Category: God

Necessary God, Contingent Creatures: Another Round with Novak

In an earlier thread, Lukas Novak writes,

. . . God simply does not need any causal acts to mediate his causal power. He is causally efficient through his very essence, directly, and contingently, imparting being to the created essences immediately. It is only with respect to this causal power which is an aspect of his essence that we call the selfsame essence an "act" (in the sense of activity).

The above is a response to the line I have been taking, which is essentially as follows. 

God necessarily exists. What's more, he is simple. God creates our universe U. U, having been created, exists. (And it wouldn't have existed had it not been created by God.) But U exists contingently, which implies (given that God created U) that God might not have created U.   Now consider God's creating of U.  This creative action is at least notionally distinct both from God and from U.  On the face of it, we must distinguish among God, God's creative action, and the effect of this action, namely, U.

We now ask: Is the divine creative action necessary or contingent?  I will now argue that it is not necessary.  God exists in every possible world. If his creating of U occurred in every possible world, then U would exist in every possible world. But then U would not be contingent (existent in some but not all worlds), but necessary. Therefore, God's creating of U, given that U is contingent, is also contingent: it occurs in all and only those world in which U exists.  

So God's creating U is contingent. But God is necessary. It follows that God cannot be identical to his creating U.  But this contradicts the doctrine of divine simplicity one of the entailments of which is that God is identical to each of his intrinsic properties. So the following propositions constitute an inconsistent triad, or antilogism.

1) God is simple

2) All created concreta are contingent.

3) No contingent effect has a necessary cause.

Given that the limbs of the triad are collectively inconsistent, one of them must be rejected.

A) Reject simplicity. If God is not simple, then we can say that God is really (and not just notionally) distinct from his creative acts, and that, while God exists in every world, he creates only in some.   This solution upholds the contingency of created concreta, and preserves the intuitive notion that a contingent effect cannot have a necessary cause.

B) Retain simplicity but accept the consequence that creatures are necessary beings.  That is, retain simplicity and accept modal collapse.

C) Retain simplicity, but reject the notion that no contingent effect has a necessary cause.  This, I take it, is Novak's way out.  As I quoted him above, ". . . God simply does not need any causal acts to mediate his causal power. He is causally efficient through his very essence, directly, and contingently, imparting being to the created essences immediately."

The difference between me and Novak is that I consider the above triad to be an aporia, a problem for which there is no satisfactory solution. Novak, however, thinks that there is a satisfactory rational solution by way of rejecting (3). He accepts divine simplicity, and he rejects modal collapse.  He concludes that there is no difference in God corresponding to the difference between the existence of U and the nonexistence of U.  The creation of U is not the realization of a divine potential to create U, and God's refraining from creating anything is not the realization of a divine potential to refrain from creating.  And this for the reason that there is nothing potential in God: God is purely actual.

Novak's solution satisfies him, but it doesn't satisfy me. It sounds like magic to me.   I find the following unintelligible: "He [God] is causally efficient through his very essence, directly, and contingently, imparting being to the created essences immediately." The words make sense, of course, but I find that they do not express an intelligible proposition.

Here, I think, is where the discussion must end.

The Euthyphro Dilemma, Divine Simplicity, and Modal Collapse

The Question

God commands all and only the morally obligatory. But does he command it because it is obligatory, or is it obligatory because he commands it? The question naturally arises, but issues in a dilemma. A dilemma is a very specific sort of problem in which there are exactly two alternatives, neither of which is acceptable. Thus we speak of the 'horns' of a dilemma, and of being 'impaled' on its horns.

Bear in mind the following tripartite distinction. For any agent that issues a command, there is (i) the commanding, (ii) that which is commanded (the content of the act of commanding), and (iii) the relevant normative property of the content.   Contents of commands can be either permissible, impermissible, or obligatory.  Note the ambiguity of 'command' as between the act of commanding, and the content commanded. And note that while finite agents sometimes command what is morally impermissible, this is never the case with God. Everything God commands is morally obligatory.  The question is whether the divine commanding makes the action obligatory, or whether it is obligatory independently of God's command.  In the latter case, God is at most the advocate and enforcer of an obligation but not its legislator.

Horn One

If God commands an action because it is obligatory, then the obligatoriness of the action is not due to God's command, but is logically antecedent to it. God is then subject to an independently existing system of norms that are not in his control. He is then an advocate of the moral order and its enforcer, but not its source, with negative consequences for the divine sovereignty.  God is the Absolute, and the Absolute cannot be dependent on anything external to it for its existence, nature, modal status, or anything else, including the justification of its commands.  The sovereign God is the absolute lord of all orders, including the moral order.

Horn Two

If an action is obligatory because God commands it, then the normative quality of the action — its being obligatory — derives from a fact, the fact of God's commanding the action. This is puzzling: how can the mere fact that an agent issues a command make the content of the command objectively binding?  Of course, God is not any old agent: he is morally perfect.  So you can be sure that he won't command anything that is not categorically obligatory. Still, the  move from fact to norm is puzzling. The puzzle is heightened if the agent is free in the 'could have done otherwise' sense.  If God is free in this sense, libertarianly free, then he might not have commanded the action, in which case it would not have been obligatory.  This is an unacceptable result.  If it is impermissible to kill babies for sexual gratification, and obligatory to refrain from such an action, normative properties cannot derive from any being's free will.  For that would make morality arbitrary. The normative proposition It is impermissible to kill babies for sexual gratification, if true, is necessarily true. Its truth value cannot then depend on a contingent command even if the one who commands is God.

Constraints on a Solution

We are assuming that God exists, that morality is objective and not up to the whim of any being, and that God is sovereign over the moral order, and indeed, absolute lord of all orders.  So we cannot solve the dilemma by denying that God exists, or by grasping one or the other of the horns, or by limiting divine sovereignty.  We must find a way between the horns.  If we succeed, we will have shown that the dilemma is a false alternative.  

The problem has two sides. First, how do we get from a fact to a norm? To be precise, how do get from the facticity of a commanding to the normativity of the content commanded? Second, how do we ensure that the norm is absolute?  We would have a solution if it could be shown that the fact just is the norm, and the fact could not have been different.

