The assumption

The central metaphysical assumption of the Izhbitza is this: the world is God's lucid dream.Footnote ⁷ Why assume this?Footnote ⁸

It is a doctrine of classical theism that God, in some sense or other, sustains the world. This doctrine could be framed in either a weak or a strong formulation. The weak formulation argues that God sustains the world intermittently, like a person providing food for a helpless youngster. The strong formulation argues that God continuously sustains, like a person conjuring up a mental image of a flower.Footnote ⁹ The image of the flower continues to exist only as long as the thinker continues to pay attention to it.

When the psalmist says, ‘Everybody's eyes wait for you, and you give them their food in its time. You open your hand, and satiate the desire of every living thing’ (145:15–16), he seems only to give expression to the weak doctrine. Every living thing exists independently of God, but without him opening his hand from time to time, they would starve, and die, like the helpless baby left unfed. Psalm 104, however, which begins with expressions of the weak doctrine, goes further (104:29–30): ‘You hide your face, and they vanish; you take away their breath, and they die, and return to their dust. You send forth your spirit, they are created: and you renew the face of the earth.’Footnote ¹⁰

If God hides his face, even momentarily, we vanish, like a mental image that disappears as soon as the thinker stops thinking. Furthermore, in this psalm, God has actively to involve himself in the sustenance of the world: ‘he renews’, as in, he continually generates or regenerates, ‘the face of the earth’. This phrase is echoed in Jewish liturgy: ‘He is awesome in praise, master of wonders, who, in his goodness, renews every day, continuously, the work of creation.’ God's sustenance isn't just a matter of periodically stepping in with the timely opening of a hand, as we see in psalm 145; God's sustenance is, rather, a continuous necessity, as we see in psalm 104, and in Jewish liturgy. This sounds more like the strong doctrine.

The strong doctrine of Divine Sustenance therefore has a certain appeal to Jewish sensibilities (and it certainly was appealing to most of the Hassidic MastersFootnote ¹¹). It isn't a big jump from accepting the strong doctrine of Divine Sustenance to thinking of God's relationship to the world in terms of a dreamer to a lucid dream, or a thinker to a mental image, or a storyteller to the world of the story being told.

The Genesis creation narrative lends further credence to the Izhbitza's assumption. In that narrative, God just has to say ‘let there be x’ and then, automatically, there is x. How does God pull that off? The traditional answer is: via omnipotence. But that isn't a particularly discursive explanation. If, on the other hand, God is dreaming us up, or is the author of our story, then of course he just has to say, ‘let there be x’, and then there will be. For what does it mean for Hamlet to be a prince of Denmark over and above Shakespeare's having stipulated in some sense or other, ‘let him be a prince of Denmark’?

The Izhbitza presents his assumption without argument. But one can at least understand why it might have seemed attractive to somebody who already adopts the tenets of classical theism, along with a commitment to the authority of the Bible. Or, at the very least, one can see why the analogy of God as the dreamer/author of the world can be attractive, even if you don't chose to take it as seriously as the Izhbitza did.Footnote ¹²

Problems with the assumption

The Izhbitza's assumption gives rise to the following problems.

Problem One – The Loss of Freedom: If I am just a character in God's dream or story, then I have no free will. I do whatever he imagines me to do. Why would God command me to act in certain ways and hold me responsible for my actions, if I have no freedom?

Problem Two – The Loss of Significance: If we are just characters in God's dream or story – his imaginary friends – then I'm not real; or, at the very least, I lose a degree of ontological significance; significance I thought I was entitled to believe myself to have.

Problem Three – Panentheism or Acosmism: The Izhbitza's view that the world is, in some sense, in the mind of God – who encompasses, but goes beyond the world – seemingly commits him to panentheism. If the world is a part of God, then God has parts. God's having parts conflicts with the Orthodox doctrine of Divine simplicity. One way out for the Izhbitza would be to say that the world isn't even a part of God. On this acosmic picture, all that exists is God. All else is a dream-like illusion. But the assertion of acosmism is self-defeating; it entails that the experiences that led us to assert it, and indeed the experience of asserting it, were themselves illusory. Why should we trust our own assertion of acosmism, if it's all grounded in illusions?Footnote ¹³

Problem Four − The Problem of Evil: If God is writing this story, why did he have to include such horrific scenes of suffering and depravity? The classical theodicies, to the extent that they are at all successful, seem shut off to the Izhbitza. Evil is all God's fault. Classical theodicies try to get God off the hook, but the Izhbitza's assumption places God radically on the hook!Footnote ¹⁴

I shall argue that the Izhbitza is able to wield his one metaphysical assumption to overcome these problems and to forge solutions to various traditional riddles in the philosophy of religion.

Response to Problem One

The Izhbitza is notorious for his play on the famous Talmudic phrase that ‘All is in the hands of heaven except for the fear of heaven’, which, in the Izhbitza's teaching, became, ‘All is in the hands of heaven, even the fear of heaven!’Footnote ¹⁵ But, this appearance of strident determinism is undercut by instances in which the Izhbitza seems committed to our free willFootnote ¹⁶ and to the radical contingency of events that transpire around us.Footnote ¹⁷ The Izhbitza seems committed to a contradiction: everything is preordained, and yet some things are truly up to us.

