“Sapientia is a directory of freely avaliable internet resources that pertain to issues in the philosophy of religion for research and education. As a collaborative effort, contributers are free to add and edit articles with the appropriate links to online articles, books, blogs, etc. This site was started by SCAE Ministries during the summer of 2009.”

We’re pleased to announce the opening of Sapientia, which is a new intiative aimed at indexing all freely avaliable internet articles pertaining to the philosophy of religion.  This includes journal entries, books, and blog posts. Nontheists are welcome to add quality articles that are critical of theism.  A section on Christian apologetics and theology is planned and will be added in the near future.

Feel free to sign up and start submitting resources!

Traditionally, some theologians and philosophers have held God to be immutable, that is, he is unchanging.  Since God is perfect, they say, He cannot change because any change would imply that either God loses something or that He gains something which he previously did not have.   Either of these would entail that God is not a perfect being.   It is implied that any change is either positive or negative.  However, why can’t there be such thing as a neutral change?  It certainly seems possible.   In fact, it seems that for God to be a personal being, He must change and additionally must exist temporally with His creation.  It also “seems counterintuitive that God would know all truths but not be able to distinguish between past, present, and future”.¹

Let’s say that I own a red car and that one day, I decide to paint it blue.  It will have changed, of course, but in what way?  Simply moving from one shade of color to another shade of color does not seen like a negative or a positive change.   One may argue that the car gains something that it previously did not have: Blue.  However, this misses the point of the analogy: The car still has the property of being colored.  In light of this, there doesn’t appear to be a good reason to believe in divine eternity (as opposed to divine everlastingness).²  It seems to me that most individuals who affirm divine eternity do so because of presuppositions about what constitutes perfection.

There are two possible ways in which God could change.  He could either change intrinsically or extrinsically.  Intrinsic change involves a change within God himself, whereas an extrinsic change involves a change in God’s relationship to His creation.   An example of an intrinsic change would be God’s knowledge of being Creator.  When God created the universe, he came to know what it is like to be Creator.  God’s act of creation was contingent — He very well could have not created anything.  If such were the case, then God would not have knowledge of what it is like to create certain things or that His creation exists.   When God creates, He gains contingent knowledge.³   On the other hand, an example of an extrinsic change would be God’s knowledge of tensed facts.   Call this moment T1, five minutes before this moment T2, and ten minutes from now T3.   As the current moment, God would know that the proposition “It is now T1″ to be true and “It is now T2″ to be false.  Similarly, he would know that “It is not yet T3″ to be true as well.  Assuming ten minutes have passed, God’s tensed awareness will have changed.  He will now know the proposition “It is now T1 to be false” and “It is now T3″ to be true.  ”Thus, if time passes, an omniscient being would have to be constantly updating its beliefs about what time is present.  Thus, an omniscient being accompanied by a temporal world would have to undergo change.”⁴

Even if one does not believe God to be everlasting (as opposed to eternal), it still seems that neutral change is certainly possible.  The presupposition that all change necessarily implies an imperfection is simply false.

1. Paul Copan, Loving Wisdom: Christian Philosophy of Religion (Chalice: St. Louis, MI. 2007). PP:35 [↩]
2. Divine eternity posits that God exists atemporally, that He is unable to change and that all change implies an imperfection as God.  Divine everlastingness, on the other hand, posits that God exists temporally with with the universe and atemporally without it. [↩]
3. Copan, Loving Wisdom, 36 [↩]
4. Michael J. Murray and Michael C. Rea, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge University Press: 2008) PP:47 [↩]

Before I begin, I don’t actually think this is a valid argument, but nonetheless it sounds interesting.  I found this argument while browsing around on Facebook groups regarding same-sex marriage.

According to Kant’s categorical imperative, one ought to “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”  This means that in considering the moral status of an action, one ought to consider it as if it were universalized.  Once done, if it is impossible for an individual to act in accordance with that action, then one ought not do it.  For example, consider lying.  In evaluating whether or not lying is morally permissible or not, we must universalize it.  However, if everyone were to lie, there would be no truth to lie about.  Therefore, we ought not lie.

Let us define homosexuality as the desire to have sexual intercourse with one’s own gender.  Now consider the proposition “I will engage only in homosexual activity.”   What happens when we universalize this proposition?  It follows that if everyone were to engage only in homosexual activity, then procreation could not take place.   Given such a world, nobody could be born, and thus nobody could exist to enact their homosexual desires, which leads to a contradiction.  Therefore, as rational persons, we ought not enact our homosexual desires.

Drama is at the heart of western society and is yearned by every human being. No matter who you are or where you go, there is always a place for drama and excitement in our lives. I had recently watched the movie UP which is about an old man who had a passion for adventure since he was a child. The interesting aspect of this is that his adventure was previously found in the ordinary things. He experienced life with a wife who expressed his same passion. Through pain, love, and eventually getting older, they represent a long life of two loving couples committed to experiencing a life of drama with each other. 

The illustration demonstrates that not only do humans seek for drama in movies, books, history, news etc, but that it is also sought for in our very own personal lives. However, we often find our lives boring in comparison to the drama that we see in stories. As a result of being dissatisfied, we look for substitutes to satisfy the void in our lives through things like sports, celebrities, stories etc. In other words, we concern ourselves more with the drama of others (be it fictional or non-fictional) than in seeking for authentic drama in our lives.

