Ask a Theologian IV

[burleyman]

Plotinus, have you read Francis Spufford's 'Unapologetic'? I've just finished it, having read it very quickly and enjoyably. More concerned with feelings about God than propositions about Him, but still interesting and very quotable. From the last page 'It would be nice if people were to understand that science is a special exercise in perceiving the world without metaphor, and that, powerful though it is, it doesn't function as a guide to those very large aspects of experience that can't be perceived except through metaphor'. I agree with him that all religious discourse is essentially metaphorical, and that much of the associated argument and incomprehension is due to a failure to recognize that it's therefore closer to poetry than to logical propositions, but you probably don't.

 

[Mouthwash]

(Most Jews think the phrase refers to humans, but there is a tiny fringe group who argues that the Palestinians are descended from fallen angels and so deserve to be exterminated.)

The Palestinians? The inhabitants of Israel since Jesus' time? So import Israelis think they have an argument against the people who originally lived there? Do they also use Exodus references to "justify" this?

There's a curious divergence between what he said and what you seem to think you're responding to.

 

[Agent327]

I am referring to the fact that presentday Palestinians are likely to be the direct descendants of Jews that, instead of emigrating, converted to Islam - most likely the majority of the then population, as there are no records of mass emigration from Israel. Ever.

What are you referring to?

 

[Mouthwash]

I am referring to the fact that presentday Palestinians are likely to be the direct descendants of Jews that, instead of emigrating, converted to Islam - most likely the majority of the then population, as there are no records of mass emigration from Israel. Ever.

What are you referring to?

Why, the latter two sentences of your post.

 

[Agent327]

Thanks for explaining.

@ Jeelen

Have you read any of the gnostic writings of Jesus' time?

The gnostics postdate Jesus - unless you are referring to non-Christian gnosticism, which rather a wide category.

 

[Mouthwash]

Have there been any notable responses to the problem of God not being able to know that he knew everything, given that if there was a fact that he had missed, he by definition wouldn't know it?

 

[Borachio]

Isn't that just another example of the impossibility of doing the impossible paradox?

So, to answer your question in its own terms: of course God would know that he didn't know something because he's omniscient. I don't see your problem with that.

(Actually, I do. But it's simply a feature of any self-referential paradox. And the way round those is simply to exclude self-reference; should you wish to, that is.)

 

[Plotinus]

This is normally a 'gotcha' question, but upon thinking about it, I think it's actually a decent one.

Why do people assume that there will be no sin in Heaven? Are we told that a fundamental part of free will is the capacity to sin? Ostensibly, the angels sinned (kinda) despite being in Heaven. Are there theologians who've pondered this, and what's the popularity of their conclusions?

Well, Augustine did. He thought that in the resurrection, humans will lose the power to sin, so we will be able only to choose what is good. But the resurrection life isn't the same thing as "heaven". "Heaven" means being close to God, and for Augustine and those who followed, the "heaven" that human beings go to after death is a temporary state, a sort of pleasant waiting room that only lasts until the resurrection. I would assume that if sin is impossible in the resurrection life it would be impossible in heaven too, but I'm not sure if Augustine actually says that.

Obviously the idea that sin is impossible in heaven, or in the resurrection life, would seem to undermine the free will defence to the problem of evil: if being unable to sin is compatible with the perfect happiness of heaven, then it raises the question why God ever gave us the ability to sin in the first place. Or, conversely, if having the ability to sin is so valuable that having it outweighs all the misery it brings, then why doesn't God give us that ability in heaven?

1) I noticed that the KJV doesn't capitalize pronouns referring to God, while some more modern translations do, and the most recent works I can find don't. Do you know anything about the birth and death of this trend?

I don't know exactly how this began. I think it began in the seventeenth century or thereabouts, perhaps rather later than the King James Bible, simply as part of the general custom of capitalising pronouns referring to kings. Since God is a king, it was natural to do the same. Anyone who spends much time reading seventeenth-century texts will know that people at that time liked to capitalise pretty much anything they could get their hands on.