William Mann's Solution via Divine Simplicity

Mann's solution is built on the notion that, with respect to necessary truths and absolute values, God is not free to will otherwise than he wills. In this way the second horn, and arbitrarity, is avoided. But how can God be sovereign over the moral order if he cannot will otherwise than he wills? If I understand the solution, it is that sovereignty is maintained and the first horn is avoided if the constraint on divine freedom is internal to God as it would be if “absolute values are the expression of that [God's] rational autonomy.” (William E. Mann, God, Modality, and Morality, Oxford UP, 2015,168) Thus God is not free as possessing the liberty of indifference with respect to necessary truths and absolute values, but he is nonetheless  free as the rationally autonomous creative source of necessary truths and absolute values. God then is the source of necessary truths and absolute values, not their admirer or advocate.  God is not subject to the moral order; he is the source of it. Indeed, he is identical to it. Does Mann's solution require the doctrine of divine simplicity? It would seem so. This doctrine implies that knowing and willing are identical in God.  If so, then the truth value and modal status of necessary truths, including necessary moral truths, cannot be otherwise in which case God cannot will them to be otherwise.

On the doctrine of divine simplicity, then, the Euthyphro Dilemma turns out to be false dilemma: the simplicity doctrine allows for a third possibility, a way between the horns.*  God is Goodness itself, not a good being among others. As such, he just is the content of morality.  The moral order is not external to him nor antecedent to him logically or ontologically: he is not subject to it.  Sovereignty is preserved. Arbitrarity is avoided because God cannot will any moral contents other than the ones he wills.

Problem Solved?

If God is absolutely sovereign, as he must be to be God, then he is sovereign over every order including the MODAL order.  It is cogently arguable, however, that the simplicity doctrine entails the collapse of modal distinctions and thus the collapse of the modal order. 

It looks as if we can solve the Euthyphro problem, but only by generating a different problem. The Euthyphro problem is solved by saying that (i) the obligatory is obligatory because God commands it, but (ii) the contents of the divine commands could not have been otherwise. They could not have been otherwise because these contents are contained within the unchangeable divine nature.  Hence  God is neither subject to an external moral order, nor the arbitrary creator of it.  God is the moral order. In God, the facticity of the commanding and the normativity of the contents commanded are one. 

But if God, because he is absolutely sovereign, cannot be subject to a logically prior MORAL order, then he also cannot be subject to a logically prior MODAL order. As absolutely sovereign, God must be sovereign over all orders. It cannot be that the possible and the necessary subsist in sublime independence of God.  It cannot be that creation is the selective actualization of some proper subset of self-subsisting  mere possibles, or the actualization of one among an infinity of possible worlds.   Creation is not actualization. For then God would not be creating out of nothing, but out of possibles the Being of which would be independent of God's Being. 

God, then, cannot be subject to a modal order independent of him. So one might think to import into God the modal distinctions, for example, the distinction between the merely possible and the actual.  This importation would parallel the importation into the divine nature of the various contents of divine commands. Perhaps it is like this. God entertains mere possibles which, as merely possible, subsist only as accusatives of his thinking, but actualizes some of them, super-adding existence to them.  The mere possibles that need an act of divine actualization in order to exist would then contingently exist, which is of course the result we want.  Unfortunately, the contingency of actual creatures (Socrates, for example, as opposed to his merely possible brother Schmocrates)  entails the possibility of no creatures and of other creatures who remain merely possible. But then we have in God a distinction between his actual and his merely possible creative decisions.  This conflicts with DDS and its commitment to God's being purely actual (actus purus).

Conclusion

The doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) allows for a solution of the Euthyphro dilemma with the following advantages: it upholds the existence of God, the objectivity of morality, the non-arbitrarity of the divine will, and God's sovereignty over the moral order. But God, to be God, must be the absolute lord of all orders, including the modal order.  The simplicity doctrine, however, needed to solve the Euthyphro dilemma entails the collapse of the modal order in which case it is not there to for God to be sovereign over. The objectivity of the modal distinctions needs to be upheld just as much as the objectivity of morality. But this is impossible if DDS is true. So while God must be simple to be God, he cannot be simple if if he is the creator of our universe, a universe whose contingency is the point of departure for the ascent to the divine absolute.

Welcome to the aporetics of the Absolute!

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* A dilemma is said to be false if there is a third possibility, and thus a way between the horns.  The contemporary Thomist, Edward Feser, maintains that the Euthyphro dilemma is false:

Divine simplicity also entails, of course, that God’s will just is God’s goodness which just is His immutable and necessary existence. That means that what is objectively good and what God wills for us as morally obligatory are really the same thing considered under different descriptions, and that neither could have been other than they are. There can be no question then, either of God’s having arbitrarily commanded something different for us (torturing babies for fun, or whatever) or of there being a standard of goodness apart from Him. Again, the Euthyphro dilemma is a false one; the third option that it fails to consider is that what is morally obligatory is what God commands in accordance with a non-arbitrary and unchanging standard of goodness that is not independent of Him. 

 

Divine Simplicity, Modal Collapse, and the Difference Principle

The question before us is whether the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) can be upheld without the collapse of modal distinctions. 

In "Simply Impossible: A Case Against Divine Simplicity" (Journal of Reformed Theology 7, 2013, 181-203), R. T. Mullins asks (footnote omitted):

Could God have refrained from creating the universe? If God is free then it seems that the answer is obviously ‘yes.’ He could have existed alone. Yet, God did create the universe. If there is a possible world in which God exists alone, God is not simple. He eternally has unactualized potential for He cannot undo His act of creation. He could cease to sustain the universe in existence, but that would not undo His act of creating. One could avoid this problem by allowing for a modal collapse. One could say that everything is absolutely necessary. Necessarily, there is only one possible world—this world. Necessarily, God must exist with creation. There is no other possibility. God must create the universe that we inhabit, and everything must occur exactly as it in fact does. There is no such thing as contingency when one allows a modal collapse. (195-196)

The foregoing suggests to me one version of the problem.  There is a tension between divine simplicity and divine freedom.

1) If God is simple, then he is purely actual (actus purus) and thus devoid of unexercised powers and unrealized potentialities. He is, from all eternity, all that he can be. This is true in every possible world because God exists in every possible world, and is pure act in every possible world.  As a necessary being, God exists in every possible world, and as a simple being, he is devoid of act-potency composition in every world in which he exists. 

2) As it is, God freely created our universe from nothing; but he might have created a different universe, or no universe at all. This implies that any universe God creates contingently exists.

The dyad seems logically inconsistent.   If (1) is true, then there is no possible world in which God has unexercised powers. But if (2) is true, there is at least one possible world in which God has unexercised powers. Had God created no universe, then his power to create would have gone unexercised.  Had God created a different universe than the one he did create, then his power to create our universe would have gone unexercised. So if God is both simple and (libertarianly) free, then we get a logical contradiction.

