Why God Cannot Think: Kant, Omnipresence, & Consciousness

It has been argued that God is omnipresent, that is, present in all places and in all times. Omnipresence is also implied by God's knowledge, power, and perfection. A Kantian argument shows that in order to be self-aware, apply concepts, and form judgments, in short, to have a mind, there must be objects that are external to a being that it can become aware of and grasp itself in relationship to. There can be no external objects for an omnipresent God, so he cannot have a mind. The standard theological attributes of God are omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence. Philosophical discussions have also focused on a set of metaphysical attributes of God that include properties such as perfection, timelessness, immutability, absoluteness, and omnipresence.1 There is also a set of tertiary attributes that God may have by implication of the other properties or that are implied by classic characterizations. These are consciousness, will, desire, and goals. It is often said that God is aware of your sins, God issues commands, God has a plan, God wants you to do good, and so on. I believe that a coherent conception of God cannot be formed from the complete set of the theological, metaphysical, and tertiary attributes. Nor can a coherent conception of God be formed from several of the subsets of these attributes because some of the attributes themselves are incoherent, or because combinations of some of the attributes are inconsistent.2 In this article I will argue that omnipresence is not consistent with having what I will call higher consciousness, which includes the cognitive capacities to recognize and judge objects in the world and to be aware of one's representations as representations. Let us call the combined property of being omnipresent and having higher consciousness, omniconsciousness. This article will argue that 1) omniconsciousness is not possible because in order to be conscious a being must be limited in ways that an omnipresent thing is not, and 2) since omnipresence has been attributed to God by a number of influential theologians and omnipresence is implied by omniscience, omnipotence, and perfection, God cannot have higher consciousness. The argument turns on some of the powerful insights from Immanuel Kant's arguments in the Critique of Pure Reason. In the "Refutation of Idealism" and the "Transcendental Deduction" sections of the Critique, Kant argues that self-awareness is not possible without awareness of objects external to one's mind. And unless a being is aware of the self and of external objects as different from self, that being cannot grasp that its mental states are representations of something different from itself. Furthermore, if a being cannot make these fundamental distinctions between self and external objects, that being cannot form judgments about objects. Building from these points in Kant, I will argue that an omnipresent being cannot make object/representation discriminations, so it cannot make a self/other distinction. If it cannot make self/other distinctions, then it cannot apply concepts or form judgments. Without those crucial abilities, an omnipresent being cannot have higher conscious, so it cannot have a mind. The Features of Higher Consciousness There are two distinguishing and defining characteristics of what we are calling higher consciousness that are precluded by omnipresence. A. Higher consciousness includes the capacity to recognize one's mental states as representations or draw a distinction between one's representations and the thing being represented. In order to grasp that a representation is a representation of an object, a being must be able to comprehend several things. First, that being must recognize that there is an object that the representation is a representation of. Humans, for example, are not merely conscious of objects external to us the way a plant can be said to be aware of the sun when it turns it leaves towards the light. Our sensory and mental faculties provide us with representations of things outside of us, and we are aware of those representations as representations. To understand that the representation is of something, a being must recognize that the representation is different from the thing represented. That is, the being must grasp that what appears to be the case in the representation may not be the case in the object, and what is the case in the object may not appear to be the case in the representation.3 When the distant 20 story building appears to be 1 inch tall according to the ruler in my hand, I recognize that it is my representation of the building that appears small, not the building itself. I also recognize that there may be things about the building, that it houses a crowd of people, for instance, that are not reflected in my representation. Furthermore, I must be able to see that the divergence or the possibility of error in my representation arises from my use of the representation to stand in for the object; the representation is not the same as the object represented. Understanding the difference between the representation and the object represented also presupposes that the person be able to grasp herself as a distinct object from the one being represented. The representation, understood as a representation of an object, serves as a bridge that connects a being's consciousness with the things that surround it. And to have what we are calling higher consciousness, a being must be able to see itself, the representation, and the object in this three-way relationship. The representation is the means by which a being can have any awareness of objects as objects at all. Kant argues that object/representation discrimination is also a necessary presupposition of selfawareness. A being with higher consciousness must do more than merely recognize or react to objects in the world; it must be able to separate those objects into the one that is the self and the others that are not, it must separate the subjective course of its experience from the objective state of affairs, and it must be able to place itself as an object among the non-self objects. This conceptual difference between the self and others is not possible for a being that does not possess the ability to make object/representation discriminations. The point here is very close to one he makes in the "Refutation of Material Idealism" in the Critique of Pure Reason. Descartes and Berkeley had maintained that self-awareness is possible prior to knowing or even without the existence of external objects. In contrast, Kant argues that being aware of the self is only possible through the existence and awareness of non-self objects. He says, "The consciousness of my own existence is simultaneously