John DeRosa's The Classical Theism Podcast, recently featured a double-header of past episodes, both with Dr. Dolezal. The second one was on divine impassibility, specifically the argument that an impassible God would know less than a passible God, because an impassible God would be incapable of knowing our experiences as experience.
I have to admit, I've never heard this argument before. I must have missed the original release of that episode. If I had heard it in a conversational forum, I would have dismissed it out of hand as absurd. However, since this was a podcast instead of a conversation, I was a somewhat captive audience, so I listened through the episode, giving the topic more attention of thought than I would have otherwise. This has led me to some dark realizations.
One of my first thoughts was to articulate in my mind's ear the very reason I would have rejected the notion out of hand: That it's absurd on its face, because God is the creator of all things, including all that we are. He could not create me as having any given experience, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or moral, unless His Own knowledge of that experience already exceeds the knowledge of it I would have by temporally living the experience. If God did not already have perfect knowledge of our experiences, then we would not be capable of having those experiences at all. To put another way, our experiences, of whatever kind, are our limited, finite way of coming into knowledge that God, in the infinitude of His Being, already has.
This very line of thinking was, indeed, brought up by Dr. Dolezal during the podcast. In a master stroke of understatement, he expressed it as a "concern" he has with the knowledge-of-experience argument against divine impassibility. Well, he's an academic, and he has to move in academic circles. Given that there seem to be people in those same circles who give credence to this argument, I suppose it's more diplomatic of Dr. Dolezal to express a concern about something than it is to call out abject idiocy for what it is.
Following on this thought, however, and related to it, is a second thought. This thought is perhaps more about the people making the argument than about the argument itself, but it bears some exploration because I think it's an example of a significant shortcoming of the modern mind, that goes beyond this one topic: Those who argue that God's knowledge would be limited by His lack of experiential modes of knowledge are making the leap of assuming that their own experiences are the referent knowledge rather than the reference knowledge.
To get at what I mean, I'll discuss several different kinds of knowledge. I was listening to a podcast once (or perhaps reading something) in which the speaker (or author) presented a dichotomy of "knowing how" and "knowing that." In many cases, the knowing how is almost indistinguishable from knowing that. For example, a child at an early age can acquire the knowledge how to open a door. However, at almost the same time he acquires the knowledge that turning the knob is what allows a door to open. But these are two different kinds of knowledge, and in the context of the podcast (or article) the real point was to distinguish procedural knowledge (knowing how) from propositional knowledge (knowing that.) The dichotomy of these types of knowledge can be more fully underscored by considering a dog. A dog can learn how to open a door. However, (assuming without bothering to prove that dogs are altogether incapable of propositional thought) the dog can never know that turning the knob opens the door. The dog has purely procedural knowledge without any corresponding propositional knowledge. Another example of this is a newborn infant. An infant knows how to suckle because humans have that instinctual procedural knowledge; however, an infant doesn't know that suckling his mother's breast is what eases his hunger.
What I want to do is further decompose that dichotomy into a trichotomy, and in doing so identify a more fundamental knowledge than either procedural or propositional knowledge: I want to discuss "knowing of." For example, knowing of a particular tree is a different kind of thing than knowing that it's a tree or knowing how to climb it, and necessarily precedes either of those other to pieces of knowledge. To use the example of the infant, an infant can know how to suckle. At a very young age, prior to any possibility of propositional knowledge, the infant "knows of" his mother as the person who gives him the breast to suckle. He even develops a "knowledge of" the hunger that impels him to want to suckle.
The reason "knowing of" is so important, though, is that it's the referent for all other non-instinctual human knowledge. One can't come to know that a particular thing is a tree, or that a particular kind of a thing is a tree, or that a tree is called a "tree," or how to climb or cut down a tree, without first "knowing of" a particular tree or "knowing of" a number of particular trees. In this sense, the raw experience of a tree, without any related labeling, procedural, or propositional frameworks, is the referent for all other knowledge about the tree or about trees generally. All knowledge (again, except instinctual procedural knowledge) is referential to "knowledge of" something. This is even true of things that are beyond direct experience, or even fantastical. One can't acquire the propositional knowledge that unicorns can climb rainbows without a knowledge of unicorns and rainbows. One can directly acquire a knowledge of rainbow, but not of unicorns. However, even if one can't directly acquire a knowledge of unicorns, one can acquire it through a description. But for any description to give one a knowledge of unicorns, the description must use concepts and vocabulary that is referential, ultimately, to some collection of "knowledge of." This is true even of experiences that are not physical in nature. Children who are far to young to express or understand certain psychic or emotional realities are fully capable of experiencing (for example) jealousy, fear, and even the sense of the absurd, as when a child laughs at a funny face made to him.
The main point, however, is that this is a fundamental truth of human epistemology: All knowledge, in some way or other, has an ultimate referent in "knowledge of," that is, in experience itself. This fact can blind people into believing that their experiences are not merely the referent for all of their other personal knowledge, but are a kind of referent for reality itself. This capacity for swapping the referent and the reference in one's understanding of the world can lead one to make assumptive leaps without realizing their assumptive nature.
