Does God Know that He Isn't a Brain In a Vat?
I’ve long thought that global skepticism is a serious philosophical concern. I believe internalism doesn’t effectively thwart the issue, and externalism only delays it. Take, for example, proper functionalism, which claims we can count certain beliefs as genuine knowledge (warranted, rational, etc.) because such beliefs are produced by properly functioning faculties generally designed to get at truth, generally good at getting truth, and operating in the kind of environment they’re meant to be in. Setting aside all the usual objections that can be levied against that view, it’s clear this isn’t something you can take all the way home. If you’re a theist, you might rightly ask: what about God’s knowledge? Surely, nobody—no theist, anyway—should want to say that God’s knowledge itself requires a certain design plan.
The point here isn’t to endorse proper functionalism (or some other form of externalism) but simply to show that even if one thinks externalism initially solves some issues, they’re bound to crop up again at the meta-level or concerning divine epistemology. For example, how does God know He isn’t a brain in a vat?
Here are my half-baked thoughts on the matter, and perhaps some reason for endorsing divine simplicity.
Philosophers have, over the centuries, attempted to account for why skeptical scenarios arise or are even possible in the first place. For Descartes, skepticism arises from the interaction of moving parts—particularly intellect and will—and the potential for divergence or failure between the two.
But there are other conditions that philosophers claim invite (at least the possibility of) skepticism. For example:
Propositional/Representational belief states.
Mind-world gap.
Imagination (which James Ross called the "master of falsity").
Finitude/inattentiveness.
One interesting thing about divine simplicity is that the very reason many people reject it—namely, because it’s so utterly “spooky”—also provides reasons for thinking that none of these conditions apply to God. While it may not be possible to know exactly *how* God infallibly knows He isn’t a brain in a vat—because it’s infinitely more difficult to know what it’s like to be (or know as) God than it is to know what it’s like to be (or know as) a bat—there is at least a negative or apophatic case to be made *that* God infallibly knows He is not a brain in a vat. We can see that the conditions that make skeptical scenarios possible simply do not arise in the case of classical theism, whereas it’s often clear that they do apply to other models of God.
God doesn’t have representational knowledge because He doesn’t have propositional knowledge. While God knows all true propositions, He knows them non-propositionally, which follows from divine simplicity. Regarding the external world, God believing that-p cannot be the case unless that-p is true, since God only believes that-p if He is actively bringing about that-p. Why so? Because, for the classical theist, God’s knowledge of the created world is entirely active or executive. In other words, divine simplicity compels us to acknowledge something crucial about God and the external world: part of what it means for God to know something about created reality is that His justifiably believing it to be a certain way is partially constitutive of it actually being that way. If it weren’t the way He believes it to be, then it wouldn’t be that way. This resolves the problem of the criterion for God, eliminating any insuperable epistemological gap between believing that-p and that-p actually being the case with respect to anything apart from God.
Put another way, for the classical theist, God doesn’t need to scan the world to see what’s going on, because whatever is happening is only happening insofar as God is causing it to be. This provides a nice model for how God is in “reliable cognitive contact” with the world—because, honestly, the idea that God just has some infallible scanning organ is hardly satisfying. God also has no moving parts, given divine simplicity, especially between His intellect and will, so Descartes’ worry is ruled out. God has no imagination either, since imagination is restricted to finite material beings (see Ross for why this is necessary for us but not for God), nor does God have the issue that finite beings have of not attending to certain things at certain times. God eternally knows all things by knowing one thing: the divine essence. It seems, then, that all the major conditions for skepticism and doubt—at least the ones I can think of—do not, and could not, apply to the God of classical theism.
Moreover, given simplicity, God just is unrestricted being, just is unrestricted truth, just is unrestricted knowing. There is no space or distance between the being, truth, and knowing of God, and thus, no conceptual room for error or non-truth.
Again, all this leaves God’s precise mode of knowing quite mysterious, but it does provide good reason to assume that God knows everything about everything infallibly and incorrigibly. Skepticism, therefore, is not a concern given divine simplicity, at least at the level of divine cognition. Final thought: might it also be the case that if we follow Aquinas’s “spooky” account of divination (participation in the Godhead), where in heaven we not only know what God knows but know as God knows, then perhaps, at last, we will attain the certainty we long for on earth but cannot achieve given the inherent conditions and limitations of creaturely nature? I find this to be an extremely attractive understanding of heaven: after all, if heaven is the fulfillment of all relevant desires (i.e., real goods for us), surely certain knowledge should be attainable there. But how? My thought—the best I can do—is that something radically other and truly transcendent is required, which divine simplicity combined with Aquinas’s account of divination seemingly provides. Thus, another (again, admittedly half-baked) reason why I am a classical theist.
UPDATE 9/26: Gaven Kerr fills in the rest of the classical theistic picture, brilliantly.