A personal and conscious God

The God of Abrahamic religions is a personal God. While there is a consensus that God is personal, that God is a person is controversialFootnote ²; but regardless of personhood, it is an essential and vital element of traditional theism that God is a conscious being – in the broad sense of the word, for now.

The property of being conscious can be predicated of an entity or a mental state, but the former case can be reduced to the latter, as entities are conscious because their mental states are conscious (Rosenthal Reference Rosenthal, Davies and Humphreys1993, 197). Does God have mental states? Every traditional theist agrees that God creates through His thoughts and will, which means that He must at least have thoughts and will, and it is hard to see how the use of His intellect and will could fail to involve mental states. How one makes sense of this depends on one’s theory of mind and metaphysical views, with different schools of theism offering different conceptions. Thomists, for example, say that creating and willing are the actualization of God’s power, the act of thought and will of a Being who is ‘pure act’ (actus purus), and who, given divine simplicity, just is this act. Nonetheless, this does not contradict the claim that God does have at least one mental state (which is also an act or actualization), namely the mental state that is identical with God.

Contemporary philosophy of mind takes it for granted that there are mental states that involve, or are constituted by, phenomenal qualities (‘qualia’). Accordingly, an entity is phenomenally conscious if it has phenomenally conscious states, i.e. there is something that it is like for that entity.

Some philosophers consider phenomenal consciousness to be fundamental while others attempt to reduce it to, or derive it from, other types of mental or biological states. As mentioned above, God is typically described as conscious in the ‘everyday sense’. Classical, neoclassical, or open theism alike posit a God who possesses intellect, will, agency, knowledge, and a kind of emotional life (Kittle and Gasser Reference Kittle, Gasser, Kittle and Gasser2022, 3–7). Special emphasis is put on the latter in the neoclassical and open theistic paradigms, and although it is less pronounced in classical theism, it still is the case that under the doctrine of divine simplicity, God is identical with His love and compassion, and He exists in an eternal, unchanging state of divine bliss. That is, even if one does not put divine emotions front and centre, as classical theism is often claimed to do so by its opponents, God is still said to have feelings. (I use the terms ‘emotions’ and ‘feelings’ synonymously. More will be said on what I take an emotion to be in the next section.)

The personhood of God only matters inasmuch as consciousness is a criterion for being personal (Kittle and Gasser Reference Kittle, Gasser, Kittle and Gasser2022, 3).Footnote ³ Qua personal being, God is conscious and has intellect, will, emotions, etc., whereas such attributes as aseity, eternality, immutability, or simplicity may also characterize abstract objects. But is it not a feature of conscious beings – and of personal beings, for that matter – that they are phenomenally conscious? Supposing it is, one can build the following argument for divine qualia:

1. (i) According to all versions of traditional theism, God is a conscious personal being.

2. (ii) Consciousness involves phenomenally conscious states.

3. (iii) Therefore, God has at least one phenomenally conscious mental state.

Premise (ii) may be contested by arguing that consciousness does not necessarily involve phenomenal consciousness. Specifically, theists following the via negativa or the way of analogy to speak about God may claim that (ii) is true only if we use ‘consciousness’ in the everyday sense, but nothing can be said of God ‘in the everyday sense’. He indeed is conscious, yet it would be a mistake to conceptualize His consciousness akin to creaturely consciousness. It may be true that a creature is conscious if and only if it has phenomenally conscious states, but given God’s transcendence and His ontological uniqueness, it does not follow that phenomenally conscious states are also required for Him to be conscious.

Speaking generally in defence of premise (ii), I am aware that those who reject phenomenal consciousness as a threshold for general consciousness will probably not find what I say convincing. However, some philosophers (e.g. Thomas Nagel) do believe that phenomenal consciousness is a decisive factor in whether a being can be said conscious in the general sense. I am sympathetic to this position for it intuitively seems right to me. Taking animal consciousness into consideration also supports this view. Whether animals are phenomenally conscious is a debated issue, but higher animals, such as mammals and birds, are often thought to be so. If they indeed are, then it seems plausible to me that phenomenal consciousness is linked to higher forms of life (as opposed to lifeless stones and lesser life forms of prokaryotes, fungi, and plants). Supposing this relation between phenomenal consciousness and the order of life forms, the former is rightly attributed to personal beings and thus to God, the highest form of life.

