Topics Religion

Question My question pertains to two common attributes given to God. Omniscience and omnipotence. If we use a definition of omniscience that includes knowledge of all future events (as most believers would today due to things like prophecy and revelation) then it follows that God knows all of his future actions with absolute certainty. If this is the case, then God's omniscience is compromised. For example, let's say God knows he is going to create a global flood "x" years in the future. If omniscience is perfect he MUST do that action and is powerless to do otherwise, lest he compromise his knowledge. If he does exercise his power and not flood the earth then he was previously wrong and his omniscience is compromised. Therefor no single entity can be all knowing and all powerful. Is this a good argument? I have never heard it used or refuted in a public debate/piece of literature.

Accepted:
September 30, 2010

Comments

It's an interesting idea, but I don't think it's quite compelling. Your argument assumes that God is in time in much the same way we take ourselves to be in time: experiencing only the present and acting only in the present. But, being omniscient, God would really be experiencing all times at once; and being omnipotent, he would be shaping the entire universe at once, from (temporal) beginning to (temporal) end or throughout an unbounded, infinite duration. An omniscient and omnipotent God engages in only one grand act of creation which is fully transparent to Him. Or so it might be said in response to your argument.

Still, I believe your conclusion can be supported in another way. With regard to omniscience we might ask whether God can really know why He exists. We find this question raised, for example, in a little-known passage in Immanuel Kant's masterwork The Critique of Pure Reason: "We cannot put aside, andyet also cannot endure the thought, that a being, which werepresent to ourselves as supreme amongst all possible beings,should, as it were, say to itself: 'I am from eternity to eternity,and outside me there is nothing save what is through my will,but whence then am I?'"

And with regard to omnipotence we might ask analogously whether God has control over His own existence: does God exist if and only if He so chooses?

Now if we can make sense of an affirmative answer to the latter question, then we may use it to answer the first: Yes, God can know why He exists; God can know that He owes His existence to His own omnipotent will. But I cannot make sense of this idea that God's existence is due to His own decision to exist. So I agree with your conclusion that we have reason to reject the hypothesis of a literally omniscient and omnipotent God.