In 1997 Nick Cave released a song, "Into My Arms", which begins in the following way:
I don't believe in an interventionist God
But I know, darling, that you do
But if I did, I would kneel down and ask Him
Not to intervene when it came to you
Oh, not to touch a hair on your head
Leave you as you are
If he felt he had to direct you
Then direct you into my arms
Into my arms, oh Lord
Into my arms, oh Lord
Into my arms, oh Lord
Into my arms
What is so fascinating about this song lyrically, so aesthetically compelling, is that it is so ambiguous, paradoxical. Cave states at the very beginning of it that he doesn't believe in an interventionist God but then the rest of the song is a prayer to just such an interventionist God. In its ambiguity it resembles "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen (and "All Apologies" by Nirvana). Quoting the first verse and chorus of this song seems a good way to begin this post; and the issue of whether God can be considered interventionist or not is something I will return to later in it.
This post is about God. In particular, it concerns the three traditional principal attributes of God: His omniscience, His omnipotence, and His omni-benevolence. I wish to present a partial argument for the existence of God – an argument that may in fact be original with me, that I might have come up with by myself. It follows from postmodern premises and is not one I have ever heard or read before. In presenting this argument, I am not committing myself to any belief in God, and certainly not committing myself to any particular religion. All the Abrahamic religions and many others outside the Judeo-Christian-Islamic nexus share the conception of God as being omniscient, omnipotent, and omni-benevolent and it is furthermore possible, in my view, that the supernatural might exist but for all current religions to be wrong about it, although a religion may arise in the future that has it right.
For a long time in this blog I have been presenting what amounts to a relativistic view of reality. Many years ago, in a post titled "True Statements About Fictional Entities" I argued that if I don't believe in Bigfoot, he is not an existent object in my world, but if you do believe in him, he is an existent object in yours. I returned to this type of argument in the post, "Fictional Objects." Essentially I have been proposing that there is not one world but many, a world for every conscious being (although different worlds overlap). This view of reality arises indirectly from my commitment to Meinongianism – a person's world is full of objects and some of them are real and some are fictional, and the distinction between the two classes of object can vary among different people. In the post "Evolution, Entropy, and the Ontological Argument For God", I went further. Because Descartes had a "clear and distinct" idea of God, God is real in his world; for those who lack such a clear and distinct idea of God, however, He is not real in theirs. God exists for those who believe in him and doesn't exist for those who don't. I did not set out to outline such a radical theory of reality when I started writing about these issues– rather it was forced on me by the logic I had been pursuing in writing these posts.
I still believe that the two most important posts I have written are the couple on quantum physics, "Probability and Schrondinger's Cat" and "Probability and Schrodinger's Cat Part 2". In those essays I argued that we have a choice – either we can suppose that every person inhabits a different world, or we can suppose that the reality is deterministic and settled but that there is some kind of non-local, hidden-variable theory operating that decides things in advance, independently of human consciousnesses. If we opt for the second alternative, this leads to the following conclusions– that the non-local hidden variables might be supernatural, and that the equations of quantum physics do not describe reality but instead describe what individuals can know about reality. (If this summation seems hard to follow, I suggest returning to these two original posts.) The argument I shall be presenting shortly has a family resemblance to the argument I advanced in those earlier essays.
I now want to put forward a new argument for relativism, one I haven't made before. Suppose my friend Geoff and I had a conversation ten years ago, and today I bring it up. I remember discussing eggplants. He however remembers discussing avocados. Which of us is right? A conversation that occurred ten years ago no longer exists: we can't point to anything which will enable us to settle the matter one way or the other. The trace the conversation left in his brain is different to the trace it left in my brain, and this is all we can say. We might, therefore, be forced to conclude that we are both equally right or both equally wrong.
The issue I am trying to discuss is relativism, and if there is an alternative to it. The fundamental question is: What is truth? The word 'true' has a variety of meanings, but the meaning I want pick out as most important, as most salient to what we are discussing, is that 'true' is a property that propositions or beliefs can either have or not have. This way of approaching the idea of 'truth' resembles the approach taken by the logician Gottlob Frege, except that he said that true propositions refer to the Truth, whereas I am arguing that truth and falsity are properties that propositions or beliefs can possess. The Truth (with a capital T) is simply the total set of all true propositions or beliefs.
