If we can't know whether a divine being exists, would that being be unimportant even if it did exist?

Question

This is what I thought at first (by "objectively important," we mean this in the sense of naive moral realism, at least):

1. If there were an ultimately powerful, knowledgeable, and good being, it would be objectively important for us to know this.
2. We can't know that.
3. If it were objectively important that we know something, we could know it.
4. Therefore, there's no ultimately powerful, knowledgeable, and good being.

Which means that if we can't know whether a certain thing exists, then we do know that it doesn't exist! I suppose we could say "if we can't directly know then we indirectly do know," but it's still a partially counterintuitive conclusion.

But none of the alternatives implicitly given seem much, if at all, better:

5. (Deny (1)) There's a divine being, but it's not important to us that there is.
6. (Deny (2)) We can know whether there's such a being.
7. (Deny (3)) Something could be both objectively important and unknowable.

Or the meta-alternative:

8. If a divine being exists, and is morally important, then moral importance is not (much/at all) objective.

(8) would not, I expect, appeal to every theist, despite being otherwise as close to the theocentric ethos as possible, here. (7) is either incoherent (violating the definition of "objective importance") or pointless (what does the concept of objective importance matter if there are indiscernible/undetectable cases?). (6) would mean that there is some direct way to know if a divine being exists, which is difficult to imagine (how can we differentiate concretely between a divine being existing and not existing?). (5) seems to have been Kant's conclusion insofar as he thought (in the Metaphysics of Morals) that we have no duties to God, so maybe (5) has a decent historical pedigree among the intelligentsia, but it still runs counter to my intuitions about a perfectly good being (or I would at least hope that I would be able to know about a being that was supposed to be perfectly good!).

Answer 1

Your argument, in particular premise 3, has some parallels in the literature, in particular those from hiddeness and skeptical theism. This is expected, since both have a heavy focus on epistemological considerations. The rest of my answer will focus mainly on these considerations.

"If X is relevant to our moral decision making, we can know it". Given that moral decision making has to do with knowledge of moral goods and lack thereof, Bergman 2009 should offer considerations against. See Tooley's Cambridge excerpt for the orthodox reply.

More generally, skeptical theists will invoke some skeptical premise about the limitations of human (moral) knowledge. CORNEA (Wkystra) is probably the most famous here, again see the relevant SEP. The difficulty here is to endorse a skepticism with respect to moral knowledge that does not infect the rest of inductive knowledge (since most plausible arguments from evil at present day are inductive). See Snyder 2009 for further considerations in the same vein. Van Inwagen also offers such considerations, but at the cost of modal skepticism, which is hard for most present day philosophers to accept.

For an excellent treatment of hiddeness, and in particular why a particular human's knowledge may be limited wrt God, see Moser. He argues from a Christian perspective, but much of his work easily generalizes to any Abrahamic, and probably personal theism (although I haven't worked out the details).

FWIW, one of my colleagues is currently working on challenging Kant's ought implies can (which I assume is what you refer to by action-guidance thesis, given that knowledge is necessary for acting in the proper sense). The challenge rests on historical and legal assumptions. Clearly the legal parallel fails, and (apparently?) not all historical societies shared this assumption. But perhaps someone more knowledgable will expound.

Answer 2

One argument is that you’ll objectively know after physical death, and it will be quite important whether you figured it out prior to physical death. If the complete forgiveness offered by the Christian God is available, we should want it.

The whole question presumes physical death is the end of the soul and the end of objective evidence.

Secondly, anyone who genuinely seeks whatever God there is has a much greater chance of objectively finding Him (and hence, obviously of finding evidence of Him) than anyone who does not seek.

You might enjoy a series by “inspiring philosophy” on youtube called “irreducible mind”.

Answer 3

What you're talking about is essentially "Deism," the idea that God exists, but has no impact on the world. There have been any attacks on Deism over the years, both from religious and non-religious standpoints, most of which boil down to the question of whether it even makes sense to talk about an entity that has no impact on the world.

However, most religious people don't believe in a Deist god, but in one that does have an impact on the world, and is potentially knowable. So deny "2" (the unknowability of God) would be the stance of most religious people. Given the relative unpopularity of Deism, the original dilemma seems effective against only a very small subset of people.

Answer 4

Imagine we're fish. Or strenghthen it to deep sea fish who reach the surface with peril to their dark low down high pressure default existence.

Now imagine we — fish — are having a discussion: Does water exist?

Con: We've never seen water
Pro: We could not exist without water
Con: You make unfounded claims without evidence
Sage: These are academic arguments, ie they cannot be resolved. And are pragmatically unimportant

The argument is animate and heated! And seemingly unending...

