Small stylistic comment: if you have a subtitle "1. The puzzle", consider adding another subtitle saying "2. The solution" or maybe removing the original subtitle. Seeing one but not the other greatly confused me.
The issue of God's certainty was the one I used to think about myself, but found no good treatments of it in the literature. Really good to see it getting attention!
I guess there can be certainty without being necessarily certain. As Klein would say, certainty in the actual world needn't be certain in all worlds. So I guess a God certain of all actual facts might not need this high of a necessitarian level. A Leftow style theist though thinking God is behind modality is likely committed to this as is a follower of Craig with his views on abstract objects. Probably Nagasawa's maximal God too as knowing the entire domain of logic sounds pretty maximal. Indeed, a run of the mill Christian might too given different interpretations of what the Gospel of John's Word means and statements from Jesus about the Father knowing the future. I'd think though that an atheist would introduce the Liar paradox to this type of certainty, but that could be a bit of fugazi in itself.
Perhaps a theist could have some subtlety here from van Inwagen's proposal: God decrees a disjunction like x or y. Here, God is still definitely deterministically behind everything, but there's still a genuine role for chance. In a strange sense, then, God is definitely sure of what could happen here, but also not sure what exactly always will. Anyway, just rambling now, but a really great article!
The point here is that we want to solve for how God can be certain that there is nothing external to him — ie that his knowledge is complete. Something like an entailment relation between all facts is what would give us that.
It’s of course true that to be certain of some proposition the proposition needn’t be necessarily true.
Yes, but I still think there are outs for God to have such certainty and omnipresence, but not have the necessitarianism. Maybe branching actualism is true or softer positions on possible worlds where they turn out to be merely logical scenarios. Throw in the closure principle too from epistemology. Now, God can be everywhere in the actual world, know the entire domain of logic as well as know what that all entails and feel pretty reasonably certain nothing is beyond His grasp. In any case, very cool ideas from you here. Really gives God some metaphysical teeth.
Small stylistic comment: if you have a subtitle "1. The puzzle", consider adding another subtitle saying "2. The solution" or maybe removing the original subtitle. Seeing one but not the other greatly confused me.
Otherwise it was a great article!
Whoops! That’s an excellent point. Thank you so much! :)
The issue of God's certainty was the one I used to think about myself, but found no good treatments of it in the literature. Really good to see it getting attention!
I guess there can be certainty without being necessarily certain. As Klein would say, certainty in the actual world needn't be certain in all worlds. So I guess a God certain of all actual facts might not need this high of a necessitarian level. A Leftow style theist though thinking God is behind modality is likely committed to this as is a follower of Craig with his views on abstract objects. Probably Nagasawa's maximal God too as knowing the entire domain of logic sounds pretty maximal. Indeed, a run of the mill Christian might too given different interpretations of what the Gospel of John's Word means and statements from Jesus about the Father knowing the future. I'd think though that an atheist would introduce the Liar paradox to this type of certainty, but that could be a bit of fugazi in itself.
Perhaps a theist could have some subtlety here from van Inwagen's proposal: God decrees a disjunction like x or y. Here, God is still definitely deterministically behind everything, but there's still a genuine role for chance. In a strange sense, then, God is definitely sure of what could happen here, but also not sure what exactly always will. Anyway, just rambling now, but a really great article!
The point here is that we want to solve for how God can be certain that there is nothing external to him — ie that his knowledge is complete. Something like an entailment relation between all facts is what would give us that.
It’s of course true that to be certain of some proposition the proposition needn’t be necessarily true.
Yes, but I still think there are outs for God to have such certainty and omnipresence, but not have the necessitarianism. Maybe branching actualism is true or softer positions on possible worlds where they turn out to be merely logical scenarios. Throw in the closure principle too from epistemology. Now, God can be everywhere in the actual world, know the entire domain of logic as well as know what that all entails and feel pretty reasonably certain nothing is beyond His grasp. In any case, very cool ideas from you here. Really gives God some metaphysical teeth.