In nuce, the problem is to explain how it can be true both that God is simple and that the universe which God created ex nihilo is contingent.  Clearly, the classical theist wants to uphold both. What is unclear, however, is whether he can uphold both.

There are two main ways to solve an aporetic polyad. One is to show that the inconsistency alleged is at best apparent, but not real.  The other way is by rejection of one of the limbs. 

Many if not most theists, and almost all Protestants, will simply (pun intended) deny the divine simplicity.  I myself think there are good reasons for embracing the latter.  But how then avoid modal collapse?

Modal Collapse

We have modal collapse just when the following proposition is true: For any x, x is possible iff x is actual iff x is necessary.  This implies that nothing is merely possible; nothing is contingent; nothing is impossible.  If nothing is merely possible, then there are no merely possible worlds, which implies that there is exactly one possible world, the actual world, which cannot fail to be actual, and is therefore necessary.  Modal collapse ushers in what I cill call modal Spinozism. 

(The collapse is on the extensional, not the intensional or notional plane: the modal words retain their distinctive senses.)

Suppose divine simplicity entails modal collapse (modal Spinozism). So what? What is so bad about the latter?  Well, it comports none too well with God's sovereignty. If God is absolutely sovereign, then he cannot be under a metaphysical necessity to create. Connected with this is the fact that if God must create, then his aseity would be compromised. He cannot be wholly from himself, a se, if his existence necessarily requires a realm of creatures.  Finally, creaturely (libertarian) freedom would go by the boards if reality is one big block of Spinozistic necessity.

Steven Nemes' Solution

If God created our universe U, and U is contingent, then it is quite natural to suppose that God's creative act is as contingent as what it brings into existence, namely, U. But this is impossible on DDS. For on DDS, God is identical to his creative causing.  This being so, U — the creatively caused — exists with the same metaphysical necessity as does God.  The reasoning that leads to this unacceptable conclusion, however, rests on an assumption:

DP. A difference in effect presupposes a difference in the cause. (Nemes, 109)

For example, the difference between U existing and no universe existing entails a difference in God between his actualized power to create U and his unactualized, but actualizable, power to refrain from creating anything. 

Nemes proposes that we reject (DP), at least with respect to divine causality.  (110) Accordingly, the contingency of U's existence does not reflect any contingency in God, even though U is wholly dependent on God for its existence at every moment at which it exists.  So if we reject the Difference Principle, then we can maintain both that the created universe is contingent and that there are no unrealized potentialities in God.  But if we don't reject (DP), then "the argument from modal collapse [against the divine simpicity] is successful." (111)

Is the Nemes Solution Satisfactory?

I say it isn't.  It strikes me as problematic as the problem it is proposed to solve. 

Consider an analogy. In a dark room I turn on a flashlight that causes a circular white spot to appear on a wall. When I turn off the light the spot disappears.  Clearly, the beam of light from the flashlight is the cause and the spot on the wall is the effect. We also note that the beam is not only the originating cause of the spot, but a continuing cause of the spot: the spot depends on the beam at every moment at which the spot exists. In this respect beam-spot is analogous to divine creating- universe existing.  Finally, we note that, just as the spot depends for its existence on the  existence of the beam, and not vice versa, the contingency of the spot depends on the contingency of the beam.   If the spot is contingent, then so must be its cause. Suppose that at time t, the light is on and the spot appears.  To say that the spot is contingent is to say that, at t, t might not have existed. But had the spot not existed at t, then the light would not have been on at t.  Surely it would be absurd to say both that the light is on at t and the spot does not exist at t

Similarly, it seems absurd to say both that the creative causing of U is occurring in every possible world and that U does not exist in every possible world.  Bear in mind that divine causing is necessarily efficacious: it cannot fail to bring about its effect. The divine Fiat lux! cannot be followed by darkness (or no light).   

But of course arguments from analogy prove nothing (assuming the rigorous standards of proof that I favor), and so Nemes would be within his rights were he simply to reject my analogy.  He might insist that just as God is sui generis, the creative relation between God and creatures is sui generis and cannot be modeled in any way.  He might insist that divine causality is unique. In this one case, a causal 'process' that occurs in every possible world — because said process is identical to God who exists in every world — has an effect that exists in only some possible worlds.

We are now in the following dialectical situation. Nemes would have us accept DDS and reject DP.  But I see no reason to think that this is any better than accepting DP and rejecting DDS.  Either way, the exigencies of the discursive intellect are flouted. 

An Aporia?

It seems that the proponent of divine simplicity faces a nasty problem.  At the moment, I see no satisfactory solution.

The aporetician in me is open to the thought that what we have here is a genuine aporia, a conceptual impasse, a puzzle  that we cannot solve. God must be simple to be God; the created universe is really contingent. We cannot, however, see how both limbs of the dyad can be true and so we must see them as contradictory, even though they are presumably not contradictory in reality.  

It could be like this: the limbs are both true, but our cognitive limitations make it impossible for us to understand how they could both be true.  Mysterianism may be the way to go.  This shouldn't trouble a theologian too much. After all, Trinity, Incarnation, etc. are mysteries in the end, are they not?  Of course, I am not suggesting the doctrine of divine simplicity can be found in the Bible. 

An Exchange with Lukas Novak

In an earlier thread, I wrote:

At best, a cosmological argument takes us from the contingent universe U to a divine creative act that explains the existence of U. Now this creative act is itself contingent: God might not have created anything. If God is simple, then he is identical to the creative act. Since the act is contingent, God is contingent, and therefore not God by the Anselmian criterion. On the other hand, if God is necessary, then the creative act and U are necessary, which is unacceptable. The following cannot all be true:

1) God is simple. 
2) God is noncontingent.
3) God's creative act is contingent. 

Dr. Novak responded:

God's creative act need not be contingent. It only needs to contingently bring about its effect.

God's efficiency is distinct from created efficiency. A created cause is itself changed by causing (by eliciting de novo the productive act as its accidental form), God is not changed by causing (being for eternity identical to any of its timeless creative acts). God would be the same in all respects had He not caused the world into existence. This is the requirement of His perfection.

Novak's first two sentences makes no sense. If the effect is contingent, then the creative act which is its cause must also be contingent. There is a three-fold distinction on the notional plane among God (the agent of the creative act or action), the creative act itself, and the effect of the creative act.  God is a necessary being. Now if God is identical in reality  to the creative act whereby he creates U, as per DDS, then the creative act must also  be necessary, in which case the created universe cannot be contingent.

