I do not know if at some point in his life Michael Martin had a near drowning experience or not. If I were a Freudian I would hypothesize of a childhood beach or pool related incident. Why?
During his 1997 AD debate with Phil Fernandes entitled “Does God Exist?” Michael Martin made the argument from swimming against God’s existence (he actually refers to his overall arguments as the Argument from Incoherence).
During his opening statement he stated:
“To say that God is all knowing, then, is to say that God has all knowledge…However, theists have not noticed the implications of this account for the existence of God. God’s omniscience conflicts with His disembodiness. If God is omniscient, then on this definition God would have all knowledge including that of how to swim. Yet only a being with a body can have such knowledge in the procedural sense, that is actually have the skill, and by definition God does not have a body. Therefore, God’s being disembodied and God’s being omniscient are in conflict. Thus, if God is both omniscient and disembodied, God does not exist. Since God is both omniscient and disembodied He does not exist.”During his second statement he stated:
“I argued that God could not know how to swim since He does not have a body and knowing how to swim is a physical skill.”During his closing statement he stated:
“I maintained that God cannot know certain things, for example, how to swim, since he has no body and that He cannot have certain knowledge by acquaintance.”
This argument against God’s existence may be applicable to, and successful against, certain theologies but is impotent against Christian theology.
Firstly, let us consider his qualifier “in the procedural sense.” He appears to recognize that it may be argued that God could have knowledge of, without necessarily having the experience of, swimming, for example.
According to Christian theology God not only has knowledge of swimming in a conceptual sense and also due to His having knowledge of the body’s sense organs and the effect of H2O and temperature upon the body. Yet, moreover, God took human form in the Messiah Jesus and could actually have physically experienced swimming (whether He actually swam or just walked on the water is another issue).
Michael Martin also took a very peculiar course of action. He cited an argument the consistency of which he himself calls into question even while making it:
“Consider a neglected argument of Roland Puccetti that I reconstruct as follows:If P is omniscient, then P would have knowledge of all facts about the world. Let us call this totality of facts Y. So if P is omniscient, then P knows Y. One of the facts included in Y is that P is omniscient. But in order to know that P is omniscience P would have to know something besides Y. P would have to know: (Z) There are no facts unknown to P…Z, Puccetti says, would be like knowing it is true that no centaurs exist anywhere at any time.
But why could not God with his infinite power search all of space and time and conclude that there are no centaurs? Similarly, why could not God search all space and time and conclude that there is no more factual knowledge that He can acquire? Puccetti is not as clear as he might be…”
Thus, there you have it, he has demonstrated how the very argument upon which he is relying is fallacious and he is kind enough to make us privy to that fact. But in that case, why appeal to the argument in the first place?
Because he sought to remedy it and discredits himself further by doing so:
“Puccetti is not as clear as he might be but one can assume that he would answer this question by saying that God could not exhaustively search space and time because they are both infinite. No matter how long God searched there would be more space and time to search. Consequently, it is possible that there are facts He does not know. Thus, for God to know that He knows all the facts located in space and time is impossible, and since omniscience entails such knowledge, omniscience is impossible.”
The conclusion may be viable given a certain presupposition. At this point the presupposition is positively affirmed, “God could not exhaustively search space and time because they are both infinite.”
Yet, he also stated:
“This reconstruction of Puccetti’s argument turns on the factual assumptions that space and time are infinite but some scientists have claimed that space is finite but unbounded. The infinite nature of time is also controversial. At most, then, the argument prove that if space and time are infinite, then God is not omniscient. But since God is omniscient by definition, He cannot exist if space and time are infinite.”
In other words, reconstruction or not, he has no argument. Did you notice the qualifiers this time? “if space and time are infinite…He cannot exist if space and time are infinite.”
If Micheal Martin’s presuppositions are viable he may have a point. Yet, what we know about modern cosmology (or what the Bible has told us for millennia, see posts here and here) is that time, space and matter came into being at a certain point and are thus finite. Ergo, his reconstructed argument is deconstructed.
In his second statement Michael Martin stated, “God would have to know there were no facts He did not know.” This actually makes us privy to another weak link in the chain of Puccetti’s argument which had stated, “If P is omniscient, then P would have knowledge of all facts about the world. Let us call this totality of facts Y.” Yet, God’s omniscience is not restricted to “knowledge of all facts about the world” but of facts outside of the world, beyond the worlds, outside and beyond the material realm into the supernatural realm.
Yet, the argument fails in any case since the totality of facts is “Y,” of which God has knowledge. Thus, it is contradictory to the argument’s own parameters to state, “P would have to know something besides Y.” Since Y is defined as the totality of facts nothing is outside of Y.
Overall, the Argument from Incoherence is very successful in as much as it very clearly demonstrates Michael Martin’s incoherence.
Perhaps the last word ought to be given to the philosopher Donald Rumsfeld who stated,
“There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don’t know.”
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