You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.[…]
Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?(Psalm 139: 2, 7)
Some people, in their manifold sour-grapery, are anti-theists. Not only do they believe there’s no God, they actively hope they’re right, and maintain that this hope of theirs is rational.
At first blush, it’s hard to see what could lead anyone to adopt anti-theism: if you set aside particular religious claims about God—that He’ll allow sinners to suffer in Hell forever, that He once commanded this or that Old Testament massacre, or that He demands we stop enjoying certain sexual practices we find fun, etc.—none of which are strictly entailed by theism (the simple claim: “God exists! 😁🌞🌈”), theism sounds like the highest hope in the world.
After all. If God exists, there’s some good chance the ultimate justice will be done, that there are no pointless evils, that every human and non-human will reach Heaven (or something like it), and that, once there, we’ll all enjoy God in His infinite goodness forever, learning every precious truth till our heads grow full. What could be better? Perhaps atheists are right. But we should hope—and pray—that they’re not.
Intelligent anti-theists, though, have their counters on hand. A major argument against theism being all ponies and roses hangs on our want for privacy. Many people want privacy. Indeed, many want it strongly. But if God exists, He knows everything there is to know about everyone: what we’ve done, what we’ve thought about, how we look in our birthday suits. And if the desire for privacy some people have about some things is total, then God’s existence would necessarily frustrate it. (Shock, horror.) Hence, for certain people, God’s existence would be a bad thing, at least in one respect. As Christopher Hitchens once quipped:
Religion is a totalitarian belief. It is the wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority who can convict you of thought crime while you are asleep, who can subject you to total surveillance around the clock every waking and sleeping minute of your life, before you’re born and, even worse and where the real fun begins, after you’re dead. A celestial North Korea. Who wants this to be true?
One pro-theist response to Hitchens, which misses only half the point, notes that much of the reason people desire privacy has to do with what they think bad actors might do if they learned our secrets. But God, if He exists, is not a bad actor: God is perfectly good, by definition. So He’d never leak our secrets when He shouldn’t, or misuse private information maliciously. And if He did leak our secrets, He’d do so for ethically sterling reasons. In extreme cases, it’s OK to override people’s desires for privacy (for example: police can force me to reveal everything in my schoolbag if they think there might be be a gun inside it.) And if one of those extreme cases cropped up, and God had no other actionable choice, He’d leak our secrets and do it gladly. There’d be nothing wrong with Him doing so.
The half of the point this gets: many people do desire privacy for reasons like these. The half of the point it misses: some people might (and probably do, given how many people there are) desire privacy for its own sake. Even if God promised never to leak your secrets and kept to His word, if you desire privacy for its own sake, your desire will necessarily be frustrated.
So: is privacy a good reason to be an anti-theist? The answer is: it depends (but no, absolutely not, never in a million years, not at all, never once.) To see why, we need to sort through two questions:
(1) Are privacy violations bad intrinsically, regardless of whether you desire privacy?
(2) Can a desire for perfect privacy—even against God—be rational?
How we think about these questions will greatly affect how we think about God and privacy.
(a) Are Privacy Violations Intrinsically Bad, Even if No-One Cares About Them?
(Spoiler: methinks not). Consider the following example—courtesy of Jesper Ryberg—of an elderly woman who people-watches through her window:
Mrs Aremac is an old lady living in her third-floor apartment in the centre of town. Due to her age, her legs no longer allow her to take part in public life. Luckily, her sight is still intact. Every morning Mrs Aremac is assisted to an armchair placed in the bay window looking out onto the street. From there she has a good view of street life, compensating a little for a life she is no longer able to participate in. In the evening she is assisted to bed, after a day made more bearable than if she had remained in bed.1
In looking at the street and the people walking in it, Mrs. Aremac pretty obviously does nothing wrong, and, moreover, there’s nothing bad about the situation (besides, of course, Mrs. Aremac’s condition.)