Rabbi Hefter (Reference Hefter2013, 61–62) suggests that we pay careful attention to the corollaries of the Izhbitza's metaphysical assumption. According to the Izhbitza, ‘creation is essentially the projection of the consciousness of God. A thought in the mind of God is reality.’ God, apparently, dreams us all up as being free, and that ‘fact makes free will a reality’. We have what Rabbi Hefter calls a ‘paradoxical two-tiered’ reality. On one tier, determinism is true. On the other, human beings have libertarian free will. I don't see a paradox here. A good way to explore this two-tiered reality is by looking at the semantics of fiction. Take the following sentences:

1. (1) Hamlet was a Danish prince.

2. (2) Hamlet was an investment banker.

3. (3) Hamlet was a figment of Shakespeare's imagination.

There is a sense in which (1) is true and (2) is false. Hamlet was a Danish prince, not an investment banker. If, in an English Literature class, you contend that Hamlet wasn't a Danish prince, but that he was an investment banker, your teacher will say that you have made a mistake. However, there's another sense in which both sentences are false. In order to be a Danish prince or an investment banker, you first of all need to exist. Hamlet never existed. If you look at a list of all of the Danish princes in history, Hamlet won't be on it. But, when your teacher asks you whether Hamlet was a Danish prince, you would be mistaken to say, ‘No, I don't think he was, since he was merely a figment of Shakespeare's imagination.’ We seem to be dealing with two senses of truth and falsehood: truth-relative-to-the-Hamlet-fiction, call it truth_H, in which (1) is true and (2) and (3) are false; and truth-simpliciter, in which (1) and (2) are false and (3) is true.

Take the following two sentences:

1. (4) Hamlet only did what Shakespeare ordained for him.

2. (5) Hamlet had free will, and thus the choice to kill his uncle was his own.

Sentence (4) is true, but would be the wrong answer to your teacher's question when she asks you: why did Hamlet kill his uncle? Thus, sentence (4) has truth-simpliciter, but isn't true_H. You owe your teacher a better answer. If you didn't think that Hamlet had free will, a lot of the suspense and the drama would be sapped out of the play. Shakespeare could have written a play about Hamlet the automaton with no will or emotion. It would have been a very different play. The Hamlet that we know and love is a Hamlet with free will.

Sentences (1) and (5) are true_H, which is a real species of truth, but, they are false-simpliciter. And sentences (3) and (4) are true-simpliciter, but false_H. Sentence (2) is false-simpliciter as well as false_H. Just as Shakespeare is the author of Hamlet, God, for the Izhbitza, is the author/dreamer of our world. And thus the Izhbitza can make the following two claims:

1. (6) We only do what God ordains for us.

2. (7) We have libertarian free will.

Just as you can assert sentences (4) and (5) without contradicting yourself; the Izhbitza can assert sentences (6) and (7) without contradicting himself. If you were accused of contraction, when asserting both (4) and (5), you would be right to accuse your accuser of ignoring the semantic ascent that you tacitly make between asserting (4) relative to the standards of truth_H and asserting (5) relative to the standards of truth-simpliciter. Likewise, if you were to accuse the Izhbitza of contradiction, for asserting both (6) and (7), he would be right to accuse you of failing to recognize the semantic ascent that he is tacitly making between (6), which he asserts relative to the standards of truth-simpliciter, and (7), which he asserts relative to the standards of truth-relative-to-God's-dream-or-story (call it truth_E for earthly truth). God's being the author of our world is no more of an attack on our freedom than Shakespeare's authorship of Hamlet is an attack on Hamlet's freedom.

The meaning of ‘freedom’

We don't want it merely to be fictionally true that we have freedom – we want real bona fide freedom. In a sense, this issue brings us straight to Problem Two. In other words: the Izhbitza's response to Problem One isn't good enough because we demand more ontological significance for ourselves and for our freedom. We don't just want to exist in a fiction; we want to exist. We don't just want freedom in a fiction; we want freedom. That is the challenge of Problem Two, which I address in the next section.

A related issue should be dealt with here: the word ‘freedom’ relative to truth_H doesn't mean the same thing as ‘freedom’ relative to truth-simpliciter. Any sentence that is true_H will be true-simpliciter once you've added a fiction-operator to it. A fiction-operator, such as ‘in the Hamlet fiction it is true that …’, takes a sentence and relativizes its truth-conditions to the fiction. The concern is that predicates under the scope of such operators shift their meaning. It is whatever ‘freedom’ means, free from the scope of any fiction-operators, that Problem One is concerned about. To be told that we have whatever ‘freedom’ means under the scope of a fiction-operator is no response at all. But I think this is the wrong way to think about fiction-operators.Footnote ¹⁸ Take the following sentence:

1. (8) In the Hamlet-fiction it is true that Hamlet is free.