Now imagine global warming happens — not the mild one which most scientists expect is in progress but the extreme ones that likely turned Venus to toast (and froze Mars).

---

Note this is not an argument for the Christian God, but more like the Spinozan God.
Or Anselm's God.
Or Jordan Peterson's God

The most piquant case is Nietzsche's God: When people brought up to believe that God necessarily implies (something like) the Christian theistic entity, come face to face with a God-idea like Nietzsche's, they end up calling him an atheist!

Answer 5

Given your response to my question, you are equivocating with the term "objectively important". In premise 1 you are using the term to mean that we cannot successfully make correct moral judgements if we do not know something. In premise 3, given your answer to my question, you mean: we should try to take it into account in our moral decision making.

Rewriting your argument with the clarified premises, it can be seen to be invalid:

1. If there were an ultimately powerful, knowledgeable, and good being, we would need to know this in order to make correct moral judgments.
2. We can't know that.
3. If we ought to take something into account in our moral decision making, we can know it.

Clarified like this, premises 1 and 3 seem reasonably sound, but they do not, with 2, lead to the conclusion:

4. Therefore, there's no ultimately powerful, knowledgeable, and good being.

Answer 6

I think you have some flaws in your argument, which you mostly pointed out already.

I'd suggest a modified version:

• If there were some just divine being, it would not punish or reward us without us knowing what it wants and what the consequences for our actions would be.
• We can't know that it exists or what it wants.
• Therefore, a just divine being does not exist or would not have us face consequences for our actions.
• Therefore, the existence of a just divine being is unimportant to us.

One could perhaps say it's unjust to reward someone just for doing things to get a reward, as opposed to because they wanted to be a "good" person (e.g. being kind and considerate to others). For that, I might suggest yet another version:

• If there were some just divine being, it would punish or reward us based on the virtue of our actions.
• If we knew of the existence of a divine being, our actions may no longer be based on virtue.
• Therefore, we can't know that a just divine being exists.
• Therefore, if a just divine being exists, trying to live a virtuous life would provide the maximum utility.
• Therefore, if we try to live a virtuous life, the existence of a just divine being is unimportant to us.

If you don't try to live a virtuous life, this argument may not work for you.

In any case, I prefer the problem of evil / suffering as an argument.

---

* Regarding the existence of an unjust divine being, they could arbitrarily punish or reward us regardless of what we do, based on which you can make a reasonable case that their existence just isn't worth worrying about.

Answer 7

I think that your problem is here:

2. We can't know that.
3. If it were objectively important that we know something, we could know it.

These depend on what you mean by "know", and I think that in any case of "know" where they are both true, it would need to be a straw man. There are lots of things, for instance, that we don't know now that are important later. "Is that really a bomb beside me?" is a very important thing to know even if you can't know whether or not it is right now. You will know it later, and most every divine being people believe exists are beings they believe that you will know with certainty of their existence at some point.

In the case that there existed some divine being which never revealed itself to us nor would ever interact with us and no evidence ever had or will exist of its presence, then in that case it would be unimportant. I think those are mostly except as a thought experiment, or perhaps Deism.

Another problem is that you refer to something you've termed "objective importance" and then attempt to define it without an appeal to a divine arbiter. If you presume Materialism, you run into the Is–ought problem. It seems as though you have an internal concept that there should be some objectively important things, but instead of seeking out the full implications of how that could be, you are just supposing that it exists. However, this ends up begging the question. If you just assumed that it existed without an explanation, then of course the explanation would seem superfluous.

8. If a divine being exists, and is morally important, then moral importance is not (much/at all) objective.

I suppose that depends about what you mean here by "objective". There is one sense in which you could say that "it's subject to the mind of that being", but in practice, that's just semantics. Most definitions of "moral" are circular, but if there is a divine being, it is conceivable that all of the non-circular definitions are satisfied singularly by that one being such that it could be said that morality is objective. Regardless, if that divine being should give out rewards and punishments based upon that moral system, then I think that most people would agree that it would be very important to consider that moral code, even if you had some definition or intuition which didn't fit. But you are right that this is different for some Theists. For instance, the Greek gods mentioned in the Euthyphro dilemma would suffer from this problem. I'm not sure whether people believe in those in modern day other than allegorically.

(6) would mean that there is some direct way to know if a divine being exists, which is difficult to imagine (how can we differentiate concretely between a divine being existing and not existing?)

If your definition of "know" allows for "we will know" as in "we will be judged", then this is easy to know. We just don't "know" yet. It seems like your unstated question here is something more like "Which belief about the existence of a God should we believe now?" That is a much different question, and one which can't be so easily dismissed.