People are going to disagree about what’s important. For example, @dga471 thought the question of acquiring language to be important, while I see that as a mere unimportant detail.
Hi Daniel. Good question. My answer is twofold.
First, God’s knowledge that configuration SE arises from Eve’s undergoing certain specific experiences is epistemically (not temporally) posterior to Eve’s having those experiences. There is no way to know such a thing in advance, even for a Deity, which means that in a world where Eve had no such experiences, God would have no knowledge that SE would produce them. If this sounds odd to you, I suggest you have a look at Steve Wolfram’s “A New Kind of Science” (which can be viewed online) and see what he writes about the Principle of Computational Equivalence. The key point to understand here is that for the vast majority of programs, the only way to know how they will execute is to actually run them - in other words, the vast majority of systems are “computationally irreducible.” Generally, there is no a priori way of knowing the result simply from looking at the parameters and the instructions, for instance. Now if we view someone’s life experiences as the evolution of a system - in other words, as the mathematical equivalent of a computation - the point I’m making can be grasped immediately. What I’m getting at here is that whether classical theists like it or not, there’s no getting around the fact that God’s (timeless) knowledge of the cosmos is: (a) discursive and not immediate; and (b) derived from creatures, and not from God’s knowledge of Himself. (See also here and scroll down to “God’s knowledge of what goes on in the world”.)
Second, even if God knew that configuration SE would arise from Eve’s undergoing certain specific experiences, prior to His decision to create Eve, He would still be confronted with a “Buridan’s ass” problem. There are infinitely many ways in which one might learn the meaning of “melodious” from other human beings, for instance. Which one is God to choose, when none is uniquely choiceworthy? Any choice that God made would be a purely arbitrary choice - and an arbitrary choice is the one kind of choice that God cannot make. “Pick a number between 1 and 100” is something we humans can do, because we have hardwired preferences that nudge us to select a certain number (a lot of people will pick 37 in this situation, for some unaccountable reason), but God, being a pure spirit, doesn’t have any hardwired preferences. Consequently, He is incapable of making an arbitrary choice: He needs a reason to select X over Y. In the absence of a particular reason, God will not make a choice.
By the way, Daniel, I have a question for you, as you’re a physicist. It pertains to miracles involving the multiplication of matter - e.g. the loaves and the fishes. Consider the following quote from Live Science:
Light, matter and antimatter are what physicists call “positive energy.” And yes, there’s a lot of it (though no one is sure quite how much). Most physicists think, however, that there is an equal amount of “negative energy” stored in the gravitational attraction that exists between all the positive-energy particles. The positive exactly balances the negative, so, ultimately, there is no energy in the universe at all.
So my question is this: suppose God multiplies loaves and fishes, and in doing so, creates matter (which is a form of “positive energy”). Would His action of creating matter also automatically generate an equivalent amount of negative (gravitational potential) energy, ensuring that the Law of Conservation of Energy is not violated? The reason why I ask is that Noether’s First Theorem seems to imply that conservation of energy is a defining property of our universe, by virtue of its having a certain kind of symmetry. If that’s the case, then God can no more violate the Law of Conservation of Energy than He can make a four-sided triangle. Thoughts?
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The mass-energy created by matter-multiplication miracles is about 9 orders of magnitude greater than the negative gravitational potential energy created. (E = mc^2 and U = -GMm/R, where M and R are mass and radius of earth, and m is mass of created matter.*) So such miracles definitely violate the law of conservation of energy. Not to mention that the idea of negative gravitational energy is somewhat speculative, and that many physicists do not consider energy to be conserved in GR anyways.
*Note: I think there’s good reasons to believe that, if there is such a thing as negative gravitational energy, it reduces to the Newtonian expression in the weak gravity of earth.
I think this is a non-sequitur: even if determining the result of a computer program is in most cases equivalent to running the program in terms of computational complexity, it doesn’t follow that God can’t know in advance that a certain neurological structure would result from certain specific experiences, without actualizing them. The evolution of a system might be mathematically equivalent to a computation, but it isn’t a computation. A differential equation might mathematically model heat flow, but a heat flow is not a differential equation. (Unless you are some kind of Pythagorean idealist / extreme ontic structural realist and believe that the universe is literally made of nothing more than mathematics; but I tend to think that is incoherent, as there must be something for math and structure to be of.)
