God's Higher Probability

 

Some philosophers claim that an omniscient God has a lower probability than just a supremely knowledgeable but not omniscient God, because it is harder to know everything than just know very much. The same can be said for omnipotence (it’s harder to be all-powerful than just very powerful), omnibenevolence (it’s harder to be all-good than very good), and perfect (it’s harder to be perfect than close to perfect). But I think this gets the probability estimate wrong. It’s true that, in the world, harder to achieve things are less probable than easier things. An amateur throwing his first 3 darts is unlikely to get 180; a man playing his first snooker match is unlikely to make a 147 break; and a woman throwing a coin off the Empire States Building is unlikely to find that it landed perfectly on its edge in the crack of the pavement.

But I don’t think that’s the case when we talk about God’s supreme properties. Consider this question. Which do you think is more probable; that a historian knows who all of the Roman emperors in the first century were, or all bar one? Or which do you think is more probable; that the world’s biggest Beatles fan knows the lyrics to all their songs, or all except one? I think in both cases, the former is more probable. It would be stranger if, respectively, those individuals knew all of the Roman emperors and all the Beatles songs bar one, than knowing them all, because it’s more difficult to explain why they don’t know the exception when they know the rest.

With God, having the power to create a universe, I think it would be stranger if He knew 99% of all things than 100% of all things (ditto the other Omni properties). Even though there are astronomically more ways that God could know 99% of all things, and only one way that He could know 100% of all things, it feels much more probable that He knows everything than nearly everything – because if He knows nearly everything, it’s harder to explain why He doesn’t know the relatively few things He doesn’t know.

 

All this is to say, it may be a hard thing to conceive of omniscience, omnipotence, omni-benevolence and perfect as God’s primary properties, but that level of hard still seems more conceivable than what might seem, in probabilistic terms, more probable in terms of the ratio of favourable cases to total possible cases being smaller. Here, it’s likely that making a proposition less complex makes it less probable too.