Conversely, these days there is a strong tendency, at least in English, to capitalise less. Most editorial styles would not capitalise e.g. "the prime minister", where once they would. Increasingly, book titles are printed in minimum capitals (e.g. "The lord of the rings" instead of "The Lord of the Rings"). The tendency not to capitalise divine pronouns is part of that.

2) How far does the parallel between the Western Christian notion of grace and the Orthodox notion of energies go?

In scholastic theology, "grace" is a sort of stuff. It's something that God can give to you, and the different effects it may have are explained in terms of different varieties of the stuff. So there's "efficacious grace", "actual grace", etc. I'm not sure precisely how literally this is meant to be taken - whether scholastic theologians really thought there are different kinds of grace, or even whether "grace" itself is really a sort of stuff, or whether they simply used this kind of language for convenience. (This is a perennial problem in trying to understand scholasticism.)

In Orthodox theology, at least as I understand it, "energies" are properties of God, or perhaps more accurately sort of semi-hypostasisations of him. I always imagine them swirling around him like an effect from an early 90s video game. The energies are, if you like, God-as-we-perceive-him, as distinct from his essence, which is God-as-we-cannot-perceive him.

So I don't see much parallel between the two ideas.

3) To what extent were Lenten fasting rules developed for pragmatic reasons (e.g.
'Meat is a luxury and takes a lot of time to prepare that could be focused on God") and theological ones (e.g. "Meat comes through violence, which is in some way indicative of our fallenness.")?

I don't know. I don't think that the violent origin of meat would be much of a motivation, though - what theological motives there might have been would have been about the luxuriousness of the food, rather than animal welfare.

I realize that this post was made quite some time back, but I think you're thinking of this argument made by Dawkins in The God Delusion. He's basically saying that probability warrants that we assume some sort of natural force resulted in the formation of our universe over assuming that God did it. It's really not an argument against God at all, it's an argument against a teleological/design argument for the existence of God.

I also don't understand how the principle of parsimony states that complex things are less probable than simple ones. The stock market depends upon prices created by supply and demand, which are in turn results of interactions of industry, biology, and environment. The weather depends upon complex interactions of terrain, the atmosphere, and the sun. There are much simpler explanations: a stock market god and a weather god. According to that logic, we should accept these deities over science and observation.

Yes, I agree with you. Dawkins is here attacking arguments for God's existence rather than putting forward an argument against God's existence, although presumably if all arguments for God's existence are undermined, that in itself is at least an argument for the claim that belief in God is unjustified.

I think the whole "principle of parsimony" thing is greatly overstated, and that both Dawkins and Swinburne are mistaken in assuming that simple explanations are always to be preferred to over complex ones.

That would be like saying the universe is concerned about the scientific method? We are the product of the universe, but yet we are concerned with the scientific method.

People tend to forget that Seth was born in Adam's image. Thus humans are no longer the image of God. Adam had lost God's image as part of his punishment. There is a differentiation between The son's of Adam and the Son's of God. I think the human consensus was that they were angels, but angels cannot have offspring. It would make more sense that the sons of God were created along with Adam. They however were not "divided" into the two sexes like Adam was and they still retained God's image.

1 Corinthians 11:7 states that humans are still in the image of God. This is certainly traditional Christian doctrine, according to which Adam lost the likeness of God but not the image. (Or, if you prefer Irenaeus' version, he never attained the likeness at all.)

Has anyone taken a serious academic look at folk theology?

That depends on what you mean by "folk theology". I'm not sure that there's any other other kind. Christian theologians do, I think, try to articulate the beliefs that they think are common to Christians; this is why there's so much talk of fuzzy notions such as "traditions" and "communities", as if every theologian is just a spokesman for a church. I don't know to what degree that picture is true.