But notice: as Mrs. Aremac looks at the street and the people walking in it, she learns certain things about them: how fat they are, how they walk, the clothes they wear, and the like. If it were intrinsically bad, in some respect, for X to learn any fact about Y whatsoever, regardless of whether Y cares about keeping that information private, we’d expect to have a different intuition about the Mrs. Aremac case. We’d expect to think either that Mrs. Aremac does something slightly wrong in observing the pedestrians, or else that there’s something bad going on in the situation. But no-one thinks either of those things. Plausibly, then, there’s nothing intrinsically bad about knowing a fact about some other person if they don’t care about you knowing that fact.
But maybe the view I just attacked is a caricature. (It probably is; I don’t know anyone who holds it, nor would I care to; only joking.) Maybe there’s a restricted version of the view on which there certain kinds of facts that it’s intrinsically bad to know about another person: dark thoughts, embarrassing past mistakes, intimate fantasies, and the like.
And note: a view like this needn’t be incompatible with the thought that in some cases, someone else knowing one of these highly personal things could be a good thing on balance. All it would say is that, all else being equal, it’s intrinsically bad for X to know [insert some Terribly Intimate Fact] about Y, even if Y doesn’t care if X knows/positively wants X to know that fact.
If a view like this were right, it would mean it would be intrinsically bad—bad from the point of view of the universe, that is—for God to know every intimate fact about our lives, even if we didn’t care if He knew/positively wanted Him to know these facts.
Trouble is, I can’t see what would motivate such a view. Suppose someone in the street rang up Mrs. Aremac and confided in her some dark or intimate secret, something he’d never told anyone, checking first if she wanted to hear it to avoid TMI. Would that be wrong, or otherwise bad? By my lights, obviously not! (If things seem otherwise to you, I’m sorry. You might need your intuiter fixed.)
God knowing everything about us wouldn’t be intrinsically bad, in any respect, so far as I can tell. If God knowing all our secrets is bad in any respect, for anyone, it must be because some of us don’t want Him to know those secrets.
(b) Can a Desire for Total Privacy—Even from God—be Rational?
(Spoiler: no methinks). To be rational is to be appropriately responsive to one’s reasons. Like beliefs and actions, desires can be rational or irrational. (Your desire to like this article is very rational; do it now or I’ll report you to actual North Korea.)2
Whether a desire for total privacy—even from God—could be rational might affect whether we think God’s existence would be a bad thing from the standpoint of privacy.
Why? Suppose there were people who had the following, ultra-specific desire: “Please, please, PLEEEEEEEEEEASE let there be no being in the universe who knows whether the number of atoms in the universe is odd or even, PLEEEEEEEEEEEEASE!!”
Plausibly, a desire of that sort would be irrational. And as a result, even if lots of people had that desire, I doubt many anti-theists would think this would count heavily—if at all—in favour of anti-theism. We can conjure up any number of Mickey Mouse, whack-a-mole desires that would be frustrated by God’s existence; but the only ones that matter much to anti-theists are ones they think are rational.3
Of course, if one has the view that any and all desire frustration is harmful to wellbeing, one will have to think that—at least to some degree—God knowing everything harms those who desire total privacy. But, like, even if that view were right (and there are many cogent objections to it) no-one would put very much weight on privacy as a consideration favouring anti-theism if they didn’t think a desire for total privacy could be rational.
So: could a desire for total privacy—even from God—be rational, all things considered? I don’t think so. That’s a fairly outlandish claim, so let me say why I hold it.
Recall the back-of-the-napkin definition of rationality I gave earlier: to be rational is to be appropriately responsive to one’s reasons. Among our reasons are prudential (or self-regarding) reasons, and moral reasons. Since some people are skeptical that we have moral reasons, I’ll couch my argument purely in terms of prudential reasons: the reasons we have to benefit ourselves.
Now, consider two questions:
(1) If an all-knowing, all-powerful being knew every dark and private secret you wanted to keep hidden, would it be possible for Him to benefit you in light of that information?
(2) If that being was morally perfect, and loved you, would He?
I think the answer to both questions is yes. Take (1). If God knew every fact about your life—rather than some facts, or no facts at all—could he use that information to benefit you? Specifically, could He use that information to benefit you more than He’d have been able to if He’d known only some or no information about you?
