I promised at the beginning of this paper [“Objectivism and Theism”] that, after presenting the positive case for theism on Objectivist grounds, I would examine Dr. [Nathaniel] Branden’s arguments and state where, in my judgement, he goes astray. To this task I now turn.

Omnipotence and the Nature of Things

Dr. Branden says: God is said to be omnipotent. This mean that (1) God has no nature, (2) Things in general have no nature, and (3) Contradictions are possible.

Dr. Branden says that the nature of an entity determines what it can and cannot do. If there is nothing that it cannot do, then it has no nature.

Here, I believe, Dr. Branden has been guilty of a common confusion. Mathematicians define “A is a subset of B” to mean, “No entity is an element of the set A without also being an element of the set B.” When students are confronted with a finite non-empty set B (such as a shelf of books or a list of book titles) and are told to consider the subsets of B, they readily understand that any selection of some but not all of the elements of B forms a subset of B, but they take longer to realize that the empty set, the set with no elements, is also a subset of B. (Failing to recognize the empty set as a set is like failing the recognize zero as a number — it took Western Europe centuries to get over that hurdle.) More to our present purpose, they also take longer to realize that the set B is a subset of itself. They think that forming a subset of B means making a selection of elements of B, and that to select all the elements of B is, well — unselective. They are right, of course, in supposing that most subsets of B (provided that B has at least three elements) are formed by selecting some elements of B and rejecting others, but they fail to allow for the special case.

Students exhibit the same bias in other contexts. Given a test question of the form, “Which of the following men were United States Senators?” they will commonly regard a correct answer of the form “All of them,” or “None of them,” as an attempt to trick them.

Now a student of Objectivist Epistemology may run into the same problem. He learns that a concept is (ordinarily) formed by differentiating two or more objects from all other objects known to him. [01] He may conclude that drawing a distinction between the included units and the excluded units is essential to concept formation, and be confused when he discovers that axiomatic concepts are not formed this way. [02] Like the student learning that one of the subsets of B is B itself, he must learn that a legitimate answer to the question “What units belong to this concept?” is sometimes, “All of them.”

This confusion, which may be called the All-is-no-Answer Fallacy, is at the root of three of Dr. Branden’s statements so far. He objects to the statement the God is infinite, on the grounds that to exist is to be limited, constrained. He objects to God as aware without any sensory means of awareness, that is, without any conditions necessary for him to be aware of something, since he assumes that a conscious being must be aware of some things, but not of others. And now he objects to the statement that God is omnipotent, because he assumes that any meaningful answer to the question, “What can and cannot X do?” must specify some things that X can do and some things that X cannot do. But that is not so. “Everything” is a perfectly straightforward answer to the question, “What can God do?” just as it is to the questions, “What is God aware of?” and “What exists?”

Dr. Branden denies that “Everything” can be an answer. He says that if God can do anything, God has no nature. Note carefully what this means. It means that Dr. Branden believes that the nature of a thing is revealed not by what it can, but by what it cannot do. Instead of defining man as a rational animal, as a living material entity capable of self-generated motion and having the faculty of volitional consciousness, Dr. Branden would define man as an entity not adequately described by the laws of physics (not a non-living object), not made largely of cellulose (not a plant, not automatically to further its survival (not a beast) and not able to leap tall buildings in a single bound (not superhuman). His definitions are not acts of definition but of wiping out. [03]

When Dr. Branden says that if God can do anything, then God has no nature, I think that he has confused “can” with “might.” To say that God can do anything is not to say that he might to anything. If we ask, “Can Miss Rand break a display window at Tiffany’s with a baseball bat?” and “Might she?” the distinction is tolerably clear. To say that someone cannot do something is to say that there is a cause other than his will preventing him. To say that God can do anything is to say that there are no external obstacles to the execution of his will, not that his will does not follow from the kind of being he is, just as Miss Rand’s not breaking windows follows from the kind of being that she is. [04]

Dr. Branden says: If God is omnipotent, then nothing has any nature. I think this is hasty. We say, in Dr. Branden’s terms, that when we use a stone for a paperweight we know that it will stay where we put it and not go making figure eights in the air, because that would not be in accordance with its nature. But if someone comes by and picks up the stone, and starts waving it around in a figure eight pattern, the nature of the stone has not been altered.

True enough, Dr. Branden might say, but if God might at any moment start picking up paperweights and moving them in figure eight patterns, then we live in an irrational and chaotic world. And in a sense he is quite right. On the theist hypothesis, any predictions we make about the world are tentative and subject to revision in the light of further information. What he forgets is that this is also true of the atheistic hypothesis. In a world in which there are free agents, it is possible for them to do unexpected things. Even leaving free agents and their actions aside, it remains true that man is neither infallible nor omniscient. Every prediction that a rational man makes carries with it the implied reservation, “provided that I have considered all the relevant factors.” Man’s knowledge is contextual. Certainty does not presuppose omniscience. But Dr. Branden tells us, in effect, that without omniscience, without a guarantee against the unforeseen or unexpected, we can have no knowledge or security at all. His idea of knowledge is the destruction of knowledge.