I now turn to address the counterargument against premise (ii), as articulated by the proponents of the via negativa or the analogical theory. These are typically associated with classical theism, the latter especially (though not exclusively) with Thomism. This sheds light on the problem with the objection against everyday senses: many historical and contemporary classical theists favour univocity over analogy (among others, the followers of Augustine of Hippo and Anselm of Canterbury belong to this category; Rogers Reference Rogers2000, 16), not to mention neoclassical and open theists who are not bound by the tradition of analogy. In a univocal interpretation, divine and human consciousness mean, by and large, the same thing: if phenomenal consciousness is an essential component of human consciousness, then it is also part of divine consciousness.

‘They mean by and large the same thing’, an interlocutor could reply, ‘but strictly speaking they do not, for humans are of a corporeal nature’. The correlation between mental and physical states is usually not contested. Although different explanations have been put forward (mental causation, parallelism, supervenience, etc.), the correlation itself is acknowledged by most dualists – and a significant proportion of theists are dualists of some sort (Nagasawa Reference Nagasawa2008, 55–56; Robinson Reference Robinson, Beckermann, McLaughlin and Walter2009, 190). Typical examples of qualia – experiences of colour, sound, taste, and smell, as well as bodily sensations such as pain – are tied to bodily perception. God, however, is incorporeal and non-physical. Does this mean that phenomenal consciousness is not part of the univocal meaning of ‘conscious’?

Take the following two paradigmatic examples of qualia: pain and the visual experience of redness. Redness, as a property of objects, is the disposition to reflect light at a certain wavelength, which the human visual system perceives as red. Dogs, whose eyes have two colour cones, perceive the same wavelength as grey, whereas bats, who navigate using ultrasound and live in the dark where they encounter little light reflection, do not perceive it at all. Since God has no eyes, the interlocutor could say, He is unable to see red and therefore has no ‘what it is like to see red’ experience.

The case of pain is similar: pain is the feeling that something hurts somewhere (in the case of phantom pain, the location is incorrect, but we still appear to experience the perceived discomfort in some part of our body). Pain seems perceptible in the first place because it is accompanied by physical phenomena. A bodiless, non-physical God has neither the something nor the somewhere, so to speak – that is, He does not have the attribute of corporeality that is required for the physical accompaniments of pain, implying that He cannot feel pain.

Here is another objection to the argument for divine qualia. This one is grounded in the ontological status of God. Classical theism in particular tends to emphasize the ‘metaphysical gap’ between God and His creatures, which is manifested not only in God’s infinite knowledge, power, goodness, and existence but also in the fact that His ontology is radically different from that of creatures. In Him, there is no distinction between substance and accident, actuality and potentiality, etc., because He is metaphysically simple. As a result, He is not one more being among other beings, but the fundament of all beings (Davison Reference Davison2019, 176–179). In this vein, traditional theists (certainly classical, but perhaps even neoclassical and open theists) can argue that phenomenal consciousness belongs to the created world, and it is a case of excessive anthropomorphism to conceive divine consciousness in the image of created beings, attributing qualia to God.

I will respond to these objections in the context of further arguments in favour of divine qualia. The case of the metaphysical gap leads to the second argument in favour of divine qualia, while the issue of corporeality will be discussed in relation to the fourth argument.

Positive emotions

Regardless of the dissimilarities between the Creator and the creatures, the God of Abraham (and of traditional theism) differs from Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover and Plotinus’ One in that He does not only have a single mental state – eternal bliss – but also emotions towards the created world. There is no consensual definition of emotions. Of the many interpretations, I take Mullins’s (Reference Mullins2020, 4) as my basis because it is metaphysically neutral: an emotion is a mental state that has a cognitive content (it is about something) as well as a phenomenal content (what the emotion feels like). Given the Aristotelian notion of emotions, it might sound odd that God has emotions, but in line with the metaphysically neutral understanding I adopt, emotions have no inherent potentiality or the aspect of ‘being acted upon’: God’s love is an emotion (it is about Himself and the creatures, and, for the reasons to be discussed below, has a phenomenal content), yet it involves no potentiality. He loves His creatures unconditionally and not because His love is ‘stirred up’ (i.e. He is acted upon) by creatures. Note that personhood does not necessarily go hand in hand with having emotions: a personal being might have such phenomenally conscious states as what it is like to see red or hear a babbling brook, and thus be phenomenally conscious, yet lack emotions such as happiness, anger, or pain.

A cornerstone of the neoclassical model is that God empathizes with the weak and vulnerable, is moved by suffering, and is angered by injustice. Therefore, the neoclassical understanding is that divine emotions are much like human emotions and they show a broad range.

