Question My question has to do with the idea of God’s omniscience and whether God as an omniscient being could somehow exist in time. It seems hard to imagine how any sentient being could exist knowing exactly what will happen to itself in virtually any and every single moment. The concept of time, I realize, is one fraught with philosophical debate; but perhaps we could say, at least for the purposes of this question, that time is defined as the gap between the realization of events that occur between one moment, say Moment A, and Moment B (I realize this may be a bit of a problematic definition of “time”; but I can let it stand for this question). If we are to believe that there is an omniscient being, it appears that there could be no time for it (so defined), no unknown, between Moment A and Moment B for itself as an entity realizing or actualizing events.

Accepted:
August 19, 2010

Comments

The question of God's omniscience is a deep one that has received considerable attention from philosophers. Your formulation of the issue, I think, raises three distinct questions: whether (divine) omniscience is compatible with temporal existence; whether (divine) omniscience can be achieved by a sentient being; and the nature of (divine) omniscience itself. I'll treat each of these issues in reverse order. First, the omniscience at issue in treatments of divine omniscience isn't merely (!) knowledge of what will happen to that being itself at any given moment, but what will happen everywhere in the universe at any given moment, throughout time: so the knowledge at issue is very broad in scope indeed. Second, and given that omniscience is knowledge of what is happening everywhere in the universe, throughout time, it seems impossible that a being that receives all knowledge from the senses--which is what I take you to mean by "sentient"--could know everything that is happening everywhere in the universe at any given moment. (Even the philosopher Leibniz, who believed that all perceptions included information about the past, present, and future, did not think that finite minds were in a position to understand this information.) Thus it would seem that omniscience requires a different cognitive relation to the world than that of finite beings--indeed, it may even require that one has an infinite mind (depending on how much information one thinks is contained in the universe, regardless of whether one thinks that the universe or world was created.) Finally, and perhaps most importantly, and especially given my characterization of the second issue, I think that it must be the case that an omniscient being stands outside of time: it seems to me that any being located at a particular point in time would necessarily be limited with respect to the information that it had access to, and, consequently, could not be omniscient.