What is Mind?: Part 4b. What Does God Know? — a Supplement

I seem to have spoken of Creation is two ways. There’s no real inconsistency but I was confused myself for a while a few days ago. In my most recent posting, What is Mind?: Part 4. What Does God Know?, I spoke as if the Primordial Universe, the stuff underlying all of Creation, is analogous to absolute infinity, a chaos — if you will — of factuality from which elegant mathematical systems can be drawn. In the more general sense of Creator of all of Creation and not just this universe, God’s thoughts range over an absolute infinity of facts and from those facts, He can create systems which correspond to various systems of truths, including mathematical truths but not only those.

In past writings, I’ve spoken of the Primordial Universe as being the manifestation of truths God selected for this Creation and now I’ve spoken of the Primordial Universe as being the factual chaos from which systems of truth can arise (like islands arising from an absolutely infinite sea of chaos). Our bias, perhaps coming from the limitations (not outright errors!) of metaphysical traditions, is to associate truths with what we might call constructed or designed systems. I’ve moved more strongly towards a view of truths as being basically ‘factual’ with ordered systems being created or shaped from those raw facts. From that viewpoint: is the Primordial Universe the islands (ordered truths) or the entire sea (factual truths) along with all possible islands?

Whatever the answer to that question, the basic thought I’m trying to communicate is: God creates truths and isn’t just a Supernatural Computer processing pre-existing possible thoughts. The Lord Almighty is a true Creator and creates factual truths as creatures know them. He’s a Shaper of pre-existing chaos only in the sense that He further shapes His Creation into specific worlds.

So what would constitute divine thought outside of His acts as Creator? Possibly nothing. God is a pure Act-of-being, His own Act-of-being, and I think Christians are bound to see that Act-of-being in terms of love between Father and Son and Holy Spirit. As a Medieval scholastic might have said: God doesn’t think. He simply knows. In this way of looking at matters, every manifested truth or unmanifested truth is to God a directly accessible fact and never a conclusion to a line of reasoning. And we move a small step closer to understanding the traditional claim: God is simple.

I’ve spoken in my book, To See a World in a Grain of Sand, and elsewhere about the nature of random numbers. Two especially important claims are:

1. A random number is simply a fact. This claim, to my knowledge, was first made in the early 1970s by Marc Kac, the highly regarded measure theorist, on the basis of the early work of Chaitin and the similar intuitive suggestions made by Kolmogorov and possibly a few others.
2. Only God with His absolutely infinite mind and His absolutely free will could actually make a random number.

To God, there may be no difference between the most elegant mathematical theorem and a random number. To the Almighty, they are most immediately known facts while to a human thinker, the first is a result of a line of reasoning and the second is essentially unknowable. On the other hand, if relationships are primary over substance, we come to a possible fork in the road. Do systematically created or constructed truths regain primacy because of their richer relationships to each other ? I’m not sure where to take this but my thoughts at this point turn back to the Holy Trinity and the relationships of love between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

I wouldn’t want to leave the impression that mathematics provides more than analogical models of substance or relationships or or persons or Persons. But those analogical models are important for any possible revision and revival of metaphysics in the modern world. The history of metaphysics and even a very casual acquaintance with Hellenistic mathematics and metaphysics would suggest the relationship is deeper than just analogical, but I’ll leave matters there after first claiming that our modern philosophical muddle is partly due to a lack of proper response to modern developments in mathematics.

God ‘simply’ exists and knows and doesn’t think any way directly analogous to human thinking. This is part of the reasoning behind the claim that “God is simple”. He has no parts and doesn’t change. To say, “God is simple” might be the same as to say “God necessarily exists”. It’s hard to imagine a creature being simple in the way ascribed to God.

I can say that God doesn’t exist in time or space, a more plausible claim on certain grounds now that mathematical physicists have produced models of reality which — though they fail — do indicate this universe might well be shaped from something which has no time-like or space-like aspects. Time and space would simply be infinitesmally small, sequential subsets of absolute infinity, ordered so that they can be traveled. The smallest ‘dense’ subset of absolute infinity, an open region of that ocean of chaos, wouldn’t be sequential in the intuitive way I’m using mathematical language and thus it couldn’t be traveled in a way that would make possible the sort of development God has ordained for this universe. This sort of thought played a part in my speculations on the Primordial Universe from which this particular universe is shaped.

So, after ascending to God in His Transcendence by way of Creation, that is, by contemplating the Creator of this world, I find myself supporting the views of the Fathers and Aquinas and other Catholic theologians when it comes to God in His necessary Being, a very ‘simple’ sort of Being. This is hardly surprising and fits in with some statements I made privately to some people at the time my book was first published: what amazed me then and now is the degree to which human thinkers can see ultimate truths even through the glass darkly. Might this be more proof that a well-formed human mind is shaped to copy by way of understanding what God does in bringing about acts-of-being? Sometimes, we can see His purposes though we’re not yet prepared to reason through the technical details of Creation.