Author: Charles Hartshorne
[p. 85]
Now if we look at the definitions of God made by dogmatic theology, we see immediately that some stand and some fall when treated by this [the pragmatic] test. God . . . as any orthodox textbook will tell us, is a being existing . . . a se, or from himself; and out of this “aseity” flow most of his perfections. He is for example, . . . simple, not compounded of . . . substance and accident, actuality and potentiality. . . . He is inwardly and outwardly unalterable; he knows and wills all things . . . in one indivisible eternal act. And he is absolutely self-sufficing, and infinitely happy. Now in which of us practical Americans here assembled does this conglomeration of attributes awaken any sense of reality? And if in no one, then why not? Surely because such attributes awaken no responsive active feelings and call for no particular conduct of our own. How does God’s “aseity” come home to you? What specific thing can I do to adapt myself to his “simplicity”? Or how determine our behavior henceforward if his “felicity” is anyhow absolutely complete . . . ? The attributes I have quoted have absolutely nothing to do with religion, for religion is a living practical affair. Other parts, indeed, of God’s traditional description do have practical connection with life, and have owed all their historic importance to that fact. His omniscience, for example, and his justice. With the one he sees us in the dark, with the other he rewards and punishes what he sees. So do his ubiquity and eternity and unalterability appeal to our confidence, and his goodness [p. 86] banish our fears. . . . And yet even these more real and significant attributes have the trail of the serpent over them, as the books on theology have actually worked them out.
Wittiam James, in “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” reprinted in Collected Essays and Reviews
If all ideas are in some sense derived from experience, then one of the first steps in examining the idea of God should be to ask, From what aspects of experience has it been derived? No doubt so fundamental an idea is based in some way or degree upon widely different experiences, but still, if it is a conception distinguishable from others, there must be privileged experiences which particularly serve to give it meaning — whether or not they suffice to prove it true, At any rate, such privileged experiences with respect to the idea of God do seem to exist, and they bear the familiar name of religious experiences. In a philosophical theology one does not wish to make such experiences the chief reason for the conclusion that God exists, since the purpose of philosophical inquiry into theology is to discover what other reasons, if any, there may be for this conclusion. But in view of the large if not decisive part which religion has had in the very origin of the theological idea, and in view of the enormous social importance which this idea enjoys only through religion, it is doubly reasonable to begin the investigation with an attempt to discover what God may be as the God of religion. (In this sense, the distinction between natural and revealed theology cannot, by the canons of the former itself, be made absolute.) If the resulting conception proves unsatisfactory philosophically, then we may consider whether philosophy can, from non-religious sources, improve upon the religious view, either by denying any God or by setting up some concept of God sufficiently similar to the religious to perhaps justify the use of the same term. (For religion [p. 86] seems clearly to have first title to the word.) But these possibilities should not chiefly concern us until we have isolated the religious idea, defined it as accurately as possible, and then evaluated the idea, so defined, by whatever philosophical resources we can muster.
Much theological writing is badly confused by the assumption that by “God” is to be meant indifferently what religious people as religious mean by it, and what various philosophers, who may also have been religious men, have meant philosophically by the term. Thus it is hard for some to imagine that the God of the latter portions of the Bible, surely the religious God, needs distinguishing from the God, say, of Anselm, Augustine, or Aquinas, as described by these men speaking as philosophers. Because they were sincerely religious, it is assumed that they could never have departed from the religious idea. I am morally certain, however, that unconsciously they did so; and I have some confidence that readers with reasonable patience will find that this conviction, which is shared today by many thinkers, even some distinguished Roman Catholics, is not without grounds worth taking into serious account.
Santayana has said, apropos of Bacon’s famous remark, that, while “much philosophy” may indeed restore the faith which “a little philosophy” tends to destroy, it is not faith in the same God that finally results. That this is what has happened to many philosophers, for example to Spinoza, would be widely admitted. That it has happened to all the great orthodox theologians of past ages has been Jess generally admitted; while a clear statement of the points of difference between religious and philosophical conceptions of God, with an evaluation of the possible philosophical uses of the former, is not easy to find anywhere in the vast theological literature.
The charge that philosophers have not taken the religious [p. 88] idea seriously may seem strange. In a sense they have taken it very seriously. Most philosophical theologians — that is to say, probably, most philosophers — have supposed their doctrines to contain the content of religious faith plus only certain logical refinements, or minus certain anthropomorphic crudities. But it is possible that the refinements are of such a nature as to destroy the value of the idea; or it is possible that the idea of God ought to be “anthropomorphic,” not only for religious but even for philosophical purposes. Anthropomorphism has been shown to be one horn of a not easily evaded dilemma: either we assimilate things to our own human experience and nature, and so perhaps fail to appreciate the extent of their differences from us, or we try to interpret them quite apart from our experience and nature, and then find that this is the same as having no idea of them at all. The only obvious complete alternative to anthropomorphism is the doctrine of an absolutely unknowable, a “thing in itself.” What things are for us, what we can get out of them, do with them, enjoy in the experience of them, that we can know. Also, what they may be as analogous to ourselves, like us, knowing, willing, loving beings — though perhaps less or more knowing, willing less or more powerfully, loving less or more comprehensively — all this we can conceive. But how we can even significantly ask, What can things be, neither as values to us nor as beings conceivable by analogy to us? has proved of the utmost difficulty to explain. Hence if God is the “wholly other,” he is, philosophically regarded, an unattractive theme, to say the least.
In view of the dilemma mentioned (so brilliantly analyzed in Hume’s Dialogues) we should be willing to give careful attention to religious anthropomorphism, as well as to philosophical attempts to transcend it, without too much initial confidence that either one, in traditional form, [p. 89] can be entirely accepted. This is all the more true because the contrast between anthropomorphism and its alternative falls within religion as well as between religion and philosophy. Primitive religion and polytheistic religion are indeed “crudely” anthropomorphic, whereas the “higher” theistic religions are precisely those which avoid at least some among the ways of humanizing deity. The difference is in brief this, that while in pretty much all religion the object of worship is the superhuman, in the higher religions the superiority of deity is taken much more strictly and absolutely, so that God becomes as it were the mathematical limit or maximum of certain properties that admit of more and less, and yet without his being regarded as a mere ideal or abstraction. Just here is the problem: can there be a concrete maximum of attributes like goodness, knowledge, or power? For instance, power must be exercised upon something, at least if by power we mean influence, control; but the something controlled cannot be absolutely inert, since the merely passive, that which has no active tendency of its own, is nothing; yet if the something acted upon is itself partly active, then there must be some resistance, however slight, to the “absolute” power, and how can power which is resisted be absolute? If these questions can be satisfactorily answered, we have also to consider the possibility that some dimensions of value, such as happiness, are inherently protean, capable of expansion beyond any concrete case whatever. Yet such protean dimensions may necessarily apply to God, since it may well be that the non-protean dimensions require them, so that God cannot, for instance, be maximally good or powerful unless he is capable of endless growth, say in happiness. I care not how absurd this may seem to some readers; they must none the less face the fact that any other view seems absurd indeed to some of us, and the further fact that to [p. 90] distinguish real absurdity from the merely unfamiliar or misunderstood has been proved a delicate matter in philosophy.
Because of these difficulties, by no means all of which will be found adequately discussed in older theological writings, it is important to avoid hasty answers to the question, In what sense, or senses, precisely do high religions conceive God as the maximal, the “supreme,” being? Very likely the answer is, In every sense in which the idea of a maximum has a meaning; for it is fairly obvious that piety has centered in the notion that God is exalted beyond all that we can conceive, so that genuine exaggeration in the praise of God is felt to be impossible. But to talk sheer nonsense is not to praise, with or without exaggeration; so that our question still remains, What are the dimensions or attributes of comparison in terms of which God may be the absolutely highest instance, or concrete limit, and how is this limiting case to be conceived? Is the highest degree of anything different from limited degrees by a “difference in degree” or by a “difference in kind”?
Our concern now is with such questions not as for philosophy to answer, but as for religion to answer, not so that philosophy may accept, but so that it may weigh and consider these religious answers. It cannot do so till it knows what the answers are. This knowledge philosophy has possessed only to a very imperfect degree during the twentyfive centuries of philosophical theologizing. The reasons are highly complex. A bare hint must suffice here. The problem for medieval thought was to harmonize the technical knowledge of the Greeks with the higher wisdom of the Scriptures, taking an optimistic view of the literal truth and adequacy of both. We today wish to know rather what is the main kernel of religious doctrine, first of all regardless of any philosophy whatever, and without assuming [p. 91] the infallibility of scriptural texts or their complete consistency. We do not necessarily assume that religion has any kernel that makes sense, but we take as methodological principle the advisability of looking for a reasonable religious tenet; since only he who has honestly looked for something can significantly report the failure to find it. And he must have looked without any other absorbing preoccupation, such as ecclesiastical dictates, political ambitions, faith in the near-rightness of Plato or Aristotle, or in previous commentators on the Scriptures. In short, a little of the garden variety of Protestant freedom and recklessness, plus some sense of historical objectivity, is called for.
But how can one hope to hear the testimony of high religion uncontaminated by philosophy, in view of the fact that the high religions came to maturity only after the rise of philosophy? There seem to be two answers. One might go to what is technically classified as revelation, for instance to the Scriptures — perhaps Hindu, Chinese, Mohammedan, etc., as well as Christian — and one might also consult the official creeds of the various churches. Possible objections would be that revelation is itself almost if not quite a philosophical concept, that some of the scriptural authors were philosophically inclined, and that the creeds certainly are not free from philosophical influences. See, for example, the term “substance” in the longer Christian creed. Still, there is little philosophy of the technical sort in the biblical writings, at least, and not much in the more popular creeds, such as the Apostles’. In any case, we can check the results of this method by another. This is to ask ourselves what kind of idea of God, or what aspects of the usual philosophical idea, are actually used in recognized religious functions and attitudes, such as prayer, sense of sin, salvation. Fortunately, this method has already been followed with admirable care and precision by [p. 92] D.C. Macintosh, in his book The Reasonableness of Christianity.[1]
The two methods lead without much appearance of disharmony toa fairly definite idea quite clearly distinguished from the traditional philosophical one, and distinguished not only from the idea that philosophers have generally accepted, but even from any idea that they have until recently conceived sufficiently clearly even to criticize — an oversight that makes ordinary adjectives scem futile! Naturally, the religious idea cannot be unfamiliar to most of us; what is unfamiliar is the sharp definition of this idea so as to make it explicit on philosophical questions without smuggling in assumptions not logically involved in it.