One source of confusion here is that 'act' can be used in two ways. To say that God is pure act (actus purus) is not to say that God is pure action; it is merely to say that he is devoid of all potency.  Note also that God is not the cause of the existence of U; the cause is God's creative action.

I can agree with the rest of what Novak says, except for the penultimate sentence, but only if he draws the conclusion that follows from it, namely, that the created universe exists of metaphysical necessity.

REFERENCE: Steven Nemes, "Divine Simplicity Does Not Entail Modal Collapse" in Carlos Frederico, et al. eds., Rose and Reasons: Philosophical Essays, Bucharest: Eikon, 2020, 101-119.

 

Given Anselm’s Insight, How is Empirical Evidence Relevant to the Existence/Nonexistence of God?

ANSELM'S INSIGHT

I take what I call Anselm's Insight to be non-negotiable.  St. Anselm appreciated, presumably for the first time in the history of thought, that a divine being, one worthy of worship, must be non-contingent.  If your god is contingent, then your god is not God. For if your god is contingent, and he exists, then his nonexistence is possible, and nothing like that could count as God. God, by definition, is that than which no greater can be conceived, to use use Anselm's signature phrase, and necessity is a greater or higher modal status than contingency. Contingency in an existing thing is an ontological defect. God is an absolute, and no absolute worth its salt is contingent.  If, on the other hand, your god is contingent and he doesn't exist, then it is worse still: your god is impossible. 

Anselm's point, expressed with the help of Leibniz, is that the concept of God is the concept of a being that either exists in every metaphysically possible world, or in no metaphysically possible world.  This formulation has the advantage of not presupposing the existence of God by the use of 'God.' For it may be that the concept is not instantiated, as it would not be if God is impossible.

Anselm's Insight rests on the assumption that the necessarily existent is 'better' than the contingently existent, which in turn rests on the Platonic sense that the immutable is higher in value than the mutable. This assumption can be reasonably questioned but also reasonably defended. But I won't go into that now. For present purposes I endorse both the Insight and the Assumption upon which it rests.

ANSELM'S ARGUMENT

But it does not follow from Anselm's Insight that Anselm's Argument is probative. I am referring to the modal ontological argument found in Proslogion III. One cannot validly infer from God's non-contingent status alone that he exists.  For it is epistemically possible — possible for all we know — that God is modally impossible. 'Non-contingent' does not mean 'necessary.' It means 'either necessary or impossible.'  To arrive at God's existence, one needs a possibility premise to the effect that God  is possible.  But how would you know that the premise is true? Conceivability is no sure guide to real possibility. 

For more on the Argument see here. Today's topic is different.

IS EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE RELEVANT TO THE EXISTENCE/NON-EXISTENCE OF A NON-CONTINGENT GOD?

A question posed to me by a reader requires only Anselm's Insight although he thinks it requires the probativity of Anselm's Argument. I take him to be asking how empirical evidence could be relevant to the existence of a non-contingent God.  

Suppose God does not exist.  Then, by the Insight, he is impossible.  But no amount of empirical evidence could show that what is impossible is actual.  So no miraculous event could show that God exists. If God is impossible, any putative empirical evidence to the contrary could be legitimately dismissed a priori.  Compare round squares and colored sounds. They are impossible. The claims of anyone who said he had empirical evidence to the contrary would be legitimately dismissed a priori.  We know that there  cannot be any round squares or colored sounds. We do not know that God is impossible. But we do know (given Anselm's Insight) that either God necessarily exists or God is impossible.  

If, on the other hand, God does exist, then he cannot fail to exist and no empirical evidence is needed or could be relevant.  Suppose that someone demanded empirical evidence of the truth of 7 is prime or the existence of 7 or the existence of the proposition, 7 is prime.   You would show that person the door.

Now either God exists or he does not. Either way, empirical evidence is irrelevant to the existence of God.

What then of natural and moral evil? Are they evidence of the nonexistence of Anselm's God?  No, and to think otherwise is to assume that God is a contingent being.

The above is my interpretation of my reader's reasoning.  I am inclined to accept it as I interpret it.

The Scariest Passage in the Critique of Pure Reason

With Halloween upon us, it is appropriate that I should present to my esteemed readers for their delectation if not horror the scariest passage in Kant's magnum opus:

Unconditioned necessity, which we so indispensably require as the last bearer of all things, is for human reason the veritable abyss . . . . We cannot put aside, and  yet also cannot endure the thought, that a being, which we represent to ourselves as supreme among all possible beings, should, as it were, say to itself: 'I am from eternity to eternity, and outside of me there is nothing save what is through my will, but whence then am I? All support here fails us; and the greatest perfection, no less than the least perfection, floats insubstantially before the merely speculative reason, which incurs no cost in allowing either the one or the other to vanish entirely.  (A613 B641, Norman Kemp Smith tr. corrected by BV)

God thinks to himself: I am a necessary being: I cannot not exist. What's more, I am unconditionally necessary: I do not derive my necessity from another like numbers and other abstracta; they derive their necessity from me, but I have my necessity from myself.  And yet, while my nonexistence is impossible, I can conceive of my nonexistence: the question Whence then am I? makes sense.  My nonexistence is thinkable without logical contradiction even if it is impossible. This is troubling.  I do not exist of merely logical necessity, but of metaphysical necessity, which is a species of real necessity, and the latter suggests some hidden contingency, some hidden dependence.

God thinks further to himself:  Am I truly unconditioned? I am who am: my nature is to be, to exist.  (Exodus, 3:14) I do not have existence like my creatures; I am existence itself in its primary instance.  As such, I cannot not exist, and I cannot cease to exist. I cannot commit suicide. I have no power over my own existence. I am bound to exist.  It is my nature to exist, and I have no power over my nature. How then am I absolutely sovereign?  I am bound by a condition over which I have no control. 

How then am I absolutely unconditioned?  I am not that than which no greater can be conceived.  For I can conceive a greater, a being that is not bound by existence but is free to enter nonexistence.  If I were absolutely unconditioned, then I would be beyond existence and nonexistence. I would be master of that distinction, and not subject to it. I would be beyond all duality.

As subject to the distinction between existence and nonexistence, I am not the Absolute, the Ultimate, the Unconditioned. I am merely the highest being. I am at the apex of the samsaric pyramid — but still samsaric. The truly Unconditioned is beyond Being and Nonbeing.