An example might illustrate.
Some time ago, I listened to a debate between Trent Horn and Alex O'Connor. Alex O'Connor stated during the debate that the greatest obstacle in his mind to accepting theism was the reality of animal suffering. His argument went something like this (I'm re-phrasing in the first person, here, as though this is Alex speaking): I can understand the rebuttal of the "existence of evil" argument against the reality of God when it comes to humans. Humans have free will, so if they turn away from their creator, then it makes sense that they lose some level of protection against evil provided by that creator, and an infinitely wise creator can even allow them to suffer evils that ultimately work for the good of those who turn back to him. But that's not the case with animals. There's no sense in which animals have somehow turned away from their creators. Yet, there are instances of horrible animal suffering from which no good comes to any animal. For example, consider a deer who happens to be running through a wood when a branch just happens to fall. The deer gets trapped and over the next few days starves or dehydrates to death, a death we all would agree is horribly painful. This deer's painful death didn't serve to feed a mountain lion or a bear. The suffering of this animal is meaningless, and I can't accept that an all-good, all-powerful creator would have created a world in which such meaningless suffering occurs.
During the debate, Trent Horn successfully (in my opinion, even though Alex O'Connor didn't quite seem to grasp what Trent was getting at) pointed out that the capacity for the pain in the nature of the deer is what God created, and that this capacity is a good thing to the entire population of deer, by giving them appropriate instincts to avoid the things that would unduly harm them. This is true, even if that capacity for pain is sometimes realized in circumstances in which there's nothing to be done about it.
But there was a deeper problem to Alex O'Connor's argument, which Trent Horn didn't address: It's that Alex O'Connor is making an assumption when he says that the deer is suffering during this hypothetical event. To be sure, the deer is in pain—the pain of hunger—in the sense that mammals have pain. The mammal physiology includes nerves in various parts of the body that transmit certain kinds of signals to the brain. Some of these signals are received by the brain as varying levels of what we would call discomfort, up to and including what we would call extreme pain. However, what is the basis for saying that the animal "suffers" when undergoing pain?
This gets at a definition of "suffering," as an ontological reality, that wasn't explored by either Trent or Alex during the debate. Whether animals truly "suffer" is probably a question that deserves its own three-hour debate, or even more, perhaps a series of long-form point/counter-point essays. I'm not going to attempt to resolve that question here, but only to point out how failing to adequately consider how our own experiences play out as references and referents can lead us to unwittingly assume things.
The problem, here, is that people will think something like, "Of course, this animal is suffering, I can see its reactions. For example, a dog yelps in pain and jumps away when you step on its tail. This is similar to the way a person would cry out and yank away from a hot burner on the stove if he accidentally placed his hand there. Clearly, the dog experiences pain the same way we do, and as with humans, if the pain were ongoing the dog would suffer." But consider that humans have a capacity for types of knowledge that dogs don't. When burning himself, a person has a capacity to consider the burn as something that needn't have happened. He can experience a sense of unfairness that he received the burn, and in the same moment of yanking his hand from the burn, he can experience a sense of insult (from the universe, or whatever) to accompany his sensation of injury. To be sure, I'm being simplistic in how I'm presenting this, but the point is, there is more going on in a person to accompany the sensation of pain, that causes it to become suffering. The assumptive leap is to assume that our reaction to the sensation of pain has anything to do with the sense of suffering we have while undergoing the pain. We think that because an animal reacts in a similar way to us under the experience of pain, it must be undergoing all the same concomitant psychic states we undergo to make it suffering.
But what if it's the other way around? What if it's not true to say, "Animals react to sensations of pain the way we do, because they suffer from pain the same way?" What if, instead, the truth is that WE react the same way some animals do because we have the same underlying physiology, and that our sense of suffering is something completely different?
In other words, what if their behavior is the referent for understanding our reactions to pain stimuli, rather than our behavior being the referent for understanding their states of mind? This is the assumptive leap that one misses by assuming that our experience is always the referent for something. As I said, I'm not trying, here, to make an argument one way or the other; I'm just pointing out that when assumptions are made about the referential meaning of our own experiences, we can be led down an epistemological path that's fraught with unfounded and unstated assumptions.
This principle about the proper identification of referents and references figures large in a proper understanding of the Christian world view. For example, every Christian is familiar with the idea of Christ as the Bridegroom of the Church, which is His spotless bride. Most Christians probably imagine that the human institution of marriage is the referent in this analogy (or the "analogon," to use the language of analogy) while Jesus' marriage to the Church is the reference. This view makes it as though human marriage is primary and God is using it—leaning on it, as it were—as a convenient way of helping us understand Christ's love for His Church. But in reality, this is exactly backwards. Scripture opens and closes with a marriage for a reason: It's that the human institution of marriage is the reference (or analogate) that God providentially arranged for us to have, as a way of understanding the primary reality (the analogon) of the intimate relationship between Christ and His Church. The marriage of Christ to His Church doesn't mimic human marriage; rather, human marriage mimics (or, rather, hints at) its formal perfection: the marriage of Christ to His Church.