Perhaps if you're thinking about examining and analysing the views of non-professional religious people, sociology of religion would be the place to look. An example of this kind of thing is a big project currently being undertaken by the sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund at Rice University, who is examining the attitudes to religion of scientists in various countries. The idea here is to see whether it is true (as is often supposed) that scientists tend to be less religious than other people, and what scientists themselves think about the relation between science and religion. And it looks at whether scientists tend to be more similar in this regard to other scientists from other cultures, or whether they tend to be more similar to non-scientists from their own culture.

That, I think, might count as the study of "folk theology" in some sense, and there are other sociological studies that try to quantify people's religious beliefs across nations or cultures. Obviously a problem with these studies is that they tend to use rather broad strokes, categorising people by fairly blunt criteria such as whether they believe in God or how often they go to church. They may also be theologically poorly informed. For example, they may ask whether people think the Bible is the infallible Word of God or just a collection of fictional myths, as if there is no other possible attitude to hold towards it.

As opposed to starting a new thread, i'd pose the question here.

Why is that many seemingly 'intelligent/intellectual/knowledgeable scientists, engineers, doctors, etc. still believe in the existence God, when there does not seem to me to be any real hard evidence that these professionals would call for in their own careers, to verify the existence, except 'faith'.

I honestly don't know. I have wondered this myself. I currently work for a very eminent scientist who is also extremely religious - in fact he seems to hold pretty conservative religious views, despite the fact that as far as I can tell he has no good reasons for doing so, at least not reasons that would satisfy his holding a scientific hypothesis with the same conviction.

I think that religious beliefs of this kind just aren't meaningfully similar to scientific hypotheses, at least as far as the psychology of belief goes. By this I mean that people don't believe them for similar reasons. I think that human beings just do, as a matter of fact, have a strong tendency to believe this sort of thing (and this tendency can probably be explained quite well in evolutionary terms), and that as a result people just do believe these things even when it appears rationally indefensible. Which amounts to saying that people aren't really very rational. But we've known that since Hume.

If anything, this was one of the initial reasons I decided to try to investigate God's existence for myself. If people like the above believe in God, there must be something to it, i.e. they have found evidence, therefore so should I (eventually).

However, no amount of searching for evidence (outside the words of the Bible), could I find any real evidence at all. Anyone I spoke to said, you simply have to have 'faith' to 'believe'. Which is in effect, no evidence at all. And as we know anecdotes from others is not evidence, except to the person who experienced the particular event.

In addition, if we assume, that the events others describe in the Bible are also simply personal anecdotes, then that makes the Bible evidence even more flimsy. It should be noted that I consider the Bible only one source of information and I need to have evidence outside the Bible to corroborate whether an actual event really took place.

Am I wrong to look for evidence outside the Bible to verify the existence of God, if so how?

I don't think you're wrong to look for such evidence outside the Bible. I would say that if good evidence for God's existence is to be found, it's much more likely to be found outside the Bible than in it, because the nature of the Bible means that even if it did contain any good evidence, it would be easy to dismiss it as legendary. E.g. if you think a spectacular miracle would be good evidence for God's existence, there are plenty in the Bible, but unless you're already committed to the notion that the Bible's reports are true, there's no good reason to think that they actually happened. You'd be better off trying to find a modern miracle of this kind that's well attested.

I would also agree with you that no good evidence is to be found. As I said above, I think that most people who believe in God do so for non-rational reasons. (It doesn't follow, of course, that people who don't believe in God are any more rational.)

Is the concept of hell being used to make children behave a major problem in religious societies? How prevalent is it among religious people?

That's something I don't know at all. But if anyone does know, it will probably be the aforementioned sociologists of religion rather than theologians.

Aren't angels supposed to be incorporeal? Although they can wrestle, apparently. I actually don't totally get that.

Have you read any of the gnostic writings of Jesus' time? They taught that there had already been several different ages of human existence that had come and gone. The western tradition is that there are only two ages. The Bible never specifies just two ages. There were two covenants, the new and the old, but they have only a slight bearing on ages. There were several covenants that make up the OT, but people usually just place them altogether.

