Exploring Extrinsic Models of Divine Knowing

Traditional metaphysical arguments for the existence of God get us to a primary cause of the existence of contingent, composite, and changing things that is itself necessary, non-composite, and immutable. In short, because God explains certain categories of things, God transcends those categories.

But there have been objections.

If God is immutable, then how can God have knowledge of changing things, assuming of course (as classical theism does) that God was free to create different worlds or no world at all.

Call this the “Changing Knowledge” objection to classical theism.

God’s eternity may provide part of the solution: since God is not moseying along in time, his knowledge of things that do exist in time is not changed by their being in time, since God is outside time. Or in other words, everything in time is simultaneously present before God in His eternity.

Unfortunately, the eternity solution — if successful — only gets us an in fact immutability; not an in principle immutability, which is what classical theism requires. Presumably, God still could have caused a different contingent order of things in time, and would this not put some intrinsic passive potency in God that could have been actualized? And wouldn’t that be incompatible with classical theism, which says God has no intrinsic passive potency (or accidents) because God is purely actual (which rules out intrinsic passive potency) and non-composite (which rules out intrinsic accidents). So, more must be said to defend God’s in principle immutability than God being eternal. This is where the extrinsic models come in.

Extrinsic models preserve classical theism by pushing all contingency (= passive potency) extrinsic to God. Because classical theism maintains that only God’s real, intrinsic being is identical and immutable, if what we are predicating of God does not pertain to God’s real, intrinsic being, then classical theism is off the hook if those predications involve contingency, or compositeness, or potency, etc. In fact, such predications have been considered to fall under the category of being “merely Cambridge” inasmuch as they describe the relations God bears to things extrinsic to himself (such as God being creator of the universe) and because these relations involve no intrinsic change to God’s real being but something extrinsic to God coming to exist with a causal-dependence relation on God, classical theism is unscathed, because the potency in this case relates only to God’s active potency (= God’s ability to bring about some effect without himself under going any real, intrinsic change).

Naturally, there are assumptions at play in these accounts, one of which is that effects can differ without the cause changing intrinsically or essentially, which is just what various extrinsic models – including Matthews Grants extrinsic model of divine simplicity—propose. In short, because God’s action is 1) basic and immediate and 2) the action of the agent is in the patient, God bringing about (or “choosing,” “intending,” “deciding upon,” etc) some created effect requires nothing other than that created effect coming about (based on reasons God has in knowing himself, but which do not demand God create) with a causal-dependence relation on God. In which case all contingency, all potency, is extrinsic to God, with God remaining entitatively the same whether he creates world (x), world (y), or no world at all.

But doesn’t the situation become more complicated with knowledge? The answer — the fair answer, anyway — is yes and no. In one sense, the situation is no more complicated inasmuch as extrinsic models can be utilized with respect to God’s knowing contingent objects; in another sense, it is more complicated inasmuch as we must accept that God’s mode of knowing is not our mode of knowing (which shouldn’t be surprising, given God’s transcendence and how natural theology works, which is apophatically and analogically).

Let us begin by examining Alexander Pruss’s model, which he provides a sketch of in his book Infinity, Causation, and Paradox. Pruss suggests the possibility of a “theater of perception” model with respect to God’s knowing and believing, which he describes this way, “On the Cartesian model of perception, our sense impressions are on display in something we might call the theater of the mind. We should not suppose, however, that the mind in observing the sense impressions always forms further representations of these sense impressions, for if it always did that, we would have a vicious regress of impressions. Rather, the mind, without having further representations of sense impressions cause in it, directly perceives the sense impressions that are on the mental theater’s stage. The sense impressions are explanatorily prior to our perceivings in a constitutive rather than causal way: our act of perceiving saltiness is constituted by an activity of the mind plus a salty sense impression.”