What about classical theism, then? In rejecting classical theism, a focal point is, besides the supposed unintelligibility of divine simplicity, the doctrine of divine impassibility. Neoclassical theists usually understand it as the thesis that ‘God does not have empathy towards creatures’, since ‘it would be immoral and irrational for God to be moved by creatures from His perfect bliss’ (Mullins Reference Mullins, Kittle and Gasser2022, 213 and 219). Yet in defending impassibility, classical theists emphasize that it is different from emotionlessness, insensitivity, or apathy. Thus for Anselm of Canterbury, impassibility means the absence of negative emotions such as pain, grief, and regret (Leftow Reference Leftow, Davies and Leftow2004, 145 and 152–153), while in Thomistic thought, it refers above all to the fact that God cannot be actualized or acted upon causally (Dolezal Reference Dolezal, Fuqua and Koons2023, 252ff.). Mullins (Reference Mullins2020, 2–3 and 19–20), himself a neoclassical theist, sees the inability to suffer as the core of impassibility, weaving the Anselmian and the Thomistic views together.

However, we interpret impassibility; classical theism also regards God as having deep and rich emotions. He cares for His creatures, is loving, compassionate, perfectly and infinitely happy.Footnote ⁴ God is love and happiness itself. Moreover, as the following quote from Aquinas attests, human happiness is, in a sense, a reflection of divine happiness: when human creatures are happy, they participate in divine bliss.

Proponents of classical theism have their own ideas about what happiness consists in (contemplation of the divine essence, unity with God, fulfilment of our nature, etc.). Nonetheless, their conception does not exclude the possibility of happiness being a phenomenal state, i.e. that there is something it is like to be happy. This is also true of love: perhaps the essence of love is wanting the good of someone and the desire for unity with them,Footnote ⁵ but this could very well have its own distinctive phenomenal character. (For the sake of simplicity, I will use happiness as the paradigmatic example of positive emotions in the following.)

From the above, it follows that if ‘a human is happy’ implies that there is something like it is for him to be happy, then the statement ‘God is happy’ similarly implies that there is something like it is for Him to be happy, even if the metaphysically proper wording is ‘God is happiness’ rather than ‘God is happy’. For human happiness is participation in divine happiness, even though it can be achieved in numerous ways. This is not to deny that perfect, ultimate happiness is the contemplation of God, union with Him, etc., but there also exists temporary, fragmentary, and ‘earthly’ happiness. What is it that these imperfect, human forms of happiness reflect from divine bliss? It is certainly not the knowledge and contemplation of the divine nature: being happy because I have passed my exam or because I can share in my best friend’s joy over her success has nothing to do with knowing God. Participating in divine bliss can hardly be anything other than participation in what it is like to be happy, i.e. the quale of happiness.

It seems to me that those who prefer the via analogica would not find this line of thought objectionable either. Although humans are incapable of imagining what it is like for God to be happy, the analogy of our own experience of happiness suggests that there is something it is like to be happy even for God. The analogy is backed up by the metaphysics of divine emotions. Suppose that creaturely qualia supervene on the physical. Humans, dogs, birds, and other primates alike experience some kind of contentment, yet their physical kinds are distinct (this has the same basis as the much-discussed multiple realizability problem). God is even more radically distinct from these kinds in that He does not have any physical properties at all – but, as all branches of traditional theism assert, He is content inasmuch as divine bliss is a longer-lasting, stable sense of peace and satisfaction. An analogy works only if its two relata share some property. Given divine incorporeality, the only candidate for this similarity between divine and creaturely contentment cannot be the physical, but only the what-it-is-likeness of contentment.Footnote ⁶

Divine knowledge and creation ex nihilo

The doctrine of creation ex nihilo, as understood traditionally, involves two claims: first, that God is the creator of everything apart from Himself, and second, that He took inspiration for creation – not literally from nothing but – from His own thought and will.

As for the first: given that God created everything, including concepts and qualia,Footnote ⁷ the concept of a conscious, all-knowing, intelligent, and rational God necessitates that God must (so to speak) ‘know what He is doing’ during creation, that is, He must have known every aspect of His creatures He was to create. In a famous paragraph quoted often in classical theistic literature on divine knowledge, Augustine of Hippo writes that God ‘does not (…) know all His creatures, both spiritual and corporeal, because they are, but they (…) are because He knows them. For He was not ignorant of what He was going to create. He created, therefore, because He knew; He did not know because He created’ (On the Trinity 15.13; Augustine Reference Augustine and Matthews2002, 194). Dolezal (Reference Dolezal, Fuqua and Koons2023, 160) is of the same opinion:

Zagzebski (Reference Zagzebski and Kvanvig2008, 231), who is a neoclassical theist, unlike Augustine and Dolezal, also shares their view: ‘if God is omniscient, he must know every aspect of his creation, including the conscious states of his creatures’. The upshot of these claims with respect to phenomenal qualities is this: when God created humankind, He knew that humans can be envious (etc.). If there is something like to be envious, then God had to know this ‘something’; otherwise, He would have ‘created in the dark’. In the light of the above, one can formulate the following argument for divine qualia.

