Abstract
I defend an account of God’s ineffability that depends on the distinction between fundamental and non-fundamental truths. I argue that although there are fundamentally true propositions about God, no creature can have them as the object of a propositional attitude, and no sentence can perfectly carve out their structures. Why? Because these propositions have non-enumerable structures. In principle, no creature can fully grasp God’s intrinsic nature, nor can they develop a language that fully describes it. On this account, the ineffability of God is explained in terms of the inability of our language and mental capacities to grasp God as he really is. I will motivate my account by distinguishing it from a rival proposal. According to this rival, there are no fundamentally true propositions about God’s intrinsic nature. I argue that this rival proposal faces problems that my account does not face. And unlike this rival and other accounts of ineffability, my account provides a fitting explanation of why God is ineffable. God is ineffable because the structure of his intrinsic nature is infinite.
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Notes
Knepper and In Kalmanson (2017) examine the claims of ineffability in nine different spiritual traditions.
I will often not include the qualifier, ‘propositions about God’s intrinsic nature,’ and instead just say, ‘propositions about God.’ When that happens, the latter should be read as the former.
See Alston (1989), Essay 1, for a defense of this claim.
Jacobs (2015).
Isomorphism is too fine-grained to be a necessary condition. A coarse-grained equivalence relation would be more accurate, but because of space constraints I will not cash it out here. See Shapiro (1997), pp. 90–91, for a way to cash out this equivalence relation.
Note that not everyone takes this operator to be a factive operator.
For the rest of the paper, I will use non-fundamentally true instead of derivatively true.
Note that on this account there could be a fundamentally true proposition about God, but it can’t be about God’s intrinsic nature. For example, it could be a proposition about God’s act of creation. This example might be contentious for proponents of absolute divine simplicity who think God’s creative act is in some sense identical with God. Thus, whether there are fundamentally true propositions about God, but not God’s intrinsic nature, depends on your views about God.
What does it mean to say that non-fundamentally true propositions are grounded in fundamentally true propositions? The answer has to do with the structure of the world. Like the the bred region and the rue region from the above figure, reality has a natural structure or joints. Fundamentally true propositions are structured and if the structure perfectly carves out the structure of the world, then they are fundamentally true. If they do not, then they are non-fundamentally true. As such, non-fundamentally true propositions depend, or are grounded, in fundamentally true propositions in that the portion of the structure of the non-fundamentally true proposition that carves, albeit imperfectly, is a proper part of the structure of the fundamentally true proposition that carves perfectly. On this proposal, the dependence relation is explained in the following way: the portion of the structure of non-fundamentally true propositions that carve is a proper part of the structure of fundamentally true propositions.
See Plantinga (1974), pp. 1–2.
I am assuming that views like Swinburne (1977), pp. 241–308, are false, and that God exists in all possible worlds. However, even if God is a contingent being, it is still true that God is ineffable in all the worlds in which God exists.
Some proponents of non-classical conceptions of God might think they must reject this principle. They might think that God has different beliefs, desires, and choices in different possible worlds. Moreover, these beliefs, desires, and choices, at least in part, are intrinsic to God. However, I do not think propositions about what God contingently beliefs, desires, chooses are propositions about God’s intrinsic nature. These propositions might be about things that are intrinsic to God, but they are not things that pick out what God’s nature actually is. Consider this analogy. I might have different beliefs and desires at different times, but this does not mean that my intrinsic nature changes at different times.
What needs to be shown is \(\Diamond \Box\)GT, not \(\Diamond\)GT, because GT, as I have argued, is a necessary thesis.
Some philosophers point to the following counterexamples to the claim that conceivability implies possibility: Water is not H2O or Hesperus is not Phosphorus. For more on the connection between conceivability and possibility, see Gendler and Hawthorne (2011).
The defender of SGT can instead say that non-fundamentally true propositions about God do imperfectly carve reality, but then they will have to say more about the thing that those propositions carve, and why there can’t be propositions that carve that thing perfectly. Also, see footnote 13.
This is the same operator that is in Sider (2013), pp. 91–96, except mine ranges over bits of language and bits of thought.
The structure of concepts has been spelled out in different ways. I find the theory-theory view to be plausible, see Gopnik and Meltzoff (1997). My view implies that thoughts are also structured because concepts make up thoughts.
Some hold that sentences are not truth bearers. Rather propositions are the truth bearers. My account is compatible with this claim. Instead of talking about a sentence being true, we can talk about it being derivatively true or true in a non-primary sense, i.e. true in virtue of the proposition in question being true. For simplicity, I will continue to talk as if sentences are truth bearers in the primary sense. Moreover, by sentence, I don’t mean a question or any form of a sentence that doesn’t have at truth-value.
One might object that the Apophatic Thesis does not seem to be as strong as the Strong Ineffability Thesis. This is not the case because AT has the power to accommodate all the non-fundamentally true propositions that SIT accommodates, but it doesn’t have the extra added baggage of requiring SGT.
