Knowledge has contents.

You might like me to sharpen the picture of this three-word cipher. But a firmer principle underlies it than the atheists’ nebulous “omniscience” uttered without examination in the Argument From Evil.

First of all atheists, usually adherents of empericism, have no Russell-ian entity that they can point a finger to and say “That is omniscient”. So we’re out of the evidential, the only thing left from an atheistic standpoint is the axiomatic.

This is where the character of knowledge matters. If in fact, my leading premise is true, then we cannot have a “knowledge” that ceases to have contents just because it exceeds our grasp to know what they are. This is why “knowing everything” increases as an inaccurate statement with an unknown bound.

Let me try to illustrate.

Doctors and Aliens

I am not exceptional as a human being. So I don’t think it is outlandish to imagine somebody who knows everything I do, and more. What does he know? If I posit him as a doctor, I kind of know some of that. We’ll give it the technical title of “doctor stuff”. Chances are that if we’re not doctors, though you might know something that falls in this gap, you will not know the contents of this gap.

I accept that there are some contents of “doctor stuff” that I can only guess by their relation to more familiar things. We have “bone stuff” for example. I know about bones. I can name most of them. I’ve heard about doctors setting bones. I know a bit about the role of marrow in producing blood cells. But I also accept that there are facts in bone physiology that I wouldn’t have the slightest inkling of because I don’t know what comprises what I don’t know.

Likewise you can’t guess at what the doctor knows that neither you or I have any clue about. There might be something there. Of course the existence of that set of knowledge doesn’t depend on my ability to theorize it, but the doctors’ ability to know it.

Now, if we can imagine an alien race where the a certain member knows almost everything we do about common phenomena, let’s imagine that on the scale of things he knows a lot more. What does he know? Suppose he knows of a phenomenon on his planet that acts in a totally different way than our planet. What does he know? Is there anything that we would have to find not as invariable as we thought?

But we can dream up as many potential–and hopefully somewhat plausible–scenarios as our imagination can handle. But to illustrate the concept we have to add details. Nothing in particular demonstrates “the state of knowing 60% more than the sum total of human knowledge.” No one concept demonstrates knowing double, triple, quadruple and so on. So what are the contents of omniscience?

We can imagine that it consists of everything we know, plus everything we hope to learn from science. And we can imagine that’s it. But only the omniscient entity would know the contents.

Which is why it is silly to pretend to let God sit in the room while we talk about him, call him characteristically “omniscient” and then telling him what we’ve deduced about his omniscience as authoritative, dismissing him from the room. Once we’ve allowed God to duck his head in the door, he is the authority. Not us.

The athiest has already concluded that he can’t comment on it, because he can’t be a party to the discussion, because he doesn’t exist. It’s strange to then conclude, given a lack of substantive objection on the human level, that he can’t then exist. The atheist has only played at “considering God.”

I do not find it meaningful, given my acquaintance with knowledge that there can ever be an abstract “state of knowing everything” that can ever approximate the likely case of a singular, particular state of knowing all particular states.

Afterward

I’m not trying to leverage human-specifications onto the cosmos. As a result, the vagueness of “omniscience” is not a limiting factor. But I would be more correct to leave up to a posited omniscient being the details of what it implies. Thus the “Problem of Evil” becomes only “A Case for the Non-existence of God provided an intuition of ‘Omniscience’”.

Judging from the sensible ground of facts as one thing and not others, I think it is at least a fair projection in counter to the “Problem of Evil” that omniscience has a lot of particulars. Not only that but there are perhaps more things known not to be the case, then are the case. I think it’s like that I can name more things that I didn’t have for supper, than what I had for supper. (They are arguably facts, though Carnap should object.)

On the subject of Logical Positivism (the undead material philosophy), Russell essentially doesn’t fail in Logical Atomism because there is a manifest lack of atomic positive states. Of course, he doesn’t come close to justifying that there are intelligibly distinct descriptions of all positive states, which would justify them as being “logical” (logos <=> word). But he also doesn’t justify the conjecture that takes up the last third of his essay as meaningful in the narrow sense that he defined as meaningful.

I have to credit William Vallicella (Maverick Philosopher) with getting me started on this. He does an interesting job attacking the “There is evil claim” portion here. (I have to warn you, if your eyes glaze over when I skim formalism here, you’re not going to like his site–but you may get a taste for it.)