1. (i) According to the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, God creates everything distinct from Himself.

2. (ii) God creates through His will and knowledge: He wills the existence of things He knows and wishes to create.

3. (iii) At the moment of creation, everything that was to be created was known by God (from (i) and (ii)).

4. (iv) There are phenomenal qualities and they are distinct from God.

5. (v) Phenomenal qualities were created by God (from (i)).

6. (vi) Therefore, God knows phenomenal qualities (from (iii) and (v)).

Let us now turn to the second statement of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, which affirms that God took inspiration for creation from His own thought and will. Ultimately, every creature exists because God conceives them, and they have certain properties or abilities to obtain properties (being coloured, the ability to experience pain, love, and so on) because God conceives them that way. At the moment of creation, the world for God is nothing more than His own thoughts, concepts, and any other relevant mental states or images. He does not acquire knowledge of the world; on the contrary, the world comes into being based on His knowledge (see Panchuk Reference Panchuk2021, 387–388). Premises (iv) and (v) state that there are phenomenal qualities and that they are created by God. It follows from the doctrine of creation ex nihilo that their ‘origin’ must be God and only God. According to classical theism, the act of creation does not affect God – if He has qualia, He has them eternally and immutably. Neoclassical and open theism may opt for a model in which God acquires new qualia after creation by interacting with His creatures. Even so, these theories must also assert that before creation, the world and qualia existed as divine ideas, and the creation of red things was the mapping of the divine idea and quale onto the language of physics, human experience and mind. Any other scenario would be tantamount to holding that God did not know what He was doing. Consider the following: before creation, God had not known what it was like to see red, He had only known that red was the reflection of light on a given wavelength. Then He created a red apple, and after creation, upon seeing the apple, He got to know what it was like to see red. Bearing in mind that the God of neoclassical and open theism can change and gain knowledge, this is possible metaphysically. But did He really know what He was doing during the creation of colours, was He really omniscient if He only learnt their phenomenal qualities afterwards? I concur with Zagzebski and Dolezal: God can be said omniscient only if He knows every aspect of His creation; otherwise, He ‘creates in the dark’.

A perfect God and his concepts

God has perfect and maximal knowledge, power, and goodness. The exact nature of the so-called omni-attributes is a source of disagreement between classical, neoclassical, and open theists, yet the very fact that God possesses these attributes is undisputable. It can be argued that God can only be omniscient and omnipotent if – to return to the example of visual experience – He knows what it is like to experience red (omniscience). Moreover, even though God has no human eyes, He can bring it about that despite lacking eyes, He knows the sensation of red (omnipotence).Footnote ⁸

This leads to the argument from concept possession.Footnote ⁹ There are several versions of this argument, but according to Yujin Nagasawa (Reference Nagasawa2008, 44), all proceed along the following linesFootnote ¹⁰:

1. (1) If God exists, then, necessarily, He is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent.

2. (2) If God does not fully comprehend the concept fear, then He is not omniscient.

3. (3) Being necessarily omniscient and omnipotent, God has never actually experienced fear (since nothing can take Him by surprise or frighten Him, and there is no difficulty that He cannot overcome).

4. (4) For any agent x, x fully comprehends the concept fear only if x has actually experienced fear.

Therefore,

1. (5) God does not fully comprehend the concept fear (from (3) and (4)).

2. (6) Therefore, God is not omniscient (from (2) and (5)).

3. (7) Therefore, God does not exist (from (1) and (6)).

I want to approach this argument not by questioning its premises but by exploring their underlying presuppositions. I have identified three, all of which are crucially important with respect to the existence divine qualia, and all three of which can be used as a basis for arguing in favour of their existence.

