Reply to Nagasawa

Jason A. Beyer
Dept. of Communication Arts, College of Lake County
19351 W. Washington St., Grayslake, IL 60031, USA
waldenphil@aol.com

In a recent article, I contended that a set of arguments proffered by Michael Martin and others, arguments which purport to show that God’s omniscience is incompatible with several other of God’s attributes, are answerable on the assumption that it is logically possible that human beings are entirely physical in nature. The upshot is this: such arguments contend that no being which is non-physical, morally impeccable, or invulnerable to such “negative” emotions as fear or despair could be omniscient – there would be forms of knowledge which would be excluded by these other attributes. To the contrary, I contended that if human beings are purely physical in nature, God could know such things as what a pineapple tastes like, what it is like to hate another human being, or how to ride a bicycle, by having full propositional knowledge of our brain states.

It is important, I think, to call attention to the logical form of both Martin’s arguments and my response. Martin attempts to show that the idea of a being which is morally impeccable, non-physical and omniscient is logically incoherent – such a being is not logically possible. As a result, it need only be logically possible for a being to have all three attributes together for Martin’s arguments to be unsound. This will be an important thing to keep in mind when I address Nagasawa’s critique of my arguments.