The meaning of any complex sentence has to be arrived at in stages. Following an example of Dummett's (Reference Dummett1981, 10), witness the brackets in the expression, ‘(2+3) × 6’. They serve to illustrate that, in relation to the multiplication-operator, ‘the whole expression ‘2+3’ is to be treated as unitary’. The first stage in the construction of our expression joins ‘2’ to ‘3’ by ‘+’ to form ‘2+3’. Only in the second stage do we join the expression formed in the first stage to ‘6’ by the multiplication-operator. Thus, complex expressions have an ‘order of construction’, or a constructional history. ‘2+(3×6)’ has a different constructional history, and thus a different meaning, from ‘(2+3)×6’. Sentence (8) is not an exception. It has a constructional history.

The phrase ‘In the Hamlet-fiction it is true that …’ is a sentential operator. It operates upon fully formed sentences. The semantic function of the predicate ‘x is free’ is to make atomic sentences true when the referent/value of x is free. The semantic function of that predicate doesn't change when it appears under the scope of the fiction-operator. It continues to make its atomic sentence true when the value of x is free. The operator then comes along, after the formation of that atomic sentence, at the next stage of the constructional history of the complex sentence, and relativizes the truth-conditions to the story.

First we construct the meaning of ‘Hamlet is free’; only then can we apply the operator, to arrive at the meaning expressed by sentence (8). In some important sense then, predicates within the scope of such operators mean just the same thing as they do outside the scope of such operators. They have finished making their semantic contribution before any operators come on the scene. If we thought that predicates meant something different under the scope of such operators, it would be very hard to follow conversations about dreams and stories. The Izhbitza's response to Problem One involves no subtle redefinition of the predicate ‘x is free’.

Of course, the problem might not be that we have changed the meaning of ‘freedom’ but that we have still changed the truth-conditions of ‘I am free’. We no longer say that the sentence is true iff I'm free, but we say that it is true (or, at least true_E) iff God dreams that I'm free. But then, as I said above, it seems that we've really moved on to Problem Two, which worries about our losing our ontological significance. We don't want ourselves or our freedom to be figments of anybody's imagination.

Response to Problem Two

There's not much that the Izhbitza can do to win you over if you simply dislike the idea of losing your ontological ultimacy. Your desire to exist in the most fundamental way possible, such that the sentence ‘you are not imaginary’ will not be true_E, but true-simpliciter, is not a desire that the Izhbitza seems to share with you. Perhaps as a result of religious experiences that left him feeling that God is, in some sense or other, more real than anything else, or perhaps because of his commitment to the theological orthodoxy that has God being ontologically prior to all else, the Izhbitza was happy to exist ‘only’ as a figment of God's imagination, and to be free ‘only’ relative to the imaginary story that God is spinning/dreaming. Problem Two is simply out of kilter with the Hassidic sensibilities of the Izhbitza.Footnote ¹⁹ But there is something that I can offer you, on his behalf, to ‘cure’ you of your desire to be fundamental.

1. (9) Between 1880 and 1914 [the years in which the Sherlock Holmes stories were set], there was no such address as 221B Baker Street.

Sentence (9) is true. There was no such address until the 1930s. But, (9) isn't true-relative-to-the-Sherlock-Holmes-stories (it isn't true_Sh). Sherlock needn't worry about the truth-simpliciter of sentence (9) since it is false_Sh. Sherlock Holmes has a greater stake in truth_Sh than he does in what we call truth. Likewise, you have a greater stake in truth_E than you do in truth-simpliciter (truth outside of the story that God is telling). The following sentences are true_E: ‘you are free’; ‘you are real’; ‘you are the figment of nobody's imagination’. That should be enough for you.

You might think that the emphasis that Judaism places upon the value of life, and of a life well lived, demands that our lives have ultimate ontological significance. Perhaps you are distressed, therefore, about the truth-simpliciter of the following sentence: ‘you are a figment of God's imagination and all your actions are determined’. But that sentence is false_E, and ‘you are free and ontologically significant’ is true_E. That, the Izhbitza might claim, should be enough for you.

In short, there are two incommensurate axes upon which to evaluate a sentence: (1) its metaphysical ultimacy/fundamentality and (2) its pragmatic relevance. True_E sentences are more metaphysically fundamental than true_Sh sentences and true_H sentences (true_H sentences are, for example, true relative to Shakespeare's fiction within God's fiction; true_E sentences are true only relative to God's fiction). The fewer fictional operators that are tacitly at play in the truth of a sentence, the more fundamental it is. But sentences that we would call true are of much less pragmatic relevance to Sherlock than are true_Sh sentences. Similarly, your freedom, and your existence, might not have the sort of ontological ultimacy that you desire for them, but at least, for you, they are real, and maximally relevant. For you, truth_E has more pragmatic relevance than truth-simpliciter.

You might think that a creator who gives his creatures more ontological significance would be more perfect than the Izhbitza's God, and thus, you might think that the Izhbitza has failed to describe the greatest possible being of classical theology.Footnote ²⁰ We commonly assume that intentional objects, like fictional characters, can be created ex nihilo. But are physical objects the sorts of things that can be created ex nihilo? We saw, earlier, that the Izhbitza's metaphysical assumption removes a lot of the mystery from the Bible's creation narrative. This is because the creation ex nihilo of intentional objects is more readily understood than the creation ex nihilo of mind-external physical objects. So, perhaps a being who gives its creatures more ontological significance, ex nihilo, than the Izhbitza's God simply isn't possible!