So even if in some sense God has to “simulate” the evolution of the system in his mind, since he is immaterial that is not equivalent to creating the system, and therefore there is no barrier to his knowing in advance how a system will evolve even without his creating it.
I see the reasons for believing that God cannot make an arbitrary choice, but I do wonder if the choice is really arbitrary after all. From our perspective, yes. But God can know the goods in each possibility more finely than we can. The different possibilities might turn out to be incommensurable, so that one cannot say one is better than the other, but that doesn’t necessarily mean an arbitrary choice is required. Alexander Pruss’ paper Divine Creative Freedom touches a bit on that.
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Maybe this is a stupid thought, but why couldn’t Adam and Eve learned to speak from other people outside of the Garden? Even if they were created de novo that doesn’t mean they didn’t have interactions with other humans who may have had proto-languages at least, especially if they were created relatively recently as hypothesized in GAE.
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I don’t. God can do whatever he wants. He has free choice and the obscene contingency of our existence is the message of many theological traditions.
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I see problems. If they were created without language, how would they interact with other people? How would they interact with each other? How would they interact with God? And remember that God talks to Adam quite soon after creation.
Also, if they’re interacting with other people, that would seem an important fact to record in the story. In addition to A&E, we should have Larry, Bruce, and Gladys, their neighbors from the village right outside the garden. Yet Genesis 2 gives the impression that A&E are the only two people in the world. And if Adam needed a companion, why wouldn’t God think of Gladys, at least?
Incidentally, there’s no doubt that there were fully mature languages, worldwide, long before 4004 BC.
There is a rationale behind it: God is perfectly rational, and this at least means that he can not make decisions for bad reasons. So the question is whether a lack of a reason is also an imperfection, the way a bad reason would be.
We could consider four candidate principles of divine rationality:
- God can not make choices for bad reasons (but can make choices for no reason at all).
- God can only make choices for good reasons (he cannot make a choice unless there is a good reason for it).
- God can only make a choice if there is no other choice that has better reasons.
- God can only make a choice if it has better reasons than any other choice. (Note the difference between 3 and 4; 3 allows ties and 4 doesn’t.)
I think 1 and 2, and perhaps even 3, make sense and would exhibit God’s perfection (especially if one holds to something like the privation theory of evil, in which case anything that exists is in some way good). But 4 is pretty strong, and I think it needs more to support it than merely the immateriality of God.
In any case, I’m suggesting that the choices in question are not as arbitrary as @vjtorley makes them out to be; God may be able to discern reasons to decide between them that we can not.
There’s no reason why not, but my question would then be: how did those people acquire language?
The point I’m making is that language is supposedly one of the things that (a) separates humans from other animals and (b) defies explanation in purely materialistic terms. Thus we still need to answer the question: where did it come from, originally?
They developed it organically over a long period of time by interacting with other people and their environment. They evolved to possess strong capabilities for language usage and acquisition.
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According to who?
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Hi @swamidass and @structureoftruth,
Thank you very much for your responses. I’d like to consider @structureoftruth’s principles 3 and 4,
- God can only make a choice if there is no other choice that has better reasons.
- God can only make a choice if it has better reasons than any other choice. (Note the difference between 3 and 4; 3 allows ties and 4 doesn’t.)
in the light of @swamidass 's remark,
God can do whatever he wants. He has free choice and the obscene contingency of our existence is the message of many theological traditions.
I actually think that 4 is true, for reasons I’ll explain below.
I’d also like to comment on the paper by Pruss, Divine Creative Freedom, which @structureoftruth kindly linked to. Pruss’s point is that God is seldom, if ever, likely to be caught in a “Buridan’s ass” situation (where two alternatives are equal in all respects), but that there are numerous alternative choices available to God which are strongly incommensurable with one another - which gives God a lot of creative freedom, including the freedom not to create a multiverse. I find Pruss’s argument generally convincing, but unfortunately, I don’t think it helps resolve the problem I was alluding to in my post above.
