Obviously God knows all. Perhaps the real question is: “What is there to be known?” But the questions are the same at a very fundamental level. What God knows is what there is to know and what there is to know is known by God.
First, if things are true, that is — if Creation is an image of some of God’s thoughts manifested in substance He created from nothing, then any true metaphysics or theology assumes we can, in some sense, ascend to the level of God’s knowledge. We have to assume we can achieve a God’s eye-view and see the truth in things.
Second, we have to remember that God the Creator isn’t the Transcendent God. No, I’m not multiplying Gods, only pointing out that God revealed truths directly to prophets, through the history of Israel and His Church, and in the life and words of the Lord Jesus Christ. But much of what we know of God is in the form of His thoughts, His acts-of-being or creative acts, as expressed in the world we live in. These are contingent acts and represent only an infinitesimal percentage of the possible acts He could have performed. And He could have chosen not to act at all as a Creator, not to create a world. Trying to understand God in His fullness by understanding His Creation is a bit like trying to understand a human writer of great versatility by analyzing a single word from one of his shortest stories.
Third, we have to avoid thinking like scholars or like dogmatists. We have to let God’s revealed truths mingle with human empirical knowledge, disciplining our imaginations to those truths and that knowledge but then giving our thoughts somewhat free rein. We must consider ourselves in light of St. Paul’s analogy to athletes. A fine race-horse would be still better. Train that horse hard and then give him free rein when he’s carrying you in the Kentucky Derby.
To discipline the mind is the hard part. In my book ( To See a World in a Grain of Sand), I recommended starting out with serious works of the imagination: “Moby Dick”, “Don Quixote”, “The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy”, “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, and others of that type. In my opinion, it’s imagination that needs nurturing as much as logical reasoning power and memorization skills. In modern times, imagination seems to have withered even more than literacy or abstract reasoning skills.
Why do I consider imagination so important? God has more freedom than traditional theology and metaphysics would allow Him. That freedom shows up in our universe as the lack of a systematic way to view that universe as a whole: browse through “The Road to Reality” by Roger Penrose and be amazed by the variety of exotic mathematics (such as non-Euclidean geometries) necessary to analyze and describe physical reality. If there is one theory of everything accessible to the human mind, it’s hiding under a complexity of interacting and consistent — but different — theories.
Neither mathematics nor metaphysics, nor even theology, provide answers so much as they provide ways of speaking about Creation and its Creator. To think that any specific mathematics or metaphysics gives us ultimate answers is to enchain God in Necessity. But we no longer have the option of even pretending that to be possible. As mathematics has expanded its ways of thinking and speaking, raising new possibilities that truly stretch the human mind, metaphysicians have only reluctantly responded and Christian theologians not at all. Even mathematical physicists have often responded to this expansion of possibilities by trying to isolate a subset of modern mathematics that will give that illusory “Theory of Everything”, a goal somewhat similar to the search of ancient and Medieval alchemist for occultish secrets to life or to the manufacture of gold.
Many philosophers and nearly all Christian theologians wish to restrict the possible understandings of Creation to those given by one variety or another of Hellenistic metaphysics, ignoring the historical fact that Hellenistic metaphysics was tied to, maybe even founded upon, Hellenistics mathematics which we now know to be true but to be only a small subset of mathematics.
Metaphysics teaches us the possibilities which God actualized when He created the truths which correspond to Creation in general while most efforts in theology strive to make sense of Creation in light of our very small stock of revelations directly from God. The problem with modern metaphysics and modern theology, at least in its Christian forms, is that they speak of a Creation and a Creator far smaller and far more impoverished in being than those implied by modern mathematics and by mathematical physics as practiced by thinkers who have wider viewpoints — such as Roger Penrose.
In prior posts such as God as the Creator of Truths, I’ve discussed these issues but constantly do I go over and over the ideas, looking for new ways to view matters and to discuss matters. In particular, I’ve discussed the findings of Chaitin, Kolmogorov, and others that numbers are ‘random’, that is, factual. The entire number line is a higher order infinity of facts, from which elegant or axiomatically constructed sets of facts can be selected. I have labeled that selection process as an act of creation, or an act-of-being possible only to God, but possible to us indirectly by way of the understanding that allows us to share in God’s creative powers.
So how does God think? What does He think about? I’ve spoken of this Creation as being one that God chose to actively love, bringing it into being by that act of love, or act-of-being. What does it mean to say that God thinks about other Creations but doesn’t chose to actively love them? Is there such a thing as passive love?
As a Trinitarian Christian, I would suggest we need to re-center some of our attention upon the Holy Persons of God and not just upon their community of love. Specifically, the modern empirical evidence that relationships might be primary and substance secondary (see A Christian’s view of Einstein’s and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality) gives us analogical reason to believe that something of the sort is true for God Himself. In fact, traditional creeds and many of the Fathers tell us: the Son proceeds from the Father. This might well be restated as saying: the Son exists to be loved by the Father. And it is the decision of the Son to show His love for the Father by a great act of obedience that led to Creation and to the shaping of this world. The world was created so the Son could sacrifice Himself to the Father, an act from which we benefit infinitely but our salvation wasn’t the main point of the crucifixion and resurrection of the Son. In His love for us whose life He shared, He created a bridge to eternal life which He can carry us across, but the drama of salvation was really a drama of love between the Father and the Son.
We’re entering new territory here as a result of an expanded understanding of Creation, of mathematics and — hence — metaphysics, even an expanded understanding of the possibilities of the human mind. We’re facing a need to strip out much of the empirical and speculative content of Christian theology, rebuilding upon the foundation of the small stock of revealed truths — see the Creed of Nicea for a concise statement of the ‘theological’ truths and the Sermon on the Mount for an authoratative statement of the ‘moral’ truths. Even the truths of creaturely morality point us towards a state where we can accept a relationship with God analogous to those between Father and Son and Holy Spirit.