Whatever the gods were taken to be, man’s relations to them were conceived as social, or quasi-social. All the gods were either friends or enemies, akin to man; all of them had some power to pass judgment upon human affairs, either moral or selfish, merely personal, judgment. In the process of cultural advance religious friendship with gods was finally conceived as the maximal case of friendship, as on the side of deity at least the one perfect social relationship, involving complete understanding and love. Also the judgment of deity upon human affairs came at last to be thought of exclusively as one of the highest ethical type,[2] a judgment sensitive to the interests of all parties concerned, and hostile only to those who themselves were averse to the recognition of the interests of others (or at least blind to them) and hostile even to such persons only so far as they were limited in this manner. This is of course the same conception as that of the perfect friend, but with emphasis upon the universal scope of the divine friendship.
The concept of maximal friendship or justice did away with the idea of many gods; for the plurality of these was [p. 93] relevant only because of the partialness of their functions as friends and judges.
But the gods were not merely the terms of social relations of understanding, sympathy, and appeal to judgment; they were involved in practical social relations, relations of cooperation. They were powers, agents with effects in the world of nature, as man himself has effects, but here again with the difference that eventually the maximal case emerged, and the gods became the one God whose effects, like his understanding and justice, were universal, cosmic, supreme.
Thus the God of high religion is the allloving and supremely efficacious friend of men and of all creatures, of the lion seeking his prey, of the birds building their nests. As supremely efficacious, God is the everlasting and ungenerated controlling power of the universe — the only way a maximum of efficacy can be conceived.
Thus it is a short step to the assertion that God is that without which other beings would not exist at all, would be nothing. And it seems only another way of saying this to state that God is in some sense Being itself, while all other things participate in being through God. Or as Ikhnaton, in his superlatively beautiful way, said over three thousand years ago, “Thou of thyself art length of life, men live through thee.”
Although for all high religions, with the not unambigu‘ous exception of Buddhism, God is the supreme agent in the universe, yet that he is also “creator,” in any further sense than that of being the maximal productive power in every stage of reality, however remote in time and space, is not by any means clearly implied by religious feeling: The Hindus seem to have been little concerned with the idea of a beginning of reality in time; the book of Genes according to some scholars at least, is not clear on the point; [p. 94] for Plato the religious view seemingly is that the matter - which creation molds is itself uncreated. The New Testament has little to say on the question. And legends which describe how a god made the world which we know, the earth, the heavens, etc., are quite consistent with the view that though God created, in the sense of first producing, the present system of nature, this production consisted in the transformation, as radical as you please, given time enough, of an earlier, to us unimaginable, nature, which itself may have been similarly produced out of a still earlier state of things. (Origen believed in an infinite series of past worlds, though he did hold each world to have been made out of not-being rather than out of its predecessor.) Not only is the unambiguous contradiction of this view not nearly so widespread as is high religion and its idea of God (as we have defined it) but there is in this idea and its implications no obvious necessity for any such contradiction. The perfection and efficacy of a friendship cannot depend upon its having been exercised only upon the present cosmos, rather than also upon an infinity of earlier universes, each produced out of its predecessor, more or less catastrophically or gradually. Does it make God more powerful to say that he has acted creatively, with respect not to infinite but only to finite past time?
However this may be, the God of religion is certainly to be described as the supremely loving friend, the perfectly righteous judge, and the primordial and everlasting ruler or supremely controlling power of the universe. He is that without which all lesser individuals would be nothing, since devoid of definitive measure, ground of relationship with others, etc. So far, this may seem to be the usual philosophical idea of God. But philosophers have generally affirmed these religious tenets subject to the proviso that they should not conflict with certain other assumptions, [p. 95] of quite other than religious origin and justification. Unfortunately, this proviso, carried out logically, nullifies the religious idea completely.
Such non-religious tenets, to which religion has been’ forced to bow, are: that God is non-temporal in the sense of having no past or future, since he knows all things in one eternal present; that God is purely active, in no respect or relation passive to anything; that he created the world “out of nothing,” implying a beginning of creaturely existence in time; that he is “without body, parts, or passions,” absolutely “simple” or unitary, a superintellectual being void of emotions, and also of will, if will involves internal distinctions between anticipatory and consummatory experience, or if it involves the prior lack of any value which is subsequently to be realized.
There are several remarkable features of these ideas. First, they all belong logically together, so that there is little use in judging any of them in isolation. Either we accept them one and all, or we reject them one and all, or we merely bungle the matter. Here is the explanation of the failure of many attempts at reconstruction in theology: they sought to pick and choose among ideas which are really inseparable aspects of one idea. Here also is seen the genius of the great theologians of the past, that they really saw the logical interrelations between a large number of affirmations (they are really and admittedly denials, negations) about God. But the second point is that the logical relations between what I have called the religious and the non-religious tenets are less satisfactory. ‘They are indeed satisfying enough from one standpoint, and in justice to the older theologians this is the one from which the matter was considered. I refer to the fact that from the non-religious tenets the religious can after a fashion be derived. (We shall see later wherein consists [p. 96] the qualification “after a fashion.”) But the crucial point is that the reverse derivation, of the non-religious from the religious tenets, cannot be exhibited; worse still, the religious tenets can be shown to imply the falsity of the nonreligious. Since, on the other hand, the non-religious do imply the religious tenets, what we have is a contradictory system of premises whose own conclusions imply their falsity. If this is the situation, as I am about to try to show, then any logician can see the consequence. ‘The non-religious tenets are implicitly self-contradictory, and hence not true, while the truth or falsity of the religious tenets remains, so far, an open question. (If p implies q, and q implies not-p, but q does not imply p, then p is selfcontradictory, but q need not be so.)
From the assumption, God is a purely actual, impassive being, the absolutely independent cause upon which all other things depend, it follows that he contains actually all possible value, or is perfect. Being perfect, he cannot change; possessing all “perfections,’ he must know all things by an immutable act above time; he must have power, will, love, all the truly “positive” attributes in maximal degree. He has everything except what connotes negation or deficiency, such as ignorance, wickedness, conflict of purposes, sense organs, etc. Thus from the mere notion of self-sufficiency or “‘ aseity” Scholastics deduce all the other attributes of God, including those I have termed religious. This is the seeming logical power of their system, extremely crudely sketched here. But the system has three weaknesses.
First, the derivation of religious tenets works only, as I have said, “after a fashion.” If you raise the question, Is God righteous, or all-knowing, or all-loving? then the Scholastic tenets do require the affirmative answer. But from the tenets themselves one would scarcely know that such [p. 97] questions could even be asked. That is, from the mere idea of self-dependent causation, or the uncaused cause, or pure actuality, one would never know, it seems, even that there were such attributes as love or goodness. Knowing otherwise of the attributes, and knowing, if we do know it, that they are not deficiencies, then we also know that God has them in highest degree; for he has everything in the highest degree which is capable of a highest degree. It is almost as if one were to say that God knows President Roosevelt, since President Roosevelt exists, and God knows all existence. But surely the truth, if it is true, that God loves is not a contingent fact like the existence of a man. Yet the Scholastic way of deriving this love seems almost to imply that it is a mere contingency. I say almost, because the bare way I have stated the matter is undoubtedly more or less of a caricature. Taking the whole of the Schoastic system into account, the externality of the derivation of religious tenets can be considerably mitigated. What I am very confident of is that it can be far more radically overcome in a different type of philosophy. But I do not wish to put the primary stress upon this objection.
The second weakness in the traditional system, with all its logical power, is that it is quite impossible to deduce the non-religious tenets upon which the system is founded from the religious tenets which the system also accepts. That is, all logical support is one-way only, from the philosophical or secular tenets to the religious, but not vice versa. Since all the tenets concern ultimate or necessary truths, they should mutually sustain and require each other. But onl halfhearted attempts have been made to show that the religious require the secular (although colossal efforts have been expended to show the reverse relationship) , and all such attempts seem to have failed. God could be all that religion believes he is, and yet the whole system of pure [p. 98] actuality, aseity, impassivity, immutability, immateriality, simplicity, be false. (The only difficulty would then be that we should have to seek some other secular assumptions from which the existence and nature of God could be determined if religion is to receive support from philosophy; but the discovery that certain proofs for a proposition rest upon false premises affords no certainty that sound proofs cannot be found.) It is, for instance, perfectly possible to conceive an omniscient being who changes. True, a being who changes will know more at one moment than at the preceding moment; but this implies that he was previously “ignorant” only if it be assumed that events are there to be known prior to their happening. For knowledge is true if, and only if, it corresponds to reality, and things that have not happened are, in so far, perhaps, not real. To know them would then be to know falsely, for there is nothing of the sort to know. If the future is indeterminate, if there is real freedom between alternatives, any one of which can happen, then the true way to know the future is as undetermined, unsettled. To know just what “is to happen” is to know falsely if there is in fact no definite thing which is to happen.[3]
Of course, it is held that God knows the future not as future to him but as belonging to all times in a single eternal present. But this doctrine is not deducible from the mere idea of omniscience, or the knowing of all reality as it is, until or unless it has been demonstrated that that which to us is future possesses objectively the same reality as that which to us is present or past; and this is a quite special and by no means self-evident doctrine about time, not in the least implied by any essential religious idea. Certainly the future as we experience it seems to be the partially unsettled, indeterminate, the somewhat nebulous. We may suppose this to be due to our ignorance, [p. 99] do we know that it is not rather, in part at least, the real character of the future? To be sure, much about the future that is unsettled for our knowledge we can indirectly see is not really in itself unsettled. When a new causal law is discovered, we can apply the law retrospectively and see that characters of once future events could have been foretold more definitely than we were in a position to do when the events were future (and before the discovery of the law). Also we know that we do not make anything like complete application even of all the well established laws, because of lack of time or inclination or ability to assemble the data or make the calculations. Still, none of this offers the least proof that, taking all the laws together, the future is wholly determined. This is precisely the question of determinism, over which the affirmative side has been fighting 'a rather losing battle during the past sixty-five years. Moreover, theologians have generally not been determinists. They have admitted that, since man is free, not all of the future could be known determinately through laws; but they have held that God knows events not through laws but in their individuality, and supertemporally. But they did not validly derive this conclusion from the mere idea of omniscience. For if the future is in fact unsettled, indeterminate, it would not be ignorance to see it as such, but, rather, true knowledge. Now, since the only way we have of knowing that the future is less indeterminate than our ignorance makes it appear is through the discovery of laws, in the manner just explained, we cannot use the admitted fact that some of the apparent indefiniteness of the future is only apparent as proof that all of it is so, since the real and the apparent are here distinguishable only so far as laws are known to extend, and it is an open question how far they do extend. We cannot inspect the contents of omniscience to discover if the future is determinately there. [p. 100] To know that omniscience knows all individual events in their individuality, and not merely through general laws, does not help us here unless we also know that future events, as individual, exist; whereas, of course, some indeterminist philosophies conceive the contents of the future as, so long as they are future, partially general, unindividual, in essence.
