to work as though atheists have already made a knowing choice to go to hell, even though they haven't. Because presumably God knows what they would choose if they were offered such a choice. And I believe we all get to face such a choice in the afterlife, but it won't contradict what God knew we would choose.

But that still doesn't explain why every Christian is a person who will choose to go to heaven and why every rejecting non-Christian will choose to go to hell if faced with the choice. After all, there are many kinds of Christians, and many kinds of non-Christians.

But I argue this objection is actually putting the cart before the horse, or rather, looking at a puddle and then remarking how lucky it is that the puddle is shaped around the hole (as Douglas Adams said in another context). God has omniscient knowledge, so he knows who would choose to go to hell or heaven if given a knowledgeable choice in the afterlife. Even though everyone who goes to hell currently lacks knowledge that hell exists, God knows what they would choose if they did make that choice freely, and thus ensures that they go to a place that honours that choice if they did make it (as they someday will.) And based on this knowledge, God makes people Christian or does not make someone Christian. So it is not surprising that all people God has made Christians go to heaven, and all those who would rather not make the choice for heaven go to hell: God has selected us, we haven't selected to accept or reject Christianity ourselves.

Of course, one objection following from this, is that there are many non-Christians who think they would actually make the choice to join with God, but don't presently have a Christian belief. But I would say this is a deep, internal choice, that we can only really fully make when faced with it in the afterlife, being shown the complete consequences of joining with God with His help. And it may not relate obviously to what we consciously think we would choose. We may think that we would choose to go to join with God, but we don't really know, for it is only with God's help that we can consciously and fully choose such a thing. I can't really explain what it would be like to consciously make such a choice, neither can any human. What would it be like to have one's spirit completely joined with and made subservient to God's Spirit, possessing some individuality but not all of that which you had before? I don't know, but I can guess it involves a cost to some people more than others.

Finally I will touch on one last objection, which is that it seems somewhat incongruous that there are clumps of Christians and atheists in the world, and the children of Christians tend to be Christian, but not the children of atheists. Another mechanism I think needs to be brought in to explain the distribution of Christians and non-Christians. That is that God actually allocates souls into this world, and that in some way souls must 'pre-exist', with God knowing their choices. So, hence, the makeup of Christians/non-Christians is the way it is to in some way to serve his mysterious will. On this point, I personally would like to think those who die before the age of accountability go to heaven, because they would have made the choice to go to heaven if they had gotten older, and those who never hear of Christianity do have some chance of being saved.

Conclusion

To summarize: hell can theoretically be justified if it can be explained how everyone who goes to hell chooses to go there fully knowing the consequences of their choice. But since no sane person would choose to do this, atheists argue, hell makes no sense. However, as I reply, some people could choose to freely go to hell if heaven involves a cost to one's self, and hell involves no pain or finite pain over an eternity. But why would people's choices in this matter be divided along Christian/rejected Christianity lines? Because God has made only those people Christian who would make the choice to become part of Him, and has caused those who reject Christianity to reject Christianity who would not make this choice to join with him in the afterlife. And God knows that we all would make that choice in a certain way because he is omniscient and can foretell what we would choose if we made that choice in the afterlife (which we do get to make in the afterlife, probably, but it's redundant.)

The discussion is continued here.

Will G
First written: 2/10/07

Michael Martin's disproof of God

Summary: Atheologians who are keen to disprove the idea of God often formulate disproofs of God based on analysing some of God's supposed attributes and demonstrating that they are inconsistent with each other or with themselves. In this essay I analyse one attempted disproof along these lines by philosopher Michael Martin. The problem with such disproofs, I argue, is that they set up definitions of God and then use those definitions to argue that God doesn't exist. But God is only the greatest possible being, and that is certainly coherent. So philosophers may be making up definitions that the greatest possible being cannot have, and thus essentially making up impossible characteristics that they use to disprove a being that could never have them, while ignoring the coherency of the greatest possible being, and what attributes THAT being has. That said, in the second section I put forward a hypothesis on why Michael Martin's definition of omniscience fails in disproving the greatest possible being. Finally I end on a more general note on all such arguments from an email discussion I had with someone where I mentioned this subject.