Premise (4) rests on the following important general principle: x can only fully comprehend the concept of a state α if they have experienced α; in other words, if they have experienced what it is like to be in state α, they have encountered the phenomenal quality associated with α. The experience itself does not guarantee full comprehension: animals experience fear, but they most probably do not have any concept of it. Nor does the principle imply that what-it-is-likeness is essential to a given concept – for instance, the essence of red might be the purely physical process of light reflection and its impact on the brain’s visual system: in Jackson’s knowledge argument, Mary knew redness (understood in this sense) when she was still locked in the black-and-white room. However, it does follow from the principle in question that without having a red quale, the knowledge of that redness is incomplete. A parallel perhaps can be drawn with knowledge gained through acquaintance. A great deal of knowledge about Jerusalem can be acquired from books, descriptions, images, maps, and so on; and it is obviously not the case that someone who has studied all sources does not know Jerusalem (including its essence, if there is such a thing). Yet it seems intuitively reasonable that until one personally visits Jerusalem, there will be something lacking from one’s knowledge of Jerusalem. Similarly, God is omniscient only if He knows the what-it-is-likeness accompanying various states, such as the state of seeing red.

This leads us to another important principle concerning omniscience. Omniscience can be defined in a vast array of ways, but it is widely accepted that God’s knowledge is complete in the sense that He knows whatever it is possible for Him to know. Building on that robust intuition, one can argue that qualia constitute far too large a part of human cognition for God to be considered omniscient without knowing them. As Kenny (Reference Kenny1979, 30) notes:

If God knows these truths without sense experience, why would He not know the relevant qualia as well? After all, what is it that God understands about thought (including cognitive phenomenology), emotions, perceptions, aesthetic experiences, etc. if He does not know what it is like to be in those states? The claim is not that God experiences these things in a human way (God may have His own ‘divine qualia’), nor that God experiences them. It seems possible to know qualia not through experience but through other ways. What I claim is that God does know what qualia are like.

The way God acquires this knowledge is another question. The argument from concept possession presupposes that in order to fully comprehend a concept, one must go through the experience associated with that concept (cf. premise (4): ‘x fully comprehends the concept fear only if x has actually experienced fear,’ see also Nagasawa (Reference Nagasawa2008, 45 and 453)). But this kind of concept empiricism can be objected. (I will get back to this topic in the next section.)

The third important idea behind the argument from concept possession is that it is possible for God to have qualia. If it were logically or metaphysically impossible for Him to have qualia, then, according to a principle that goes back to Aquinas and is accepted by the overwhelming majority of traditional theists, God’s omniscience and omnipotence would not be thereby limited (Nagasawa Reference Nagasawa2008, 23–24). This would also undermine the argument for divine qualia.

Why might it be impossible for God to have qualia? One might have the intuition that it is logically impossible for God to have the same subjective, first-person access to Mary’s experience of redness as Mary does. Even if God is ‘more intimately present to Mary than her innermost being’,Footnote ¹¹ the definition of first-person access entails that it is not possible even for God to access Mary’s experience the same way Mary does. Nevertheless, this does not rule out either that God has His own subjective access to redness, or that He has third-person access to Mary’s and others’ experiences in such a way that, to the greatest extent logically possible, He knows and feels what it is like for creatures to see red.Footnote ¹²

An interlocutor might suggest that the doctrine of divine simplicity rules out divine qualia. (Needless to say, this does not pose a problem for theists who reject divine simplicity.) The reason is that different experiences are associated with different qualia: what it is like to feel pain is different from what it is to be happy. This variability runs contrary to God’s metaphysical simplicity, or so the interlocutor could claim. As mentioned in the introduction, the doctrine does not permit any ontological complexity in God, hence the claim that ‘the knowledge of God is also His wisdom, and His wisdom is His essence or substance itself’ (On the Trinity 15.13; Augustine Reference Augustine and Matthews2002, 194). Granted that the experience of pain and of red are different qualia and that God has qualia, the quale of happiness and the quale of red would create complexity within God. Even if there is nothing logically incoherent in God’s having qualia, having more than one quale would contradict His simplicity. The doctrine is often labelled as the tenet of classical theism; therefore, the incompatibility of qualia and simplicity would mean that a classical theist must reject divine qualia.

In response, I claim that this issue is part of a widely recognized difficulty with regard to divine simplicity; therefore, no new concern emerges for a classical theist who accepts divine qualia. For specificity, I will present the argument in an Aristotelian–Thomistic framework, which is one of the most popular options within classical theism.