With this, his final thought, God entered nibbana.

Natural Evil and Fallen Angels

This is an old post from my first blog,  dated 3 January 2005, slightly redacted.

………………………………..

Keith Burgess-Jackson writes:

I have a question for my theistic readers. How do you reconcile the devastation wrought by the tsunami with your belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being? If God could have prevented the tsunami but didn’t, then God’s omnibenevolence is called into question. If God wanted to prevent the tsunami but couldn’t, then God’s omniscience or omnipotence is called into question. You can’t explain away the evil by citing free will, for no human being brought about the tsunami. (Surely you don’t believe in fallen angels.) Do events like this shake your faith? If not, why not? If death and destruction on this scale don’t make you doubt the existence of your god, what would?

1. The parenthetical material is puzzling. If someone can see his way clear to accepting the existence of a purely spiritual being such as God, then the belief in angels, fallen or otherwise, will present no special problem. Given the existence of fallen angels, the Free Will Defense may be invoked to account for natural evils such as tsunamis: natural evils turn out to be a species of moral evils.

2. Of course, the argument can be turned around. If someone argues from the fact of evil to the nonexistence of God, that person assumes that there is indeed an objective fact of evil, and thus, an objective distinction between good and evil. A sophisticated theist can counterargue that there cannot be an objective distinction between good and evil unless God exists. I could make that argument as rigorous as you like. That is not to say that the argument would be compelling to every rational consumer of it, but only that it would logically impeccable, plausibly premised, and sufficiently strong to neutralize the atheist's argument from evil. I distinguish between refuting and neutralizing. It may be difficult to refute a sophisticated interlocutor since he will not be likely to blunder. But he can be neutralized by presenting counterarguments of equal but opposite probative force. The result is a stand-off: you battle the opponent to a draw.

3. In a separate argument, a theist could make the case that the very quantity and malevolence of the moral evil in the world — think of the 20th century and the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro, the 100 million murdered by Communists, etc.) — cannot be explained naturalistically. This would be another way to argue from the fact of objective evil to supernatural agents of evil.  See my The Holocaust Argument for God's Existence.

4. There is no denying that evil presents a serious challenge to theism. Should it shake the theist's faith? Only if the objections to atheism/naturalism shake the atheist's/naturalist's faith. We seem to have doxastic parity. There are reasons both for and against theism. But there are also reasons both for and against atheism/naturalism. It would be special pleading to suppose that the reasons against theism are much more weighty that the reasons against atheism/naturalism. See my companion post on the naturalist's version of fides quaerens intellectum.

5. At the end of the day, after all the dialectical smoke has cleared, you simply have to decide what you are going to believe and how you are going to live. The decision is not a mere decision, but rationally informed, and subject to revision after the consideration of further arguments; but at some point ratiocination must cease and a position must be taken.

Note: Most atheists are naturalists, hence my conflation of them in this post. But one could be an anti-naturalist and an atheist (McTaggart) and I suppose one could be a theist and a naturalist.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Seder Scene in “Crimes and Misdemeanors”

"Crimes and Misdemeanors" is Woody Allen's masterpiece. Here is the Seder scene.

Crimes-and-misdemeanors- seder

Addendum 8/26

The scene ends with Saul saying "If necessary, I will always choose God over the truth."  It works cinematically, but it is a philosophically lame response to the atheist Aunt May. It is lame because Saul portrays the theist as one who self-deceivingly embraces consolatory fictions despite his knowledge that they are fictions. Saul might have plausibly replied along one or both of the following lines.

1) It cannot be true that there is no God, since without God there is no truth.  The existence of truth presupposes the existence of God. Truth is the state of a mind in contact with reality. No minds, no truth. But there are infinitely many truths, including infinitely many necessary truths. The infinity of truths and the necessity of some them require for their ultimate support and repository an  infinite and necessary mind. "And this all men call God." So if there is no God, then there is no truth, in which case one cannot prefer truth over God in the manner of Aunt May.

Nietzsche understood this very well. He saw that the death of God is the death of truth. He concluded that there is no truth, but only  the competing perspectives of mutually antagonistic power-centers.

Now the above is a mere bloggity-blog sketch. Here is a more rigorous treatment.

2) Saul might also have challenged Aunt May as follows:

You say that it is true that there is no God, that there is no moral world-order, that might makes right, and so on. You obviously think that it is important that we face up to these truths and stop fooling ourselves.  You obviously think that there is something morally disreputable about cultivating illusions and stuffing the heads of the young with them, that morally one ought not do these things.  But what grounds this moral ought that you plainly think binds all of us and not just you?  Does it just hang in the air, so to speak? And if it does, whence its objective bindingness or 'deontic tug'?  Can you ultimately make sense of objective moral oughts and ought-nots on the naturalistic scheme you seem to be presupposing?  Won't you have to make at least a Platonic ascent in the direction of the Good?  If so, how will you stop the further ascent to the Good as self-existent and thus as  God?

Or look at this way, May. You think it is a value that we face reality, a reality that for you is Godless, even if  facing what you call reality does not contribute to our flourishing but in fact contributes to the opposite.  But how could something be a value for us if it impedes our flourishing? Is it not ingredient in the concept of value that a value to be what it is must be a value for the valuer? So even if it is true that there is no God, no higher destiny for humans, that life is in the end absurd, how could it be a value for us to admit these truths if truths they be?  So what are you getting so worked up over, sister? I have just pulled the rug out from under your moral enthusiasm!

Crimes and misdemeanors seder 2


How are God and Truth Related?

By my count, there are five different ways to think about the relation of God and truth:

1) There is truth, but there is no God.

2) There is truth, and there is God, but God is not the ontological ground of truth.

3) There is truth, there is God, and truth ultimately depends on the existence of God. There is truth only because there is God.

4) There is no truth, because there is no God.

5) There is God, but no truth.

Ad (1). This I would guess is the view of  many if not most today. There are truths, and among these truths is the truth that God does not exist.  This, I take it, is the standard atheist view.

Ad (2). This, I take it, would be the standard theist view among analytic philosophers.  Consider a philosopher who holds that God is a necessary being and also holds that it is necessarily the case that there are some truths, but would deny the truth of the subjunctive conditional, If, per impossibile, God were not to exist, then truths would not exist either. 