There are no gnostic writings of Jesus' time. Gnosticism developed later, and there were dizzyingly many versions of it - they all taught different things from each other.

Plotinus, have you read Francis Spufford's 'Unapologetic'? I've just finished it, having read it very quickly and enjoyably. More concerned with feelings about God than propositions about Him, but still interesting and very quotable. From the last page 'It would be nice if people were to understand that science is a special exercise in perceiving the world without metaphor, and that, powerful though it is, it doesn't function as a guide to those very large aspects of experience that can't be perceived except through metaphor'. I agree with him that all religious discourse is essentially metaphorical, and that much of the associated argument and incomprehension is due to a failure to recognize that it's therefore closer to poetry than to logical propositions, but you probably don't.

I haven't read it - it looks quite fun, that kind of very Anglican version of agnosticism that basically admits that religion's a non-starter but doggedly sticks to it anyway. You're right that I don't agree that all religious discourse is poetical and metaphorical. Or rather, maybe in practice it is, but I find that infuriating. If you can't cash out your metaphors in literal language, they have no meaning. That's what Scotus said to Aquinas' theory of analogy and I think it still holds.

Have there been any notable responses to the problem of God not being able to know that he knew everything, given that if there was a fact that he had missed, he by definition wouldn't know it?

I honestly don't understand what you're getting at here. If God is omniscient he knows everything (that is knowable, at least by a single individual). I don't see why this fact couldn't be among the things that God knows.

 

[Borachio]

Ah, but he couldn't be sure that he knew everything, could he? And in the absence of that knowledge, how could he be omniscient?

He can't know what he doesn't know*, so he can't know that he knows everything.

It looks, to me, like a straight-forward paradox.

*and there must be either something he doesn't know or nothing he doesn't know - and which is the case, itself, is unknown. But this is a feature of these sorts of paradox: you can just keep on writing stuff, and reach no conclusion.

At which point, I get rather fed up with the whole process.

 

[Atticus]

There is the possibility that his knowledge of his omniscience doesn't rely on his knowledge on all the facts that he knows them.

For example, I know that every prime number greater than 2 is odd. This knowledge doesn't come from me knowing that 3 is odd, 5 is odd, 7 is odd, 11 is odd,... It comes from the definition of prime number and deduction. Otherwise knowing it would be impossible since there are an infinite amount of primes.

In similar way God could deduce from something that he is omniscient. I think some people think they've done that too: "God is by it's definition the perfect being, therefore he is omniscient".

 

[Borachio]

Oh right! But that's the proof of God by perfection, isn't it?

Descartes' 2nd proof:

The concept of God includes all perfections. Existence is a perfection. Therefore God exists.

Hmm.

I'm not convinced.

 

[ParkCungHee]

More over, this seems to be working on the assumption that god's thought process is like ours, only more so, that he is a very powerful, perhaps incorporeal sorcerer.

It does not necessarily follow that God would necessarily have to choose between senses which have the potential for unreliability, or his own reason. It is entirely possible, reasonable, even to assume god has no intermediary device between himself and his knowledge, because if god created all things, he would have to create that intermediary device first.

 

[Mouthwash]

Plotinus's response reminded me of the Ontological proof as well (God knows that he knows everything "by definition"). I'll need to have a better grounding in epistemology when I get back into this subject.

Forgot to ask- Plotinus, have you studied the philosophy of religion specifically, or just general philosophy?

(Also, welcome back).

 

[timtofly]

1 Corinthians 11:7 states that humans are still in the image of God. This is certainly traditional Christian doctrine, according to which Adam lost the likeness of God but not the image. (Or, if you prefer Irenaeus' version, he never attained the likeness at all.)

