Challenges to God's Omniscience in the Kalam Argument

1. Today’s Lecture • One more thing about your first assignment • Concluding the Kalam Argument • Preliminary comments on the Teleological Argument • David Hume

2. One more thing about your first assignment • I need your first assignments back. It won’t take long, but I forgot to do something with them. I’m afraid that I won’t be able to return your second assignment until I see your first assignment. Sorry about the inconvenience.

3. Moreland: Points to remember - Basic Argument • Let’s go back to my suggestions at the beginning of this section on Cosmological Arguments. • IF the Kalam Argument successfully calls into question the existence of actual infinities, then God cannot be omniscient. • This will have a ripple effect in at least two directions: (i) The God of Christianity, the Judaic Tradition or Islam, if ‘He’ exists at all, is not a Perfect Being and so (ii) the Ontological Argument does not concern the existence of the Christian, Jewish or Muslim God.

4. Moreland: Points to remember - Basic Argument • How does the Kalam Argument challenge the omniscience of God? • What is omniscience? The term itself literally means ‘all knowing’. If there is any knowledge to be had, God has it. (Given our previous problems with the notion of knowledge, this should already be setting off alarm bells.)

5. Moreland: Points to remember - Basic Argument • (1) Take mathematics. If this is a branch of knowledge, then there is no better mathematician than God (at least as understood within the Christian, Judaic or Islamic Traditions). • (2) Take a fairly innocuous series of numbers in mathematics, the natural numbers (0 on up into infinity). • (3) For any given segment of this infinite series that is a possible object of knowledge, God knows it. • (4) We can make this stronger. As the infinite numerical series is itself, in principle, an object of knowledge (after all any member of this series is, in principle, an object of knowledge), God knows it.

6. Moreland: Points to remember - Basic Argument • (5) But this would mean that there is an actual infinite, namely the mathematical knowledge possessed by God. • (6) Imagine now that actual infinities are impossible (as argued by one version of the Kalam Argument). • (7) God’s knowledge of mathematics entails that there are actual infinite series of numbers contained in the mind of God.

7. Moreland: Points to remember - Basic Argument • (8) That God has this knowledge is entailed by the Christian, Jewish and Muslim belief that God is omniscient. • (9) But such infinities are impossible. • (10) So it is not the case that God has knowledge of actual infinities. • (11) So it is not the case that God’s knowledge of mathematics is exhaustive. • (12) So it is not the case that God is omniscient.

8. Moreland: Points to remember - Basic Argument • What of the alternative version of the Kalam Argument that allows that an actual infinite exists? • Under this version of the Kalam Argument God can be said to have exhaustive knowledge of mathematics. • But if an actual infinite can occur in the mind of God, why not elsewhere? • This seems to allow for the possibility that the model of oscillating universes is a real alternative to a creative act of God after all. • If this is to be resisted there must be something about God that is relevantly different from every ‘thing’ else.

9. Moreland: Points to remember - Basic Argument • It may be thought that God’s atemporality allows for the instantiation of an actual infinite, as it allows for it to occur all at once (CP, p.25) … whatever that means. • But this will not distinguish God from an infinite series of oscillating universes, as temporality begins and ends with the expansion and collapse of each universe, but does not apply to the series as a whole.

10. Moreland: Points to remember - Basic Argument • Of course we could argue that there is a temporality implied in this series. After all, there is a succession of universes coming into and going out of existence. I.e. there was a universe before this one, and there will be a universe after this one. • But this sense of temporality also applies to Moreland’s conception of God. After all, since there is an absolute beginning to the universe, and God has no beginning, there was a before-creation for God. • I can’t think of any other feature of God that may be relevant to this question and sets Him apart from every ‘thing’ else. Can you?

11. Moreland: Points to remember - Basic Argument • In saying all of this, it is not at all clear why it is more intelligible to suggest that an actual infinite can happen all at once rather than through successive addition. An actual infinite series must still come in to being. If this is not possible through successive addition, how can it be possible to do “all at once”? • Alternatively, even if Moreland’s argument against actual infinities only concerns their generation through some kind of successive addition, this does not mean that they can come into existence any other way. So even if Moreland grants their existence in his second version of the Kalam Argument, there is no obvious way in which these series can be thought of coming into ‘being’.