Ad (3). This is the view that I am inclined to accept.  Thus I would affirm the subjunctive conditional lately mentioned. The difference between (2) and (3) is subtle. On both sides it is held that both God and truths are necessary, but the Augustinian — to give him a name — holds that God is the ultimate  'source' of all truth and thus of all intelligibility, or, if you prefer, the ultimate 'ground' of all truth and intelligibility.

Ad (4). This is Nietzsche's view.  Tod Gottes = Tod der Wahrheit.

Ad (5). I have the impression that certain post-Nietzschean POMO-heads hold this. It is a view not worth discussing.

I should think only the first three views have any merit.  

Each of the three has difficulties and none of the three can be strictly proven.

I will mention quickly a problem for the admittedly plausible first view.  

Among the truths there are necessary truths such as the laws of logic. Now a truth is a true truth-bearer, a true proposition, say. Nothing can have a property unless it exists. (Call this principle Anti-Meinong). So no proposition can have the property of being true unless the proposition exists. A necessary truth is true in every metaphysically possible world. It follows that a necessarily true proposition exists in every possible world including worlds in which there are no finite minds.  But a proposition is a thought-accusative that cannot exist except in, or for, a mind.  If there is no God, or rather, if there is no necessarily existent mind, every mind is contingent. A contradiction ensues: there is a world W such that, in W, there exists a thought-accusative that is not the thought-accusative of any mind.

Here are some ways an atheist might 'solve' the problem:

a) Deny that there are necessary truths.

b) Deny that truth is any sense a property of propositions.

c) Deny Anti-Meinong.

d) Deny that propositions are thought-accusatives; accept some sort of Platonism about propositions.

But each of these denials involves problems of its own which I would have no trouble unpacking.

Indexicality and Omniscience

Patrick Grim gives something like the following argument for the impossibility of divine omniscience. What I know when I know that

1. I am making a mess

is an indexical fact that no one else can know. At most, what someone else can know is that

2. BV is making a mess

or perhaps, pointing to BV, that

3. He is making a mess.

Just as no one except BV can refer to BV by tokening the first-person singular pronoun, no one except BV has access to the indexical fact that, as BV would put it to himself, I am BV. Only BV is privy to this fact; only BV knows himself in the first-person way. Now an omniscient being knows everything that can be known. Although I am not omniscient, there is at least one proposition that I know — namely (1) — that is not known by any other knower, including an omniscient knower. So an omnisicent being is impossible: by its very definition it must know every fact that can be known, but there are indexical facts that it cannot know. God can know that BV is making a mess but he cannot know what I know when I know that I am making a mess. For any subject S distinct from God, the first-person facts appertinent to S are inaccessible to every mind distinct from S, including God's mind. That is what I take to be Grim's argument.

I suppose one could counter the argument by denying that there are indexical facts.  But since I hold that there are both indexical propositions and indexical facts, that response route is not available to me.  Let me see if I can respond by making a distinction between two senses of 'omniscience.'

A. X is omniscient1=df X knows every fact knowable by some subject or other.

B. X is omniscient2 =df X knows every fact knowable by some one subject.

What indexical facts show is that no being is or can be omniscient in the first sense. No being knows every indexical and non-indexical fact. But a failure to know what cannot be known does not count against a being's being omniscient in a defensible sense of this term any more than a failure to do what cannot be done counts against a being's being omnipotent. A defensible sense of 'omniscience' is supplied by (B). In this second sense, God is omniscient: he knows every fact that one subject can know, namely, every non-indexical fact, plus all facts pertaining to the divine subjectivity. What more could one want?

Since no being could possibly satisfy (A), (A) is not the appropriate sense of 'omniscience.' Compare omnipotence. An omnipotent being cannot be one who can do just anything, since there are both logical and non-logical limits on what any agent can do.  Logical: God cannot actualize (create) an internally contradictory state of affairs. Non-logical: God cannot restore a virgin.  So from the fact that it is impossible for God to know what is impossible for any one being to know, it does not follow that God is not omniscient.

To sum up. There are irreducible first-personal facts that show that no being can be omniscient in the (A)-sense: Patrick Grim's argument is sound. But the existence of irreducible first-personal facts is consistent  with the truth of standard theism since the latter is committed only to a being omniscient in the (B)-sense of 'omniscience.'

Does Omniscience Require Incarnation? Pursuing Some Consequences

Dr. Vito Caiati  occasioned in  me a new thought the other day: that divine omniscience might require divine incarnation.  The gist of the thought is as follows. If God is all-knowing, then he possesses not only all knowledge by description, but also all knowledge by acquaintance. But it is not easy to see how God in his disincarnate state  could have all or any  knowledge by acquaintance of beings whose subjectivity is realized in matter.  And this for the simple reason that if God is a pure spirit then his subjectivity is real without being realized in matter.

One could know everything there is to know objectively  about bats but still not know subjectively, 'from the inside,' what it is like to be a bat in Thomas Nagel's sense.  Objective omniscience is compatible with subjective nescience.  To know what it is like to be a bat I would have to be one: I would have to have the physiological constitution of a bat.  And so for God to know what it is like to be a man dying on a cross God would have to be a man dying on a cross.  To have objective knowledge of every aspect of dying on a cross is not to experience dying on a cross. That's the rough idea.  It has interesting and troubling consequences which I didn't pursue on Saturday night. So I am pleased to hear from Jacques.

Jacques writes,

I agree that God has to become a human being in order to know everything. But, as you say, this seems to lead to further problems. Here are two things that come to mind. 

First, there would be the same problem with respect to every sentient being. God has to be one of us in order to know certain perspectival or subjective facts about us. But God also has to be a bat or a beetle, for the same reason, if God is to be truly omniscient.

It seems so.

But in addition, it's not enough for omniscience that God has been incarnated once as a certain type of being. After all, that would mean only that God knows what it's like to have been that human being–a male one, living in the Roman empire, etc. Surely God also needs to know what it's like to be a woman, or a Mayan, or whatever. And also needs to know what it's like to be me as opposed to you, and you as opposed to me. Does this mean that believing in an omniscient God rationally supports some kind of Hindu-ish or pantheistic theory over Christianity? (Or does it mean that Christianity properly understood implies that God is every single one of us, and every bat and beetle?)