Response to Problem Three

Problem Three seeks to force the Izhbitza into a choice between the ‘heresy’ of panentheism and the absurdity of acosmism. There is a variety of responses open to the Izhbitza.

Response (i): The contents of a thought needn't be a part of the thinker unless the thinker happens to be thinking about her nose (or any other of her parts)! And thus, despite his being in the mind of Shakespeare, we don't need to say that Hamlet is a part of Shakespeare. Nor are we forced into saying that Hamlet doesn't exist. Indeed, there are viable schools of thought that would have it that Hamlet does exist (see e.g. van Inwagen (Reference van Inwagen1977) and Goodman (Reference Goodman2004) ) outside Shakespeare's mind despite being dependent upon Shakespeare and the continued existence of a literary work (see e.g. Thomasson (Reference Thomasson1999), 35–38). Likewise, the Izhbitza could consistently claim that human beings are in no sense a part of God, and that despite depending upon God, their existence as Divine fictions is assuredly real. And thus the Izhbitza can escape panentheism and acosmism. Of course, this comes at the expense of admitting that we and our world are abstract objects, like fictional characters. But that admission is only true-simpliciter; it isn't true_E. In fact, it is false_E, and therefore this admission isn't pragmatically relevant to us.

Response (ii): Even if the Izhbitza wanted to adopt internalism about mental content and claim that the contents of God's dreams are part of God, he could deny the claim that panentheism is anathema to Jewish Orthodoxy. The doctrine of Divine Simplicity isn't explicitly stated in the Hebrew Bible. It was widely adopted by mediaeval Jewish theologians and became something of an orthodoxy. But older conflicting theologies were kept alive in the Kabbalistic tradition. According to this response, the Izhbitza could take his panentheism and rest assured that he is innocent of heresy.Footnote ²¹

Response (iii): The Izhbitza could claim that his metaphysical assumption is able to remove the absurdity from acosmism.Footnote ²² Take the following sentences:

1. (10) God is all that exists.

2. (11) All appearance is unreal.

Sentence (10) is (contra response (i) ) true-simpliciter, according to this response. But it is false_E. Sentence (11) is false_E, but, if the phrase ‘all appearance’ rigidly refers to appearances that occur to us in our world, then (11) is true-simpliciter. As long as (11) is false_E, then, relative to the notion of truth that has most pragmatic relevance to human beings, we haven't committed ourselves to the absurdity that Problem Three alleges against acosmism.

There seem to have been some strong acosmic trends in early Hassidic thought (trends that are still alive today in some Hassidic circles).Footnote ²³ The Izhbitza's assumption can make sense of that trend, saving it from absurdity. Acosmism is true, according to response (iii), when stated in Godese (that is to say that it is true-simpliciter), but it is false when stated in English (that is to say that it is false_E).

Response to Problem Four

In a famous Talmudic story, Moses gets a glimpse of the future sage, Rabbi Akiva, and of his horrific death. Moses asks God the following question (Tractate Menachot 29b):

1. (12) Why do such bad things happen to Rabbi Akiva?

God answers with the phrase ‘’. The Soncino translation of the Talmud (Epstein (Reference Epstein1935–1948) ) translates the phrase as ‘Be silent, for such is my decree’. But this translation does violence to the text. A more direct and literal translation would be this: ‘Be silent, for so it arose in my mind.’Footnote ²⁴ On the Izhbitza's assumption, we can run with this literal translation of the phrase, and see how it might function as an answer to Moses’ question.

Authors will often report that they don't feel themselves to be completely in control of their characters or their stories. They begin writing something one way, and it turns out differently from how they expected. They will even talk of characters taking on a life of their own. Of course, the author is ultimately in control. If she doesn't like the direction the story takes, she can edit it. But there may be a limited sense in which she's not in control; a sense in which the creative process places the creator in a passive role. The creator waits to see what will arise in her mind and unfolds the internal logic of the story in ways that may even surprise her.Footnote ²⁵ When God says to Moses, ‘Look, that's just how it arose in my mind’, he's saying that he's just a dreamer or an author, and he's not completely in control of the dream that he's dreaming or the story that he's spinning.

You might think that if God is a perfect being, he wouldn't create in a passive way. He'd have a plan, and stick to it. But perhaps the creative process is such that even the perfect author must be sensitive to the ideas and images that passively ‘arise’. A perfect being might have to be in control of his thoughts – maybe that's not the case with a perfect-creator/artisan.

Even so, it's one thing for God to say to Moses, ‘Look, I'm sorry that that's what came up in my mind’; it's another thing entirely for him to desist from trying to change that story, or dream the dream towards a more fair ending. God, on this interpretation of the story, seems uncaring. Well, does God really love us? In the dream/story, as told in the Bible, God as a character in his own story is presented as loving us. Thus, the sentence, ‘He loves us’, is true_E of God. But, perhaps that true_E sentence is false-simpliciter.Footnote ²⁶ God might be saying to Moses, ‘Look, from the perspective of my character in the story, I owe you a theodicy, because my character loves you and has the power to save you, but you know me as an author, in my transcendence, and, from that perspective, I don't owe my merely fictional characters anything, and I'll continue to create as the ideas rise up to me.’

