God must have those capacities that are essential to persons, including the capacities for
reasoning, self-awareness, remembering, and—some items not mentioned by Locke but
items that theists will not want to deny—capacities for perceptual awareness and willing.
Now, there is a powerful psychological theory to the effect that these capacities, or the
modules that serve them, are informationally encapsulated; that is, they operate on
specific domains of input and in relative isolation from each other (see Fodor 1983). It
follows, says the persistent critic, that God's mind is internally structured, consisting of a
suite of diverse mental faculties on which God depends essentially in order to be the
being he is.
Finally, here is the persistent critic's case for God's having accidental mental states that
are dependent on the way the world is. Pick any contingent fact about the created world,
say, that it rained last night. An omniscient God must know this fact. Part of the content
of God's mind, then, is dependent on the fact that it rained last night. The example can be
generalized to every contingent fact.
end p.49
Simplicity and Modularity
To examine the case of structural dependency first: if God's mind were structured by
informationally encapsulated modules, then some parts of God's mental activity would be
opaque to other parts. Perhaps the highest level of divine consciousness, where all the
information streams converge, could take in all the modular activity. The modules
themselves, however, would remain relatively blinkered. Such opacity may be part of the
human condition, but many theists would resist applying to God's mental activity the
imagery of corporate structure, with underlings functioning on a need-to-know basis.
Aquinas and others articulated a view that is consistent with the modularity thesis about
human minds yet denies the application of the thesis to God's mind. For present purposes
we can single out one element of the view. It is the claim that there is no diversity of
modules or “faculties” that structures the divine mind. Consider the augmented list
constructed from Locke's characterization of a person: reason, self-awareness, memory,
perceptual awareness, and will. Focus initially on perceptual awareness, self-awareness,
and will. In humans, perceptual awareness of the created world requires the possession of
the right kinds of healthy, functioning, physical organs operating in the right sorts of
physical environment. If God is a spiritual being, then however God acquires awareness
of creation, it cannot be in virtue of possessing the right kinds of physical receptors
functioning in an environment to which they are adapted. Suppose, instead, that God is
aware of all of creation simply in virtue of having created it. God knew every detail of the
world he would select and knows that he has selected it. The kind of awareness that God
would thus have is immediate; in having complete cognitive access to himself, God is
aware of the world. Perceptual awareness and self-awareness are two separate faculties in
humans, but in God, what we call perceptual awareness is subsumed under divine self-
understanding.
The next step is to connect self-understanding to the will. Nothing could be clearer than
that in the case of humans, what we understand about ourselves often conflicts with what