Does Paul teach that the image was restored through Christ? Saying that humans lost the likeness of God may be the philosophical way of looking at it? The observable human image did not change after Christ. We are still in the image we were since Seth was born. How would a human pull off such an image while others could not? That is one of the issues that we are left with. Would such a change be proof that God existed and since there is no change, we are only left with faith? God forbade any graven image of his likeness. Seems to make sense to me that we cannot exist in his image or likeness in our current condition. My opinion on Paul's comment would be an idealistic effort to attempt regaining the image of God in the relationship of God, Christ, man and woman. Woman is the image and glory of the man. Man is the image and glory of God. God is the head of Christ. Christ is the head of man. Man is the head of his wife. That sounds idealistic to me and tends to not work out in real life.

There are no gnostic writings of Jesus' time. Gnosticism developed later, and there were dizzyingly many versions of it - they all taught different things from each other.

This is coming from one who accepts the gospels as writings "of Jesus' time". Can't fault any one taking my question as being literal. My point being that even the gnostics "wrote" about multiple aeons of time existing before Jesus' earthly life. I was trying to point out a non-biblical reference to multiple ages of time existing before Jesus. I realize that some would point out the fact that those writings may be just as spurious as the Bible itself.

 

[Plotinus]

Ah, but he couldn't be sure that he knew everything, could he? And in the absence of that knowledge, how could he be omniscient?

He can't know what he doesn't know*, so he can't know that he knows everything.

It looks, to me, like a straight-forward paradox.

*and there must be either something he doesn't know or nothing he doesn't know - and which is the case, itself, is unknown. But this is a feature of these sorts of paradox: you can just keep on writing stuff, and reach no conclusion.

At which point, I get rather fed up with the whole process.

There is the possibility that his knowledge of his omniscience doesn't rely on his knowledge on all the facts that he knows them.

For example, I know that every prime number greater than 2 is odd. This knowledge doesn't come from me knowing that 3 is odd, 5 is odd, 7 is odd, 11 is odd,... It comes from the definition of prime number and deduction. Otherwise knowing it would be impossible since there are an infinite amount of primes.

In similar way God could deduce from something that he is omniscient. I think some people think they've done that too: "God is by it's definition the perfect being, therefore he is omniscient".

Oh right! But that's the proof of God by perfection, isn't it?

Descartes' 2nd proof:

The concept of God includes all perfections. Existence is a perfection. Therefore God exists.

Hmm.

I'm not convinced.

God by definition is omniscient. This isn't akin to the ontological argument, because trying to argue that something exists by definition is quite different from simply asserting that it has some property by definition. E.g. a square, by definition, has four sides. If we're talking about squares, I don't have to worry about whether they have four sides or not, although I may worry about what follows from their having four sides or what it involves. Or again, if we're talking about the president of the United States, I know that the person we're talking about is the commander in chief of the US military, because the president has that position as well, by definition. This is so whether or not there actually is a president of the US. There's nothing weird about this. Similarly, if God exists, he's omniscient, because that's just part of what we mean by "God" (at least if we're using the term within the tradition of classical theism). Obviously it doesn't follow from this that any such being exists.

As for how God's knowledge works, the traditional answer is that God knows everything that's true via himself. He knows necessary truths via his understanding and contingent truths through his will. E.g. he knows that 2+2=4 because he has perfect understanding of all necessary truths; and he knows that I'm sitting here typing this because he knows that he himself chose to create a universe in which I do so. Both of these are really knowledge of himself, because all possibilities exist as possibilities only within God's understanding (this goes back to Augustine but it was greatly elaborated on by the scholastics). God doesn't have to look beyond himself to find stuff out.

This leads to the second point about God's knowledge, which is that it is immediate and intuitive. God doesn't have to do anything to know, he just knows. (Similarly, his omnipotence is such that he doesn't merely have the ability to do anything logically possible, he has the ability to do it immediately without requiring instruments.)