Pruss says he is skeptical that the theater of the mind represents an accurate account of our perception but argues it is nevertheless plausible as a model of God’s knowledge and that the events of the world do not cause impressions or thoughts in God (and so we avoid needing not posit some intrinsic passive potency) but are only explanatorily prior to divine beliefs in a constitutive way: in other words, God’s beliefs about contingent events are constituted by the events they are about together with the activity of God’s mind. Pruss’s proposal connects to our concern about intrinsic accidents in God in the follow way, when he says, “But, necessarily, God believes only and all true propositions. Thus, the property of God believing that p, where p is a contingent truth, is a property that God will lack in worlds where p is not true, and hence it is an accidental property. It cannot, thus, be an intrinsic property. Hence, the classical theist has to say that God’s beliefs about contingent truths are partially constituted by items external to God. And it is particularly elegant to take the facts that the beliefs are about as those items, which then gives us the above model.”

Pruss’s model handles the objection head on while (presumably) entertaining the possibility that God has propositional knowledge, an assumption which may be independently challenged, as Robert Koons has indicated: “We have to distinguish between knowing a proposition and propositional knowing. For example, I know the (false proposition) that 2 + 2 = 5. I know it as an object of acquaintance, not propositionally. Conversely, a small child might know (propositionally) that 2 + 2 = 4, without being familiar at all with the proposition. God knows all propositions, but non-propositionally.”

Either way, we can let that issue alone, because it is not essential to settle that now. The point is simply that anything contingently related to God’s knowledge/belief on this model is grounded extrinsic to God, which preserves not just simplicity but immutability, and since classical theism is amenable to God having different or changing extrinsic (Cambridge) properties, the threat is alleviated.

Pruss’s model is sufficient to stalemate objections against God’s immutable knowledge based on God’s ability to have created otherwise, because one can always insist that Pruss’s model (or something like Pruss’s model) must be true given the traditional metaphysical arguments for God, and though it remains mysterious how God’s mode of knowledge works, we are entitled to at least a moderate helping of mysterianism given God’s transcendence. (Pruss has two recent blogs on this as well. See here and here.)

However, more can be said, which is where W. Matthews Grant and Fr. Norris Clarke come in.  

Let us turn to the model proposed by W. Matthews Grant, which he calls the extrinsic model of divine simplicity (and which he extends to divine knowing).

Here is the executive summary: If only God exists then God knows himself perfectly, and in God’s perfect self-knowledge is embedded knowledge of all the ways anything else could participate in existence. God in knowing himself perfectly also knows – in one single, simple, self-reflective insight – all the reasons it might be good to create things other than himself, though he is free to refrain from doing so. Importantly, God knows, in knowing himself perfectly, that nothing else could exist unless God causes it. Thus, it is not that God knows “there are no unicorns, etc” if God has not created unicorns; rather, it is that in knowing himself, God comprehends the nature of anything else that could be instantiated and included in that knowledge is the fact that such natures are contingent and could never exist apart from God’s causal influx. Such knowledge will always be true, invariant across possible worlds, if you will. Then, should God decide to create, the only difference is that whatever God decides to create is created and now exists with a causal dependence relation on God. However, the only difference “on the ontological scene” between the world where God doesn’t create and world where God does create is the created object with its causal dependence relation on God, in which case God remains really and essentially/intrinsically the same across all possible worlds. Mutatis mutandis with God’s knowledge, for on Grant’s model God knowing some created contingent reality just is that created contingent reality existing because of God’s causing it for a reason (which is enough to say God acts intentionally). In other words, God knows the contingent reality in the intentional causal act of bringing it about (which is distinct from God). As Grant explains, “If God knows contingent objects in the act of intentionally bringing them about and if, as EM maintains, God’s intentionally bringing an entity about does not involve anything intrinsic to God that would not exist were God not bringing that entity about, then God can know contingent objects without there being any intrinsic accidents in God.” (Free Will and God’s Universal Causality.)