In the thought of Aquinas, qualitative features like colours, odours, and tastes are not solely in the mind of the perceiver but also in the things they characterize: the redness of an apple is a form that inheres in the apple, and when being perceived, the mind or intellect of the perceiver receives this form (Davies Reference Davies1993, 126–128; Feser Reference Feser, Leach and Tartaglia2016, 60–61; see also Compendium of Theology I.82). As Adams (Reference Adams, Geivett and Sweetman1992, 227) put it:

Redness, thus, cannot be reduced to physical properties such as wavelengths and dispositions to reflect light because it is a form in itself (cf. Feser Reference Feser, Leach and Tartaglia2016, 61). I am not sure about the qualia of feelings since, unlike colours and tastes, they are not forms inhering in objects, but it seems to me that they are ultimately related to one’s nature and, therefore, a form. For illustration, consider two negative feelings, pain and envy. Pain is the absence of the healthy functioning of the body, but healthy functioning is basically determined by the essential form of the living organism. Envy is the lack of compassion and of love for one’s neighbour, and these also belong to the proper mental functioning of humans based on their essential form. Ultimately, the what-it-is-likeness of pain and envy is grounded in the malfunctioning of human nature.

One of the consequences of this view is that the explanation that God knows red based on its physical description (as in the case of Mary in the knowledge argument) does not hold water. Forms are proper, ‘independent’ objects of knowledge; they are not reducible to physical descriptions, nor are they alternative ways of access to already known information. The other consequence is that within this framework, the issue of incorporeality is not an ‘issue’: if qualia are some kind of forms, God can know them the same way He knows other forms (e.g. the forms of humans and horses), regardless of whether phenomenal qualities are tied to bodily perception, that is, to matter.

Thomists assert that God knows literally everything He creates, and in Thomistic metaphysics, ‘everything’ refers to the form and matter, essence and existence of creatures, since every creature is a composite of these.Footnote ¹³

Similarly, Dolezal (Reference Dolezal, Fuqua and Koons2023, 264) claims that ‘the actuality of every particular quale in a human’s experiential knowledge falls within the scope of God’s causality and knowledge’. All this points towards the conclusion that redness and other qualia appear qualitatively, i.e. as something to God. Indeed, given the doctrines of creation ex nihilo and divine impassibility, it is not the case that whenever there is a red apple, God somehow perceives it, and His perception is accompanied by a phenomenal quality. Redness and its relevant phenomenal quality exist in the first place because God created them. Speaking in terms of Aristotelian causation, God is the first formal cause of everything apart from Himself (matter as well as form, including qualitative features), and in His capacity as first formal cause, He knows all that has been (formally) caused by Him. As a formal cause, God is present in human experience not as an observer (as humans are with regard to the pain of others), nor as an experiencer (as humans are with regard to their own pain), but in a third way, the intimacy of which is on a par with subjective experiences. Dolezal (Reference Dolezal, Fuqua and Koons2023, 265) writes that divine ‘causal knowledge is a nonexperiential way of knowing creaturely experiences that understands those experiences more perfectly and exactly than the subjects of experience themselves’.

Causal knowledge comes in useful, for it offers a solution to two problems of classical theism. First, it explains how God can have knowledge of qualia, and second, it also addresses the issue of simplicity. Under this model, God knows himself, and it is through knowing Himself that He also knows the effects of His causal power (see Summa Theologiae I, q. 14, a. 5–6). Since qualia are forms, and forms are also created by God, He knows these exactly the way He knows other things – by knowing Himself. The object of divine knowledge is thus God Himself, and there is no knower–known, subject–object distinction.

Concerns have been raised as to whether this model of knowledge is really in agreement with divine simplicity, with Timothy O’Connor (Reference O’Connor2023, 129–130) providing a brief, concise summary. The key objection is essentially this: ‘How does a simple God entertain an infinity of distinct ideas, concepts, forms, etc.?’ where these mental items represent the creaturely world. What I wish to point out is that this difficulty arises independently of the question of divine qualia, and divine qualia do not add anything to it. After all, if God knows the form of red and the form of blue, these are two different bits of His knowledge, which is already in tension with simplicity. Whether the form of red ‘contains’ a phenomenal quality in addition to a physical description does not cause any additional problems for the theory. According to the doctrine of simplicity, God’s love, wrath, compassion, mercy, and happiness are identical with each other – the counter-intuitive character of this claim is acknowledged by classical theists, who nonetheless maintain that it does not make the doctrine of simplicity incoherent. If they are correct, then adding that the what-it-is-likeness of divine compassion is identical with the what-it-is-likeness of divine love will not do that either.