12. Moreland: Points to remember - Basic Argument • Of course Moreland could suggest that this problem itself necessitates the existence of God. After all, given His infinite nature, and His necessary existence, there is nothing unintelligible in saying that actual infinities, if they do exist, only do so as eternal ‘entities’ dependent on the necessary being of God. • There are two problems with this suggestion: • (1) It assumes that you can’t have eternally existing actual infinities that are not the God or Goddess. • (2) This presumes the success of some (other) version of the Cosmological Argument.

13. Moreland: Points to remember - Basic Argument • Moreland’s talk of God’s atemporality raises two more problems for the orthodox conception of God in the Christian, Judaic and Islamic Traditions. • (1) Moreland has already spent some time, no pun intended, speaking of time as a temporal series of succeeding distinct moments. Time is, for Moreland, in some substantive sense a succession of distinct moments (see CP, pp.24-25).

14. Moreland: Points to remember - Basic Argument • On the other hand Moreland dismisses Kant’s paradox of God being in a time before time at the moment before creation as a misunderstanding of both God’s atemporality and the nature of time. Time only exists as a result of creation, he argues. So the moment before creation is not literally a moment at all (CP, p.27).

15. Moreland: Points to remember - Basic Argument • Unfortunately he can’t have it both ways. If time is a succession of distinct moments and there was a moment before God created, then God was in a time before time. Admittedly this is not the paradox Kant thought it was, since there is nothing to say there are not more temporal series than the one we are in. It will however generate another problem with an actual infinite, and that is God’s past existence up to the moment of creation.

16. Moreland: Points to remember - Basic Argument • (2) It is the contemporary orthodox Christian, Jewish and Muslim view that God is a Perfect Being. I.e. God is maximally perfect. One consequence of this is that there was no time when He was lacking in anything. This means He has always been complete. This means that He is unchanging. Thus the view that God must be outside of time (as time involves motion or change).

17. Moreland: Points to remember - Basic Argument • But there’s a problem. If God has always been complete, and is unchanging (and thus atemporal), then God, as we approach ‘the moment of’ creation, is not different in any way from God in the act of creating. This means all the desires, preferences and interests He has in the act of creating were there all along.

18. Moreland: Points to remember - Basic Argument • But here’s the rub. What then moved Him to create when He did? After all, there was ‘a time’ when the creation was non-existent. But if He always had the same motivations that moved Him to create, and these were sufficient to move Him to create when He did, then there should never have been ‘a time’ when the creation was non-existent. • There’s no easy way out of this conundrum. God can’t have a time-indexed desire to create, as He is supposed to be outside of time.

19. Moreland: Points to remember - Basic Argument • This discussion can be abruptly stopped if Moreland plays the ‘mystery card’ (i.e God is a mystery or God is beyond our comprehension). Moreland seems to play this card on page 27 of your CP. • But this comes at a cost. If this is legitimate for Moreland, why isn’t it also legitimate for his interlocutor precisely at the point where things get tough? • If it is legitimate for his interlocutor, then we quickly generate a stalemate. • If it is not legitimate for his interlocutor, it is not legitimate for Moreland.

20. Moreland: Points to remember - Basic Argument • 8. The beginning of the universe was caused or it was not caused. • 9. That which is contingent does not come from nothing without a cause. • 10. Events are contingent. • 11. So, events do not come from nothing without a cause. • 12. The universe is a temporal series of events. • 13. The universe began with a first event (or E1). • 14. So, E1 did not come from nothing without a cause (CP, p.28).

21. Moreland: Points to remember - Basic Argument • It is important to note that this section of the Kalam Argument depends heavily upon the Principle of Sufficient Reason. • The Principle of Sufficient Reason: That for any fact of the matter there is some sufficient reason for it, or there is something that makes it a fact of the matter or is an explanation of its existence. • But the Principle of Sufficient Reason is not a necessary truth. • This means that Premise 9 (“That which is contingent does not come from nothing without a cause”) can only be possibly or probably true.