It is sometimes argued, however, that we do know that future events are determinate. The law of excluded middle may be invoked. Either I will write the letter tomorrow or I will not write it tomorrow — only one of these can be true. The indeterminist may reply, Yes, only one of them can be true, but perhaps both of them are false; for the truth may be that it is unsettled that I will write the letter, and equally unsettled that I will not. ‘The proposition, “I will write the letter,” is either true or false, but to say it is false is not to say that the proposition, “I will not write the letter,” is true. For “I will do it” means that the present state of affairs (perhaps my resolution of will, in part) determinately excludes my not doing it, while “I will not do it” means that the present state of affairs excludes my doing it; but between these is the situation expressed by “I may or may not do it,” which means that the present situation of myself and indeed of the world in its totality is indeterminate with respect to my doing it. Or, in other words, it “will” occur means that all the possibilities for tomorrow which are still left open involve the occurrence in question; while it “may” occur means that some of the open possibilities involve the occurrence; and it “will not” occur means that none of the possibilities involve it. Thus we meet once more the fundamental triad, the almost childishly simple but generally neglected mathematical key to philosophical problems, of all, some, and none. And no violation of the law of excluded middle [p. 101] as applied to propositions is in question. For surely to deny “all” is not to decide between “some” and “none.” Hence if “it will occur” is the proposition p, then the corresponding negative or not-p is, not the proposition “it will not occur,” but rather the followin “Fither it will not occur or, at least, it may not occur. Hence, granting that, given any proposition p, either p or not-p is true (the law of excluded middle), it does not follow that the future is determinate. The only “middle” which indeterminism refuses to exclude is that between all (possibilities) and none, and this middle is universally admitted in logic.
The only escape for our opponent must be in denying that there are such entities as possibilities, distinguishable from necessities or actualities, inherent in the constitution of the future as such. And for this denial logic has, to put it mildly, no legitimate support. Logic requires the idea of alternate possibilities (as the referents of concei able, though mutually incompatible, hypotheses) , since mathematics and the theory of induction alike require the idea. The only question is, Shall we locate such alternatives in time or not? If not in time, then not in the real world so far as we know it; for what do we know but the world of process? Thus logic must at the least refrain from denying the indeterminist theory of time, if it is not almost driven to assert it.
But still, you say, the future, when it comes, will be determinate. Yes, it will tomorrow be definitely true that (it rains or it does not rain). For when tomorrow comes, the possibilities for tomorrow that still remain “open ad possibilities will have dwindled to zero, since the choice will have been made; hence it will no longer be true that some of the open possibilities involve the occurrence under discussion and some do not; for there will be no open possibilities. [p. 102] Thus, I may-or-may-not-do‘it is only true in advance, and is in common sense only intended to be true in advance, of the time spoken of. The three cases of all, some, and none, dwindle, when the time spoken of arrives, to one case, which must be either the all or the none (say of the possibilities involving the letter-writing) , although it may be false that there was any “must” making it the one or making it the other, since the must spoken of above only compels it to pass from the indeterminate to the determinate relation to the alternative.
It is of course true that may-or-may-not is ambiguous, having either a weak, subjective meaning, “so far as we know, either the expected event, or its non-occurrence, is compatible with the present state of the universe, with the totality of what exists,” or a strong, objective meaning, such as “even for perfect knowledge, either of the two cases would at present be incompatible with actuality.” In the case of “rain tomorrow,” the weaker or subjective interpretation would usually be intended. But in the case of future personal decisions, or even the future behavior of an amoeba, it is more or less natural to common sense to intend the objective interpretation, namely, that existence includes both members of a pair of alternative possibilities as such, as real alternatives between which the course of events is to decide but which way it is to decide being definitely not decided. To reject the distinction between the subjective and the objective interpretation is merely to deny the relevance of the idea of possibility to actuality, and since Spinoza the difficulties of so doing have become increasingly clear.
It is to be admitted that the view I am defending is not so simple as the usual philosophic view. (Philosophic error can perhaps be more compendiously described as oversimplification than in any other way.) ‘Thus, suppose [p. 103] I say, “It is unsettled whether I write or do not write the letter tomorrow.” “Very well,” says the determinist, “Jet us wait and see.” Tomorrow comes, and I do not write the letter. “There, you see, it was true that you were not going to write it. Anyone who had so prophesied would have been vindicated, his prophecy would have been verified.” “No,” says the indeterminist, “all that has been shown is that when tomorrow had ceased to be tomorrow and had become today, it was definitely what it was; this is no proof that it was definitely ‘going to be’ what it in fact became.” The prophecy in question was fulfilled, it “came true,” but it is not necessarily to be regarded as vindicated, verified. If the prophet had seen that my character was such that I was likely to do as he foretold, then indeed he would have had knowledge of the future (as probable, not certain) , but this kind of determinateness of the future we are admitting — namely, determination through law. For a man’s character is a sort of law of his being — whether or not it can be reduced to a mere special case of the general laws of nature. But the question is, How far do such determining tendencies go?
A solitary case of successful prophecy may be mere coincidence. Unless the prophet makes many successful predictions, we cannot assume that he has knowledge even of mild probabilities, not to mention certainties, absolute predeterminations. A successful prediction is quite d tinguishable from a verified one, inasmuch as the determinateness of the future as future can be verified only so long as the future is the future, that is, so long as it is not the present — except so far as the future consists of laws which, being general, can have been observed in the past and yet have application to the future. ‘The future as strictly indi vidual could be verified only by direct anticipatory intuition, [p. 104] such as many clairvoyants claim to enjoy. (Or do they, for the most part, content themselves in effect with claiming simply an unusual insight into relatively specific determining tendencies?) It is too late to verify such intuition in an isolated case when the future has become present. We verify only a more or less exact correspondence between expectation and result which is perfectly conceivable as a coincidence in a world in which the outcome were not determined to come out as it did.
I conclude that omniscience does not imply a knowledge “above time.” There could be a future even to an all-knowing being. When a future event comes to happen, such a mind will know more than it did before, but at both times it will know all that there is, though at the later time there will be a new event to know. No ignorance will be involved, if ignorance is accurately defined, namely as the failure to know some existent thing as existent, or some possible thing as possible, or some partly determinate, partly indeterminate thing as both determinate and indeterminate to just the extent that it really isso. Ignorance is a lack of correspondence of knowledge to what is known, a lack of adequacy to the object. Indeterminism justly denies any such lack in a mind’s not knowing details of a future which as future has no details to be known.
It is astonishing that the impossibility of inferring divine foresight of details from omniscience has escaped so many great minds. It is, however, evident what a relief to religion it will be to realize that “predestination” is a religiously groundless conception. It might, of course, seem that this conception has religious value; but I hold it to be too evident almost for argument that it has, rather, irreligious value, that it has often nearly ruined religion, caused it to fall into hopeless conflict with itself and to [p. 105] make nonsense of the relations of God and man. In the whole of the world’s Scriptures, Mohammedanism apart, it is hard to find the idea. But, you will ask, what becomes of the idea of Providence? The religious conception of God as friend certainly implies that God has prearranged the course of events so far as it would be friendly to do so. Is it evident that it would express friendship to prearrange things to the last detail? To me the opposite is evident. Friends respect the independence of their friends. Why should God insist upon deciding all things for us? If he does, he is an absolute tyrant, not the God of religion. Theologians themselves have generally admitted that God gives us real freedom and responsibility. In that case why need Providence, as predestination, be anything more than a plan setting wholesome limits to our eccentricities, and guiding the world as a whole in a desirable general direction, in spite of the fact that each member of it has within limits its own determining initiative?
But we must consider “omnipotence.” That to be capable of change is to be weak rather than omnipotent is, I suggest, a weak argument. Theologians usually grant that men, not God, are responsible for human choices, at least the evil ones, and that God’s creative action is prevented in this way from producing a perfect world. How change could limit omnipotence any more than this admission does I fail to see. If “omnipotence” is defined reasonably, both “limitations” will appear as implied by the term rather than as limitative of it. This we shall see more fully later. Omnipotence or “perfect power” is by no means the same as pure impassivity, and does not imply it. It is surely not simply because of their weakness that men are influenced by each other. A strong man is open to many an influence that leaves a cat beautifully “impassive.” [p. 106] Weakness is in being influenced in the wrong directions, or disproportionately, as by a friend more than by a stranger in a dispute in which both have equal right to be heard. Love is exalted as much through its passive as through its active side. Insensitiveness is power only to the extent that it may compensate for the lack of sensitiveness in some other direction, producing in a negative, that is, inferior, form the value of balance which the strongly sensitive have in positive form.