I am open to the fact that perhaps sentences that refer to fundamentally true propositions do not carve at all. Perhaps they do some carving (i.e. they are non-fundamentally true), or perhaps they do not carve at all (i.e. they are true simpliciter). The important thing is that they do not perfectly carve, if they carve at all.
Unlike Jacobs’ defensive strategy, I offer a plausible story that explains why it is impossible for created beings to fully describe God as He really is. This explanation gives us evidence for AT. Whereas with Jacobs’ defensive strategy, we do not get any positive evidence for the possibility of SGT, and SGT seems to be independently implausible.
In 1874, Georg Cantor proved that the power set of positive integers is not enumerable. See Boolos et al. (2007), pp. 16–20, for an explanation of the proof.
The cardinality of infinite sets are represented by the Hebrew letter ’\(\aleph\)’. The smallest is \(\aleph _0\), which refers to the cardinality of the natural numbers. Given the Continuum Hypothesis, \(\aleph _1\) refers to the higher cardinality of the real numbers; and so on. We can make the stronger claim: for any cardinality \(\aleph _x\), the cardinality of the structure of fundamental propositions about God is more than \(\aleph _x\).
One way to understand the apophatic tradition is that the tradition seems to think negative claims, by their very nature, do not carve or at least do not perfectly carve. Rather, negative claims either merely refer or if they carve, they do not carve perfectly.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for pointing this out to me.
There are arguments against the existence of actual infinities, see David Hilbert’s 1924 lecture in Hilbert et al. (2013), and Pruss (2018). These arguments at best show that actual infinities cannot exist in the concrete world, which is consistent with my claims and in fact strengthens my claims, and at worst show that actual infinities are very strange. What is strange need not be impossible.
See Davis (2011) for a defense of this view.
One might object: on conceptualism, there are just as much new entities in the divine mind as there are assumed by platonism. Moreover, these new entities will have to be taken as primitives, just like the abstract objects postulated by platonism. So there is no ontological cost. In response, traditionally, divine ideas are not “entities.” Instead, they are modes of the divine mind because these ideas cannot be separated from the divine mind. That is, these ideas do not exist on their own. By contrast, platonism postulates a host of independently existing, full blown, entities. Lastly, whether these entities are primitives does not prevent the cost. The more primitive entities a theory postulates, the more costly it is. A conceptualist is already committed to theism. The cost of adding modes to the divine mind is similar to the costs of drawing dots with a marker on your white t-shirt. The platonist multiples the number of t-shirts. The conceptualist multiples the number of dots.
There are other views of theistic platonism, where either God creates abstract objects or these abstract objects exist necessarily but still depend on God for their existences by some type of grounding relation. See Craig (2016) and Craig (2017) for a case against the different varieties of theistic platonism.
In Craig (2016), pp. 72–95, he also rejects divine conceptualism, but he does so because he finds no use for it. My view, on the other hand, makes great use of it.
One might object here and say that God does not propositionally know his intrinsic nature. Maybe God only has personal, or Franciscan knowledge of his intrinsic nature (on Franciscan knowledge, see Keller (2018)). There is no reason to think that God couldn’t or does not know his intrinsic nature, at least in part, propositionally. In the apophatic tradition, it seems that some do say that God knows his intrinsic nature in this propositional sense. For example, while explaining the eternal generation of the Son of God in the Trinity, St. Gregory the Theologian says, ‘But the manner of His generation we will not admit that even Angels can conceive, much less you. Shall I tell you how it was? It was in a manner known to the Father Who begot, and to the Son Who was begotten. Anything more than this is hidden by a cloud, and escapes your dim sight’ (Third Theological Oration (Oration 29), ch. VIII).
Unlike the Ineffability Thesis, where non-fundamentally true propositions about God’s intrinsic nature are groundless, the apophatic thesis tells us that there is an infinite gap between our knowledge of God and who God really is. This infinite gap is grounded in the fact that fundamentally true propositions about God’s intrinsic nature are infinitely far from the non-fundamentally true propositions that we know about. By Contrast, since the Ineffability Thesis rejects the existence of fundamentally true propositions about God’s intrinsic nature, then there is nothing that grounds the infinite gap between the non-fundamental and the fundamental.
The claim that God’s intrinsic nature has structure is also a non-fundamentally true claim because that claim does not carve God’s intrinsic nature perfectly. It merely refers to the fact that it has a structure, e.g. the proposition that water has a structure does not carve the structure perfectly; it merely claims that there is such a structure
There are different conceptions of divine simplicity, and here I’m not talking about any specific conception, but a more general conception of divine simplicity. For different conceptions of divine simplicity, see Bradshaw (2010).
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Fakhri, O. The ineffability of God. Int J Philos Relig 89, 25–41 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-020-09762-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-020-09762-y