Philosophy: religious musing, or omniscience and the Iraq war escalation

Any idea about God, when pursued to its extreme, becomes insanity. – Stephen Mitchell (introduction to The Book of Job)

One of the central difficulties people have with a Christian God is the idea of omniscience (most often presented along with omnipotence and benevolence, cf. theodicy). We’ve covered this in my Philosophy of Religion class recently and noticed that in reading Genesis and Exodus, there is absolutely nothing to suggest that God is omniscient. Quite the opposite seems to be the case on a superficial reading: Adam and Eve ‘hide’ from God, God questions them, God later seems apologetic after the flood, noting (realizing?) that humankind is sinful by nature, and Moses repeatedly reasons with God in order to keep him from killing off the Israelites Moses has led out of Egypt (a slaughter that would later be carried out by Moses himself with his family).

What is found is not a Christian God at all, but a tribal God – often an admittedly jealous God, one who wants fame and who is not hesitant to strike down seemingly good folks (and innocent children) with suffering and/or death.

He who is believed in his presuppositions is your Lord and your master. – Montaigne

But yet there still are those who say that this God is omniscient. Why? Generally we can get knowledge to support our claims in two ways: experience and reason. Certainly our experience of the text gives no reason to call this God omniscient. And reason, it would seem, fails as well. Our ‘proofs’ of God (and his subsequent omniscience and other traits), propagated by the likes of Anselm, St. Thomas Aquinas, and others have been shown to rest on illegitimate presuppositions. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant forcefully rejected all ‘proofs’ of the existence of God and his reasoning has held, for the most part, to this day.

Other reasons for claiming God’s omniscience abound. Nietzsche had a theory about why people would claim this, as did Marx, Freud, and others. One thing that struck my mind is that the idea of omniscience, once accepted, is utterly irrefutable. If you can convince a person that it is true, no amount of evidence or reasoning will be sufficient for them to abandon this belief. Plagues and hardships become ‘tests’, our reasoning is labeled as always insufficient. And thus our normal avenues to knowledge are cut off.

If we believe a being is omniscient we are unable to see his/her mistakes as mistakes, failures as failures, foolishness as foolishness, ignorance as ignorance. And I wonder if those who attribute omniscience (with neither evidence nor reason) to God are not more likely to attribute it to a political leader. Even more so a political leader claiming to be led by God. So I wonder if these people don’t set aside reason and evidence when entering into politics as well.

Two good discussions of the role of faith in Bush’s current Iraq War escalation plan can be found at the Washington Post website, by Buddhist professor Robert Thurman, and Philosopher Daniel Dennett.

Dr. Thurman writes:

As far as the current escalation of the occupation of Iraq, since it is mentioned in the question, it is obviously unrealistic, futile, and a tragic misuse of others’ lives in the personal stubbornness of this president.

To implement it, one secretary of defense and the generals in charge had to be fired, the will of the majority of both Americans and Iraqis had to be ignored, and the Congress had to be further intimidated. It is disheartening that pundits and politicians solemnly discuss it as if it was a sane decision, a “plausible option,” something that is to be debated; instead of stating plainly that it is an act of unacceptable foolishness and therefore impeachable incompetence.

Where is the brave little girl who can plainly state that this “emperor” has no clothes?

While Dennett laments:

Nothing has done more to discredit religious faith in recent years than the self-righteous overconfidence with which our leaders have “listened to God” instead of listening to the knowledgeable secular advisors who have warned them, repeatedly, of the follies they were embarking on.

Defenders of religion are eager to point out that the motivation for this war was not religious, in spite of President Bush’s blunder in calling it a “crusade,” but they must admit that the administration’s faith in faith over faith in facts has probably been the principle cause of the moral calamity that now confronts us.

And while it is not a universal characteristic of monotheists, it does seem common enough (in my experience) that an air of certainty pervades their faith, an air that Mr. Bush likewise fashions into his speeches. I return to the Bible, now to the book of Job and his three ‘consoling’ friends, each with his own air of certainty in trying to explain poor Job’s afflictions. In these friends we are invited to see what we so clearly fail to see in our political and religious leaders, that “Their rigid orthodoxy surrounds an interior of mush, like the exoskeleton of an insect.” – Mitchell (intro to the book of Job).