But is not the religious sense one of “complete dependence” upon God, implying his complete independence of us? No, it is not so simple as that. Complete or absolute dependence (Schleiermacher) in every respect would make God, not us, the sinner as well as the saint. Division of responsibility is as necessary to religion as anything can be. Now if, in any sense whatever, we are other than purely passive in relation to God — that is, if in any sense we have responsibility for sinning or not sinning against his will — then in some sense he is not purely active in relation to us, but (what else can it be?) genuinely passive. If we determine the sin, then we determine that he shall know the sin; for had we not sinned he had not known us as sinning. If determining what an individual shall know is not acting upon that individual, what would be? Thomists deny that it is so, but there is nothing in religion to compel us to agree with them; and it is the religious strand in theology that we are now discussing. (It may be urged that had we not sinned, God would still have known us as potential sinners, but the knowledge of the potential as such is still not the knowledge of the actual as such. God could know it to be a fact that we sin only if it be a fact, and that it is or is not a fact is supposed to express our choice, our activity, in some degree or fashion. Thus either we determine something of what there is for God to [p. 107] know and hence of what he knows, or else there is no human freedom whatsoever, and God is alone the sinner.)
The absolute dependence upon God which religion involves is dependence for existence. Without God we should be nothing, and existence itself would be the same as non-existence. The great “I am” is for religion the essential factor of existence as such. It does indeed follow that no matter what we may do with our freedom, our responsibility, God will not fail to exist. We are not to think that by sinning we can jeopardize his being, or that by good acts we can make the universe safer for him. But it is one thing to contribute to the safety of a being, its freedom from the danger of annihilation, and another to contribute to the color and richness of its existence. Granted that God will continue to exist, with his essential characteristics of power, goodness, and wisdom, no matter what we may do, it does not in the least follow that he will, also have the same concrete experience no matter what we” may do. For his essence may be independent of us but his accidents may not be. To say he has no accidents is to beg the question just now under discussion. What is there in religion to imply that God has no accidents? From the premise, “God exists necessarily,” the inference, “therefore his whole nature is necessary and he has no accidents,” is a fallacy of ambiguity. God’s “essence” is not accidental —that is indeed required by the premise, which implies that in any possible state of affairs God will be included, and this means that there will always be something by which he may be identified as God, and no other. This something is his essence. But from all this we learn nothing against the possibility of accidents, details, in God, any one of which will or will not be present in him according to circumstances.
The ambiguity spoken of appears in many related forms. [p. 108] It is one thing to say God could exist without us, or without any creature or group of creatures you wish to specify; it is logically quite another to say he could exist were there no creature at all. For God’s necessity of existing, while our existence is contingent, may simply mean that had we not existed, still some creatures or other would necessarily have existed, sufficient for God’s needs. Any particular contingent thing might not have existed; but it does not follow that there might have been no contingent things. It would be a contradiction to say that a certain accidental thing happens by necessity; but there is no contradiction in saying that it is necessary that some accidents or other should happen, that there should be accidents. It is, to use Charles Peirce’s example, as if a cook should say, “I must have apples for an apple pie, but there is no one apple or group of apples I must have, provided I have some group or other.” If the cook possessed unlimited power to guarantee herself sufficient apples, then her operations would be independent of any given apples, since the assumption is that should these fail she would only have to wave a wand and others would appear.
Thus God may depend, even for his essence, upon there being creatures, but he may have power to guarantee absolutely that there should be such; while beyond his essential characters he may necessarily have accidental ones, just which ones being contingent and depending upon which creatures exist — and since the creatures are partly self-determining this means, depending partly upon what the creatures may choose to do. To have failed to discuss these distinctions systematically is a technical defect of procedure in the tradition, altogether regardless of what the truth of the matter may be. For the purpose of philosophical theology is to analyze the logical interrelations of the ideas implied in religion, and to prevent the answering [p. 109] of religious questions without regard to the conceivable, or not obviously inconceivable, alternatives.
That God is the cause, the “creator,” of all things, again, does not imply that he is in no sense the effect of anything. For his essence may be the cause, the necessary condition, of all other essences, and the effect of none in particular nor of any totality of them; and yet his accidents may be both cause and effect in relation to other things. In terms of accidents man may be part-creator of God. When he sins, he causes God to grieve; when he does well, he causes God to rejoice, as a child similarly does a parent. When Beethoven, by his devotion and partly free action, made new forms of beauty not hitherto contained in all of creation, he created a new detail of value in the experience of God, he contributed to the divine reality, without thereby in the least deciding that there should be this divine reality to which contribution could be made.
It is true, and important, that religion can hardly admit that such contributions should make any difference in the degree of righteousness in God, his holiness. This, for religion, is not an accident. But, as we have seen, all this is perfectly compatible with there being accidents, and even implies that there must be such, in the one who is necessarily holy.
Just as the notion of the necessity of God’s being may be both true and false, according as the essence or the accidents of God are intended, so may he be both mutable and immutable.
Any changing enduring thing, indeed, has two aspects: the aspect of identity, or what is common to the thing in its earlier and later stages, and the aspect of novelty. A man is a new, different person every moment; but equally he is the same person every moment. There is no paradox in this, By change is meant exactly this combination of identity [p. 110] and difference. A being a through a finite time has an identical aspect which changes only at the beginning and end of the stretch of time during which the thing endures. (We shall see that even this is to understate the aspect of immutability involved precisely in the changing.) A being which changes through all time has an identical aspect which changes at no time whatever, that is, it is in this aspect immutable. Thus there is a character in God which is exempt from change. The ancient Hebrews discovered what this character is, namely, God is unchangeable in the sense that at all times he is equally, because wholly, righteous and wise. It by no means follows, and the Scriptures do not assert it as true, that he is at all times equally and absolutely happy, completely good aesthetically as well as ethically and cognitively. On the contrary, the Scriptures depict God as in different states of joy or grief at different times because of the different states of righteousness or sin of mankind. His state of righteousness does not vary with these changes of pleasure and displeasure; on the contrary, it is just because he remains equally righteous in attitude that he must change in total value-experience in appropriate accordance with changes in the objects of his righteousness. ‘The wicked or stupid man may be unmoved by deterioration or progress in other men, the perfectly righteous and wise individual cannot be thus insensitive. Changes which really make a difference to the value of reality must make a difference to God because he is not selfish or stupid, and in respect to this unselfishness and wisdom is indeed beyond all possibility of falling into a different state, is indeed beyond all shadow of turning. Thus it would be false to say that the new theology makes simply no use of the traditional concept of immutability and its corollaries. Rather it assigns that concept its place, tells both how [p. 111] it is true and how it could be interpreted and for ages almost universally was interpreted (in technical theology) so as to be partly false.
Of course, the distinction between the immutable and the mutable aspects of God cannot be defended without renouncing the doctrine of “simplicity,” which was precisely intended to cut off such distinctions. And yet even here, the issue is rather one of level of discrimination than of mere contradiction. The immutable aspect of God is also simple, just as it is impassive, immaterial, etc. The unchanging righteousness as such has no parts, and it cannot be acted upon or made different. Yet it may require that the concrete reality in which it exists have passivity and complexity; perhaps as a universal, though not itself particular, yet may imply that there are particulars of which it is the universal or common property. The goodness which has no parts may belong as an abstract aspect toa being of which all things whatever are constituents.
All this is a way of saying that the righteousness or wisdom of God is not the whole of his nature. We say, God is holy, not that he is holiness. Only “love” is an abstraction which implies the final concrete truth. God “is” love, he is not merely loving, as he is merely righteous or wise (though in the supreme or definitive way). This is because in love the ethico-cognitive and the aesthetic aspects of value are both expressed. The lover is not merely the one who unwaveringly understands and tries to help; the lover is just as emphatically the one who takes unto him: self the varying joys and sorrows of others, and whose own happiness is capable of alteration thereby. Of course, one could distinguish between the abstract invariable lovingness of the perfect lover, and the concrete varying loveexperiences he has of his objects in different stages. But love is the one abstraction which makes it almost entirely [p. 112] obvious that there must be such a distinction between the generic unchangeable factor and the total value enjoyed. It is not an accident that love was the abstraction least, often appealed to in technical theology, though frequently suggested in the high points of Scripture and other genuinely religious writing.
True, there are two scriptural texts which seem to assert the changelessness of God. But the context makes clear enough that the writer was concerned in each case with the fixity of God’s ethical character, with his lack of fickleness, his fidelity or constancy of benevolent purpose. In so far as God has resolved what the future shall be, he never relents or changes his resolution. We can rely completely upon his righteousness, today as in the past. But when we say of someone that he adheres strictly to his ethical principles, we do not thereby assert that he changes in no way whatever. A mother may be equally devoted to each of her successive children, just as true to her obligations to each in turn; but the detailed content of her devoted awareness and action will be different with each one, and ought to be. To treat every event, as it occurs, in just the same way, and yet with equal wisdom and goodness, is nonsense. If the religious idea of the divine constancy is ethical and cognitive, meaning that God is always adequate to every state of the world, then this does not conflict with, but even seems to imply, a different state of God for every state of the world.
Change of purpose is clearly not the only kind of change. Aman may have an undeviating purpose to be kind to his friends, but just what action this will imply will properly be different with each occasion. We can distinguish well enough between change which is disloyalty to principle, and that which, unchangeably if you like, conforms to it. Without such a distinction all ethical judgment would be [p. 113] at an end. An authoritarian church may declare that the implication of context or that of common experience is not to be used to limit the meaning of biblical texts, but not being a member of such a church I shall not discuss this further.
But is not God the everlasting, incorruptible being, and can he be this if he is changeable? Why not? That a being subject to change is therefore subject to decay or generation is a mere dogma, a non sequitur. It depends upon what kind of change is involved, or upon how the being is subject to change. You can as well argue that a being who wills must will in all conceivable ways, and therefore in wicked ways. Birth and death are changes, but in their absence change would still be possible.
