Tuesday, April 7, 2020

Wylie Breckenridge (non-LDS) on Achieving Omniscience by Eternal Progression


In a fascinating article, “Mormonism: Is the Mormon Concept of God Problematic,” Wylie Breckenridge who is not a Latter-day Saint, wrote a defence of Latter-day Saint theology in response to certain arguments forwarded by Francis Beckwith’s essay, Philosophical Problems with the Mormon Concept of God. While the entire essay should be read, here is Lucky’s response to Beckwith on the topic of divinized persons achieving omniscience:

Third Problem: Achieving Omniscience by Eternal Progression

The third problem that Beckwith tries to raise for the Mormon view targets the following claim: a Mormon god is a being which progresses from having limited knowledge to being omniscient.

Beckwith argues that it is impossible for a being to do this. He argues as follows:
1. Changing from having limited knowledge to being omniscient involves changing from having a finite amount of knowledge to having an infinite amount of knowledge.
2. It is impossible to change from having a finite amount of knowledge to having an infinite amount of knowledge.

Therefore,

3. It is impossible to change from having limited knowledge to being omniscient.

Beckwith seems to be assuming, in the first premise, that being limited in knowledge amounts to having finitely much knowledge. But these two things are not the same. I am limited in knowledge (there are some things that I do not know), but I have infinitely much knowledge (there are infinitely many things that I know – there are, for example, infinitely many numbers x such that I know that x is even). So one can be limited in knowledge without having only finitely much knowledge. So when the Mormon view claims that some beings change from having limited knowledge to being omniscient they are not thereby committed to claiming that they change from having only finitely much knowledge to having infinitely much knowledge. Moreover, it would be implausible for the Mormon view to claim that before a being becomes a god it has only finitely much knowledge. After all, it is pretty easy to have infinitely much knowledge – I gave an example above of one way in which I have infinitely much knowledge; another way is this: I know where my cup is, and because of this I have infinitely much knowledge – there are infinitely many locations y such that I know that my cup is not at y. So a charitable reading of the Mormon view would have them claiming that beings, before they become gods, have limited knowledge, rather than that they have only finitely much knowledge.

Let’s set aside this first concern and grant that the first premise of the argument is true. What about the second premise? Beckwith claims that it is impossible to change from having finitely much knowledge to having infinitely much knowledge. In support of this Beckwith says that it is impossible to count to infinity if one starts at a finite number. Beckwith seems to be assuming here a certain picture of how the knowledge in question is acquired: it is acquired in such a way that the items of knowledge could be counted as they are acquired. But this is an overly restrictive view. When I see that my cup is on my desk I thereby acquire infinitely much new knowledge – there are infinitely many locations y such that I acquire the knowledge that my cup is not at y. Moreover, this is an uncountable infinity – there are uncountably infinitely many such locations. So the view of knowledge acquisition that Beckwith seems to be assuming is overly restrictive. On a less restrictive and more charitable view it seems quite plausible, contrary to the second premise, 

That a being can change from having finitely much knowledge to having infinitely much knowledge.

Beckwith thus fails to show that there is a problem for the Mormon view in claiming that a Mormon god is a being which progresses from having limited knowledge to being omniscient. (Wylie Breckenridge, "Mormonism: Is the Mormon Concept of God Problematic?" in Morgan Luck, ed. Philosophical Explorations of New and Alternative Religious Movements [London: Routledge, 2012, 2016]; my thanks to Jaxon Washburn for making me aware of this work)