Mr. Know It All

Listening to some theist vs. atheist debate in Luneta, I’ve notice that some Filipino non-believers are still in the dark regarding God’s omniscience. Filipino atheists have taken the issue of divine omniscience very lightly that they have neglected vital issues which believers use to squeeze themselves out of the difficulty.

So today I will talk about this misunderstood attribute.

Omniscience is understood as an attribute that God knows everything there is to know. It is simple knowledge without limits. It is also said that God knows the past, present and future (also known as foreknowledge).

Philosophers agree that there are at least three kinds of knowledge: Propositional or knowledge by facts, procedural or knowledge of how to do things and knowledge by acquaintance. To say that God is omniscience means that he has all these three kinds of knowledge.

Limits of Divine Omniscience
Theologians have always set limits on God’s omniscience. St. Jerome for example declared that it is ridiculous to suppose that God knows the number of fleas on Earth. Today modern theologians say that God’s omniscience is limited on logical knowledge. That means God doesn’t know how to make a square circle or he doesn’t know any married bachelors.

Some even limits God’s omniscience on propositional knowledge. This idea reduces God into some kind of a CPU or a computer storage bank.

Majority of non-believers also seems to consider the attribute of divine omniscience is difficult for believers to defend...Let see.

Let us take this one as an example: Most atheists use God’s knowledge by acquaintance as an argument against divine omniscience. They say that since God is omniscient he is incapable of knowing lust or greed. But remember that God is supposed to be a spirit being with intellectual and observational capacities greater than anyone. He can perceive everything in anyone’s consciousness. He can instantly experience it without the share of blameworthy motivation associated with these feelings. So I think this example is really not a serious objection against God’s omniscience.

Modern theologians have devised new arguments to save divine omniscience. Here’s an example: According to Patrick Grim indexical expressions like “I” are essential and therefore cannot be replaced by non-indexical ones such as proper names. That means God cannot know what is known by John when John knows that “I opened the door.” (Against Omniscience: The Case from Essential Indexicals, Nous, 19, 1985. pp 151-180)

There is a way believers can escape this…yes God cannot apply the pronoun “I” as it is applied to John but it just say that God can know the same facts as John without having the delusion that he is John.

In another example: Again, Patrick Gim utilizing Cantor’s work shows that there’s no set of all truth (There Is No Set of All Truths, Analysis , 44, 1984 pp. 206-208). As Cantor has shown, the power set of all sets will be larger than the original set. That means an omniscient being that know all set of all the truth is impossible. But believers can respond to this in two ways: (1.) That they can suggest that paradoxes and other curiosity of logic and set theories nearly indicate the imperfections of existing versions of these theories and (2.) They can insist that God’s failure to know what logically cannot be known is not a serious limitation on omniscience. If God knows all events that occur, at every label of generality, then it doesn’t seem much that he doesn’t know certain facts about the membership of power sets (Atheism Explained – From Folly to Philosophy, David Ramsey Steele, p.237)

Problems of Divine Omniscience

In order to find the difficulties associated with omniscience, we have to see it as irreconcilable with other divine attributes.

First, omniscience cannot be reconciled with freewill. If God knows the future with infallible certainty, the future is already predetermined and it is impossible to change it.

Second, omniscience also contradicts the attribute of omnipotence. If God knows the future he cannot change it – thus he is not omnipotent. If he can change it, then he cannot have infallible knowledge of it prior to the actual happening – in which case he cannot be omniscient.

Then what is divine omniscience?
To possess knowledge, man needs two elements – acquisition and verification. Knowledge always comes from somewhere. If we would consider John Locke’s idea, acquisition of knowledge comes from sensation and reflection. Then the human mind combines or compare these ideas to form complex ideas, thus we verify.

So where God’s knowledge does comes from? How can an omniscient being undergo the process? Believers will insist that God’s knowledge is somewhat …an instant. So can they explain it? Well…a lot of Christian apologetics tried, but it all fell down to faith.

Then divine omniscience is a concept that is again trapped within the frameworks of the unknowable. Divine omniscience and God’s knowledge is again a senseless utter…an absurd attribute of an incoherent God.