So God would know perfectly well the fact that he is omniscient. In fact, it's a necessary truth, so he would know it through his understanding. More specifically, there is no possible being which is a non-omniscient God (because it's a contradiction in terms). If God were to examine the contents of his understanding - which is the location of all possible beings - he would not find there the concept of a non-omniscient God. He would therefore know intuitively that God is necessarily omniscient.

Forgot to ask- Plotinus, have you studied the philosophy of religion specifically, or just general philosophy?

Yes, both. My PhD was mainly on seventeenth-century philosophy, but a lot of it involved religious-type stuff (in fact part of my thesis was on that business of all possible concepts being in God's mind), and since then I've done a fair bit of research in philosophy of religion, mainly concerning the incarnation.

Does Paul teach that the image was restored through Christ? Saying that humans lost the likeness of God may be the philosophical way of looking at it? The observable human image did not change after Christ. We are still in the image we were since Seth was born. How would a human pull off such an image while others could not? That is one of the issues that we are left with. Would such a change be proof that God existed and since there is no change, we are only left with faith? God forbade any graven image of his likeness. Seems to make sense to me that we cannot exist in his image or likeness in our current condition. My opinion on Paul's comment would be an idealistic effort to attempt regaining the image of God in the relationship of God, Christ, man and woman. Woman is the image and glory of the man. Man is the image and glory of God. God is the head of Christ. Christ is the head of man. Man is the head of his wife. That sounds idealistic to me and tends to not work out in real life.

A problem with this kind of thing is that it's all highly metaphorical language. I don't know what it means to say "Man is the image and glory of God," let along "Man is the head of his wife." I can't assess whether these claims are true or not, and I can't assess whether or not the claim "Man retains the image of God" is true, without having them reduced to non-metaphorical language. This goes back to the point I made to burleyman: using metaphorical language and poetic imagery is all very well, and there is a place for it, but it all falls apart once you start asking more fact-oriented questions such as "Is this true?" You can't even begin to answer that until you translate these questions out of metaphorical language and into literal language.

This is coming from one who accepts the gospels as writings "of Jesus' time". Can't fault any one taking my question as being literal. My point being that even the gnostics "wrote" about multiple aeons of time existing before Jesus' earthly life. I was trying to point out a non-biblical reference to multiple ages of time existing before Jesus. I realize that some would point out the fact that those writings may be just as spurious as the Bible itself.

They're considerably more spurious, I'd say, at least if you're talking about the historical claims made in them. The mythological claims, I suppose, are just different.

 

[Borachio]

God by definition is omniscient. This isn't akin to the ontological argument, because trying to argue that something exists by definition is quite different from simply asserting that it has some property by definition. E.g. a square, by definition, has four sides. If we're talking about squares, I don't have to worry about whether they have four sides or not, although I may worry about what follows from their having four sides or what it involves. Or again, if we're talking about the president of the United States, I know that the person we're talking about is the commander in chief of the US military, because the president has that position as well, by definition. This is so whether or not there actually is a president of the US. There's nothing weird about this. Similarly, if God exists, he's omniscient, because that's just part of what we mean by "God" (at least if we're using the term within the tradition of classical theism). Obviously it doesn't follow from this that any such being exists.

As for how God's knowledge works, the traditional answer is that God knows everything that's true via himself. He knows necessary truths via his understanding and contingent truths through his will. E.g. he knows that 2+2=4 because he has perfect understanding of all necessary truths; and he knows that I'm sitting here typing this because he knows that he himself chose to create a universe in which I do so. Both of these are really knowledge of himself, because all possibilities exist as possibilities only within God's understanding (this goes back to Augustine but it was greatly elaborated on by the scholastics). God doesn't have to look beyond himself to find stuff out.

This leads to the second point about God's knowledge, which is that it is immediate and intuitive. God doesn't have to do anything to know, he just knows. (Similarly, his omnipotence is such that he doesn't merely have the ability to do anything logically possible, he has the ability to do it immediately without requiring instruments.)

