Information, Agency, and the Trinity

Theology and science has, for traditional sciences, been a two way street. It should be no surprise then that foundational issues in semantic information theory and AI may provide insights into religious dogmas: in this case, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. In the early days of information theory and AI, Donald M. Mackay developed two particular theories based on his research in these domains: complementarityand logical indeterminism. Each of these gives insight to the nature and behaviour of agents (artificial and natural). He also applied these theories to provide further understanding of different aspects of the Trinity. In this paper, we will see how extended and corrected versions of these can provide an understanding of why the Godhead must be multi-personal. Complementarity gives an illustrative model of the Godhead given that He is triune, whereas modal indeterminism shows why incarnation requires multi-personality (the economic Trinity). Here, we also extend the analysis to the ontological Trinity and argue that modal indeterminism also necessitates that each individual person of the Godhead cannot be absolutely omniscient (but only omniscient after their Person): only the Godhead can be absolutely omniscient. This has implications for the general relation between the persons of the Trinity, and suggests that absolute omniscience requires the unity of classical theism.