Could God guarantee intelligibility?
My last post argued that those who ask “Why is rationalism true?” thereby commit themselves to presuming the truth of rationalism. Even if my argument works, however, it doesn’t establish that rationalism is true, i.e., that reality is fully intelligible. What could establish it? Some philosophers say that God could. If reality consists of an infinitely intelligent God and his creation, then God can understand every detail of reality, even if limited beings like us never will.
But that argument works only if whatever happens in reality happens mechanistically and never by magic. For not even God could understand how magic happens, there being no such thing as how magic happens. To use Adolf Grünbaum’s example: If God created photons genuinely by word-magic (“Let there be light”), then there’s no mechanism that God used and hence no fully specific explanation of how God created photons. Not even God could know exactly how he did it, for at some level there’s nothing to know.
It’s not just the Genesis story but the very concept of a theistic God that implies magic. For theism insists that God’s intentions are deeper explanations of what happens than any mechanisms are. Because the existence of God implies the existence of magic, God can’t guarantee the full intelligibility of reality. On the contrary, the existence of God would guarantee that reality isn’t fully intelligible.