If we embrace relativism, we are in essence proposing that there is more that one Truth, that the Truth is different for every single person. But to say, "What's true for you may not be true for me," is effectively to argue that there is no such thing as Truth at all. In fact, this has been a popular position among many philosophers. Nietzsche, for instance, argued that there was no such thing as truth, and it has been been a significant strain in postmodernism, with some postmodernists arguing, for instance, that truth is a social construction. But this is not a satisfactory solution. In the post "Concerning Truth" I discussed the pragmatist stance on truth and took a step towards a better solution, the solution I shall outline in a moment. Rorty's solution, pragmatism, is also only a partial solution. It seems that, to escape relativism, we need to go further than Rorty did. We need to pass right through postmodernism and out the other side.
The argument I shall present, now, is simple.
1. There is only one Truth. It is singular and unified.
2. The Truth is the set of all true beliefs.
3. Beliefs exist in the mind of a knower.
Therefore:
There exists a knower who knows all and only the Truth.
To put this argument more succinctly: If there is Truth, there must exist an omniscient mind (i.e. God).
This is not a watertight argument for the existence of God. It is simply an argument that we must either choose between total relativism or God. It is possible that God does not exist but only if we suppose that Truth also does not exist. This argument, which I admit could be clearer and which I may attempt to clarify better in a later post, is only an argument for an omniscient God, not an argument for an omnipotent or omni-benevolent God. In the remainder of this post I shall consider these other two fundamental attributes.
When we say that God is omnipotent, what do we mean? It seems to me that when people use this word they mean that God is potentially omnipotent. God is in a sense separate from the world: He steps in only when asked or when he feels like it. Suppose I am running late for work and I pray to God that I will catch the bus in time. Either God intervenes (by, say, causing the bus to run a little late) or he doesn't intervene, leaves the universe alone to run according to its own devices, and I fail to catch my ride. To speak of an interventionist God is to say that the universe can tick along quite nicely without Him, even if things don't always pan out the way we like, but that on occasion, as a response to prayer for instance, he can step in and cause things to occur. By contrast, if we say that we don't believe in an interventionist God (as Nick Cave does), we are saying that God is dispensable: the universe operates according to laws of nature, perhaps laws of nature established by God, but nevertheless laws of nature that wholly suffice to explain everything. If we say "I don't believe in an interventionist God" this is equivalent to saying, "I don't believe in miracles." Either way, whether we say we believe in an interventionist God or say we don't, we are saying that God stands apart from the world.
But if God is truly omnipotent, everything that happens happens because He wants it to happen. God is continually and continuously intervening in the world. If I succeed in catching my bus that is because He wants me to; if I fail to catch my bus, this is also because he wants me to, to be late for work. Omnipotence, by definition, has no limits. Everything that happens does so because it is God's will.
This brings us quite nicely to the third attribute: omni-benevolence. The problem of evil has two subcategories or subheadings: the evil that happens to people (as a result of, say, natural disasters like earthquakes and volcanos) and the evil that people do (evil actions). For the moment, I want to focus on the first sort. If God is omni-benevolent, how can He permit human suffering? Some people lead lives of total misery – if God is both omnipotent and omni-benevolent, how can He permit this to happen? The only answer is to suppose that there is an afterlife: we experience suffering so that we can appreciate happiness, either in this life or the next. Or perhaps suffering leads us to another positive value instead of happiness, such as wisdom or salvation, whatever that might be. Keats described the world as a 'vale of soul making' – perhaps it is through suffering that souls are forged. As Nietzsche said, "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger."
No discussion of the three fundamental attributes of God which touches on the problem of evil would be complete without a mention of the philosopher Alvin Plantinga. Plantinga presented an argument to address the second subcategory of evil: he argued that God created beings capable of committing immoral acts because a world of free individuals is more valuable than a world without free individuals. We can't choose good unless we are also capable of choosing evil. I don't find Plaintinga's argument convincing, however, because I am unsure that free will exists: I think it might be an illusion. Calvin advocated a view of the world in which free will didn't exist (he claimed that it was incompatible with God's omniscience) and proposed that people are born destined to be either saved or damned. Perhaps the world is a kind of industrial machine-like process that ushers people from birth through spiritual torment to death and then to some kind of higher spiritual state.
This post is not the most lucid post I have ever written, but I may return to these ideas in future essays. For now I want to summarise my three main conclusions.
1. If there is Truth, there must be an omniscient Knower (i.e. God)
2. If God is omnipotent, everything that happens happens because He wants it to happen.
3. If God is omni-benevolent, an afterlife must exist.
To finish up, I would like to reiterate that, although I am playing with religious ideas, I am not committed to any religion. All religions seem to me to hint at the truth but no one religion has it completely right. Maybe we go to heaven or hell when we die? Or maybe we are reincarnated? I don't know myself and I don't think anyone else does. I guess we just have to wait and see.