a direct consciousness of the existence of other things outside of me."4 Kant also explains the relationship between self-awareness and object awareness this way: The I think must be capable of accompanying all my presentations. For otherwise something would be presented to me that could not be thought of at all-which is equivalent to saying that the presentation either would be impossible, or at least it would be nothing to me.5 Kant's "I think" that must be able to accompany a higher consciousness' representations is that being's awareness of itself as a thing among other things in an objective world. A being can recognize the difference between its representations and the objects that they are representations of if and only if that being is also capable of being self-aware. Let us stipulate that a being that is aware in some sense, but is not capable of object/representation discrimination is a being with lower consciousness. Self-awareness of the sort Kant describes is not possible for this being because it necessarily presupposes the capacity to make object/representation discriminations. Many animals fall into the lower consciousness category. The family dog who wags its tail or growls and barks at itself reflected in the mirror is not aware of the image as an image. And it is no accident that it fails to recognize the image as an image and it fails to recognize the dog in the mirror as itself. Object/representation discrimination cannot be had without self/other awareness because they are two sides of the same ability. Without it, the only sort of interaction with the world that the dog can have is an immediate and instinctual stimulus response. There are good reasons to think that this capacity is one of the properties that are necessary for having a mind. It is not merely the capacity to have representations that distinguishes the beings with minds from the beings without minds, but the capacity to grasp that those representations are a subjective reflection of an objective state of affairs. A lower consciousness is aware of nothing but the series of representations it has, in the order that they occur. Higher consciousness grasps that its representations are merely one possible subjective course of representations among many that can be had through an objective world. In Kant's famous example, even though I first observed the ship upstream and then downstream, I can conceive of the ship's being downstream first and traveling upstream.6 The family dog comes to associate the jingle of keys with going somewhere in the car, in that order. We could as easily condition the dog to associate the ringing of a bell with going somewhere in the car. In contrast, we recognize that the keys can jingle or the bell can ring for a number of reasons and that travel in the car may or may not be next. And it is this ability to see that my representations could have been different as well as the ability to causally order my representations that distinguishes higher from lower consciousness. I can separate the cause of an event from objects that are merely accidentally associated with it. The difference between these two levels of consciousness appears to be a difference in kind, not merely degree. It is the also the boundary between beings with minds and beings without because it is the difference between having the capacity for self-reflection, selfand otherawareness, and even freedom, Kant argues. All of these abilities are lacking in lower consciousness. The merely representational and associative consciousness is acted upon by the world, but the being that is aware that its stimuli serve as representations of the world locates itself and its subjective experience in relationship to the world; such a being is aware that objects in the world are acting upon it to generate representations. A closer look at some beings that are very close to having higher consciousness makes the distinction between higher and lower even sharper. In a recent study on chimpanzees, researchers put a spot of paint on the chimps' forehead without their knowing it. When the chimps were shown a mirror, they noticed the red spot in the reflection and reached up to their own foreheads to remove it.7 Their reaction suggests that these chimps both have a higher level of self-awareness than the animals that react to the mirror as if it is another animal, and that they have some rudimentary awareness of the difference between a representation of an object (in the mirror) and the object itself (the paint spot on their own heads.) While they may have a partial grasp of the difference between the image and the object, other research suggests that they do not have a conception of what it is for another being to share their level of consciousness. In several tests, chimps were just as likely to beg food from a researcher wearing a blindfold or a bucket over her head as from a researcher with her eyes uncovered.8 These tests suggest that the chimps are not making a distinction between what it is for another being to be aware or not be aware of events around it. So we can modify our account of full self-awareness such that it includes the capacity to make object/representation discriminations, self/other awareness, as well as the capacity to recognize that others possess higher consciousness and self-awareness. There is another distinctly Kantian mental capacity that we should include in our account of higher consciousness before we examine the implications for God's omnipresence. B. Higher consciousness includes the capacity to form judgments about objects, identifying and attributing properties to them. Some creatures, like ourselves, can identify properties that objects possess, and we can ascribe those properties to the object by means of concepts.9 Identifying the properties that an object has requires relating it to other similar objects with a general, abstract term that labels the property they have in common. Possessing the concept, brown, for instance, makes it possible for me to grasp that the trunk of the tree and a dog have something in common. Subsequently, I can form judgments about both: "The tree is brown," and "The dog is brown." But being able to apply the concepts is not enough to form judgments. A being must also be able to recognize the relationships between the different concepts, how and in what order they are connected, which combinations are not syntactically coherent, and so on. Kant refers to this kind of concept employing and judging consciousness as a discursive consciousness in contrast to an intuitive consciousness whose cognitive access to objects is not mediate. It has direct and immediate access to objects as they are in themselves.10 So judging requires both the capacity for abstraction, or the ability to recognize the use of one representation to stand in for a group of others, and it requires the ability to employ those concepts within their syntactic system. Again, recent studies on chimps shed light on what these abilities are. