Open Theism and Divine Omniscience
Open Theism and Divine Omniscience
Before beginning this examination, we need to be clear about what exactly open theists are saying about divine foreknowledge. The obvious difficulty is that a God who is ignorant of future contingents knows less than a God who isn't so ignorant, making the openist God appear less impressive and Godlike than His more traditional rival. Some openist efforts to clarify their position on this score are genuinely helpful while others are not. Let's look first at a couple that are not.
Gregory Boyd, a leading defender of Openism, attempts to turn the tables on the critic by claiming that the openist God actually knows more than the God of Classical Theism (hereafter, the “classical God”). Boyd thinks the critic overlooks all the possible ways the contingent future might go. Since these possible futures are all but infinite in number, this is a vast trove of knowledge, and it's available to the openist God.
So far so good. What is puzzling is Boyd's claim that the openist God would therefore know more than the classical God. This implies that the classical God would not know these truths. But why suppose this? The future contingents known by the classical God, being contingent, can happen otherwise; it's just that they won't. Unless Boyd can show why the classical God would mistakenly regard the contingent future as noncontingent, this God must know not only how things will turn out but also all the possible ways they might have turned out if they hadn't turned out that way.
Boyd also tries to shift attention away from God's limited knowledge by reconceiving the problem. If God knows less, it's because there's less to be known, and there's less to be known because that's the kind of world God chose to create. God could have created a world in which the future is completely settled in advance and therefore completely knowable; instead, He chose to create a world in which the future is not completely settled and therefore not completely knowable. For this reason Boyd claims that the dispute between openists and classical theists isn't really about God's knowledge but about the doctrine of creation.
But which dispute is Boyd talking about? The dispute over creation is with Calvinists. What is the nature of the dispute with traditional Arminians? The latter agree with open theists that God created a world with future contingents. They have no dispute with openists over creation; theirs is clearly a dispute over what God knows.
With these red herrings out of the way, we can look at some genuine clarifications of the openist position. With all due respect to Boyd, the dispute is over God's knowledge, and it's a dispute in which the openist God knows less. How then do openists explain their position so that their conception of God doesn't seem inadequate or impoverished? Openists have endorsed three basic lines on this question.
1. There are no such truths to be known (Boyd, Sanders). That part of the future that is contingent does not yet have a fixed truth-value so there is nothing yet there for knowledge to grasp. Failing to know future contingents, like failing to know the prime numbers between 13 and 17, is therefore a virtue in God, not a vice.2
This move preserves divine omniscience. An omniscient being is one who knows all truths. There may be fewer truths for God to know, but He does know all of them.
2. There are such truths, but they are logically unknowable (Hasker, Basinger). Knowledge comes with conditions. A lucky guess, for example, may be true, but it can't be credited to the believer as knowledge. The contingent future, because it is not yet fixed one way or the other, cannot be known by anyone, even God—perhaps especially by God since His knowledge must be infallible.3
This move abandons omniscience. If there are truths that God doesn't know, for whatever reason, then He isn't omniscient. But perhaps this isn't so serious. After all, if God's omnipotence isn't compromised by His inability to do what is logically impossible, perhaps His cognitive power isn't compromised by His inability to know what is logically unknowable.
3. There are such truths, God can know them, but He freely refrains from doing so in order to secure the sorts of goods openists think are at stake (Willard). If tomorrow Jones faces a significant fork in life's road, God can foreknow Jones's choice, but doing so would presettle the question of which way Jones will go. If it's important to God that this question not be presettled because it's important that Jones have both directions genuinely open to him, then God might decline to know Jones's choice until it's made.4
This also abandons omniscience, but the parallel with omnipotence might again be invoked to argue that God's greatness is not thereby diminished. God still has unlimited cognitive power; He just chooses not to exercise it. We don't think God is less powerful because He refrains from exercising all the power He possesses; so why think He would be less knowledgeable just because He refrains from knowing all the things He can know?
In sum, openists give different accounts of why God doesn't know future contingents, and this leads them to different conclusions about whether God is omniscient. What all three forms of Openism have in common, however, is that God learns things over time that He didn't know earlier: as time progresses, there are (1) more truths to be known, (2) more truths that are knowable, or (3) more truths that God allows Himself to know. This common Openist view that God's body of knowledge grows over time is sometimes referred to as “dynamic omniscience.”