Plausibly, He could. Consider: the more a therapist, counsellor, or friend knows about you, the more they understand you and your needs; and the more they understand you and your needs, the better and more precisely they could meet them, assuming they had the power to. But God, an omnipotent being, would have all the power in the world. If He wanted to, He could use His knowledge of us as individuals to make our lives go better, tailoring specific benefits to specific people in the afterlife. The more God knew about us, the better He’d be able to benefit us. Thus, from the standpoint of prudence, if we thought God (if He exists) really would use everything he knows about us to our all-things-considered benefit, it would be irrational to desire that He have less information about us, or none at all.
Which leads us to (2). Would God use all He knows about each individual to their benefit? By my lights, this part’s easy: God is a perfect being! Of course He would. To think He wouldn’t is to undersell how perfect perfection is. By my lights, the truth of theism would entail the truth of universalism: the radical claim that God is a perfect being, and as such would persuade every conscious creature to join Him in Heaven (or some other net-positive afterlife) and then proceed to benefit each of them infinitely.
There might be a Hell, on this view, but for each individual it would only be temporary. Eventually, all the once-damned would be released from it (since no finite crime deserves an infinite punishment) or rationally persuaded to leave of their own accord (since, if God invested all the time, power, and resources he had at his disposal—i.e., all of them—into persuading the denizens of Hell that saying in Hell forever is irrational, and enhancing their rational faculties so they’d be maximally receptive to God’s persuasions, those denizens would freely choose to leave).
The rub is this: plausibly, if a perfect being exists, universalism is true. Eventually (God knows when) we’ll join God in a positive infinite afterlife, where God will benefit us all infinitely. Also plausibly, the more God knows about us, the better He can do this job. Thus, purely from the standpoint of prudential rationality, we should hope God knows all of our secrets. People who wish otherwise are being prudentially irrational, all things considered.
Conclusion: on the whole, considerations of privacy don’t speak in favour of anti-theism. Respect for privacy isn’t intrinsically good in the absence of anyone desiring it, and insofar as one does desire total privacy—even from God—one is being irrational. God, if He exists, has seen you cry. And that is a very good thing.
Ryberg, J. 2007. Privacy rights, crime prevention, CCTV, and the life of Mrs Aremac. Res Publica, 13: p. 130.
In what follow’s I’ll make a bunch of controversial assumptions about reasons and desire without properly defending them. Please forgive me.
See, e.g., Lougheed, K. 2020. The axiological status of theism and other worldviews. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan: pp. 55-110.
I’m not exactly an anti-theist, as that implies I care more than I do, but I can channel some anti-theism:
First: Theism does not imply that God is perfectly good “by definition”. There are hundreds of Gods in various religions and mythologies that are not good. You are free to define God as perfectly good, of course, but it’s an unfounded assumption without supporting evidence. Also, it usually leads to some circular definitions, as “good” is often defined as what God wills. To me it’s not even clear that God is the most “good” super-natural being in the text and tradition, and definitely not perfectly good.
But let’s assume perfect knowledge and perfect goodness. Wouldn’t that require God to take away people’s supposed moral free will? After all, perfect knowledge and perfect morals would imply that God always knows which action everyone would have to take to optimize for “good” outcomes, putting him in a pickle: If he allows people to create chaos and evil, neither he nor the afterlife can be perfectly good; if he forces or manipulates people into making the “right” choice in his mind, then it’s authoritarian and non-free.
The case for privacy on Earth (as in heaven), is not just as protection against bad actors, but against actors with perfectly reasonable and moral objectives that are just imperfectly aligned with our own.
E.g.: Imagine some business that uses its information about us to improve its revenue, productivity, sustainability, and other things we agree are largely good that businesses do. It can (they do) use information about us to manipulate us into acting without regard to our own interest – not from evil, but from a different set of priorities. We should be glad they don’t have perfect knowledge about us, which would allow them to operate at near-perfect effectiveness. Our freedom comes from the fact that no single player with its own objectives has perfect information and some power.
(I happen to not believe in the kind of free will discussed above, but that’s tied into my atheism. In a universe where a good God judges us on our choices, moral free will has to be a given. And I do believe in free volition – the experience of making informed choices, even if they aren’t exactly free – and that will be on the chopping block in variations of the all-knowing God in the afterlife scenario.)