Two potential theodicies arise:

Theodicy 1: According to the first theodicy, God isn't responsible for the evil that occurs in history, even though he is its author, because, like any author, certain scenes just arise in his mind. It might be telling that in the original quote of the Izhbitza, God isn't likened to an author, but to a dreamer. In a dream, even the most lucid of dreams, the dreamer is not fully in control. God might even love his fictional characters.Footnote ²⁷ But, he can't stop the horrific scenes arising before his mind. God is not a perfect Being but a perfect Artisan. Theodicy 1 also gives us a freedom that might be less offensive than the account of freedom given so far. ‘We are free’ is true of us, even relative to the standards of truth-simpliciter, in the way that characters have a life of their own and surprise their authors.

Theodicy 2: We can deny, according to this second theodicy, any claim that the creative process essentially involves a degree of passivity. On the contrary, God wrote the history of the world and was in complete control. But the responsibility that an author has for the evils occurring in their stories doesn't seem to be a moral responsibility. Anthony Burgess is not morally responsible for the evil things that occur in his Clockwork Orange. The victim of the rape that occurs in that book would be acting irrationally if she accused Burgess of moral responsibility for it. ‘Burges imagined the rape into existence’ is false-relative-to-the-Clockwork-Orange-fiction (call it false_Cl). It is only true relative to our tier of reality. And, relative to those standards, it isn't true to say of the victim of that rape that ‘that woman is a real woman’. Burgess didn't harm anybody.

1. (13) God is morally responsible for all evil that has occurred in history.

Sentence (13) is false-simpliciter, because, fundamentally, history is merely a fictional story whose author is God. Admittedly, it seems to be true_E. But, relative to the standards of truth_E, all of the traditional theodicies are open to the Izhbitza because the Izhbitza doesn't think that it is true_E to say that ‘we are just characters in a Divine story’.

Not only are the traditional theodicies open to the Izhbitza, relative to the standards of truth_E, the Izhbitza has shown how the problem of evil doesn't touch God as he is in himself. This is the crux of Theodicy 2. For, just as truth_E-claims are the ones that are most pragmatically relevant to us, truth-simpliciter-claims are the truth-claims that are most pragmatically relevant to God. Accordingly, if (13) is false-simpliciter, then that's what's going to matter to God. According to theodicy 2, God says: ‘Recall, Moses, that I, as Creator, am not morally responsible in the way that you are suggesting, with your question, that I am, because the sort of responsibility you have in mind only makes sense within creation.’Footnote ²⁸

Theodicy 1 may not satisfy you. Even if you accept that God can't help himself, you might think it doesn't get him off the moral hook. God might not be harming real people of flesh and blood when he harms us – given that, from his transcendent perspective, we're just fictional characters – but you may nevertheless count it as a moral failing in an author if he is even capable of (yet alone incapable of not) coming up with scenes containing barbaric depravity. Burgess was not responsible for the rape of a real woman, and perhaps he couldn't stop himself from thinking/writing it up, but we might count it against him as a moral vice that his subconscious could spew up such filth. I would want to resist this line of attack. There are some works of excruciating darkness that are of such aesthetic brilliance that to count them as a vice against their creators seems incongruous with the inherent worth of their creation. Furthermore, if God, as an infinitely great artist, is creating an infinite number of stories, then some of them are likely to be sweet and delicate, and some of them are probably going to be dark and gritty. We just happen to live in a dark and gritty story.

The second theodicy stands to face a more powerful objection. Why is it that Burgess shouldn't be morally responsible for evils in his story? Probably, you might think, because they aren't hurting sentient persons! But, in that case, God should be morally responsible – his stories, unlike Burgess's stories, affect sentient persons: us! The key claim of this critique seems to be sentence (14),

1. (14) Unlike fictional characters, we are sentient, die, and exist in space-time.Footnote ²⁹

But, sentence (14) is only true_E. It is, by the lights of the Izhbitza's assumption, false-simpliciter. We only make a distinction between God's stories and Burgess's stories because we're living in God's story. But, inside Burgess's stories, it is true to say that his characters are sentient persons. And, outside our story, it is true to say that we are merely abstract objects – fictional characters; figments of God's imagination. If you don't like this way of thinking, it seems to me that you're not really taking the Izhbitza's metaphysical assumption seriously. That's your prerogative. It's an outlandish metaphysical assumption that we are merely fictional characters. But, to criticize this theodicy because you don't like its foundational assumption isn't to undermine my claim that that very assumption can play a role in generating theodicies.

Finally, you might say that if the Izhbitza's metaphysical assumption is true, then authors should be more careful: as it turns out, their characters really do suffer, just as we suffer as God's characters. And, because authors should be careful, and because God isn't careful, God is not off the hook for the evil that occurs in our world.Footnote ³⁰ But, once again, I fear that this line of attack doesn't really take the assumption and its multiple tiers of reality seriously enough. From God's transcendent perspective, which is the one that is maximally pragmatically relevant to him, it really is true that we are abstract objects.Footnote ³¹ It really is false that we are sentient beings. And thus, from his transcendent perspective, it really is true that he isn't morally responsible for the evils that occur to us, which, from that perspective, are merely fictitious evils.