Perhaps enough has been said in support of our thesis that the religious tenets of traditional theology do not imply the secular ones. What is the significance of this fact? It seems to me the definite refutation of this type of theology. For religious ideas claim absolute ultimacy. They must involve all ultimate truths, which must be deducible from them. Otherwise, secular truth would be more final than religious. Traditional theology makes religion a corollary from universal truths knowable without it; but the reverse derivation does not hold. Of course contingent truths, mere matters of fact, should not be deducible from religious ultimates; but the secular tenets of traditional theology are not proposed as contingent.
The fact is that traditional theology makes the abstract the basis of the concrete, whereas the reverse relation is logically correct. The abstract is reached by abstracting from some aspects of the more concrete. Religious ideas claim to be the concrete form of ultimate truths; it follows that the more abstract ultimate truths should be derivable from them. But the secular tenets follow in no way from [p. 114] the religious. Hence at least one of the two must be wrong.
But there is a third objection to the traditional technique. This is that (as partly worked out above) , though it seemed possible to derive the religious God from the technical definition, it could also be argued, and by great minds was argued, that the very opposite of the religious idea was implied in that definition. For instance, knowledge seems to imply an internal distinction between subject and object — but God is said to be simple. Volition seems to imply change — but God is changeless. Purpose seems to imply a present lack of something — but God is perfect; and for him there is no contrast between present intent and future realization. Love involves sensitivity to the joys and sorrows of others, participation in them — but we cannot infect God with our sufferings (since he is cause of everything and effect of nothing) , and our joys can add nothing to the immutable perfection of God’s happiness. Though in religion one speaks of “serving” God, in reality, according to technical theology, one can do noth , ing for God, and our worst sins harm God as little as the finest acts of sainthood can advance him. Religious motivation is not altruistic desire to benefit God but solely individual or collective egoism of the creatures, who serve themselves through God, but never God through their own achievements. And God’s altruism toward the creatures is the exact opposite of man’s “love” for him, since it is just as free from self-interest as the latter is exclusively constituted by it. What then becomes of the religious motivation of living in imitation of God? (“Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Matt. 5:48.) Thus, although religious doctrines do follow, “after a fashion,” from secular ones, they are at the same time in [p. 115] compatible with the latter. From the same premise that God is immutable and wholly the cause of his own states, a purely impassive being, Spinoza deduces that God does not love men, while orthodox theologians deduce that he does. Both consequences do follow. Being all positive value, unenrichable perfection (“absolutely infinite,” as Spinoza expresses it) , God must involve the value of love. But on the other hand, since love involves dependence upon the welfare of the beloved, and in so far is a passion, God, being passionless, wholly active, is necessarily exempt from it. One may go through all the religious attributes and show that all of them must, and all of them must not, belong to the immutable deity. An immutable purpose is meaningless, yet the possessor of all perfections, of all positive predicates, must not be without purpose. But since he has once for all everything that he could purpose to have, there is no sense in his purposing anything. It may be said that the purpose could be altruistic, to benefit others, But for what purpose does God benefit others? In the overflowing expression of his own glory or superabundance, said theologians. But he would have been just as glorious had no creation existed; for God eternally is all value, world or no world. Pure altruism is all we can say, from the side of God. This solution involves two grand difficulties
Lest I be thought to battle a straw man, let me quote.
All action . . . even whether good or bad, contributes to the glory of God, for our acts may be deprived of their good, but nothing can deprive God of his glory. . . . The act of a good which has no good to acquire remains a mystery. . . . [p. 118] The Christian universe is entirely good as regards what it is, but incomplete. . . .
— Étienne Gilson [4]
“For since the soul in the mystic union has been made one thing with God, it is after a certain manner God by participation.” . . . Thus it gives God to God; its act of love, which measured in itself is finite and limited, gives to God, by the infinite Love of God, the infinite itself, a gift without measure. A donation which evidently must not be understood as being in any degree in the entitative order, as though the soul were able to exercise any influence on God or add to his perfections, to enrich the being of God with that being itself, which would be absurd. A most real donation, but. . . .
— Jacques Marrraty.[5]
What does it come to? That, be we saint or sinner, no matter what we choose to do, it is all just the same to God, for his glory has the identical absolute perfection in either case. The universe is incomplete, but it matters no whit what is done or not done to complete it, for the universe contributes nothing to the value of existence, since in abstraction from the universe there exists absolute perfection. A “most real donation” leaves God exactly the same as he would have been without the donation — perfect, no more and no less.
I submit that writers who do not even see the appearance of sophistry in such reasonings may have something to say to their devoted disciples, but not to the critical reader. To many it seems clear, though not because they have not considered both sides of the question, that if God has no good to acquire and hence cannot permit us the privilege of contributing value to himself, the sole worthy cosmic recipient of values, the only one able to receive all we can give, all the good that we are (some of which escapes all human friends) , then he is incapable of responding to our noblest need, which is that there should be a cause to which nothing of ourselves is merely indifferent, and nothing [p. 119] good is without positive value. If this need, which is rational not “emotional,” since no other means is available to relate human values to the cosmos as a whole, must be renounced, then atheism seems the simpler and perhaps the more honest way to make the renunciation.
I call the reader’s attention also to the undiscriminating use of the term “glory.” If by this were meant the “beauty of holiness,” the abstract ethical goodness of God, then this is for religion indeed that glory which God is bound to have, no matter what happens. But it would not follow that our good and bad acts contribute by equal necessity to God’s glory; for it is precisely his holiness to which we cannot contribute. Where we can make a contribution (to God’s happiness) , good and bad acts are by no means equivalent. Note, too, the unconscious sophistry — is it anything else? — of inferring “contributes to” from “cannot deprive of.” What Gilson means, it seems, is merely that good and bad acts contribute in the same sense to the glory of God, that is, both totally and therefore equally fail to make any contribution; for the sum of God’s glory is fixed independently of our acts.
Here is no trick to deceive us, but rather, unless I am blind indeed, an innocent and tragic inability, in two otherwise magnificent minds, to think carefully and accurately about a subject whose treatment authority has prescribed —unfortunately, authority as largely crystallized before the logical structure of the problem had been adequately traced, that is, studied with a view to the formal possibilities involved, and with all the main aspects of experience consulted in the light of these possibilities in turn. The results of this inadequacy are now sacrosanct, and efforts toward adequacy sabotaged. The issue, at any rate, seems clear.
Maritain’s argument about the impossibility of enriching [p. 120] God with his own being cannot be fully answered here (see chapter 8). But we may say that the being which God is to gain from us is to bea certain particular case of mutual being, and that the only way to enjoy mutuality is to depend for it in part upon others, since such dependence is mutuality, is love. We, through our voluntary acts by virtue of which in part we are whatever, at any moment, we actually are, make it possible for God to love us in each new state of our existence and to gain the increment that a new object of love brings, not to the lovingness, but to the total resulting aesthetic value. And that it does depend upon us in part whether the contribution shall be made is not a paradox, but a deduction from the definition of love.
Thus we stand before the fact, or what seems to numbers of devoted, learned, and distinguished minds to be the fact, that the theological tradition is not one doctrine but an inconsistent compound of two, a religious doctrine and a secular one. These are so related that the secular implies both the religious conception and its opposite, while the religious doctrine implies only the contradictory of the secular doctrine. The secular concept is thus shown to be self.contradictory, while the religious one may, so far as these relations of ideas are concerned, be true.
Since, in the realm of necessary truths, such as we are dealing with, a false proposition is an impossible one and an impossible proposition implies (as C. I. Lewis has pointed out) all other impossible as well as all necessarily true propositions (at least, all of the same generality, a qualification here fulfilled) , it is not surprising that from the axioms of medieval theology both religious ideas and their negations have been arrived at by superior minds, which sort of consequence being elicited depending naturally upon temperament and circumstances. Equally naturally, orthodox inferences for long ages predominated, and the unsoundness of the axioms therefore escaped notice.
[p. 121] The logical relationships discussed in this chapter may be diagrammed as follows:
FACTORS IN TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY
| Religious | Pseudo-religious, false (“technical”) interpretation of O | |
|---|---|---|
| O | ←————————————————→→ AA | ←←————————————————→→ AA |
| ↑ | AA implies 0 O implies not AA, contradicts AA |
therefore AA implies not AA; or AA implies its own negative, contradicts itself |
| | | ||
| | | ||
| ↓ | ||
| AR |
Correct technical interpretation of O O and AR imply each other
EXPLANATIONS:
That the secular tenets imply contradictory conclusions will seem less surprising when we note that they are selfcontradictory in themselves. The idea of “pure actuality” is the idea of the absolute realization of potency where there is no potency to realize. The very meaning of actuality involves the contrast of possible and existential; to suppose that the highest actuality destroys this contrast is to suppose nonsense. Again, we have the idea of pure unity with no inner complexity to unify, the idea of an activity [p. 122] not related to any other activity, or if so related devoid of passivity in this relation. It is a tissue of incompatible thoughts, not less so because verbal distinctions are introduced to create the appearance of consistency; for the distinctions themselves conflict with the only experientially possible meanings of the primary concepts.
To be sure, the simplicity of the first type seems almost to guarantee its consistency. Against this, however, we must set certain indications of a hidden complexity in the doctrine of the all-perfect —a complexity strongly suggestive of contradiction. The doctrine is at once supremely positive and supremely negative. God is all-actuality, allvalue, all-knowledge, etc. Yet not for nothing have theologians held that we know what God is not, in a more strict and literal sense than we know what he is. He is in all respects the _un_surpassable, infinite, _im_material, _un_measurable (‘‘immense”), _im_mutable, without body, parts, or passions, _in_dependent, _im_passive. Now perhaps these unqualified negations are incompatible with any positive attributes whatever, therefore with such attributes as will, knowledge, goodness, even though in their perfect form. Of course every affirmation implies negation, as omniscience implies the negation of ignorance. But ignorance is itself a negation, the negation of omniscience, and this suggests the principle that only essentially negative predicates need or should be absolutely negated of the perfect. Change, passivity, having parts, these are not unmistakably the negation of any positive predicates whatever. There is no positive predicate given in experience which is negated by change. The “permanent” may very well change, since destruction is not the only species of alteration. Nor is the “passive” that which lacks activity, for the wholly inactive cannot be influenced, and to obey is also an act. That which “has parts” is not at all the same as [p. 123] that which lacks unity, unless one takes parts in some absolute sense in which no experience can exhibit them. If we know anything about aesthetic experience, for instance, we know that unity and variety are not contradictory of each other. Perhaps God has not the least but the most change, passivity, complexity, etc? This would imply, however, that he is, in certain respects, only a de facto maximum or supreme being, since there is, as we shall have occasion to argue, no definite upper limit to complexity.