Another example from Scripture will drive the point even deeper: Everyone is quite familiar that Jesus said to His apostles, "I am the vine, and you are the branches." Again, in this, the temptation is to treat vines we have on earth (probably grape vines) as the referent/analogon—the perfection of the form—and the manner in which we have life in Christ, through His Grace, as the reference which imitates vines. But what if that's exactly backwards? What if Jesus didn't search around for some earthly reality to which He could relate the life we have in Him, but rather that God, in the infinite providence and wisdom with which He created, gave us vines as something to reflect the perfection of our life in Jesus? This view is further supported in Scripture, because Jesus didn't quite say "I am the vine." Rather, He said "I am the true vine," as though vine-ness itself is primarily and perfectly found in Him, and all earthly vines are mere imitations of the reality of our grafting into Christ through grace, given to us to point to that more perfect referent.
What most people have not considered is that perhaps the whole world is this way. It's not only possible, but even likely, that everything we experience, whether a physical qualia or an emotional or psychic sense, is not itself the ultimate referent, but rather something given to us by God to point us towards a deeper referent truth that He wants us to see. What if it's no happy coincidence that the Psalmist says "God is my rock,' but rather that God, in His constancy and firmness, is the true rock, and purposely put rock-like things in the world to reflect Himself into our experience? What if the "living water" that Christ offered to the woman at the well is not just a convenient reference, but is rather the referent? What if God put water into the world and built us to experience water in all the particular ways that we do, specifically as a reflection and imitation of the wellspring of grace that Christ would become for us when dwelling within our souls?
It's easy to understand why this view of reality is so easy to miss, since our own experiences are so fundamental to all the rest of our knowledge, including knowledge imparted from others. Those who argue against the impassibility of God by citing experience as a particular kind of knowledge in itself, without which God can't have true omniscience, are making the mistake of thinking human experience is a fundamental referent, when it's actually just a reference by which God gives our limited minds access to more fundamental realities.
But think about what it would mean, theologically, for God to not have the divine attribute of impassibility, and specifically to require experience, of a human kind, in order to be truly omniscient. Such a God would not only lack impassibility, but would lack immutability, as well, since experience is a temporal mode of knowledge. Furthermore, since experiential knowledge involves bringing into act psychic states that previously were in potency, it would mean that God is not simple, either. In other words, it would mean that God is not at all the God Christians worship. Such a god (to refer to this non-Christian concept, I'll start using the uncapitalized "god") would gain knowledge from creation. But he would not merely gain knowledge from creation as something distinct from him; rather, such a god would make creation as part of himself, so as to acquire the knowledge of the experiences of his creatures. If god is passible, then we are all part of that god in an ongoing process of becoming omniscient through the experiences we have.
To be sure, I did not discursively work through all of this in my mind while listening to John DeRosa's podcast. All of the above is just my attempt to unpack what came to me in a few short moments of intuition. But shortly after this intuition, I happened upon a realization: While nobody has yet quite figured out how to define "synodality," the one thing that everybody promoting it agrees on is that experience is at the center. Experience is the thing that seems to be valued above everything else. It's as if the "synodal church" is a church in which experience, and not God, is the ultimate referent. At its core, synodality appears to be an attempt encode into ecclesiology a certain kind of pagan theology: The theology of a passible, evolving God of which we are all a part. Such a church would be right to keep changing, to keep responding to new experiences. Under such a theology, it would be quite correct to claim that "all religions are paths to God."
After this realization, I happened upon another realization: This idea of an evolving, changing, experience-driven Church surely did not start with Pope Francis. It's ludicrous to think that Pope Francis invented such a concept of the Church, and within the years of his pontificate managed to convince so many bishops, cardinals, and priests to go along with it. This evolutionary concept of a church (and the matching concept of a god) has been around, growing beneath the surface of of the institutional Church, for some time. It made its first public appearance under a different name, a name that seemed less threatening because it could mean something true and good: aggiornamento. This refers to an ongoing process of reforming to accommodate modernity.
Pope Francis has said that his pontificate is directed towards the completion of Vatican II. But he's clearly not talking about the documents of Vatican II; rather, he's talking about the spirit of Vatican II. Let's be honest about this: There is a spirit of Vatican II. This spirit was not invented by Vatican II, but pre-existed it. Depending on your read of John XXIII, you might say this spirit inspired Vatican II, or you might say it captured Vatican II, but there is definitely a spirit of Vatican II and it's not the Holy Spirit. This spirit is best summed up in the word "aggiornamento." This is what synodality truly is, but it wasn't until the Francis pontificate that it became clear that the real spirit of Vatican II is not just a new ecclesiology, but rather a new theology, and a pagan one at that.
The god of the synodal church—the god of the spirit of Vatican II—is not the Christian God at all, but the pagan god of panetheism.