When I spoke of a “Buridan’s ass” problem in my post above, I was speaking very generally: my remarks were not meant to apply solely to the situation where the two choices are identical, but to any situation where neither alternative is uniquely choiceworthy. That would include situations where the alternatives are strongly incommensurable. In such a situation, human beings possess a built-in mechanism for deciding between the alternatives which “breaks the tie,” as it were: physical limits which nudge us toward one alternative rather than the other. Thus a multi-talented young woman tossing up between majoring in mathematics and majoring in medicine (to borrow one of Pruss’s examples) may choose the former simply because it’s cheaper, and she only has a limited amount of money. My point was that for an unlimited Being like God, there can be no such tiebreaker: He has no physical constraints. Also, God, having no physical nature, has no built-in biases of any kind, which would nudge Him one way or the other. That puts Him in a real quandary if He is to choose between strongly incommensurable alternatives A and B. How is He to decide? He has no criterion whereby He can. It seems that He would indeed be stuck, like Buridan’s ass.
Here’s another way of looking at it. Suppose you’re arguing with an atheist, and the atheist objects: “How is the theistic claim that God chose to create A over B for no reason any more rational as an explanation than the skeptical claim that A (and not B) simply happened for no reason?” How would you answer the atheist? It seems that he has a legitimate point.
@structureoftruth helpfully comments,
In any case, I’m suggesting that the choices in question are not as arbitrary as @vjtorley makes them out to be; God may be able to discern reasons to decide between them that we can not.
This sounds more promising. Getting back to my original dilemma,
There are infinitely many ways in which one might learn the meaning of “melodious” from other human beings, for instance. Which one is God to choose, when none is uniquely choiceworthy?
it may be that God simply chooses the one that involves the least effort, in terms of neurological rewiring, although I still think that personally raising Adam and Eve would be more theologically appropriate than wiring up their brains with memories of events that never happened (which configuration SE would inevitably involve, to at least some degree).
In other words, even when the alternatives are strongly incommensurable, God may still be able to choose between them on the basis of non-trivial aesthetic and/or mathematical reasons.
Someone might object that this merely kicks the dilemma up one level: how is God to decide which set of reasons will guide His choice? (For instance, the criterion of beauty might push Him in one direction [e.g. towards A rather than B], while the criterion of simplicity pushes Him in the other direction.)
But it could well be that among these various criteria, one criterion (call it X) yields a clear-cut ranking system among the alternatives being considered that enables God to come to a decision, while the other criteria are much vaguer in their rankings. In that case, God might well decide to use criterion X, precisely because He does not want to end up like Buridan’s ass. Just an idea.
There may, however, be cases where God is forced to create an ensemble of alternatives, simply because they are individually unrankable. The case I’m thinking of here is the very small but non-zero value of the cosmological constant. New Atheist physicist Sean Carroll has argued that there’s absolutely no reason for God to choose the particular value that it has. If that’s the case, then it may be that God creates a finite multitude of universes in the near neighborhood of our own, having values that are not too far removed from ours. I don’t know.
@structureoftruth, thanks for your comments on the Conservation of Energy. But if you’re right about the nine orders of magnitude difference between the positive rest energy and the negative gravitational energy, wouldn’t that apply equally well to any mass in our universe? Just wondering. Cheers.
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We need some of the Lutherans to weigh in. This just seems totally at odds with the scandal of particularity.
Hi @John_Harshman and @John_Dalton,
You’re both secularists, so naturally, I wouldn’t expect you to subscribe to a non-materialist account of language. All I will say here is that language exhibits the property of intentionality, and that the question of whether intentionality can be naturalized is a philosophically controversial one. My own view (for what it’s worth) is that restricted kinds of (biologically relevant) intentionality can be naturalized, but that intentionality relating to matters of truth and falsehood, rather than practical success or failure, cannot.
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Who is to judge whether a reason is bad or good or better? And if God is the only one competent to make such a judgement, then isn’t the statement empty?