This is much less clear.  You and I are two numerically different human beings, but I don't need to be you  in order to know what it is like to be you.  Despite the privacy of experience, most if not all of our sensory qualia are similar if not qualitatively identical.  Lacking the special powers of Bill Clinton, I can't feel your pain: I cannot live through numerically the same pain experiences you live though when you are in some definite kind of pain, such as non-migraine headache. Your experiencings are in your psyche; mine are in mine. But I know what it is like when you have a headache since the subjective qualitative features of the experiencings are the same or very similar.  What makes this possible is that we are animals of very similar physiological constitution.  I suspect that sensory qualia are universals of a sort.

I am not a woman and I so I don't quite know what it is like to experience menstrual cramps. But I know what muscle cramps are like, and so I have some basis for empathy with the distaff contingent of child-bearing years.

And so I would not go so far as to say that for God to know what it is like to be a human, he must be or become every human.  It suffices for him to become a human. Nor is it necessary that he become a woman for him to know what it is like to be a woman.

But then there is this consideration:

Is there something it is like to be me, this particular person, numerically different from every other person?  Sometimes I have the strong sense that there is.  Call it one's irreducible haecceity (thisness) or ipseity (selfness).  It is irreducible in that it cannot be reduced to anything repeatable or multiply exemplifiable or anything constructed out of repeatable  or multiply exemplifiable elements. This is a sort of quale that I alone have and experience and that no one distinct from me could have or experience. We are all unique, but each of us has his own uniqueness 'incommunicable to any other' as a scholastic might say. I sometimes have the sense that each of us is uniquely unique as a person, as a subject in the innermost core of his subjectivity. And sometimes it seems that I know what it is like to be this uniquely unique person, absolutely irreplaceable and (therefore?) infinitely precious  and of absolute worth.

If God exists, he is super-eminently uniquely unique and we, who are made in his image and likeness, are derivatively uniquely unique.

Trouble is, this notion of a uniquely unique haecceity tapers off into the mystical. For my thisness or your's or anything's is ineffable. It cannot be conceptually articulated or put into language. Individuum ineffabile est as a medieval Aristotelian might say.  Is the ineffable nonexistent because ineffable?   That was Hegel's view. Or is the ineffable existent despite being ineffable? That was the Tractarian Wittgenstein's view: Es gibt allerdings das Unaussprechliche.   One cannot eff the ineffable. Does this mean that it is not there to be effed? Or does it mean that effing is not the proper mode of access to the existent ineffable? I incline in the latter direction. 

Now suppose that each person at the base of his subjectivity is uniquely unique and is acquainted with his own irreducible haecceity and ipseity. How could God know anyone's haecceity?  He can't know it objectively, and to know my haecceity subjectively, as I know it, God would have to be me.  This leads on to the heretical thought that for God to be all-knowing, he would have to be every sentient being, as Jacques appreciates.

Second, it seems that having all objective knowledge precludes subjectivity and vice versa. While incarnated as a particular man, with a perspective and personality, God was not simultaneously aware of all objective facts. That kind of awareness would seem to make it impossible to have a perspective and a personality. So is true omniscience impossible? Either you know everything objective, or you know only something objective and only something subjective. I don't mind this result too much. I have no strong intuition that omniscience is possible. But then what should a Christian or other theist believe about God's knowledge? 

A God's eye view is a View from Nowhere (to allude to a title of one of T. Nagel's books.) An incarnate God would have to have a definite perspective and personality.  But then he could not be objectively omniscient. If, on the other hand, he were objectively omniscient, then he could not be incarnate.  That seems to be what Jacques is saying.

It might be replied that that Jesus qua God is objectively omnisicent but subjectively nescient, but qua man is objectively limited in knowledge but has knowledge of qualia. If that makes sense, then we could say that an incarnate God knows more than the same God aloof from matter. For then the incarnate God knows everything the disincarnate God knows plus what it is like to be a man, and by analogy what it is like to be a cat or a dog or any sentient being sufficiently similar in physiological make-up to a man.

Is true omniscience possible? If true omniscience requires knowing everything there is to know, both objectively  (by description) and subjectively (by acquaintance), then true or full omniscience is impossible, i.e., no one person could be fully omniscient.  What then should a Christian theologian say?

He could perhaps say this: God is omniscient in that he knows everything that it is possible for any one person to know.  Now it is not possible that any one person know everything both objectively and subjectively. Therefore, it is no restriction of God's omniscience that he does not know everything.

Could an eternal God know what time it is? Presumably not. Could God be both omniscient and ignorant with respect to future contingents?  Why not?  God knows whatever it it possible to know; future contingents, however, are impossible for anyone to know.

It is like the situation with respect to omnipotence. It is no restriction of God's omnipotence that he can do only what it is logically possible to do.  God is powerless to restore a virgin. But that's nothing against the divine omnipotence.

Robert Spaemann Dies at 91

Professor Robert Spaemann, Philosopher and Advocate of the Traditional Mass, Dies at 91. (HT: Kai Frederik Lorentzen)

See also, Philosophie und Glaube: Vom Tod von Robert Spaemann. Excerpt:

Gott als Grundlage aller Wahrheitsansprüche

Gottesglaube ist weder Bedingung für wahre Urteile noch für Gewissensüberzeugungen. Aber da die Existenz Gottes der ontologische Grund beider und in ihnen impliziert ist, beseitigt die Leugnung Gottes die Grundlage aller Wahrheitsansprüche und aller sittlicher Überzeugungen und damit tendenziell diese Ansprüche selbst.

God as Foundation of all Truth Claims

Belief in God is a condition neither of true judgments nor of convictions of conscience. But because the existence of God is implied by both and is the ontological ground of both, the denial of God does away with the foundation of all truth claims and all moral convictions, and thereby tends to do away with these claims and convictions themselves. (tr. BV)

You don't need to believe in God to make  true statements. Atheists make many true statements. And you don't need to believe in God to have correct moral convictions. Atheists have many correct moral convictions. But if there is no God, then there is no truth including moral truth. If there is no God, there are no truths to state.  Atheists don't need to know that God exists to make true statements, but if there is no God, then they cannot make true statements.

But is it obvious that: no God, no truth?  It is not obvious but it can be persuasively argued. Here is a rough sketch of one such argument.  The laws of logic are not only true, they are necessarily true. As we say in the trade, they are true in all possible worlds. Now finite minds are not to be found in every possible world: there are possible worlds in which there are no finite minds, Furthermore, truth cannot exist outside of a mind: truth resides in minds to the extent that said minds are in contact with extramental reality.   Since the laws of logic are necessarily true, there must be a necessary mind. And this all men call God.

Now that was quick and dirty. I present the argument with considerably more rigor and intellectual cleanliness here.