In an effort to solve the inconsistency between the multiplicity of divine ideas on the one hand, and simplicity on the other hand, Panchuk (Reference Panchuk2021) offers a theory of divine conceptualism, inspired by Aquinas and other historical figures. According to conceptualism, divine ideas and concepts fill the role of universals, i.e. the apple gains its redness by participating in the divine idea of red. Whether Panchuk succeeds in her endeavour falls outside of the scope of this paper, but what she says about divine knowledge has relevance to the issue of qualia. She proposes that ‘God’s knowledge is more like our knowledge of what things are like than our knowledge that P’, explicitly drawing a parallel between Mary’s experience of red in the knowledge argument and God’s knowledge (Panchuk Reference Panchuk2021, 397). On this account, the fundamental constituents of divine knowledge are phenomenal qualities, or even a single quale, that of the divine essence, which God knows in a single act of intuition.

The compatibility of Panchuk’s model with divine simplicity, just like causal knowledge, does not depend on the existence of divine qualia, but on how the supposedly simple divine intellect can contain the multiplicity of things to be known. The peculiarity of Panchuk’s theory is that it explicitly builds on divine qualia as essential to divine knowledge.

Classical theists usually endorse a model in which God’s knowledge is first and foremost not propositional: ‘the traditional doctrine of divine omniscience cannot be squared with the popular contemporary assumption that the primary objects of knowledge, including God’s knowledge, are propositions’ (Rogers Reference Rogers2000, 76, see also Kenny Reference Kenny1979, 43). The gist of the ‘traditional doctrine of omniscience’ is that God knows things in the most direct and intimate way possible: through His essence, He is immediately and directly aware of the creatures’ participation in Him. Among the types of knowledge humans are commonly held to possess – propositional knowledge, ‘knowing how’, and knowledge by acquaintance – God’s knowledge resembles the latter the most (see Dickinson’s (Reference Dickinson2019) and Alston’s (Reference Alston1986) accounts of divine knowledge).Footnote ¹⁴

Conceptualizing God’s knowledge akin to knowledge by acquaintance also supports the claim that God has qualia. Conee (Reference Conne1994) argues that the novelty in Mary’s knowledge when seeing red for the first time is best understood as becoming acquainted with the phenomenal quality of red. On this account, ‘concerning a certain look, (…) what is learned is it. A look is not a fact. This learning seems to be unproblematically classified as a relation of a person to a phenomenal quality’ (Conee Reference Conne1994, 142). Extending this to what-it-is-likeness in general, and to God as well, the result is that God is acquainted with the things themselves – persons, essences, and phenomenal qualities.

By presenting these accounts of divine knowledge, my aim was to show that there are other options besides the empiricism in the argument taken from concept possession. Kenny (Reference Kenny1979, 31–33) and Dolezal (Reference Dolezal, Fuqua and Koons2023, 259–260) also argue that it is possible for God to have experiential knowledge without actually experiencing the objects of knowledge.

Lastly, I wish to say a few words about representationalism and whether divine qualia fit coherently into the theory. On this view, qualia ‘are not qualities of experiences’ but ‘are really representational contents of experiences into which the represented qualities enter’ (Tye Reference Tye and Zalta2025). Looking at a red apple, I represent one of its (physical) properties as red; redness is therefore the extrinsic property of the apple, not of my experience, and the apple’s having that property is the representational content of my experience. Bodily perceptions (such as pain), emotions (such as the heart-pounding feeling of joy), and moods may be treated the same way: the previous two are qualitative properties of body parts, while moods are qualities of oneself overall (Tye Reference Tye2002, 142–144). In contrast, in the Aristotelian–Thomistic model, redness inheres as a form in the apple, but upon looking at it, the same form also enters my experience; hence, it is present in both the apple and my experience. Aquinas reiterates this in several places – for example, in the Summa Theologiae (I, q. 79, a. 5, ad 1), he writes that ‘sensible things are found in act outside the soul’ (see also Madden Reference Madden2017, 12–14 and 20–24).

In a representationalist framework, God knows what it is like to see red as, given His omniscience and omnipotence, it is possible for Him to have access to the representational content that the quale of red is. A representationalist would argue that this model can be generalized to other perceptual and emotional modalities: an omnipotent God can bring it about that He knows the representational content of Mary’s headache or heart-wrenching jealousy. Whether bodily sensations and moods have representational content is a debated issue in the philosophy of mind, but this aside, I see two fatal objections to the representationalist strategy with regard to God.

The first is that it leads to incoherence when applied to God’s happiness or His other emotions. Representationalism, so it seems to me, is inherently linked to corporeality; for what is represented, what has the quality, is always extrinsic to the mind and the experience, and is always physical. God has nothing of this sort – but then what is it that divine happiness represents?