At this point it should be added that, at least according to Thomistic psychology, to know a thing is to possess the form of a thing objectively. But God understands one object – namely, the divine essence itself – and embedded in that all the ways anything could partake in existence. Thus, if God had not created, it is not as if God knows, say, propositionally and individually, “there are no zebras, there are no elephants, there are no humans, etc.” Rather what God knows is that God is the fullness of existence as such and that nothing else could exist unless he causes it (whether the form of zebra, elephant, human, etc), because part and parcel of God’s understanding of zebra (or any reality distinct from God) is the fact that no such reality could be real in the first place unless God brings it into existence. Further, because there is no form to possess objectively relating to the proposition “there are no zebras, etc” there is accordingly no contingent accident that could be placed in God had God not created; instead, there is only the form of zebra, which God knows perfectly though analogically through knowing himself. Then, should God create a zebra, the only difference is on the side of the created object: that is, the only difference on the ontological scene is there is now some zebra existing with its casual-dependence relation on God, since God’s intentional action is 1) basic, 2) immediate, and 3) in the patient. So, God remains intrinsically the same whether God creates or does not create.

There is one final model (for our purposes, anyway) where the threat of contingent accidents with respect to God’s knowledge of contingent things is alleviated. Fr. Norris Clarke advances a traditional distinction between real and intentional being.

I’ll quote an extended passage from his essay A New Look at the Immutability of God (found here) to present the idea, “Now, the only being of an object of knowledge, existing as such in a knowing consciousness, is, as ST. Thomas puts it, its being-known: esse eius consistit in ipso intelligi (its to-be is its to-be-thought-about). It has no real being of its own, but exists entirely within the consciousness of the knower, with an ‘existence’ or presence given and maintained entirely by the react act of knowing in the knower, and only as long as the knower actually thinks about it. Hence its intentional mode of being is entirely according to the mode of being of the knower: if the knower is completely spiritual in its own being, then the mode of being of the object as known will also be completely spiritual, even though it may be of or about the most solidly material thing imaginable. And since the order of intentional being within a knower is intelligibly distinct from – although, of course, always inseparable from and dependent on – the order of its real being, it follows that multiplicity, materiality, or motion in the intentional objects of consciousness do not in any way of themselves divide up, materialize, or introduced change into the real being of the knower. (It should be noted, of course, that the distinction between the real act of a mind thinking and the intentional being of the contents of its thinking cannot be, for St. Thomas, a real distinction, since that would require that both terms be real. It is a sui generis ‘relation of reason,’ i.e. a relation of distinct intelligibility holding between a real act of thinking and its idea-content. Hence when St. Thomas insists on the real identity in God of the intentional order with the one, simple, infinite act of existence that is God’s real being, this should be taken in its strict technical meaning as denying all multiplicity of real beings or real acts in God. But this does not in the least deny the formal distinction of intelligibilities between the two orders: the one real act of divine thinking, on the one side, and the many distinct intelligibilities God is thinking about in the intentional order, on the other. Thus a spiritual knower can know a material object, without its own real being or its real act of knowing being material; introducing multiplicity into its own real being or into the real act by which it knows them; it can know things in motion without its own being or its own act of knowing being in motion. If, however, it has to receive the content of its knowledge by action of the object itself on it from without, then the real being of the knower must itself undergo real change as the necessary complement of its new content of knowledge. This is not the case with God’s knowing.”

Clarke also furnishes a model which shows how God can be truly even if not really (using traditional terminology) related to his creatures which counters the charge that the God of classical theism is not only spooky but unfriendly.

Finally, Clarke provides some speculative (though plausible) thoughts on how even a contingent creatures free actions can fit into his model, which complements the work Grant has done to secure libertarian freedom via divine simplicity. But that I leave for the reader to investigate on their own, by comparing the two accounts.

I must emphasize the purpose of presenting these models isn’t to argue for the ultimate correctness of any of them (maybe they are all false?) but to show there are ways of affirming God can have knowledge of changing things without himself changing intrinsically or essentially, which is all that’s needed to avoid the charges against divine simplicity and immutability – in a word, classical theism.

Either way, there are seeds in these accounts for a fuller, richer story, and while I believe objections against classical theism from God’s contingent knowledge can be halted by invoking a principled mysterianism, one is still curious to see how much further these extrinsic models can be developed. Just in case anybody is considering PhD topics ; )

For more:

- Pat

PS - Of course, I have only scratched the surface of available models. Eleonore Stump has her own way of handling these issues in Aquinas; as does Peter Totleben. Also, Maritain and Marin-Sola. Grant has other models, as well. Finally, Rob Koons deals with a related objection — modal collapse — here. Happy reading!