There is, then, reason to question the consistency of simple perfectionism. Of course subtle attempts have been made to justify the extraordinary role of negation in this doctrine. It is said that since we know God not directly but through the creatures, and since he is not a creature but the creator, we must know him through negation essentially. But if God is known wholly indirectly, then he cannot be immanent in experience, and this conflicts with his ubiquity and immensity. Even Aquinas will be found admitting that we are not wholly without direct awareness of God, quite apart from special revelation or mystic states.[6] And besides, Aquinas and almost everyone else asserted positive as well as negative knowledge of God, such as that he is good and loving. And it is precisely these positive predicates which are not readily, if at all, reconcilable with the sweeping negations, as many great theologians have more or less completely admitted (Maimonides, Philo, Spinoza) .
Second-type theism avoids absolute negatives, except of predicates themselves clearly negative, such as ignorance, lack of interest in others, cessation of existence. To the contention that the creator cannot share predicates with the created, it replies that even the idea of causality is not so sacred that it can be applied without qualification, that ina very real sense the First Cause is also effect (not in his [p. 124] essence) , the creator is also (in some aspects) created, and the creatures are also creative. To the contention that our human concepts are not adequate to, and must be denied of, the divine it replies that this must also be true of “causality” and “creator.” Probably no simple affirmation or denial is fool-proof here. To the contention that God is “not in a genus” and hence cannot be defined positively through differences, the answer is that this argument is based on some of the negations in question, such as that there is no matter or potency or complexity in God. Undoubtedly God’s relation to genera is a unique relation. But this uniqueness is not best arrived at by simple denial. God’s relation to “goodness” is doubtless unique but does not consist in his being simply non-good; his relation to time is certainly a special case but may not consist in his being timeless; etc. First-type theism seems to waver and adopt opposite solutions to parallel problems here, fortified by arguments which are ingenious but not such as to satisfy other minds equally ingenious and less bound by the past.
Such expressions as the “finite-infinite,” or the “perfectperfectible,” suggest that second-type theism is also a selfcontradiction. To be sure, it is in different senses that the two contradictory predicates are to be applied, different respects of value. But perhaps it may be thought that perfection on any dimension implies perfection upon all! The perfect, it may be argued, is the complete, and the complete is above all limitations of dimensions. But let us remember that we have defined perfection not as completeness, but as unsurpassability or maximal value in any respect in which “better” and “worse” are possible, or as the property of that which, in a given dimension of value, could not be better than it is. Is there any reason why the impossibility that anything should be better than x in respect R should imply the impossibility that anything should be better than [p. 125] x in any respect you choose? Surely only a careful development of a theory of value could justify such an assertion. In the following chapters we shall present reasons for a contrary conclusion.
It is an extraordinary habit of many theologians to consider contradictions in doctrine a positive merit. It is argued that since God is beyond our understanding we ought not to be able to conceive him without difficulty. But on the other hand, if we give up the intellectual criterion of consistency, only one is left, namely, adequacy to experience. So let us consider this remaining criterion. Is it not precisely first-type theism, traditional theology, which is one-sided, meager, incomplete in its use of experience to arrive at the nature of God? It simply denies certain all-pervasive, infinitely fundamental aspects of life — change, variety, complexity, receptivity, sympathy, suffering, memory, anticipation — as relevant to the idea of God. It will not do to justify the contradictions of this theology on the ground that it is more important to include all aspects and dimensions of the truth than to see exactly how these aspects are compatible with each other. The contradictions are due too-plainly to the opposite cause, to the deliberate poverty, not the unmanageable richness, of the conceptions. Thus both criteria, all that we have, are flouted in traditional procedure. The Absolute is not only an invitation to a moral holiday, as James said; it is likewise, as he also, though less clearly, saw, an invitation to an intellectual holiday, to irresponsibility in regard to every ideal whether of goodness of conduct or of goodness of thought. Only illogicality made it possible to overlook this, And perhaps the popularity of the doctrine is partly due to the dim realization of the implied freedom from ideal demands.
Theologians may have underestimated at least one effect [p. 126] of “original sin,” its influence upon the development of their own doctrines. I believe sincerely that even saintly theologians are not exempt from the effects of subconscious egoism, cowardice, laziness, even cruelty. Consider how they have frequently striven to demonstrate the eternal rightness of slavery, tyranny, and many forms of injustice! In theologizing, too, we must try to obey God — by seeking truth — rather than men and their traditions and will (however sublimated) to power and self-satisfaction, their more or less incurable blend of ignorance and determination to appear to know. I make no pretensions to complete innocence of such defects. I merely suggest that in philosophy there is no man we can trust too absolutely, nor any group of men, short of all mankind, so far as pursuing the truth cooperatively through the centuries, with the current chapter of the story being no less worthy of careful perusal than any past one, and with an eye to the possible surprises of the future. Theologians would be no more justified in denying offhand that they can have misled religious thought for centuries than doctors were in their indignant denial that it was they themselves who consistently infected mothers with puerperal fever. Human nature is like that, even theologian-human nature. Infallibility, individual or class, is lightly assumed.
But is there no way in which contradictions may usefully serve to bring out the essential limitations of human thought? I believe that there is. An idea can always be kept free of apparent contradictions by leaving it sufficiently vague. For the less definite an idea, the less we can know with what it is compatible or incompatible. Now our ideas about God will never be free from vagueness. We cannot simply rest in this vagueness, however, since we can get the most value from our ideas only by making them as definite as we are able. But sooner or later, in the course [p. 127] of introducing sharper definitions, error will creep in, and contradictions will result (for error in regard to first principles, necessary truths, is always absurdity, self-contrad tion). What we should then do is not at all to make a merit of this temporary defeat — for that is all itis — but to retreat to the vaguer stage of the idea, and start over again to give it a more definite meaning. The process may well never wholly end, so that ever anew contradictions may be met.
As for the idea that as created beings we can know God only as he is not, or as he is in the creatures not as he is in himself, this idea I believe to be crude. It is vagueness, not blank ignorance, that we have to struggle against. The whole idea of religion, at any rate, is precisely that we can know God as he is in himself (though vaguely), for we know him through love, and love is taking the standpoint of the other” (Mead). True, we know human beings whom we love somewhat indirectly and externally, but this is just because they are our metaphysical equals and are localized partial entities, who can be external to us, not the indwelling, supreme, and universal being, God. Love of God is the norm of creaturely love; for religion, all other human love is deficient. God as cause is in his effects, and God as cause is God himself. We do not know the crea tures at all, if theism is sound, just in themselves, and then by negating their limitations infer God. On the contrary (and this is why human friendship is no substitute for religious love) , we know ourselves and everything else in relation to our dim but direct sense of God’s love, with which we are one by our subconscious but inalienable returning love for him. The arguments by which it is held to be shown that God cannot be positively (even though vaguely) known by us simply beg the question, turning as they do on the characteristic categories of first-type theism, [p. 128] such as the idea of a being wholly without accidents, hence having no essence distinguishable from accidents, etc. These arguments cannot be used to justify the inability of first-type doctrine to give even vague positive (and consistent) character to God, until the claims of second-type theism to do so have been considered on their merits.[7]
The two strands in theology, then, are as follows: There is the popular or operative religious idea of the God of love, perfect in lovingness, and hence all-understanding and everlasting, so that nothing has ever been or ever can be deprived of his love while existent at all. Then there is the set of secular concepts by which this religious idea has usually been interpreted: pure actuality, immutability, impassivity, uncaused causality. This set is mutually implicative, so that it must be right clear through, wrong clear through, or in some qualified way both right and wrong clear through. That it is entirely right clear through is impossible, for as we have seen it has contradictory implications, and is not an accurate rendering of the religious idea it is to interpret. Yet the secular set need not be unqualifiedly wrong, for as we have seen it is possible to distinguish two aspects, an abstract and a concrete, of the religious God, such that in one of these aspects, A, he is indeed immutable or incapable of being acted upon, while in the other, R, he is not merely mutable and passive, but preeminently so, to an extent infinitely beyond the mutability and passivity of all other beings. Thus the secular strand becomes indeed the philosophic rationale of the religious strand, provided it be used twice over, once positively and once negatively. (The secular concepts being themselves negative, their negative use is really positive in meaning, thus: God does change, or is not unchanging, he is complex, or not without parts.) The denial of the traditional ideas as they stand has the [p. 129] curious and fortunate result of enabling us to see a profound truth in these ideas, whereas, if we persist in the tradition, then all opposition and criticism become stupid or sinful error, and nothing else. “That which changes” of course has an aspect which does not change; that which is passive of course has an aspect which is impassive, active; and since God is the supreme case of change and passivity, he is also the maximal case of the immutability and impassivity which these ideas imply, just as a very great capacity for joy implies a very great one for sorrow. That which endures all change whatever also enjoys all permanence whatever, in no paradoxical sense, but in the simple plain one of being the abiding substratum of a maximal range of temporal differences. To change through x states is to be, in one aspect, permanent through those states; to change through infinity-times-x states is to be infinitely more permanent.