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Duane Rumbaugh11 have been able to draw out some remarkably abstract conceptual abilities and even syntactic awareness in chimps with some carefully designed training and trials. The chimps were trained to sort one group of items into two groups of items: food and tools. Then the chimps were trained to associate each of these two groups with abstract symbols that did not resemble the objects in either of the groups. In time, when they were presented with an entirely new food item or tool, the chimps were able to place it with either the symbol for food or tool correctly. Some of the chimps who had received previous lexical and syntactic training were more successful at the symbol-sorting project than others. These chimps had been trained to use a simple language of 2 verbs (one for solids and one for liquids) and 4 nouns (2 solid foods and 2 liquid foods) so that they could form simple requests like, "Give banana." The researchers devised a complicated set of exercises to teach the chimps not only which combinations of the 6 terms were grammatical and allowable, but which of the numerous combinations did not form grammatical assertions like "banana juice give."12 Eventually the chimps were able to make grammatical requests in their simple language with new food items and a corresponding new symbol for that food item. It appears that the chimps had mastered the primitive syntax of their language and had learned to correctly integrate new symbols into the language, although the number of symbols, the syntactical structure, and the abstraction of the symbols were all significantly limited for the chimps. They appear to be poised at the cusp for both of the abilities of higher consciousness that we have singled out. Omniconsciousness is Impossible We are now in a position to see why an omnipresent being cannot have higher consciousness, or why omniconsciousness is impossible. Here is the argument in schematic form: 1. A being with higher consciousness possesses two abilities A) the ability to discern between the object and a representation of the object, and B) the ability to apply concepts and form judgments about objects. 2. If a being has the ability to discern between the object and a representation of the object, and the ability to apply concepts and form judgments, then that being must be able to grasp the difference between the self and not-self. 3. A being is omnipresent when that being occupies or is present in all places, far or near, in all times, past, present, or future. 4. There is nothing that is not-self for an omnipresent being by definition of omnipresence. 5. So an omnipresent being cannot grasp a difference between the self and not-self.13 6. Therefore, an omnipresent being cannot possess higher consciousness. 7. In short, God cannot have a mind because omniconsciousness is impossible. A brief return to Kant's argument in the "Refutation of Material Idealism" will help clarify the argument that omniconsciousness is impossible. In response to Descartes' skepticism and Berkeley's denial of the existence of external objects, Kant argues first that consciousness (higher consciousness, in our terms) presupposes the capacity to distinguish the self from the non-self, and secondly, if a being is aware of the self, there must be something in the world that is not that being. Necessarily, for a being to have higher consciousness, there must be something independent or different from that being and that being must be aware of those independent objects as separate. Berkeley thought that the concept of mind-independent objects is incoherent. Descartes thought he could prove the existence of his own mind while the existence of external objects remained in doubt. Kant argues that being aware of one's own existence as a thing with properties (which neither Berkeley nor Descartes denied) is only possible if some mind-independent objects exist and if a being grasps the difference between itself and those objects. Notice that Kant's conclusion is stronger than the one I have been arguing for. There is an important difference between Kant's anti-skeptical conclusion that 1) higher consciousness requires that material objects exist in the world, and the claim in this article that 2) higher consciousness requires that a being must think of objects in the world as being external. In the "Refutation," Kant is attempting to disprove radical skepticism or idealism about the existence of material objects. Kant's stronger conclusion would support the argument we have been making about omniconsciousness, but it is not necessary to adopt the strong anti-skeptical position. The weaker conclusion 2) shows the problem with omniconsciousness just as well, but it makes a more modest claim about the way a conscious mind must think about the objects of its representations, whether there be external, material objects or not. So the success of the argument does not depend upon Kant's strongest anti-skeptical argument. Being omnipresent precludes the possibility of there being any objects external to that being as well as the possibility of that being's accurately thinking of objects as external. If there is nothing external to a being or nothing that the being can accurately think of as external, then that being cannot draw a distinction between itself and objects which are not itself. There are no objects that would make such a distinction possible. Without the subject/object distinction, a being cannot possess either of the capacities of higher consciousness. That being cannot recognize that it has representations of objects and that those representations are different from the objects themselves because that being cannot grasp the relationship between itself, its representations, and the objects that it represents. Nor can that being form judgments about objects by attributing properties to them since judging also presupposes the subject/object distinction. In order to judge, "My neighbors are playing loud music," I must be able to distinguish between what the real state of affairs is and what I represent it to be. I assert that the music really is being played loudly, and not merely that I am hallucinating it. When I make a judgment I assert something to be true (rightly or wrongly) about the real state of affairs that I intend my judgment to reflect. If I cannot distinguish between the self and the non-self (which an omnipresent being would not be able to do) I cannot grasp that there is a gap between what I represent to be the case and what is the case.