If God is all knowing...

meshnaster said:

i discussed this with a group of people who go to church. we all decided it's a very biblical thing. if God says it Himself, then i don't care who laughs at it, cuz it's still the truth.

but yeah, a lot of people would be very hesitant to accept it. but i think it's only because they haven't studied it as much as they've studied other things that are probably more important to study. and again, it's not because God is not all-powerful that He doesn't know everything. it is just because He decides to not know. He can find out if He wants.

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Ah well, another thing about christianity that makes no logical sense at all. I'll add it to the pile

sullivanstud7 said:

It has been said, and I am sure many of you all know, that God is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. This would mean that he is all powerful, everywhere, and also all knowing. This would include the fact that God can do anything, be anywhere, and know past, present, and future. If these facts are true, answer this question.
Why would God put the Tree in the garden, knowing that man would eat from it? Why would he put it there to tempt man?
Secondly, why would God create Lucifer, knowing that he would turn against and bring evil to this world. Because, if God is all knowing, he would have realized that Lucifer would try to take control of the throne and overthrow God.

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Agreed. There is a group of evangelical Protestant Christian theologians called "open theists" today who oppose the idea of God's absolute knowledge, particularly His absolute foreknowledge, because it seems implausible to say that God can foreknow my free acts if I have not yet utilized my freedom to decide the outcome. I found out about this movement from a periodical called the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, although I wonder if "open theism" would yield any hits in a search engine.

Open theism in my opinion is correct. After all, orthodox Christianity in the past defined God as inherently omniscient (immutably omniscient). The problem with this view is that Christ, being God, could not then become an ignorant fetus in Mary's womb. I therefore define God as originally ignorant who, as Ancient of Days (Dan 7:9), acquired His knowledge over incalculable ages of time. Therefore it was easy for the Father to return a portion of His total being (the Son) to ignorance temporarily. And there is then no need for the orthodox claim that Christ was a merge of the divine Son with a created human soul (an ignorant human soul). This merge has been called a "hypostatic union" and problematically seems to imply that a created human soul united with the Trinity resulting in a Quadrinity.

According to open theism, God foreknows all MAJOR events because He foreordains them by controlling the world as to direct the general course of history. That's why the Book of Revelation, for example, makes many predictions. God can also foreknow/foreordain many of our individual actions because our freedom is not absolute. For instance if we have a loose tongue, this bad habit can become so ingrained that God can predict how certain temptations will cause us to speak. That's how the Father foreknew that Peter would deny Christ three times.

I'm not sure that "absolute knowledge" is a meaningful term. As open theists we might say that God's knowledge is infallible in all significant areas of understanding such that our heavenly future and safety in Him are secure. Let me give an example of why "absolute knowledge" isn't meaningful. Does God really know what it is like to sin? In one sense, yes, He understands it far better than we do. But in another sense, no, because He has never sinned. How can He FULLY know what it is to hate if He has never done it? How can He FULLY know what it is like to be you if He is not you? He knows enough to be infinitely more generous and fair in His justice than any human judge. But to say that He has ABSOLUTE knowledge seems unintelligible - and that for an additional reason that I won't delve into here.

Try it out on any christian church. The idea of a non-omnipotent/omniscient god would be laughed at.

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Not true. There are churches which would be open to the idea. Beyond this, there are plenty of Christian churches which do not subscribe (at least not exclusively) to the idea that an omni-etc God is necesarily a human-style, personal type entity (so omnipotence and omniscence would not necessarily be understood in the same way this thread discusses them).

sullivanstud7 said:

It has been said, and I am sure many of you all know, that God is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. This would mean that he is all powerful, everywhere, and also all knowing. This would include the fact that God can do anything, be anywhere, and know past, present, and future. If these facts are true, answer this question.
Why would God put the Tree in the garden, knowing that man would eat from it? Why would he put it there to tempt man?
Secondly, why would God create Lucifer, knowing that he would turn against and bring evil to this world. Because, if God is all knowing, he would have realized that Lucifer would try to take control of the throne and overthrow God.

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Well, look at who learned something.

Compare it with the story of Abraham and Isaac. God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.

God knew Abraham would obey him. The person who didn't know if Abraham would obey God was...[drumroll please]...Abraham. The purpose of the exercise was not for God to figure out what Abraham to do, but for Abraham to realize he had the faith in God to do anything, including things that seemed on the surface to be contrary to his own best wishes and happiness.

So, the purpose of the tree of knowledge of good and evil may been to grant that knowledge...and to let the human race know their own base nature and iniquity.

Hello there! What an interesting question you pose, I have been pondering it myself lately.


In response to the original post, I for one do believe in the omnipotence and omnipresence of God in the traditional sense, however I see it through a different... perspective. That is, if one is to accept that God exists in all time and all space while avoiding a sort of panentheism (like Spinoza would suggest), it is necessary to accept that God exists both within and beyond the very concepts/measures of time and space. This leads me to say that God does exist and does not exist at the same time, since His being is both intimately imminent and infinitely transcendant.

How this relates to the universe(s) and the human condition is a little more complicated. I believe that the universe was founded upon and exists upon two principles; chaotic change and fundamental cause. That is, all the processes of our universe, the cycles of galactic/solar/planetary formation, evolution, constant movement, etc are all the result of an original action which, being beyond existence in the real sense, somehow had the foreknowledge or "design" to know that the original cause would result in such an environment as we know today.