A philosopher called Michael Martin wrote an interesting attempted disproof of God's existence a while ago, available here, which I'd like to take a look at. Martin's argument, to rephrase it in my own words, is that the idea of omniscience (the way God can know everything) necessarily must include all kinds of knowledge. So, obviously, it would include propositional knowledge, like 'America is a country' but he argues also it must also include all other kinds of knowledge, such as experiential knowledge like how to swim. This wouldn't just be knowing how to swim as an intellectual idea, that you move your arms and legs in a certain way in the water, but to actually have knowledgeable experience of swimming. In the same way Michael Martin uses the example of experiencing, envy, lust, and other emotions that a God of complete love or goodness couldn't experience. If experiencing envy gives you a kind of knowledge of envy, and if God can't experience envy, then God can't really know everything and hence the idea of omniscience doesn't make sense. (Martin puts the argument a little differently, applying it only to the 'common person's' ideal of God, but since I think Martin's argument only has any force as long as it's applied to an orthodox Christian ideal of God, I am stating it against that. I am not sure of how that distinction is meant to work.)

I want to concentrate on this argument not just as a specific objection to God's existence, but as illustrative of a general type of argument I haven't yet addressed on this website. This will be done utilising two arguments that work against Michael Martin, and which also support each other. First of all, omniscience need not include all experiential knowledge to be omniscience, e.g. of swimming or lust, and secondly in some circumstances we intuitively reject the idea that omniscience does need to include all such kinds of experiential knowledge.

Martin's argument, I think, is ultimately based on the idea of contradictions existing in the attributes we give to God. God's non-physicality, his existence as a spirit, contradicts the idea that he can experience swimming, since a spirit cannot swim. In the same way, God's perfection contradicts with the idea God can experience envy, since envy is a morally bad emotion. As with lust, because God can't have sex, he cannot, it seems, experience lust. So Martin is showing that no matter what, God cannot really experience things that we can experience, through such contradictions. And through these contradictions we can see that God can't experience things humans can, he can't have, as Michael says all kinds of 'procedural knowledge'.

To make my first argument, before getting on Michael Martin's objection to God specifically, (I will get on to that in a second) I would like to point out how dangerous it is to argue that because two attributes of God are contradictory, then God doesn't exist. This point applies to all God-contradiction arguments generally. If someone points out a contradiction in two supposed attributes of God, then we should defend the idea of God as much as possible, but if two supposed attributes really are contradictory then it does not mean that God doesn't exist, but that we misidentified and mis-analysed the attributes he does have. The idea of 'the greatest possible being', which is a philosophical definition of God, certainly makes sense. So it may be that God can't really be omnipotent and omniscient in the way some people understand it, but that just means he has the next best thing, whatever that may be. And if that means God can't make two and two equal five, then he has the next best thing, which is to do anything logically possible (so, everything apart from making two and two equal five.) So, the greatest possible being can't make two and two equal five, but he can do everything else. And if tomorrow we discovered that God can't for example, make more than a certain number of planets in a second, then that will mean that the greatest possible being can't make two and two equal five, and can't make more than a certain number of planets. So we would define omnipotence differently, to cope with our new understanding, just as we would define omnipotence differently if we understood something new about omniscience that contradicted our understanding of omnipotence. But that doesn't mean the greatest possible being can't exist, only that he actually has fewer abilities that we originally thought. Philosophers need to be careful lest they fall into definitional confusions, and mistake those definitional confusions for real discoveries about God, or the non-existence of God.