The main conclusion to draw from theodicy 2 is that the classical theodicies are open to the Izhbitza after all. The claim that allegedly closes the door to traditional theodicies (that God completely controls our destiny) isn't true_E, and thus, relative to the standards of truth_E, the traditional theodicies might well be true.

Summary: the philosophy of religion

In responding to the four problems that we raised with the Izhbitza's metaphysical assumption, we have seen that, armed only with that assumption, he has the resources to resolve both the problem of theological fatalism and, perhaps, the problem of evil, whilst making a certain amount of sense of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, and perhaps saving acosmism from absurdity.

The philosophy of religious language

On my presentation of the Izhbitza's thought, there is no mystery at all as to how we can be both free and determined. But this should ring alarm bells: the Izhbitza himself called it a ‘great mystery’ (Leiner (Reference Leiner1995), Tazria s.v. Isha), and Rabbi Hefter (Reference Hefter2013, 62) describes the relationship between what I have called truth-simpliciter and truth_E as a ‘paradoxical two-tiered reality’.

Perhaps a detour through the topic of brains in vats will help us to explain the Izhbitza's sense of mystery and paradox.Footnote ³² Hilary Putnam argued that we can know that we are not brains in vats (Putnam (Reference Putnam1982), ch. 1). Given Putnam's somewhat ambiguous statement of the argument, I invoke Anthony Brueckner's (Reference Brueckner1986) reconstruction of it.

Putnam's argument relies upon a causal theory of reference: a person can only refer to entities to which he and his act of reference stand in certain causal relations. Imagine that you are a brain in a vat (henceforth, a BIV). Because you're a BIV, you have never witnessed a real tree, but only computer-generated simulations of trees. Imagine that you have never been taught English by anybody who has any causal contact with real trees. Imagine, instead, that you, or your community of unknowingly envatted brains, have coincidentally developed a language that is internally indistinguishable from English.

Given the contours of this thought-experiment, your use of the word ‘tree’ couldn't possibly refer to a tree. Putnam offers three possible alternative referents for the BIV's token of ‘tree’: (i) the tree-in-the-image (which Brueckner (Reference Brueckner1986, 150) takes to be ‘the succession of sense impressions had by the BIV’); or (ii) the electrical impulses that cause the brain in the vat to have the sense impressions that are had when un-envatted brains see a tree; or (iii) the features of the computer program responsible for generating those impulses. Opting for option (i), though any of them would do, Brueckner reconstructs Putnam's argument as follows:

1. (a) Either I am a BIV (speaking vat-English) or I am a non-BIV (speaking English).

2. (b) If I am a BIV (speaking vat-English), then my utterances of ‘I am a BIV’ are true iff I have sense impressions as of being a BIV (given option (i) ).

3. (c) Even if I am a BIV (speaking vat-English), I certainly don't have sense impressions as of being a BIV.

4. (d) If I am a BIV (speaking vat-English), then my utterances of ‘I am a BIV’ are false (given (b) and (c) ).

5. (e) If I am a non-BIV (speaking English), then my utterances of ‘I am a BIV’ are true iff I am a BIV.

6. (f) If I am a non-BIV (speaking English), then my utterances of ‘I am a BIV’ are false (given (e) ).

7. (g) My utterances of ‘I am a BIV’ are false (given (a), (d) and (f) ).

What's more, the following sentence turns out to be true whether it is said in English or in vat-English:

1. (T) My utterances of ‘I am a BIV’ are true iff I am a BIV

Brueckner (ibid., 156) explains:

Given the truth of both (g) and (T), you seem able to move from a mere semantic claim about the self-defeating nature of the sentence ‘I am a BIV’ to the epistemic claim that you know that you are not a BIV. Since you know that your utterances of ‘I am a BIV’ are false, and that they have disquotational truth-conditions (given (T) ), you also know that you are not a BIV.

Opponents of this argument are going to think that they have been the victim of some sort of philosophical sleight of hand. Indeed, Brueckner (ibid., 164) contends that Putnam's argument amounts to nothing more than a ‘trick’. Given (g), I do know that the proposition I happen to be asserting with my tokens of ‘I am a BIV’ is a false proposition, but I don't know which proposition it is that I'm asserting. I don't know if I'm speaking English or vat-English. I don't know if I am falsely asserting the proposition expressed by English tokens of the sentence, or falsely asserting the proposition expressed by vat-English tokens of the sentence. There's a big difference!

Thomas Nagel's way of putting the concern with Putnam's argument is as follows (Nagel (Reference Nagel1986), 73):

Imagine that we are scientists looking at the output of BIVs. One day, we observe that one of the brains has uttered the sentence, ‘I am a Brain in a vat’. On the assumption of Putnam's theory of reference, we know that the brain must be speaking vat-English. Thus, we know that she's said something false. But we also know that, in the final analysis, this falsehood has a different cause from the falsehood that arose when she said that ‘2+2=5’. The latter falsehood arose through bad arithmetic, but the former falsehood seems to arise only because the BIV didn't have the linguistic capability to express what she really wanted to assert. We might say, about that BIV, in such a situation, that despite saying something false, she had come about as close as she could to articulating the truth about her situation. We might say that her falsehood was illuminating. To echo Nagel, it was an attempt (perhaps the best possible attempt) to think the truth about what she is, despite lacking the necessary concepts.