So God would know perfectly well the fact that he is omniscient. In fact, it's a necessary truth, so he would know it through his understanding. More specifically, there is no possible being which is a non-omniscient God (because it's a contradiction in terms). If God were to examine the contents of his understanding - which is the location of all possible beings - he would not find there the concept of a non-omniscient God. He would therefore know intuitively that God is necessarily omniscient.

You're good at this! Obviously.

Let us admit for the moment that God is omniscient - meaning that God knows everything.

But then God cannot know what it is not to be omniscient. Therefore, there is something he doesn't know; and hence he isn't omniscient.

Or let's go down the path that he knows what it is not to be omniscient - since he knows everything. Hence, directly, he isn't omniscient.



Or would you prefer that God is simultaneously omniscient and not omniscient? I'm not sure there's a happy conclusion to that, either.



I'm not sure that God can be said to be an entity with any attributes whatsoever; including existence or non-existence.

Perhaps that's the point of God in the first place. An entity that transcends definition?

Though where that might lead, I'm really in no position to say.

 

[timtofly]

You're good at this! Obviously.

Let us admit for the moment that God is omniscient - meaning that God knows everything.

But then God cannot know what it is not to be omniscient. Therefore, there is something he doesn't know; and hence he isn't omniscient.

Or let's go down the path that he knows what it is not to be omniscient - since he knows everything. Hence, directly, he isn't omniscient.

Or would you prefer that God is simultaneously omniscient and not omniscient? I'm not sure there's a happy conclusion to that, either.

I'm not sure that God can be said to be an entity with any attributes whatsoever; including existence or non-existence.

Perhaps that's the point of God in the first place. An entity that transcends definition?

Though where that might lead, I'm really in no position to say.

When the Jewish nation started with Moses, all the info they had on God was I AM. He became known as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They also came up with many names or attributes to describe how God reveals himself to mankind.

If Jewish scholars (who have as a people group experienced God in a more tangible way than any other group) consider God as indescribable, then how would humans do so without any objective vantage point? For humans to uncover and describe what is understandable about the universe is an amazing accomplishment.

When a human says they know everything, they may be capable of knowing everything up to the present. They do not know the future. Saying that there is still unknowns makes sense to us. Claiming that there is an unknown to God, would not describe anything that we know about God, and is a non-variable in such a description. If God told us that there are things that He did not know, then that variable could be added. Now God could be deceiving us and/or that variable does exist, but until things change, we can only guess that God cannot know everything.

How can we know that God does not know what it is like to not know all? God declares that he knows our thoughts and feelings. If he knows that, then he knows what it is to not know everything. From our understanding of God, the experiences of all creation are vicariously known to him, there is nothing hidden.

 

[Borachio]

So, you're saying God is simultaneously omniscient and not omniscient. Fine.

Of course, a parent can "know" what it's like for their child not to know something: children don't generally have much idea what it is to go out to work full-time and support a family for example. And a parent can recognize this lack of knowledge on behalf of their child. But they can't forget their own knowledge at the same time. (Or would you say that they can?). So, in this particular case, is it possible to say that the parent truly knows and does not know what it is to go out to work and support a family?

Is it possible to extrapolate this example to the point of view of God, and say that God cannot be both omniscient and not omniscient?

Indeed, is there any meaning in the phrase "point of view of God" at all, anyway?

If Jewish scholars (who have as a people group experienced God in a more tangible way than any other group) consider God as indescribable, then how would humans do so without any objective vantage point? For humans to uncover and describe what is understandable about the universe is an amazing accomplishment.

I like this paragraph of yours very much. It seems to imply that Jewish scholars aren't human. Or perhaps it implies that Jewish scholars are the only humans with an objective vantage point.

Though I'm not sure how spending all one's time indoors, with your nose in a book, could be described as experiencing God in a more tangible way.

But perhaps I'm misinterpreting (teasingly) what you're really saying.

 

[Plotinus]

You're good at this! Obviously.

Let us admit for the moment that God is omniscient - meaning that God knows everything.