(This permanence includes the immortality of the past in the divine memory. To say an event is “past” for God does not mean that it is absent from his present awareness; it means that it is not the “final increment” of determinate detail contained in that awareness, the final increment being that which involves all the others though it is involved by none, the “next to last” being that which involves all the others but one, and is involved solely by that one, etc. To say a past experience is part of present experience is not a contradiction, for the date of present experience as a whole is the date of its final increment, not of its non-final increments, this being the meaning of “date.” Those who deny this must offer some other account of the unity of time, and of how the past can be known now. A non-final increment as non-final, as “past,” in or to a certain subsequent date, has yet its own date — the “when it was present” — namely, the date in which it was and is the final [p. 130] end of the whole chain exclusive of what the increment fails to involve. Nor is it impossible to give the meaning of “involves” in the above definition of pastness. To remember the execution of a certain antecedently entertained purpose is to see the antecedent entertainment as involved in the experience of the act which was conscious of expressing the purpose; but the prior purpose itself is not remembered as involving just the act which in fact did execute it, for it is not the nature of a purpose, however exalted, to specify just one unique realization, but rather to indicate a region of possibilities any one of which will serve. To make anticipation and purpose individually determining is to destroy the difference between memory, or the past relation, and foresight, or the future relation. The future must not be contained individually in the present; otherwise there would indeed be a contradiction, for all dates would then be in all others in a symmetrical fashion incompatible with any distinction between them. What time requires is not that the past be lost, but that the future be really unattained so long as it is future, for then this not having been attained in its predecessor can belong to each event even after it is past and establish the temporal order even within an omniscient present — that is, one absoIutely conscious of all its contents, as some philosophers have thought human experience to be.
Thus, to attribute change to God, so far from conflicting with permanence or stability in his being, means rather that nothing positive that ever belongs to God can change, but only the negative aspect of not yet being this or that. Except in his negative determinations, his not-being, God is utterly immutable. Yet since negative determinations are inherent in positive, God really is mutable. To be this is to be not-that—not because of any weakness of finite being, but because of the meaning of “being.” Yet the [p. 131] “not-that” need not with respect to all that’s be permanent, for one may be this and then that; and the that will include the this, although the this could not have included the that; for such is the logical structure of time, that it gives determinations a unique asymmetrical order of involvement. Of course, the “that” in the not-that is a universal of which the that in the “then that” is one possible instance. To laugh is to not-smile, but any subsequent smile will be unanticipated, even negatively, in its individual flavor. Otherwise, the temporal involvement would be symmetrical. The whole of classical metaphysics is more or less vitiated by the assumption of the symmetry of time. To take such symmetry for granted is to think in a pre-Bergsonian, pre-Whiteheadian, and pre-Peircean manner, and in my judgment is somewhat as though a physicist were to ignore quantum mechanics. Omniscience in the old sense that excludes gain as well as loss, and the naive view that the past is as literally lost as the future — while future — is unattained, are equally incompatible with the nature of time, as interpreted by some of the greatest recent philosophers. This interpretation seems to be the last chance for a solution of the problem. For of the logically possible views of time, all the others have been long and carefully explored without generally satisfactory results.)
Among the secular concepts was that of simplicity. This, taken absolutely, at once shut off any possibility of reaching a synthesis of positive and negative versions of the concepts; for the only way to avoid contradiction in such a synthesis is to distinguish two aspects of God, and, in so far, to make him complex, not simple. On the other hand, if we start with the negative version (really positive in meaning) that God is not simple but complex, then there is no reason why we should not be able to find an aspect of God which [p. 132] is simple, and simple in supreme or maximal fashion, and thus we may render justice to this time-hallowed conception.
If it is really true that the idea of God is, because of its exalted character, but barely conceivable by human beings, is it not to be expected that in order to reach him we should have to make the most of our ideas, to use them in as many ways as possible, both positive and negative? Which theism, then, has the best title to claim that it faces the limitations of human thought, that which relies upon unqualified assertions (really denials) or that which systematically stretches our categories to the limit by employing them both positively and negatively, though withal consistently, thus admitting that whether we assert or deny we are bound to see God inadequately, and doubly so in proportion as we fail to use our powers both of assertion and denial to the uttermost?
Second-type theism enables us to give a new meaning to the old doctrine that we know that, but not what, God is. If God has accidents, it is clear that our only clue to them is our detailed knowledge of contingent being in space and time, since it is contingent being that forms the accidental content of the divine experience. But our acquaintance (ofany appreciable accuracy and clearness) with contingent being is infinitesimal in extent—in comparison to the whole of time and space — and is at all points more or less lacking in clarity and accuracy. Thus we know no accident of God just as it is, and we know with appreciable accuracy only a vanishing proportion of the ever growing totality of events which is given to God. We know that an infinity of accidents must belong to God (if we know the truth of AR) but as to what these are we know very little, and that little imperfectly, beyond that they have the common generic properties of contingent being, such as those of [p. 133] being temporal, spatial, and having other such categorical features in their bare universality.
It is only with things which come under a genus that it means anything to say we know the that and not the (specific or individual) what. For if neither an individual (or specific) nor a generic what is known, then the that only means bare “something” (or is that too a genus?) , and we could not even say a something superior to or better than other things, for that would impute value, a positive what. On the other hand, it is the very nature of the universal that one can know the genus without knowing all the species, or any of them with perfect distinctness, and certainly without knowing the individual natures which the genus makes possible. Not even God sees the individual natures as items in the generic, for it is a contradiction to make the common property imply the differences, past and future alike, thus destroying temporal distinctions (see chapter 7 and also The Universal Orthodoxy). Now the accidents of God come under the genus , of possible states of God, a genus inexhaustible through any series, even though infinite, of actual states, it being part of the meaning of possibility that it cannot be translated without remainder into actuality. We do know the nature of the genus, but of practically all the instances coming under it we know virtually nothing.
There is another sense in which (according to AR) one might say that we do not know what God is, though we know he exists. Our insight into the meaning of such concepts as define the essence of God, which includes the generic aspect of the accidents, the having.accidents as such, is fluctuating, more or less confused and unclear. Such concepts as better than all others, better than all others except other states of God himself, have only so much meaning as we can put into their constituent terms, [p. 134] such as “better than.” The ways in which things can be “better than” are illustrated in our experience with no perfect lucidity, and very likely with radical incompleteness as to the possible dimensions of better and worse. Something like Spinoza’s doctrine of infinite attributes, only a few of them (with any clearness) known to us, may be true.
I ask the reader to note these two ways in which second type theism can equal or even surpass traditional first-type doctrine in its admission of our human ignorance of God. In spite of the seeming definiteness of certain aspects of the new doctrine — for instance in its ascribing the whole of nature, with all its known detail, to the accidental aspect of the nature of God—the indeterminateness and mystery which yet remain are literally infinite. The difference seems to me to be that the new doctrine states once for all wherein the mystery lies, and abides by this statement; it does not play fast and loose with it, as the older doctrine so often appears to do, with its oscillation between positive description and denial that there can be positive description of a being held to have only one perfectly simple nature (which in consistency must be known asa whole or not at all).
In formal terms, the “religious strand” in theology is the view that God is a maximum (compared to all that is actual or possible — even as a possible state of God himself) on certain of the dimensions of value; while the “secular strand” is the view that he is maximal on all dimensions. The religious view is A but not (A), that is, it is not explicitly committed between A and, for instance, AR; though implicitly we have found it to favor AR. Formally the two views are compatible; but when one considers the more than formal aspects of the religious strand, it appears to negate the secular. The basic religious view [p. 135] is that man’s good acts and happiness have a value to the supreme being which his bad acts and misery do not. But, human experiences being particulars, then, since no maximal sum of particulars is possible, the contribution of these experiences to God is either zero, contrary to religion, or it is less than maximal, and hence the resulting divine value is on at least some dimension other than maximal, contrary to the secular tenets. Either they or religion must be given up.
In more religious terms, love means happiness varying somehow with variations in the happiness of others, and hence maximally happy love would mean love all of whose objects were maximally happy, an impossibility if the objects are to include created, imperfect beings. How little some theologians understood this is seen in their willingness to suppose God in the enjoyment of absolute bliss while numbers of his creatures suffered incurable pains (however refined the conception of these) in hell. While ostensibly maximizing value in God, they reduced even below the human level his lovingness, the very dimension with which religion is concerned. So frail are human reason and insight!
To hold that God “wills” or purposes human welfare, but is absolutely untouched by the realization or nonrealization of this or that portion of the purposed goal (due, for instance, to human sin or unfortunate use of free will), seems just non-sense. Making all allowance for subtle doctrines of the non-univocal, “analogical” meaning ascribed to such conceptions, are we entitled to think that any law of analogy is being adhered to, rather than being played fast and loose with? It is admitted by Thomists, for example, that God’s knowledge is to his objects as the objects of human knowledge are to the knower! (See chapter 7.) Here the analogy is exactly in reverse. [p. 136] Is this, then, what religion meant by saying God is love — that he is its exact opposite? I believe this is what traditional theology comes to.
Apart from religion it seems clear that some dimensions, which yet are essential to any value at all, cannot be maximized. Thus knowledge seems to imply a known, a notself enjoying some sort of partial independence from the knowing; hence even omniscience must be related to something not in every sense wholly dependent upon it, and from which therefore it cannot itself be wholly independent (as, for instance, it would not be if it were a changing being and the known were its own past, the past conditioning the present in a sense in which the present does not condition the past). Also knowledge, as maximal, in still another way implies a non-maximal aspect of the knowing experience. To know the actual as actual and the potential as potential is to be wholly free from error and ignorance, and yet it is to be sure of an increase in content should the potential become actual, hence knowable as actual, that is, as somehow more than the merely potential orunactual. That the potential could become actual is an analytic judgment, expressing the very meaning of potentiality. Now if something could happen, then whatever this happening implies could also happen, that is, the omniscient could have actual content which it lacks. If it be said that to know the actual as such is to know no more than it is to know the potential as potential, is this not to say that we should all think it no better to know that our friends exist, now that they do, than it would be to know that such beings are possible, were they merely possible? Both would be exact, complete, and true knowledge under the posited circumstances. (The denial that the objects of God’s knowledge contribute anything to God will be dealt with in detail in chapter 7.)