As I’ve argued elsewhere: God’s revelations give us some knowledge of Himself in His Transcendence and also the purposes for which He has brought Creation into existence. Those revelations, in other words, tell us a little bit about God in His Transcendence and — along with empirical and speculative knowledge — a lot about His thoughts as Creator.
As Creator, God is a story-teller and the world is a morally meaningful narrative. The meaning is revealed most clearly in the crucifixion and resurrection of His Incarnate Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. In the current context, it’s more interesting but also far more frustrating to return to that question: what thoughts does God have from which His thoughts as a Creator are drawn?
This isn’t a Promethean quest to somehow capture the essence of divinity but rather a part of the effort to understand our Maker that we might respond properly to His offers of companionship. It also isn’t a quest to ever be completed. As unlikely as it is that we, even as a race, will come to a complete and accurate understanding of the universe, it’s far less likely we can achieve such a goal for all of Creation, and flat-out impossible that we can do it for God.
Still, if we have some sort of language for talking about the universe, a more encompassing (metaphysical) language for talking about all of Creation, a still more encompassing (theological) language for talking about God the Holy Trinity, we can talk when appropriate and perhaps have better judgment about being silent when appropriate.
Let me make a very tentative stab at language for talking about how God Himself thinks:
- We know that the universe resembles a narrative more than a designed construction and, so, we can speak of God as Creator of this world as also being the Author of this world. But the language of this narrative includes mathematical statements and a variety of other empirically founded statements covering the fields of physics and chemistry, biology and psychology, history and biography, poetry and fictions of all sorts.
- I’ve proposed that this world, the universe seen in light of God’s purposes for it, was shaped from something I call the Primordial Universe. This Primordial Universe is a manifestation of the truths God wished to use in shaping this world and also in shaping the world of the resurrected. The Primordial Universe would thus be a manifestation of all the complex mathematical systems which Penrose used in “The Road to Reality” and many more systems of truth — not all mathematical for sure. But, using and perhaps abusing, the insights of modern theorists of randomness (eg, Gregory Chaitin), I would propose the Primordial Universe to be analogous to absolute infinity, a chaos — if you will — of factuality from which elegant mathematical systems can be drawn. In the more general sense of Creator of all of Creation and not just this universe, God’s thoughts range over an absolute infinity of facts and from those facts, He can create systems which correspond to various systems of truths, including mathematical truths but not only those.
- And so we come to God in His transcendence. If the above two paragraphs give a general idea of appropriate language for speaking of God, in His freely chosen role as Creator of this role and in His freely chosen role as Creator of all of Creation, then we’re stuck. What thoughts can lie beyond the chaos which is an absolute infinity of facts from which can be created all the systems of truth human beings seemingly know or could know? I don’t know but possibilities have opened up that might allow us to speak even of God in His Transcendence, guided by both His direct revelations and those given to us in the physical universe and the systems of truth which we’ve derived from analysis of that universe and from imaginative thought based upon those systems of truth.
A modern program in natural theology would move towards God in His Transcendence by the three stages discussed above. It would require theologians, metaphysicians, and scientists who would have to be educated to extremely high standards and those thinkers would have to have a very wide range of talents. Following is an effort to state the three stages in a more programmatic way:
- First, we would understand God as much as possible by way of the decisions He made in shaping this particular universe. This would involve broad and deep learning of modern empirical knowledge, history and literature as much as physics and biology. This first stage is, at absolute best, the highest point reachable by a pure natural theology such as that advocated by Intelligent Design theorists, but it’s not a minor achievement to truly penetrate this stage. Many of those thinkers I foresee would do meaningful, even great, work in this first stage.
- Second, we would generalize by way of abstract reasoning. This would expand our views by way of proper consideration of modern logic, encompassing Aristotelian logic but much broader and deeper, and modern mathematics, encompassing Hellenistic mathematics but also much broader and deeper. I’m particularly fascinated by the possibilities in transfinite set theory which forces us to think in ways far beyond ‘everyday’ numbers and mathematical concepts. At the very least, transfinite set theory would seem necessary to re-establish the proofs of God’s existence on a firmer basis. This enlargening of our mathematical horizons would force a great enlargening of our metaphysical horizons as well.
- Finally, we reach a territory which is quite strange to finite creatures — that Act-of-being Who is Himself and is, thus, self-sustaining. We reach God. I have mixed feelings about any such stage, fearing and hoping that to reach this stage is to have the beatific vision which is the union with God described very tentatively by various mystics. Certainly, great mystics — though certainly not many even of the great saints — have reached this state without having any deep understanding of Creation. God can choose to bless anyone He pleases with direct communion in this life. That has no bearing on the program I’m proposing to rebuild Christian theology to retain the very truths being obscured and confused by ties to outmoded empirical and speculative knowledge. We should also realize that while we have reason to believe that human knowledge can expand much further than anyone would have guessed, God in His Transcendence might always be best described by the semi-mystical and semi-poetical language of negative theology. Still, even that language can be enriched and disciplined by an expanded metaphysics.
It’s clear that theology and metaphysics, at their frontiers, are not the domain of talented scholars but rather the domain of creative thinkers who are more interested in speaking to God than in writing textbooks. Some, such as Augustine and Aquinas, could do both, but a little bit of knowledge and a sometime reckless creativity would probably accomplish far more than great scholarly knowledge and careful working techniques.
At this time in history, when we’ve gained so much knowledge of God’s Creation and have so much potential for understanding His natural revelations that point to the Creator Himself, most scholars on the scientific and theological sides refuse to follow the leads as if there truly is a deep and unbridgeable chasm between Creation and its Creator, or perhaps as if this universe is something else than a Creation of love.