Given the Izhbitza's metaphysical assumption, a Putnam-like argument (and a Nagel-like response) can lead us to an apophatic theology:

1. (h) Either I am a figment of God's imagination (in which case I make assertions relative to the standards of truth_E) or I am not a figment of God's imagination (in which case I make assertions relative to the standards of truth-simpliciter).

2. (i) If I am a figment of God's imagination, then my utterances of ‘I am a figment of God's imagination’ are true (relative to the standards I assert things to) iff according to the image that God imagines, I am a figment of his imagination (given a causal theory of reference and the Izhbitza's foundational assumption).

3. (j) If I am a figment of God's imagination, then I do at least know that I am not a figment of his imagination in the image that he imagines.

4. (k) If I am a figment of God's imagination, then my utterances of ‘I am a figment of God's imagination’ are false relative to the standards to which I asserted them (given (i) and (j) ).

5. (l) If I am not a figment of God's imagination, then my utterances of ‘I am a figment of God's imagination’ are true (relative to the standards to which I assert things) iff I am a figment of God's imagination.

6. (m) If I am not a figment of God's imagination, then my utterances of ‘I am a figment of God's imagination’ are false.

7. (n) My utterances of ‘I am a figment of God's imagination’ are false (given (h), (k) and (m) ).

Furthermore, my utterances of (T′) are true, relative to my own standard of truth, whether or not I am a figment of God's imagination:

• (T′) My utterances of ‘I am a figment of God's imagination’ are true iff I am a figment of God's imagination.

Knowledge of (n) and (T′) should have been enough for the Izhbitza to know that he is not a figment of God's imagination! But, perhaps that's what leads to the Izhbitza's sense of mystery. Perhaps he recognized that all of the things he was asserting about the relationship between God and the world were false; that he was unable to make assertions relative to God's truth-standard, and thus unable to assert the propositions that he wanted to assert. On this reading, the Izhbitza would identify with Nagel's words: ‘Perhaps I can't even think the truth about what I am, because … my circumstances make it impossible …!’ All this talk of our being figments of God's imagination, or characters in his story, is false_E; but that falsehood was the best that the Izhbitza could do to gesticulate towards the propositions he was unable to express – the propositions that his words might well have expressed had he been able to speak the language of God.

Just as belief aims at knowledge, but doesn't always make it, the attempt to assert a proposition might not always succeed. There is a temptation to describe the BIV's utterance of ‘I am a BIV’ as a failed attempt to assert the proposition that English expresses with tokens of ‘I am a BIV’. She did assert something. She asserted the proposition expressed by vat-English tokens of ‘I am a BIV’. But it is intuitive to describe her as attempting, and failing, to assert a proposition that was, in the end, epistemically closed off to her. The inaccessible proposition was the one towards which her falsehood somehow ‘gesticulated’.

Committing the Izhbitza to a causal theory of reference will surprise people, no doubt. But, he did hold his metaphysical assumption, and he did adopt a certain mistrust of religious language, and, on a causal theory of reference, one can see why his metaphysical assumption might have led him to that mistrust (give the argument from (h) to (n) ). Indeed, according to the Izhbitza, even at Mount Sinai, the revelation par excellence, we got some sort of approximation: an illuminating falsehood much like the illuminating falsehood that emerges, on a causal picture of reference, when a BIV says ‘I'm a BIV’. On the Izhbitza's idiosyncratic reading, the first item of the Decalogue should read ‘I am an approximation of the Lord your God’ instead of ‘I am the Lord your God’.Footnote ³³

Having said all of this, it's not clear to me that the Izhbitza needs to defend anything like the apophatic mystery and paradox towards which he seems to have been attracted. In Putnam's thought-experiment, the BIVs have no contact with the outside world; nobody from outside the vat teaches them how to speak English. Disanalogously, even if we are characters in God's story, God has inserted himself into that story, as a character, and communicates with us. Putnam's BIVs can't learn English. Disanalogously, God can teach us ‘Godese’.

The ‘philosophical moves’ in this article, besides their counter-intuitive wackiness, only work if we have the linguistic and epistemic ability to understand assertions made relative to truth-standards more ‘fundamental’ than our own. If, like the Izhbitza, this concern overwhelms you, you can at least appreciate the Izhbitza's doctrines, not as philosophy, but as apophatic mysticism; as illuminating or gesticulating towards theological facts that can't be conventionally asserted. Furthermore, you have, on the back of the Izhbitza's assumption, a new way of framing apophaticism and the debate with cataphaticism: can figments of God's imagination meaningfully engage in theological speculation, or not?