How Can Anyone Live for This Life Alone?

This just over the transom:

There's a question I've been pondering for some time that I'd like your opinion on if you're willing. I've always been fascinated by people who have been occupied and consumed by the things of the world- power, money, fame, sex, etc. For example, I just finished watching a documentary about Ronnie Coleman, one of, if not the most, famous body builders of all time. For him, body building was his life, he won 8 Mr. Olympia titles. Now, in his old age, he has horrible back issues from all his training and gets around on crutches. Yet he says he regrets nothing. There are countless examples of people who spend their entire lives devoted to the material and transient world, seemingly in complete ignorance of the Divine and the eternal.

As a Christian, I find it hard to understand how this is possible. If God does exist, and there is an eternal realm as Plato thought, then how can someone be 'satisfied' with a life that was devoted to the temporal and earthly realm? Is it that such persons are simply ignorant? Or perhaps such persons are willfully ignorant? As a person who has always had a religious disposition, like yourself, I find it hard to understand and sympathize with people who do not. 

Any thoughts you might have would be much appreciated. Thanks so much for your time. 

How can so many live for the goods of this life alone?

The short answer is that they don't take seriously the idea that there is any other life and any other goods.  It is not just that they don't believe that there is an eternal realm, Unseen Order, divine milieu, or whatever you want to call it.  It is not even an issue for them.  The question is idle and otiose: it simply does not arise for them in any existentially arresting form.  Questions about God and the soul are simply dismissed in the way almost all adults dismiss questions about Santa Claus.

But WHY don't they take Unseen Things seriously? 

It comes down to what could be called one's sense of reality.  For the worldling, the transient things of this world are as real as it gets, and all else is unreal. The impermanence of things and the brevity of life do not impress or shock him as they do someone with a religious sensibility.  The worldling doesn't take then as indices of unreality as a Platonist would. If you point out the brevity of life to a worldling he might give a speech like the following:

Precisely because life is short, one must not waste it.  Brevity does not show lack of reality or value, pace Plato and his latter-day acolytes such as Simone Weil, but how real and valuable life is. This life is as real as it gets.  It is precious precisely because it is short. Make the most of it because there is not much of it, but what there is of it is enough for those who are fortunate, who live well, and who do not die too soon. Don't waste your life on religious illusions!

The attitude here is that life is short but long enough and valuable enough, at least for some of us.  One should make friends with finitude enjoying what one has and not looking beyond to what is merely imagined.  Near the beginning of the The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus quotes Pindar, "O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible." (Pythian, iii)

A frat boy might put it like this:

Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust
Life is short
So party we must.

Or in the words of a 1970 beer commercial:

You only go around once in life
So you have to grab for all the gusto you can.

This attitude of the worldling is possible because it is actual and indeed widespread more so now than ever before in history, in good measure because of our technology that extends life and makes it vastly  more endurable than in previous centuries. Our 24-7, 365(6) connectivity also practically insures that we will remain trapped within the sphere of immanence and be unable to 'pick up any signals' from beyond the human horizon. 

The worldling's attitude is a matter of sensibility and it is difficult to argue with anyone's sensibility. I cannot argue you out of your sense of reality. Arguments come too late for that.  In fact, arguments are often little more than articulations on the logical plane  of a sensibility deep in the soul that was already in place before one attained explicit logical skills.

Is the worldling ignorant?

My reader and I would say he is. But how prove it either to him or to us? Can one PROVE that God and the soul are real? No. At best one can give a number of plausible arguments for these 'objects' and a number of plausible arguments against metaphysical naturalism. But at the end of the day one is going to have to invoke certain mystical vouchsafings, intimations, glimpses, revelations, teachings of some magisterium deemed finally authoritative, all of which are easily hauled before the bench of reason to have their veridicality questioned. In the end, a leap of faith. You will have to decide what to believe and how to live.

Suppose I take the 'bite of conscience' as pointing to the existence of a Supreme Moral Authority of a personal nature.  I could make a very strong case. But would it be rationally compelling? No.  Could I ever be objectively certain that no naturalistic explanation could account adequately for the deliverances of conscience?  I don't think so.

Is the worldling morally culpable for his ignorance?

Some might be, but in general, he is not.  Pace St. Paul at Romans 1: 18-20, I don't find unbelief to be morally culpable.  It is neither evident that God exists nor evident that he does not exist.

If God Cannot Cause Himself, How Can He Know Himself?

This from a reader:

If we say God cannot create himself since this implies a contradiction (God existing prior to himself to act on himself), how can we say God does anything with regard to himself?

For instance, we say God knows himself. But how is this possible, seeing as God would need to first exist, in order to know himself? Knowledge is a relation in the mind to what is outside it. If I "know" a thing, I have the thing, the thing that is not me, in my mind. But if there is only simply God, how does he "have" himself in his mind?

An interesting question worth thinking about.

I grant that God cannot create himself. For if he creates himself then he causes himself to exist, and nothing can cause itself to exist. For a thing cannot enter into a causal relation unless it exists. So if God causes himself to exist, then his existence is logically, if not temporally, prior to his existence. And that, we agree, is impossible.

The main point is that the existence of a thing cannot be logically prior to its existence. (And if it cannot be logically prior, then it cannot be temporally prior either.) But the existence of a knower not only can but must be logically prior to its self-knowledge.  I cannot know myself unless I exist, but I can exist without knowing myself. In the finite case, then, it is clear that existence is logically prior to self-knowledge, and indeed other-knowledge as well.

God knowsNow God is omniscient and exists in all possible worlds.  So there is no possible situation in which he does not know himself or fails to know everything there is to know about himself. If we think of God as omnitemporal as opposed to eternal, then at every moment he enjoys full self-knowledge. At every moment, his existence and self-knowledge are simultaneous. But this is not a problem since there is no problem with God's existence being logically prior to his self-knowledge even if the former is not temporally prior to the latter.  We get the same result if God is eternal.

In sum, God's existence cannot be logically prior to God's existence as it would have to be if God creates himself. But God's existence can be logically prior to God's self-knowledge.

There is a second problem that the reader conflates with one I just discussed.   If God alone exists, how can God know himself if "Knowledge is a relation in the mind to what is outside it"?  This problem is solved by denying the assumption. Self-knowledge is NOT a relation to what is outside the mind.  I feel good right now, and I know it. The object of my knowledge is an internal state. God's self-knowledge can be said to be analogous to finite self-knowledge.