Online research in philosophy

Based on the Wilde Lectures in Natural Religion given by Anthony Kenny at Oxford from 1970 to 1972, here revised in light of recent discussion and reflection, this provocative book examines some of the principal attributes traditionally ascribed to God in western theism, particularly omniscience and omnipotence. From his discussion of a number of related topics, including a comprehensive treatment of the problem of the relations between divine foreknowledge and human freedom, Kenny concludes that there can be no such being as the God of traditional natural theology.

A certain objection to belief in God is based on the intrinsic incoherence of the concept of Divine Being or God. In particular, it questions the major traditional characteristic, notably omniscience, and its relation to omnipotence, moral unassailability, and absence of embodiment on the part of the Divine Being. In this paper, an attempt is made to counter this objection by an appeal, not to natural theology, but rather to physicalism in its application to human beings, and by extension to the possible consistency of God’s omniscience with the other divine attributes, which philosophers such as Michael Martin have found to be mutually inconsistent and therefore wanting.

I shall confine my attention to the one Scotist doctrine that seems to be singled out as especially worrisome, the doctrine of univocity. In the first part of the paper I argue that the doctrine of univocity is true. So even if the doctrine has unwelcome consequences, we ought to affirm it anyway; it is not the job of the theologian or philosopher to shrink from uncomfortable truths. In the second part I argue further that the doctrine of univocity is salutary. That is, it does not have the deplorable consequences that have been attributed to it. It should be noted that by “consequences” I mean logical consequences. What historical consequences the doctrine may have had are beside the point: if people have been led astray by false inferences from the doctrine of univocity, the proper remedy is to correct their inferences, not to reject univocity.

Two major objections to divine atemporality center on supposed tensions between the claim that God is omniscient and the claim that he is timeless. Since most defenders of divine timelessness are even more firmly committed to omniscience, driving a wedge between the two is intended to convert such persons to a temporal view of God. However, I believe that both arguments fail to demonstrate an incompatibility between omniscience and timelessness, and that the objections themselves rest in large part on misunderstandings regarding both the motivation for and substance of the doctrine of divine timelessness.

This essay examines a conflict between God's omnipotence and His omniscience. I discuss our intuitions regarding omnipotence and omniscience and describe a method by which we can decide whether a being is omnipotent. I consider the most promising versions of omnipotence and argue that they produce a genuine conflict with omniscience. Finally, I suggest that we can take the example of omniscience and generalize it to several of God's essential properties and thereby reveal incompatibilities that result even from sophisticated conceptions of divine attributes. (Published Online August 11 2004).

In contemporary philosophy of religion, the doctrine of omniscience is typically rendered propositionally, as the claim that God knows all true propositions (and believes none that are false). But feminist work makes clear what even the analytic tradition sometimes confesses, namely, that propositional knowledge is quite limited in scope. The adequacy of propositional conceptions of omniscience is therefore in question. This paper draws on the work of feminist epistemologists to articulate alternative renderings of omniscience which remedy the deficiencies of the traditional formulation.

Suppose there are possible worlds in which God exists but Anselm does not. Then (I argue) there are possible worlds in which Anselm does not exist, but God cannot even entertain the thought that he does not. In such worlds Anselm does not exist, but God does not know that. This, I argue, is incompatible with (a straightforward construal of) the doctrine of God's essential omniscience. Considerations involving negative existentials also call into question a certain picture of creation, on which God chooses which particular (possible) individuals to create. They suggest that there is an element of brute contingency about which individuals exist.

IN COMPARISON with other doctrines Cthe doctrine of omnipotence, for example Cthe proper formulation of the doctrine of omniscience has not seemed especially problematic. Once we accept the contemporary wisdom that knowledge is knowledge of truths, the formulation of the traditional doctrine seems straightforward: to be omniscient is just to know all truths. What has seemed problematic, rather, is whether the doctrine is itself true. In particular, many have wondered whether anyone can know the parts of the future not necessitated in any way by the present or past.