THE ESSENTIAL PROBLEM OF GOD’S KNOWLEDGE

This title is a pun—if by the end of this e-mail, you do not understand the pun, you can be sure that you have not fully understood Rambam’s points. [A joke: a violinist plays a concert in Tel-Aviv and when he finishes playing, he gets a roar from the audience, everyone is standing up chanting "Do it again, do it again!" Flattered, he plays it again, only to get the same response, after the third time, and the same response, he says "Thank you so much for your kind reception, I would love to play the piece again, but I have to be in Jerusalem for a concert later this evening, so I really must go now." At which point an elderly (insert ethnicity here) Jew gets up and says, "You will stay here and play it again until you get it right!"].

Getting to God’s knowledge, philosophers in Rambam’s time were bothered by the concept of God having knowledge of the world, since that would imply that there was change in God. The God who knew me as a two year old could not be the exact same God as knew me as a twenty one year old. You cannot dip in the same river twice.

DETERMINISM MEANS THERE IS NO CHANGE

One solution was to claim (and Rambam seems to adhere to this, although we’ll have more to say about that in a moment) that God has always known everything that would happen. As Rambam says, (on p. 480-81 if anyone is still following inside the book), if God always knew that a certain person would be born, live a certain number of years and then die, when the events actually occur, there is no reason to see that as change in God’s knowledge. Rambam doesn’t point this out, but the only way that that is true is in a completely deterministic world—if everything is pre-ordained, then indeed there is no change in God. But if I can choose whether to do a mitsvah or not, and God knows the results of my choice, then that would (apparently) involve change.

PROBLEMS EVEN WITH DETERMINISM

One problem that philosophers raised with the idea of deterministic knowledge being unchanged by the actual unfolding of the predetermined events was that they believed that it was impossible to have knowledge of something that didn’t exist. It was impossible, in that view, for God to know people before they were born.

Rambam , however, distinguishes things that don’t exist and never will from nonexistent things that will eventually exist. While he agrees that it is impossible to know the former—and presumably "know" here means something more than imagine in one’s head—there is no reason, in his view, for God not to know things that will one day exist.

Bothered by these problems with God’s knowledge of individuals, some philosophers believed that God only knew infinites, such as species. Remember that pre-Darwin many thinkers believed that the world as we know it was eternal, meaning it had always existed in this way, and that all the species were eternal as well. Since those species never changed, they reasoned, it would be reasonable to say that God knew those species and avoid the problem of change in God.

CHANGE EVEN IN ETERNALS

However, as Rambam points out, even if the species as a type is eternal, it still changes and develops (it has more or less population, flourishes more or less, etc). There is an interesting discussion in Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach about how groups of individual might be thought of as an individual as well—the example he uses is an ant colony. As the various ants move about, perhaps, they are really functioning as the neurons of an intelligent organism, the colony. That view explains precisely how God’s knowledge of a species—an infinite—would still change as the species changed. As a result, some philosophers decided that God only knows His essence (himself).

FORGETTING THE RADICAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN US AND GOD

Rambam strongly rejects this view. He particularly blames philosophers for espousing it, since it was philosophers who (correctly) distinguished so sharply between God and man in the conception of the essence. Philosophers were the ones who pointed out the impossibility of God’s having a body, or of there being anything other than complete unity in God. Because of that, Rambam says, they should have realized that God’s knowledge and His Esence are one and the same thing, despite the apparent changes in God’s knowledge.

The same way we recognized our inability to understand God’s essence, we realize that we cannot understand the nature of God’s knowledge. We simply know that God knows many different things, from different species, without that affecting the unity of His knowledge; that the changes in those things over time do not cause change in Him; that He knows objects that do not yet exist; and that he knows things that are infinite.

RAMBAM ON FREEWILL

Before completing Rambam’s list of the ways in which His knowledge differs from ours, we have to preface a comment Rambam makes without significant introduction. After having berated philosophers for confusing the term knowledge when applied to God with the work knowledge as applied to humans—leading to the fear of change in God—Rambam mentions his understanding of the Torah’s verses relating to human freewill. You will recall [from earlier in this discussion] that Rambam noted that knowledge of a completely determined world would not involve any change in God.

Now, without noting his change, Rambam mentions that he has understood from the Torah’s verses that God’s knowledge does not affect human freewill. Since various verses refer to the possibility of a certain circumstance, rather than the necessity, Rambam believes that it reveals the openness of possibilities in the world.

Rambam gives two examples of verses that make his point; each strike me as questionable. First, he notes the verse about ma`aqeh, building a protective fence around one’s roof. The verse he quotes says "then you should build a ma`aqeh. Rambam apparently believes that if our choices were predetermined, there would be no reason for the verse to say "then you shall." Rather, I suppose, the verse could have said "all of you who will build rooves must, etc."

Similarly, when the verse orders us to turn away from the army any man who has betrothed a woman but not yet completed the marriage, the verse says "pen (lest) he die in war and another man take her." In a deterministic world, there would be no room for possibilities. Here, too, though, the verse doesn’t discuss choice, just open-ended pssibilities. The truth is, though (as Rambam notes), that the whole notion of commandments only makes sense in a world of freewill (I am well aware of others who see the issue differently; I am an adamant believer in freewill and believe Rambam was as well).

TWO ASIDES ON FREEWILL

Given a statement by Rambam that determinism helps us understand the lack of change in God’s knowledge, and this one about freewill, philosophical readers of Rambam might be tempted to say that he only meant one or the other. I would point out, though, that Rambam writes about this dilemma in Hilkhot Teshuvah in almost exactly the same way, suggesting that he really saw it that way. [Interestingly, there Rambam doesn’t quite say that God’s foreknowledge doesn’t force the future; he just says that if we could understand God’s knowledge we’d see that there was no contradiction. Raavad, however, insists on a better answer, and says that God’s knowledge doesn’t force our actions].

That, then, is the fifth difference between God’s knowledge and human knowledge—God’s knowledge does not take the future out of the realm of the possible. Regardless of what God knows, we still have the choice to good or evil, fulfill commandments or not, etc.

VERSES TEACH RAMBAM PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES

Rambam’s references to phrases in the Torah as convincing him of a certain proposition are striking—he seems to have recognized that philosophy had nothing to say on this issue, because of the radical difference of God’s knowledge from our own. (In fact, the chapter ends with a reminder that all of the words we use—knowledge and providence for two prime examples—mean different things for God than for us, because in God all is His essence, and nothing is other than His essence.) Without his intellect to guide him, he sought the guidance of the verses and found illumination there.

Another verse—again, one we all know—ratified this concept for Rambam. As we say in the haftarah for fast days, God informs us "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways yours ways." In Rambam’s reading, that is God reminding us of His radical difference from us, so that we not fall into the trap of philosophers regarding human knowledge. Are any of us having as productive times reading Yishayahu as Rambam?