Another form of apophaticism seems to hang upon the following question: does the word ‘God’ in the story that God is telling, or the dream that he is dreaming, refer to the same entity as does the word ‘God’ when uttered by God outside the fiction? Does ‘Baker Street’ in the Sherlock Holmes stories refer to the same entity as ‘Baker Street’ in regular English?Footnote ³⁴ There are two plausible answers: (1) either all names in a fictional discourse refer to fictional entities, but some of these fictional entities, such as Baker-Street-in-the-Sherlock-Holmes-stories, somehow represent non-fictional ones, such as Baker Street; or, (2) some names in a fictional discourse refer to fictional entities (as does the name ‘Sherlock Holmes’), and some refer to non-fictional ones (as does the name ‘Baker Street’).

According to the first answer, we cannot actually refer to God. We can only refer to a ‘fictional’ representation of God, as he appears in this world; perhaps this explains the Izhbitza's reading of the first item in the Decalogue. According to the second answer, there is no reason for the Izhbitza to adopt apophaticism, but every reason for him to be very humble when trying to describe God as he actually is; all we really know of him, even though we can refer to him directly, is how he (albeit he himself) appears as a character in his story. Whichever side you take, we see new ways of framing the debate between apophaticism and cataphaticism.

The Izhbitza meets Hugh McCann

The philosophy that I have sketched on behalf of the Izhbitza shares important similarities with the contemporary Christian philosopher Hugh McCann (Reference McCann2012). Like the Izhbitza, McCann (ibid., 22) adopts the strong formulation of the doctrine of Divine sustenance, which ‘calls for God's creative activity to be directly efficacious throughout the world's history’. McCann (ibid., 23) is quick to see what sort of trouble this will land him in:

McCann's favoured way out of this problem is to appeal to two different varieties of causation (call them natural causation and theological causation). (1) A natural cause doesn't confer existence upon an effect. Natural causation is, instead, ‘a process whereby conserved quantities of energy and momentum are transferred to produce new manifestations of what already exists’.Footnote ³⁵ (2) Theological causation is existence-conferral. God causes everything at every moment to exist; but he grants those things real qualities and natures that lead to real interactions. As McCann puts it (ibid., 41):

And thus, the Izhbitza and McCann both commit to a form of Divine sustenance that threatens to overwhelm the universe with God's immanence, giving rise to occasionalism and to all of the headaches that come along with it; a problem that Paul Gould (Reference Gould2013) calls the problem of the Divine micromanager. The Izhbitza hopes to respond to this problem by placing a wedge between God and the world via two levels of truth; McCann attempts to perform the same feat by appealing to two notions of causation. According to McCann, God micromanages the world via theological causation, but not via natural causation (the variety of causation that interests the natural scientist, and has most pragmatic relevance to us in our day-to-day lives). For the Izhbitza, it is true-simpliciter that God micromanages the world, but it isn't true_E (which is the notion of truth that has the most pragmatic relevance to us).

There are other similarities between the two thinkers. McCann (Reference McCann2012, 44–45), for instance, is moved by the metaphor that thinks of God as the world's author, and utilizes that metaphor in his account of our free will (ibid., 108): ‘The author of the novel never makes her creatures do something; she only makes them doing it. It is the same with us and God. He does not make us act; he makes us acting, so the freedom that goes with genuine action can still be present.’ This is strikingly similar to the Izhbitza's God imagining our free agency. But, fundamentally, for McCann, the metaphor of God's being the world's author is just that: a metaphor. On certain occasions, McCann explicitly breaks free from the metaphor; in the hope of giving us more ontological significance than mere creatures of fiction (ibid., 45), for example, or for the purposes of theodicy (ibid., 123). What really does the heavy philosophical lifting, for McCann, isn't two notions of truth – he has only one – but two notions of causation. This difference is key and, I shall argue, it helps the Izhbitza to steal a march upon McCann.

On the Izhbitza's picture, we can remain absolutely neutral on the nature of causation. Causation in this world is whatever God imagines it to be; perhaps that is something he gives us the power to discover through metaphysical speculation. It could be a relation of existence-conferral between events, or it could be the sort of energy flow that McCann describes (or it could be something else). McCann, on the other hand, ties his theology to a very specific metaphysics. McCann's whole picture can only get going if natural causation is as McCann says it is. The Izhbitza makes much more room for different metaphysical theses about causation and other controversial matters. The Izhbitza's position is consistent with monism, pluralism, realism, anti-realism, idealism, you name it; any of those positions could be true_E; it all depends upon how God imagines things to be.

The heavy philosophical lifting, for the Izhbitza, is done by his metaphysical assumption, and by a certain understanding of what it means to be true-relative-to-a-fiction. Truth in a fiction, for the Izhbizta, isn't truth in some actually existing fictional world (a view rejected by David Lewis (Reference Lewis1978) ), nor truth in some set of worlds (Lewis's view, forcefully rejected by Greg Currie (Reference Currie1990), §2.3). Instead, truth and falsity relative to a fiction is dependent (directly or indirectly) upon the intentions of an author. Fundamentally, what makes Hamlet a prince of Denmark is Shakespeare's intending it so. But even these metaphysical assumptions of the Izhbitza are only supposed to be true-simpliciter. Perhaps other views about fiction are true_E; again, that all depends upon how God imagines things, including the nature of fiction, to be for us in our world.