The question from this in my mind is whether a clear, well-thought out, comprehensive analysis of the greatest possible being would show the greatest possible being can't have the attributes of the kind of God described in the Bible, because it turns out the Biblical God really can't have attributes we think he should have. So, the real question is, not whether two attributes of God are contradictory, since ultimately that can't disprove the greatest possible being, it is whether on closer philosophical analysis, the greatest possible being is not only limited in making two and two equal five, but in, for example, how much love he can give his creatures at any one time. If he was limited in such a way, that would undermine Christianity.

I think specifically in regards to Michael Martin, that he is putting the cart before the horse in this aspect. Martin is arguing that a personal God must necessarily have experiential knowledge, but that he can't have experiential knowledge of how to swim, for example, so he can't have as much knowledge as humans, and hence can't be all-knowing. But, remember, omniscience is only the best omniscience any being can have. Michael is putting the cart before the horse. Our idea of omniscience shouldn't define how how we think of the greatest possible being, rather the idea of the greatest possible being should define how we think of omniscience. It may be that the best kind of omniscience God can have, and that is actually possible, is one in which a supreme being doesn't have all kinds of experiential knowledge, just like the best kind of omnipotence doesn't include the ability to make two and two equal five. To be sure, I'll grant to Michael Martin that God doesn't know some things that we know, like lust or envy. But then again, you'd think that the problem would be that omniscience is nonsensical, NOT that God can't experience lust or envy. In other words, I see how it undermines Christianity that God can't be omniscience, I don't see how it damages Christianity to say that God can't experience lust. But I think Martin's argument only applies on the weaker level.

That said, I would like to make a second argument that Michael Martin's objection isn't that strong, supporting my one above - based on the idea that we can make analogies with Michael Martin's argument where it doesn't seem fair that he should have to know some things to be omniscient. And I would argue that this is because the concept of omniscience, properly understood, automatically excludes experiences God can't have by definition. And this can be shown in examples where we feel such knowledge can be excluded from God without undermining his omniscience.

In some sense, I can know propositionally how to eat, and I can know how to eat because I have experienced eating firsthand. In the same way I can know propositionally that a person called Will G exists (myself), and I can know propositionally that I am Will G. But the propositional knowledge that 'I', and only I am Will G, is a kind of propositional knowledge that no one else can have. God can't know 'I am Will G' as a statement about himself, nor can you, nor can anyone else who reads this. Only I can. But does this mean that God isn't omniscience in a propositional sense? Of course not. That would be very unfair on God; to say he can't know all facts just because He can't know He is Will G. Actually no atheist philosopher I know of has said such a thing, because it is so ridiculous to demand that of God. This is because, by definition, God can't know 'I am Will G', so it's unfair to suppose that he should know it in order to qualify for omniscience. But, as I will argue, experiential knowledge like how to swim can be contradictory in much the same way.

Is it possible to have experiential knowledge of how to be Will G? For example, I have swum before, so I know how to swim, as an experience that I've had. But could you argue that I also have experience of being Will G, as I am Will G? Is being yourself something you can have experience of? In other words, can I know 'how' to be Will G as a kind of procedural knowledge? I would say there is no good reason to think just like swimming, or playing tennis, that you can't experience and get experiential knowledge of being yourself. But if this is true, then Michael Martin's argument can be reduced to absurdity. Demanding that God must have all kinds of experiential knowledge, including the experiential knowledge of how to be Will G, is like saying that because God hasn't experienced being George W. Bush, he can't know everything. That sounds like some kind of joke on atheistic arguments. But it's really just the experiential version of the propositional argument that since God can't know propositionally 'I am Will G' or 'I am George Bush', then he doesn't have the right amount of knowledge to be qualified as omniscient.