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Moreover, what if many choices are equally good? What warrant is there for thinking the “best” choice isn’t an inconceivably large range of options?
I must admit that I don’t understand a word of that.
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I’m going to have to start from the top there 
Many child development experts believe that language learning (not creating!) is subject to a critical learning period. People who are not part of a language-learning environment before a critical age will not be able to learn language effectively later in life.
So assuming God created A&E with the same brain/body constraints as humans alive at that time, then a languageless A&E would not be able to learn language well as adults, maybe not at all if it is their first language. Presumably, the only way to create A&E in a language-capable state would be to create them being able to use a language, possibly the one used by the first humans they would encounter under GAE.
If A&E were created at the time before modern humans, this idea may not apply. We don’t know about their (language) learning capabilities.
I’d be interesting in more on why you think that is a special case. I suspect it involves language, and since the thread is about language, I don’t think it is O/T,
I understand the issues involved in of naturalizing intentionality so no need to explain that part.
Hi @vjtorley,
My first response is to note that most of your objections are not directly relevant to the topic of the Deceptive God Objection and de novo creation (DNC) of A&E; in fact they are more to do with the coherence of the concept of DNC itself. (And I think your concerns, if true, would have bearing on God’s creation of the whole universe, not just A&E.) The only relevant part is that you seem to think that in order for God to realize neurological structure S_E, God needs to implant false memories to some degree, perhaps because of your view that meaning is tied to causal history. As I noted in my original post, this is disproven by the Kyle and Amato cases: even if God had to assume a “false” causal history in order to decide which meanings and nuances Adam and Eve would understand with regards to words, he did not have to implant false memories. His actions would be similar to creating Adam and Eve with adult human bodies and a choice of a certain ethnic complexion (and maybe a bellybutton).
My second response is more directly to your claims about DNC. First, I think Wolfram’s Principle of Computational Equivalence is not a universally accepted principle. Most materialists would regard the complete laws of physics (once we discover them) as in principle sufficient to predict the behavior of all things in the universe, given some initial conditions.[1] For those who are not materialists (such as Aristotelians 
, but also in general - @structureoftruth seems to hold this view), the Principle would in fact be evidence of the inability of the mathematics to capture everything about reality. Thus, instead of concluding that mathematics or physics limits God’s ability to create, we would say that this only shows our fundamental inability to exhaustively understand reality which only God can do.
This ties broadly into your argument against arbitrary choices by God; I do agree with Matthew that we cannot really know whether the choices are arbitrary, given the existence of chaotic behavior and the notion that creation is made to reflect God’s glory: we don’t have exhaustive knowledge of God’s glory, so we have no idea what features of creation are necessary to reflect that, nor whether two different configurations are equally as good in realizing this, such that choosing one of them becomes an arbitrary choice by God.
I also note that your observation that there is an infinity of ways of learning the word “melodious” seems to show that the way of learning is unimportant compared to the final meaning, such that for God to choose any one of them for A&E is inconsequential to whether he is deceiving anyone with that choice. Now, if there were infinite ways of understanding the word “melodious” we would ask the question of how did God pick one way, and I think the answer is that God picked whichever was the most useful to realize his eschatological purposes, including for Adam and Eve to be in a relationship with him.
Finally, to your question about whether Jesus’ multiplication of the loaves and fishes violates the Conservation of Energy: I honestly do not know for sure - my default response is that it does, and that is not a problem. I think you have a misunderstanding of Noether’s theorem; all it says in this case is that time translation invariance implies conservation of energy. Thus, Jesus violating conservation of energy would imply that the universe violates time translation invariance. That’s not an issue for me, as this is a miracle and the amount of violation is quite small (a few thousand loaves and fishes) compared to the amount of matter in the universe. Also, it is entirely possible that Jesus teleported those breads and loaves from somewhere else; I think these are details which are not very meaningful to speculate on.
Notes
[1] @PdotdQ has reminded us that there are problems with this view even in the case of classical physics, such as the space invaders problem and Norton’s dome.
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