The second possible objection is that representationalism is incompatible with the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. ‘In the beginning was God’ – only God, and no external objects that could have ‘provided’ the intentional content for His thoughts. Redness was not a physical property of objects represented as red in the mind of God; on the contrary, redness, as it existed in the mind of God, got to be ‘represented’ as the physical quality of the surface of the apple after creation.

Undivine emotions

If God created emotions like lust, hopelessness, and envy while knowing what He was doing, does this mean that He also has undivine emotions, emotions that are not worthy of Him, and arguably metaphysically impossible for Him to have? This question undoubtedly poses a serious problem for neoclassical theists who accept divine passibility. If having qualia is compatible with classical theism (as I believe it is), then this problem also must be addressed by classical theists. I think the answer on both fronts is the same: ‘yes and no’.

So far, I have neglected the crucial distinction between first-person and third-person perspectives. Accessing someone else’s qualia does not imply having one’s own qualia. God, by virtue of His omniscience, knows what it is like for humans to be lustful or hopeless; that is, He has access to human qualia. To exclude undivine emotions, one must assert that, at the same time, God does not have the divine qualia of lust, hopelessness, and so on. God knows what it is like for Cain to feel murderous hate towards Abel, yet He is aware that the murderous hate is not His own emotion. Zagzebski (Reference Zagzebski and Kvanvig2008, 243) and Mullins (Reference Mullins2020, 31–32 and 62–64) also draw attention to the fact that knowing or even understanding another person’s perspective is not equal to agreeing or accepting this perspective, and it is far from (mis)taking it for one’s own.

An imperfect analogy is provided by the case of acting. If an actor really gets into the role of Hamlet, he feels Hamlet’s desire for revenge, even though the actor himself does not harbour any revengeful thoughts. Although there is no doubt that the actor feels vengeful, I would not say that it is his own. In the context of God and humans, God is the actor, and the role He immerses himself in is the personal life of each human, which, regardless of the depth of the immersion, never becomes God’s own.

Another consideration in this regard is the fact that knowing what it is like to α is not the same as actually being in the phenomenal state of α. As I am writing these lines, I do not have toothache, yet I know what it feels like. Similarly, the omniscient God knows what it would be like to be depressed, but He is not actually depressed. If one accepts the classical theistic concept of a God who is ‘pure act’, it cannot go unmentioned that God is not even potentially depressed. Knowing what it would be like for me to α does not imply that it is metaphysically possible for me to α. For instance, I may know what it would be like for me to be a dolphin, but since I am essentially human, it is metaphysically impossible for me to be a dolphin. One might insist that I can only know ‘in a human way’ what it would be like to be a dolphin – a fact I do not wish to deny. My point is that God can know ‘in a divine way’ what it would be like for Him to be depressed, despite being unable to be depressed. Undivine emotions are metaphysically impossible for God, but it is not epistemically impossible for Him to know what they are like. (Note that this goes hand in hand with the rejection of the second part of premise (4) of the argument from concept possession.)

The last issue to be addressed is that of eternal divine bliss and knowing what it is like to suffer. If God is said to be compassionate, caring, and loving, then knowing creaturely suffering ought to disturb His tranquillity – or so the reasoning goes (see Mullins Reference Mullins2020, 46ff.). This objection is typically directed at impassibility, not at divine qualia specifically. After all, there is nothing undivine in the phenomenal quality of red, as opposed to that of pain or lust. I find that the answer to this problem depends much on what one thinks of divine bliss. I consider divine bliss to be akin to a mood in that it has no external object, is not really directed at anything.Footnote ¹⁵ My personal experience is that when I am in a certain mood, e.g. contentment, I can and do empathize with my sorrowful friend. I really am worried about her well-being and sad over her misfortunes. Yet, at the back of my mind, there lingers my general happiness, or the conscious awareness that I am happy. If I were not happy but depressed, I would react quite differently to the pain of my friend precisely because my overall mental state would be different. Adapting this line of thought to the case of God, I believe that He is not indifferent to our sufferings, but the phenomenal foundation of His ‘mental life’ is still eternal bliss. His impassibility manifests itself in the fact that we are unable to disturb His general mood.

An interlocutor could suggest that this explanation is yet another challenge to simplicity, because we are assuming both eternal divine bliss and an emotive relation to the sufferings of creatures. The problem, however, can be traced back to the most basic difficulty of divine simplicity already mentioned above, namely ‘How does a simple God have an infinity of distinct thoughts, phenomenal states, etc.?’