The thing is, I'm not saying that experiential knowledge of how to swim is not knowledge, just as knowing how to lust is not knowledge. Just as I'm not saying that propositional knowledge that 'I am Will G' is not a kind of knowledge. But it doesn't matter to our idea of God or our definition of omniscience if God doesn't know some things. Just as we intuitively know that for some reason, it doesn't matter to God's omniscience that he can't have all propositional knowledge, like 'I am Will G', so it doesn't matter to God's omniscience that he can't have all experiential knowledge, like how to be Will G. There is something absurd about the example that since God can't know I am Will G, he can't know everything. And this absurdity that makes us reject that argument should make us reject Michael Martin's. The difference I think that makes it more absurd to say this than what Michael Martin was saying, is that many people can know how to swim, but not many people can know how to be Will G or George Bush, just one, and it is in fact logically impossible for all those other people to know.

So, it seems that if it's unfair in a propositional sense to declare that if God can't know 'I am Will G', or else he gets kicked out of the omniscience club, then it must be unfair in the experiential sense to demand God experience lust, swimming, or building a house with his hands or he gets kicked out of the experiential knowledge club. God can't know 'I am Will G' by definition, he can't experience being Will G by definition, he can't experience lust or swimming by definition. And if we say God is omniscient even though he can't know he is Will G, because God can't know that by definition, then it also must be unfair to demand God experience lust, blind hatred, swimming, and building a house if he cannot by definition.

The key point is what you can't know by definition. And what you can't know by definition is automatically excluded from the concept of omniscience as it can apply to you.

So, if an atheist does not wish to make the point that, because God can't experience being Will G, therefore he can't experience everything and is hence not omniscient, he cannot make the same point with regard to other experiential knowledge, like how to build a house, how to feel lust or how to swim. So whatever we may have thought at first, God gets off the philosophical hook in some way. And so it really doesn't undermine His existence at all to say He can't experience lust, envy, or how to swim.

1/26/07

Post Note

This is part of an email discussion I had with someone where I summarised some relevant points relating to this issue.

XXZ wrote,

Hey!

Have you seen this argument I found on a website of a philosopher?

[Link]


I wrote in reply

I had a very quick look at the article, just skimming it. It's interesting, because I think in a way it's similar to Michael Martin's disproof of God that I wrote about. No one that I know of has been convinced by Michael Martin's disproof of God, I personally cannot imagine anyone being convinced by it, because to me at least, it has so little force. Yet for me, actually figuring out why I probably thought this took a long time.

Ultimately I think a lot of atheistic arguments that attempt to disprove God are based on definitional confusions. For example, God is conceived of as being omnipotent, which means he can do anything, and omniscient, which means he knows everything. But he can't know how to lust, so he isn't omnipotent or omniscient. But the problem here is that omnipotence has been defined wrongly, as has omniscience. The argument arises because someone has made a *plausible* definition, that means God should know how to lust, but this plausible definition is just that: plausible, it is not the truth.

So in relation to this philosopher's argument I think he is using plausible definitions of spatial unlocatedness, space, spatial points etc. that have served him and philosophy well. But I think he is making definitions that are just plausible and do not encompass the whole truth of the concepts he is using. And thus he is getting caught in a definitional confusion, because he's using those 'only plausible' definitions to argue God doesn't exist, just like those who make up attributes of God and argue that since those attributes are contradictory, God can't exist.

Exactly how are his definitions just plausible and not the truth, you might ask? Well, first of all, philosophers have a really bad track record at defining things properly (we still don't agree on what 'mind' is, what 'person' is, what 'good' and 'evil' are, etc). Secondly, I think that his argument is only as strong as the plausibility not only of the definitions he is using, but of the precise delineation of those definitions, which I find implausible for any philosophical definition, and not only philosophical but just about any definition of anything generally except something really simple like, 'what is a tent.' And thirdly I don't find his argument at all persuasive I have the strong suspicion that his definitions do not encompass the whole truth of the concepts he is using.

I think these points should make us very cautious about making strong conclusions regarding ANY arguments that primarily rely on definitions about stuff. Whether it's an atheological argument for the nonexistence of God, or whether it's some elaborate theological argument regarding God's nature or something like that.