The odd thing is that no one knows this better than Dr. Branden. Speaking of free agents, he says:

One can predict, for example, that a man of authentic self-esteem will find intellectual stagnation intolerable....
  One cannot predict with certainty that these men will not change their thinking. Therefore one’s predictions must take the form of “All other things being equal,” or “Assuming no new factors enter the situation.” But this is true in instances of prediction in the physical sciences also. [05]

In order for an idea or concept to be integrated into man’s consciousness and cognitive knowledge, ... the concept must never be closed to further scrutiny or examination.... [06]

Dr. Branden maintains that when a situation is entirely dependent on someone’s choice, the result must be chaos. Let us consider precisely such a situation. As regards the contents of Atlas Shrugged, Miss Rand is omnipotent. She can make Hank Reardon and his wife fall madly in love with each other. She can make James Taggart, in the last chapter, throw off his pose of incompetence and come up with a new invention, better than Rearden Metal or the Galt Motor, that will save the world. She can make Dagny Taggart become a fanatical disciple of the Guru Maharaj Ji. All of the characters, all of the events, are utterly at her mercy. Does this mean that the novel must be without plot, without structure, with rationality? That none of the persons in it may be said to have a nature? Does it not rather mean that when we perceive the orderliness and rationality of the novel we are in touch with the rationality of Miss Rand’s creative imagination? Very well, when we perceive the rationality of the world, we are in touch with the rationality of God. [07] 

References
[Editor’s notes are in blue. Readers who prefer to ignore the links in the text and follow the notes on a separate page, may open a separate page with the references here.]

* The title refers to Nathaniel Branden’s lecture “The Concept of God,” from his lecture series “The Basic Principles of Objectivism.” That lecture is fully transcribed in his book The Vision of Ayn Rand: The Basic Principles of Objectivism (Gilbert, Ariz.: Cobden Press, 2009), chapter 4. Partial and perhaps complete audios seem to be available throughout the Internet. See also R.A. Childs, “The Epistemological Basis of Anarchism,” Note 19.

[01] A. Rand, “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology,” 5/7/5g. [July 1966] [References of this form refer to The Objectivist Newsletter, so that volume 5, number 7 would be July 1966. After volume 4, the name of the publication was The Objectivist. The page numbers for the latter are those of the original format, not those in the bound volume.] and IOE 11 [Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. (And the reference here is to the original paperback monograph reprinting the articles from the periodical. However, James has erred in his pagination, and the correct page number is 15; the corresponding page number for the Expanded Second Edition containing additional material by Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff (New York: NAL, 1990) is 10.)]
  A concept is a mental integration of two or more units which are isolated according to a specific characteristic(s) and united by a specific definition.

  A. Rand, “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology,” 5/7/7a [July 1966] and IOE 11 [corrected page 16; the corresponding citation for the Expanded Second Edition is pp. 11-12.)]
  The same principle directs the process of forming concepts of entities — for instance, the concept “table.” The child’s mind isolates two or more tables from other objects....

  A. Rand, “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology,” 5/7/8c [July 1966] and IOE 16 [corrected page 18; the corresponding citation for the Expanded Second Edition is 13.)]
  All concepts are formed by first differentiating two or more existents from other existents.

[02] A. Rand, “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology,” 5/12/4c. [December 1966] and IOE 77 [corrected page 54; the corresponding citation for the Expanded Second Edition is 58.)]
  Since axiomatic concepts are not formed by differentiating one group of existents from others....

  A. Rand, “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology,” 5/12/4d. [December 1966] and IOE 77 [corrected page 54; the corresponding citation for the Expanded Second Edition is 58.)]
  “Existence,” “identity” and “consciousness” have no contraries — only a void.

[03] AS [Atlas Shrugged] 960jj-mm [paperback] (1035p-s) [hardback].

[04] I am indebted for this distinction to Prof. Leonard Peikoff, who used it in “Certainty without Omniscience,” a speech given before the First Regional Conference on Objectivism, University of Virginia at Charlottesville, April 30, 1967. On that occasion, he contrasted the statements, “It is possible, for Gandhi to murder” (nothing restrains him) and “It is possible that Gandhi will murder ” (we are not certain that he will not). I do not know whether he has repeated this illustration in any published Objectivist text. [This talk is listed here, but the link takes the user to a page that tells us (as of December 2019) that the publication is “Not yet available.”
  In 1970, Jarret B. Wollstein, president of the Society for Rational Individualism (the forerunner of the Society for Individual Liberty [SIL], which later became the International Society for Individual Liberty), published notes he had taken (expanded and organized into full sentences) as a five-page, single-spaced, typescript outline entitled “Notes from ... ‘Certainty without Omniscience’” and made the outline available for sale. The Gandhi example as James quotes it appears on page 4 of those Notes, and because James was acquainted with Wollstein, it is very likely the source for his quotation. It should be noted that Wollstein says at the beginning of his Notes, “In no case should [it] be assumed that the below notes are exact quotations.”
  There is an entry with the title “Certainty without omniscience” in Leonard Peikoff’s online course “The Philosophy of Ayn Rand” in Part II, Lecture 9: Reason, which perhaps contains the Gandhi illustration. His book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (Dutton, 1991) contains no obvious parallel, but there is this passage on pages 117-18: “‘It is possible for man...’ does not justify ‘It is possible that this man...’. The latter claim depends on the individual and on the specific circumstances. It must, therefore, be supported by data that are equally specific.”]

[05] N. Branden, “Volition and the Law of Causality,” 5/3/13g-14/b. [There is a parallel passage in The Psychology of Self-Esteem: A New Concept of Man’s Psychological Nature, page 63 (New York: Bantam, 1971). James did not cite material Branden published after his break with Ayn Rand (May 1969), even when it was presented in terms identical to his earlier work, but only material presented before that break, the idea being that he didn’t want to create an opening for the objection Branden’s later work did not correctly state principles of Objectivism.]

[06] COG, lines 44-50. [“The Concept of God”; James is citing the lines of his transcription. The lecture is available here, and the passage cited begins at 2:40 and ends at 3:07. It may also be found in The Vision of Ayn Rand, page 94.]

[07] One critic has objected that the parallel between God and the novelist is imperfect (in that, for example, the novelist uses a pen or a typewriter, while God presumably does not). But I am not claiming a perfect parallel. My point is simply that the writer’s freedom does not imply a chaotic product.