But then God cannot know what it is not to be omniscient. Therefore, there is something he doesn't know; and hence he isn't omniscient.

Or let's go down the path that he knows what it is not to be omniscient - since he knows everything. Hence, directly, he isn't omniscient.

You've put your finger on a problem with omniscience which I think has been discussed a fair bit in the literature. There are some things, it seems, which God couldn't know.

This is normally presented as a clash between his omniscience and his other properties. For example, an omnipotent being can never be weak. But then he would never know what it's like to be weak, which means he can't be omniscient. Or again, a timeless being can't know that today is Monday. He may know that 10 June 2013 is Monday, but that's not quite the same thing. So there again there's something he doesn't know.

But the problem with this line of argument is that it seems to trade off an ambiguity in "know". If I say "Peter knows true suffering", I'm using the word "knows" different from how it's used in "Peter knows that the square root of 4 is 2". In the first case, "knows" is being used to refer to personal experience (what we might call "knowledge of" something). In the second case, it's being used to refer to an awareness of what is true (what we might call "knowledge that" something). "Knowledge of" is experience of events or objects; "knowledge that" is propositional. This is a bit like the distinction in French between "connaitre" and "savoir" (and this distinction exits in other languages too).

Now the point of this is that God's omniscience is usually taken to be propositional. He knows all facts. It doesn't follow from this that he experiences everything. So it may be true that God doesn't know suffering, or the passing of time, or ignorance, and so on, in the sense that he never experiences them. But it doesn't follow that he's ignorant of everything there is to know about them. God knows what suffering is, he knows what causes it. He may even know what it's like. This last one is dubious. Some would argue that knowledge of what something is like cannot be gained except by experiencing it; I cannot really understand what pain is all about if I have never been in pain myself. I'm not convinced by this. It seems to me that, in theory, a perfect duplicate of me could be created by a mad scientist (or an act of God), and this perfect duplicate would have all of my knowledge of what pain is like, but without ever having suffered it.

There's also the question of whether this kind of thing is really knowledge at all, in the propositional sense. If I study pain in great detail for many years and know everything about its physiology, but without ever actually experiencing it, is what I lack really knowledge? If I then experience pain for the first time, do I learn something new? Many would say so (this is similar to Frank Jackson's argument from colour about qualia), but I'm not sure there's any way to tell.

So it may be that God could know everything about pain, weakness, etc. without having to experience these things. In that case his omniscience would not be threatened. He could even know what it's like not to be omniscient, without ever not being omniscient. But there's another point to make about omniscience, which is that it is generally taken to mean knowledge of everything that can be known. Just as God's omnipotence means only that he can do anything possible, without meaning that he can do impossible things such as make it the case that 2+2=5, so too his omniscience means only that he can know anything that he is capable of knowing. Suppose that there are some things that are genuine items of knowledge that God genuinely cannot know, being prevented by his various properties. In that case it's logically impossible that God could know them. And in that case his omniscience is not threatened, because God doesn't have to know what it's impossible that he knows.

One has to be careful here too. On that definition of omniscience, my pencil is arguably omniscient, since it too knows everything that it's capable of knowing (i.e. nothing). So the definition would need refining.

Or would you prefer that God is simultaneously omniscient and not omniscient? I'm not sure there's a happy conclusion to that, either.

I agree that that doesn't seem a very fruitful approach to take.

I'm not sure that God can be said to be an entity with any attributes whatsoever; including existence or non-existence.

Perhaps that's the point of God in the first place. An entity that transcends definition?

Though where that might lead, I'm really in no position to say.

That's the view of apophatic theologians such as Pseudo-Dionysius. He says basically this in his Mystical Theology, which you can read here - it's very short, but notice in particular the last two chapters.

 

[El_Machinae]

So, speaking of omniscience. You said that God 'by definition' is omniscient. Do you think Paul and Jesus would've thought of God as omniscient the same way we think of omniscience? Or at least, similarly enough?