22. Moreland: Points to remember - Basic Argument • Two things are problematic about this Principle and are not addressed by Moreland. • (1) The evidential ground for this claim must be experiential, or inductive. But this Principle is universal in scope. Given that we only know a small portion of the Universe, with varying degrees of depth, this Principle is radically underdetermined by the evidence (i.e. it goes well beyond its evidential support). • (2) That such a methodological principle has been hitherto useful is not enough to evince its truth.

23. Moreland: Points to remember - Basic Argument • 15. The first event was caused by something personal or something impersonal. • 16. Either the necessary and sufficient conditions for E1 existed prior to time (for all eternity) or they did not. • 17. If these conditions did not so exist, then their coming to be prior to time was the first event (or E-1). • 18. Either the necessary and sufficient conditions for E-1 existed prior to time (for all eternity) or they did not. • 19. If these conditions did not so exist, then their coming to be prior to time was the first event (or E-2).

24. Moreland: Points to remember - Basic Argument • 20. This cannot go on into infinity, because of the problems with actual infinites discussed above. • 21. If the necessary and sufficient conditions for E1 existed prior to time (for all eternity), then they either gave immediate rise to E1, or they did not. • 22. If they gave immediate rise to E1, then the universe has existed from eternity. • 23. But this is just to say that the universe is an actual infinite, which is impossible.

25. Moreland: Points to remember - Basic Argument • 24. If an event occurs spontaneously, without any prior event being sufficient (though perhaps necessary) to bring it about, it must be caused by an act of free agency. • 25. E1 appears to have arose spontaneously, without any prior event being sufficient (though perhaps necessary) to bring it about. • 26. E1 must have been caused by an act of free agency (CP, pp.28-29).

26. Moreland: Points to remember - Basic Argument • Note that Moreland tries to address some of the problems with God’s atemporality I mentioned before. • I mentioned that Moreland’s view of God’s atemporality seems to lead to a paradox about God’s creative act. • Moreland suggest that the nature of God’s free agency means that He could at any ‘time’ choose to create, and that’s why creation came into being at some point, despite the fact that God was the same before and during the creation event.

27. Moreland: Points to remember - Basic Argument • This is not convincing however. • Since God is complete, He has always had the desires, preferences or interests that were, at the moment of creation, sufficient to move God to act. But if they were sufficient at that point, they were always sufficient (since God is unchanging), and so there should never have been a point at which God existed but the universe did not.

28. Moreland: Points to remember - Basic Argument • He can preempt this by saying that the much needed sufficient desire of God came suddenly into existence and moved Him to create at the ‘moment’ of creation , but (i) this necessitates a change in an unchanging God (which is absurd), and (ii) reduces God’s ‘free agency’ to ‘random acts of kindness’... which is not a particularly attractive (i..e morally desirable) attribute of an omnipotent Being.

29. Preliminary comments about Teleological Arguments • Teleological Arguments derive their name from two Greek words, telos and logos. Telos simply means ‘end’ or ‘purpose’, and so Teleological Arguments for the existence of God move from perceived design in the universe to the need for a Designer to best explain this perceived design. • Teleological Arguments are inductive, and so only claim that their conclusions are, at best, probably true. • Unlike deductive arguments, then, the premises of a good Teleological Argument could be true and the conclusion could still be false.

30. Preliminary comments about Teleological Arguments • Teleological Arguments are analogical arguments. • In an analogical argument we infer the presence, or absence, of a feature or property of, or from, a given object or set of objects based upon a comparison of that object or set of objects with those objects which possess the feature or property in question. • In a positive analogical argument we infer, from the similarities between objects that we are comparing, that a feature possessed by one object (or set of objects), but which we do not yet know is possessed by the others, IS PROBABLY so possessed.

31. Preliminary comments about Teleological Arguments • In a negative analogical argument we infer, from the dissimilarities between objects that we are comparing, that a feature possessed by one object (or set of objects), but which we do not yet know is possessed by the other, is PROBABLY NOT so possessed. • It is important that these similarities or dissimilarities are relevant to the existence or absence of the sought after, or target, property. • This means that the similarities or dissimilarities between the objects under discussion must be make the presence or absence of the sought after, or target, property more likely.