Vito Caiati, commenting on Good Friday: At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron:
In yesterday’s Good Friday post, you write, “The fullness of Incarnation requires that the one incarnated experience the worst of embodiment and be tortured to death. For if Christ is to be fully human, in addition to fully divine, he must experience the highest exaltation and the lowest degradation possible to a human. These extreme possibilities, though not actual in all, define being human.”
Why is the full scope and content of the human experience, including the most extreme pain and death itself, not known by God, who is omniscient, without the Incarnation? Why should the flesh, enmeshed in and limited by human sensory perception, be a necessary, supplementary mode by which such experience is conveyed to and hence shared by the Deity?
The question is why an omniscient God would have to enter the material world to know the full scope and content of human experience. If God is omniscient, then he knows everything. And if he knows everything, then he knows what it is like to be a man undergoing torture and bodily death. Why then must God compromise his purely spiritual status by Incarnation? Why can't God know what it is like to be a man without becoming a man?
To answer directly, one could know everything it is possible to know about a sentient organism without knowing what it is like to be that organism. And so God, who knows everything it is possible to know about every type of sentient organism, and is therefore objectively omniscient with respect to every type of organism, is nonetheless subjectively nescient in that he does not and cannot know what it is like to be an organism of any type. This is because he is not an organism of any type; he is a pure spirit.
Consider an ethologist who studies bats. Suppose he comes to know every objective fact about bats including exactly how they locate and perceive objects in their environment using echolocation, or 'bat sonar.' Knowing all these objective facts, our scientist would still not know what it is like to be a bat. He would not know the subjective experiences that bats have when they detect, pursue, etc. objects in their environment. He could know everything about the objective correlates in the bat's brain of the bat's experience, but he would not be able to know the subjective character of those experiences. To know bat qualia, our scientist would have to be a bat.
Same with God: he would have to be a man to know what it is like to be a man, that is, to know 'from the inside' the subjective character of human experience, its highs, lows, and doldrums.
These ruminations give rise to a number of further questions. But it is Saturday night, time to punch the clock, pour myself a drink, and rustle up some grub.
Aficionados will know that I am borrowing from Thomas Nagel, What is like to be a bat? Here is a short video that treats of some of his ideas.
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