At first this theory seems hard to accept, since it falls into the traditional duality of change versus constancy and how they are incompatible in the physical sense (Aristotle's unmoved mover), therefore insufficent to describe the origin of the universe. However, in good Taoist mindset, I would go on to say that ultimately, to a being beyond time and space, there is no difference between change and constancy; they are perceived on a whole new level permeating every possible thread and expression of reality. Hence, to be omniscient and omnipresent must be redefined as the non existence of both time (being cognitive of all events regardless of order) and space (being part of everything).

Finally, this relates to the story of Genesis in that the tree of knowledge of good and evil (which I believe is a whole other branch, forgive the pun, of philosophy, requiring a whole new topic) was an essential part of the universe's evolution, with humanity being meant to "eat of its fruit," there being no other possible outcome as a result of the "cause's changes." The real point of contention in the theist/atheist debacle is whether the anthropological interpretation presented by Christians holds ground; As an Orthodox Christian I believe the fall of man was the result of man's action, that this led to the fall of creation (again, requiring a whole new topic to discuss in full) and that the Christ, being the Logos, the "cause," is the very "jump start" of the universe's existence as relative to humanity's role in it.

Well, I hope that this isn't too disjointed; I hope that this helps establish a variant Christian position

In peace,

-Justin

OrthodoxServant86, great post!

Hello everyone,

I found this thread to be a very interesting topic of discussion. If we accept that God is all-knowing, and if his spirit lives within all of us, then yes--I would have to say that God does know everything that is going on. I guess it depends what view each person has of God. My view of God is that he is living in all of us. Therefore, God resides in us and knows our every move...even before we move.

So, for me, there is no inconsistency here. I believe when God created Lucifer, God was in him too; however Lucifer chose to shut God out and as a result, he sinned against God. I'm not a bible guru, so please excuse my simplistic train of thought.

I've been a Chrisitian for many years and just recently, my walk with God has been renewed and I have no doubt that God is with me and that he loves me. For about 10 years, I chose to have faith based on my own conditions and chose to shut God out of my life. What lessons I have learned!

Anyway, I just wanted to throw in my three cents to this discussion.

ALRIGHT! i've been studying this a whole lot lately and talking with people and trying to figure it all out. i've decided that i was absolutely wrong. God actually does know everything. it is God's knowledge of everything that is a part of what makes him so good to trust.

when God was talking to abraham about sodom and gomorroah, He already knew what was going on and He was going down there to check up on the people. this may be ebcause He is a personal God, or it may just be for some other reason.

and is response to the argument: "if God knows the future, then people don't have freewill," if i told you what you did yesterday, would that mean you had no choice? God is not bound by time. He's at the beginning of time and He's at the end of time. He can know what you will choose do because He's at the end of time where you've already chosen it.

and if God knows that bad stuff will happen, why does He still let it happen? God has the power to redeem anything that can be done. the bad things happen because of sinful desires and satan, so it is not God causing them to happen.

meshnaster said:

Response to the argument: "if God knows the future, then people don't have freewill," if i told you what you did yesterday, would that mean you had no choice? God is not bound by time. He's at the beginning of time and He's at the end of time. He can know what you will choose do because He's at the end of time where you've already chosen it.

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That's the standard response, but I'm not ready to accept it. You seem to be suggesting that God knows the future in virtue of inhabiting it. Consider the implications. This would mean both (a) the future already exists and (b) God knows it in VIRTUE of inhabiting it (in other words he who inhabits his future knows his future).

OK, fine. Now let's go back to A. If the future exists, then I, who am part of that future, inhabit my future. So just like God, if I inhabit my future, then I should already know my future. But I don't. So that's why I have to abandon assumptions A and B. The reality is that I have not yet made my future choices, and the future does not yet exist, and therefore God does not inhabit the future.
- That's my argument. Maybe it's not water-tight, but it seems reasonable. Feel free to reply.
- On the other hand you do have a good point that God calls Himself the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I heard an alternative intepretation once, but I will have to reflect on this because I can't seem to remember it.

JAL, good day to you!

Your argument is very interesting and thought provoking; it would indeed seem impossible for God to inhabit the future if it is, empirically speaking, not yet existant. You likewise express the paradox of the possibility of occupying both infinite time and space, since a being that occupies space according to (as far as I know) all laws of physics must occupy time as well, and vice versa. For the sake of discussion, I offer this consideration:

God's "foreknowledge," as we call it, is not based upon His presence "in the future," but rather upon His Being entirely beyond the existence of both time and space. That is, the entirety of the physical universe as a self-contained entity (and, on a mircocosm, man on mostly closed system of the Earth) is bound by laws necessary for it to function and we are consequently a result of those very laws; but the divine is inherently within and without all things, including "nothingness," or "abyss"... whatever the opposite of "is" is.

This form of existence (if it may be called such, empirically) would therefore demand a sort of consciousness capable of logical/rational/observational faculties quite beyond anything a human could experience. So foreknowledge is (for most of us) impossible to the human since we are a result and part of a closed system guided by laws essential to functionality, whereas to God, foreknowledge is the reality of His perception, intergrated into the very definition of His existence.

This is a little bit of a rant, I realise, but hopefully this in correlation to my earlier post could make some sense.

In peace,

-Justin