The conceivable “increase” involved in knowing potentiality [p. 137] is not got rid of by insisting that omniscience must be inclusive of all time in a changeless present; the possible increase then must be translated into a non-temporal form, equally incompatible with the notion of maximality, but by no means equally satisfactory on other grounds. We then have the additional difficulty that a portion of the possible is in effect impossible, since at no point of time could it ever have been, or can it ever be, added to reality (since for all points it is excluded by the single point of omniscience) ; or else one must deny the category of possibility, and hold that what never occurs is necessarily non-existent, and one must also define necessity otherwise than as the impossibility of the contradictory (for where nothing that does not occur is possible, possibility has no meaning distinguishable from that of actuality). Thus we have all the paradoxes of necessitarianism, according to which my hat is as necessary as God (whatever necessity would mean if possibility meant nothing), the particular is as necessary as the universal, although contingency is the essential logical meaning of particularity (that from which one can abstract as non-essential to existence and thought). Thus timeless omniscience can also be an all-dimensional maximum only if both necessity and possibility, and with them all logic, be emptied of meaning. Temporal omniscience, capable of increase in content and value, though not in accuracy or freedom from ignorance of its objects, is therefore not only not a paradox but the only view of omniscience which is not paradoxical.
Thus the religious strand, freed from entanglement with the all-dimensional maximum, with first-type doctrine, gains rather than loses in consistency, and leads to a more than formal interpretation of second-type theism. A doctrine is reached which is equally advantageous from a religious and a metaphysical point of view. (“Pure actuality,” for example, is just as absurd as maximally happy [p. 138] righteousness. Actuality implies potentiality and hence its own impurity. Thought is irreducibly polar.[8])
From the argument of this chapter I conclude personally that first-type theism is false beyond reasonable doubt, while second-type theism conforms to religious experience and is at least not so manifestly absurd as first-type theism. However, I shall not assume so strong a conclusion for the remainder of this book. The man whom I shall regard as beyond the reach of reason is not the man who continues to believe in first-type theism, but only the man who insists that the case for that doctrine is so clear of difficulties that alternatives do not deserve careful consideration, at least as careful as they are given in later chapters of this book. Such a man I cannot think has the concerns of philosophy at heart. For if the difficulties urged against his doctrine are not serious, then no difficulties urged against any philosophy are serious. There is always some possibility of defense in philosophy. But if the defense so far given of absolutism (the all-dimensional, or superdimensional, maximum) is satisfactory as it stands, then by similar standards so is the defense of atheism, and of other philosophical tenets which traditional theists suppose themselves to have refuted. Whatever the conclusion of theistic argument is to be, the argument itself cannot remain where the Thomists, the Spinozists, the Hindu absolutists, or the Hegelians [9] wish to leave it. This I believe Ihave shown. But to make assurance doubly sure, additional evidence will be adduced throughout most, if not all, of the following chapters.
See also Macintosh’s essay in My Idea of God, edited by Joseph Fort Newton (Little, Brown & Co., 1927), pp. 195-58. ↩︎
The ethical view of deity appears with some distinctness in Egyptian documents of over three thousand years ago. See James H. Breasted, The Dawn of Conscience (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933) . ↩︎
That omniscience sees the future as it is, that is, as partially indeterminate, might be called the Principle of Gersonides, for the earliest statement of it, so far as I have been able to find, is set forth in the writings of Levy ben Gerson, Jewish astronomer and theologian of the fourteenth century, whose doctrines furnished a counter-balance to the pure absolutism of Maimonides. See Isaac Husik, A History of Medieval Jewish Philosophy (The Macmillan Go., 1916), p. 945. The principle was also clearly stated by the Socinians, two centuries later. See Otto Fock, Der Socinianismus (Kiel. 1847). pp. 437. For a recent defense of the doctrine see Alfred E. Garvie, The Christian Faith (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937), p. 105.
Apart from the theological application, the view that it might not be definitely true either that x will occur or that x will not occur is found in several ancient logicians, eg. Carneades and Aristotle, and in some recent ones, eg. Lukasiewicz. For the last mentioned see “Philosophische Bemerkungen 7u mehrwertigen Systemen des Aussagenkalkiils,” Rendus des Séances de la Société des Lettres de Varsovie, Classe 111, Vol. XXIII, 1930. Fascicules 1-3, pp. 51-77. Cited and discussed by C. A. Baylis in “Are Some Propositions neither True nor False?” Philosophy of Science, II, 156-66. In conversation Bertrand Russell expressed himself to me as open-minded on the question.
Ockham and some other late Scholastics, who followed Aristotle in his analysis of propositions about future contingents, inclined to the view that this analysis, although philosophically sound, was not, for secular reasons, ‘compatible with divine omniscience, although revelation compels us, they thought, to assume such compatibility. Perhaps it was their brand of revelation, not their philosophy, that was here chiefly at fault. God cannot, they suggested, know truths which are not there to be known, but a few biblical texts, like Christ’s prophecy to Peter (“Thou shalt deny me thrice”), as well as the whole theological tradition, seemed to assert that God eternally knows the details of the future, even where free-will acts are in question, The Socinians worried particularly over the prophecy above referred to. It is not smoothly to be fitted in, one must admit. (Perhaps it was a statement of probability, not meant as sheer fact or certainty. Perhaps it meant that in that respect the act was not free. It would not follow that there was no sin in it, for that Peter was not free to do better might have resulted from earlier acts that were free, so that there might have been a time when even divinity could not have made the prophecy. The Socinians seem to have missed this way out. The feeling of guilt over an act does not prove that we could, at the moment, as we then were, have done otherwise, but it does imply, if valid, that at some time or other a course had been open to us that would not have led to the act.)
What seems lacking in most discussions of the matter is the distinction between the falsity of “x will occur” and the truth of “x will not occur,” the first of which asserts that the possibilities still include the non-occurrence of x, while the second asserts that they include only its non-occurrence, that they exclude its occurrence. Only by means of this distinction ‘can one combine the indeterminateness of the future with the law of excluded middle, to sacrifice which, as Lukasiewicz suggests we should, seems to involve serious inconvenience, at the least.
It is to be observed, however, that even if one of the two, “x will occur” and “x will not occur,” is always true, the argument of this chapter could still be maintained, and that in one of several ways. There are logicians, eg. Baylis (loc. cit.) , who would say that in “truth” all the details of the future are fully determinate, but that conceivably these details are not wholly knowable because there is nothing in the present to indi ‘ate them. We could then say that omniscience is all the knowledge that is possible, which by definition is perfect knowledge, but that since some truths about the future could not be known at present, omniscience does not know them. But even granting that there is definite truth concerning all the details of the future, and granting further that all truth is knowable, one could still hold that omniscience as an idea actually functioning in religion does not mean all possible knowledge, but only all-possible, or perfect, knowledge of the past and present, and sufficient knowledge of the futute to constitute a providential plan, but with enough uncertainty in details of execution to allow for human choice. It would be difficult to show that more than this is implied by concrete religious attitudes and sentiments. Thus there are at least three ways of dealing with the religious idea of omniscience which do not imply that God is above change. All of these ways, and perhaps others, must be refuted before it could be regarded as established that religion requires the conception of an immutable Knower.
For the purposes of science, the mode of speaking suggested at the beginning of the last paragraph may be more convenient than the one I have advocated in this chapter. I believe Bergson has shown that what is convenient in physics may be most inconvenient and misleading in philosophy, which cannot accept fictitious simplifications simply because they cover all that we are able to measure and predict. I take Bergson also to have shown that relativity physics does not conflict with the notion of a real cosmic past and a real cosmic future, the latter not yet fully determinate, and the two divided by an objective and cosmic (though for physical measurements useless) simultaneity (see Durée et simultanéité, Paris, 1922, p. 122). Physics is merely not interested in such a conception, because human observation is not cosmic but local. Yet Bergson gives reason for holding that relativity physics is more favorable to such a view than Newtonian physics. Those who hold that the new physics supports absolutism, or the notion that time is merely another dimension of space, and that consequently the future is incomplete only for our human ignorance, should undertake to refute the arguments of Bergson (and of many others) on this point. ↩︎
Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936) , pp- 145, 103, 148. ↩︎
Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938) , PP. 458-60. ↩︎
See G. Picard, “La Saisie immédiate de Dieu dans les états myst Revue d’Ascétique et de Mystique, LV, 45-51. Against this view Maritain argues that there can be no direct seizure of the divine nature without grace, for the divine essence, being simple, must be grasped entire, rather than “obscurely or by halves.” But does it not follow that the successful mystique, the one rewarded with grace, intuits God with complete adequacy, that is, becomes cognitively equal to God? This seems to be M. Picard’s reasoning, and it is hard to see why it is not conclusive. (See Maritain, Degrees of Knowledge, p. 333.) ↩︎
Maritain’s discussion of William James and other recent theologians in his Reflexions sur l’intelligence (pp. 262-87) is a good example of the confrontation of first- and third-type theism with no recognition of the possibility of an intermediate position. It is significant that he closes che discussion with the charge that the theologians under consideration change the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of corruptible man.” As if it were not perfectly possible to maintain intact the incorruptibility of God while admitting his capacity for increasing richness of content, for creative though not destructive change (not reckoning suffering as destruction, however) ! ↩︎
See Morris R. Cohen, Reason and Nature (Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1931). ↩︎
If Hegel was a second- rather than first-type theist, he failed to enlighten most of his followers on the point. Hegel is a clear writer only if “clear” be given a very Hegelian meaning. But in so far as he is clea he is, I think, a first-type theist. If there are also contrary indications, this, only illustrates the inherent contradictoriness of this form of theism. Some learned scholars indeed think that Hegel believed both in a changeable God and in real contingency. But then for Hegel the real is the rational, and that for him seems to mean the deducible, the necessary, so that what we come to is that there are contingent entities, but they are unreal! And doubtless there is change, but it is unreal! Schelling, in later life, did affirm a changing God, but he seems to have tried to combine this with a Spinozistic necessitarianism — all the while talking much of “freedom.” Recent philosophy shows, I hold, a fundamental advance in such matters. ↩︎