Such an attitude is akin to socializing with robots, instead of seeking to do so with real people. This is how western society functions, and for the most part, is a product of a sensate culture that believes whatever can be verified or perceived by the five senses is all that there is. This worldview undermines the authentic drama that humans should be seeking in their own lives. If naturalism is true, there is no ultimate purpose but only an ultimate destruction that will laugh at our meaningless attempt at subjective purpose and survival.

An ideational culture embraces a supernatural or immaterial reality that can be known and is a reality consisting of God, free will, an afterlife, immaterial beings and purpose. Without values such as objective morality, we cannot be satisfied because those who mistreat us are simply doing so because it makes them feel good. Nor can anyone lead a life of character and wisdom unless he is being drastically inconsistent with his own worldview. Only theism offers a thick world that provides us with the drama that we truly desire. 

The above outlines how important a worldview is. We might not see it as dramatic, but just remember how marxism possessed the power to change a whole nation. We need to evaluate our own worldview with the same interest that we seek in a movie, or at least with as much concern. Naturalism contends that we really are nothing but chemical machines with no intrinsic worth. If this is true, we would not be inclined to think our lives are worthy of anything great but theism contends that we have a place in the magnificent kingdom of God that is filled with wonder, excitement and mystery. I encourage everyone to consider their worldview with passion and consideration. 

It seems to be  intuitively true that in order to know a posteriori knowledge, we must experience it or have empirical evidence for it.  To use Thomas Nagel’s classic example, in order to know what it is like to be a bat, one must experience it firsthand.  Thus, according to what is called concept empiricism, one’s knowledge of sensations and emotions (such as lust and envy) is contingent on their having experienced them.¹  If this is true, then it would seem that God, being omniscient, must know lust and envy and thus must have experienced it.   However this contradicts the very nature of God, and hence it is argued that God is necessarily non-existent.  Michael Martin structures the argument as:

1. If God exists, God has not had the feelings of lust or envy.
2. If God exists, God exists as a being who knows at least everything man knows.
3. If God exists as a being who knows at least everything man knows, God knows lust and envy.
4. If God knows lust and envy, God has had the feelings of lust and envy.
5. God exists.
6.  .: God has had and has not had the feelings of lust and envy.
7. God does not exist.²

Theists may respond to this argument in several different ways.  Some assert that God only have propositional and not experiential knowledge.  Others maintain that God can know feelings of lust and envy, yet in a way which does not compromise God’s necessary goodness.  The problem with the first solution seems obvious.  If God’s knowledge is only propositional and not experiential, then in addition to not knowing feelings of lust or envy, God cannot also know feelings of love or mercy!   Though it eliminates the problem, the solution itself would compromise several key tenets of God’s nature because there is no logical stopping point.    Thus, the theist cannot accept the first solution.

While it is indeed true in regards to contingent beings such as ourselves that we cannot know sensations or emotions without experiencing them, there is no reason why it should be true in regards to God.   It would only be true in regards to God if it were a necessary truth.  But there is nothing about concept empiricism which makes it necessary.  ”Even if human beings cannot grasp x without experiencing x, is this a self-evident principle that governs all possible forms of knowing?”³

One can certainly conceive of a possible world in which they know what it is like to swim because a demented neurosurgen implanted the memory in their mind.⁴  Moreover, there could exist a possible world in which I do know what it is like to fly a plane, but in which I imagine doing so, and that imagination is enough to justify my knowing what it is like to fly a plane.  Or perhaps there could exist a possible world in which I do not know what it is like to ride a roller coaster, but in which that experience was directly generated and implanted into me.   Being omnipotent, God could come to know what it is like to lust, envy, swim, fly, and ride a roller coaster without having to actually experience these things, as he could simply could just directly generate the event or imagine it.⁵

The theist can also argue that God’s experiential knowledge is perhaps known in the same way as his propositional knowledge. 

Everyone agrees that God need not acquire certain forms of knowledge that humans must acquire. For example, I have to study long and hard to master the Calculus. But God, if He exists, knows all mathematical truths eternally and essentially in virtue of His omniscience; He never has to learn mathematics. Maybe God’s knowledge by acquaintance, then, is like His mathematical knowledge: He does not acquire it, but simply has it.⁶

There thus are many possible ways in which God could know experiential knowledge in a way in which he does not need to experience it to know it.   In order to be binding on God, concept empiricism would have to be necessarily true.  But again, there is no reason to suppose this.  There is no contradiction in asserting that God could know experiential knowledge by directly generating it, imagining it, or knowing it in the same way he does propositional knowledge. There are a wide range of possibilities to which God could thus know experiential knowledge.   It seems questionable in the first place to generalize in such a way.

1. Charles Taliaferro, Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Oneworld. 2009) PP:36 [↩]
2. Michael Martin, A Disproof of God’s Existence. http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/michael_martin/disproof.html [↩]
3. Taliaferro, 38 [↩]
4. I do not believe that God could know things in this way, because he would have false memories [↩]
5. Alexander Pruss, Could God know what it is like to be a bat?,  http://prosblogion.ektopos.com/archives/2008/10/could-god-know.html [↩]
6. Tom Wanchick, Michael Martin on Divine Omniscience,http://christianfighter.blogspot.com/2005/07/michael-martin-on-divine-omniscience-i.html [↩]