Omniscience
Omniscience
The thesis that God is all-knowing has generated weighty philosophical attention, especially with regard to the scope of divine knowledge. The chief focus has been on “future free contingents,” future events that are genuinely contingent, not predetermined, such as result from the exercise of free choice. Freedom means the possibility of doing something with the ability to do otherwise. But what if God knows perfectly and precisely that you will give to Oxfam tomorrow? If so, the future seems fixed. If God knows what you will do tomorrow, you cannot do otherwise. But if the future is fixed, how can you be free?
There are several replies:
The first is simply to claim that the objection falsely assumes that divine knowledge you will freely give to Oxfam tomorrow undermines your freedom. If you freely will do x tomorrow and had the power to do otherwise, the foreknowledge of what you will freely do does not at all imply that you could not do otherwise. To adopt an analogy from ancient Greek philosophy, if you foreknow which chariot will win the race tomorrow, your foreknowledge does not determine the winner. An objector might protest that you could know the victor only if the race is fixed, but two points can be made against this objection when applied to God: first, God's mode of knowing may be profoundly different from human foreknowledge (see the section on eternity below) and, second, since our knowledge of past free action does not in any way undermine the actor's freedom, why should knowledge of the future?
The second reply to our initial challenge invokes a radically comprehensive portrait of divine knowledge. According to some philosophers, God possesses what is called “middle knowledge,” knowing what all possible creatures would do under any condition. Knowing what circumstances you are in at any point in your life, God knows how you will exercise your agency and your power to do otherwise. This exalted understanding of divine knowledge was formulated by the sixteenth-century philosopher Luis de Molina and is defended today by Thomas Flint and William Craig.
A third, different (and controversial) reply is that omniscience does not cover future free contingents. If you have not yet given to Oxfam, whether you will or will not do so is not fixed or determined. But if it is not known what you will do, “omniscience” can cover only “all possible knowledge.” If there is no possible knowledge of what will occur in future free contingencies (though many theologians would dispute this), an omniscient being would not be bound or expected to know the future.
Let us consider another objection to divine omniscience. A formal version of the argument involves what is called “concept empiricism.”
This is an interesting argument indeed. The first premise is intuitively plausible. After all, if you knew everything about the concept of red (the retinal and brain conditions essential to seeing red, the relevant wavelengths, and so on), but had no sensation of seeing red, you would not know what red looks like.
The conclusion can be challenged by objecting to its understanding of the relation of the divine attributes to the emotions and sensations. Many theists claim that an all-powerful God who creates genuinely free creatures might have to limit divine power in order for them to be genuinely free and thus would experience a kind of self-imposed restraint or weakness. If creatures can genuinely and freely resist God's love, wouldn't a loving God experience vulnerability?
A similar case is made with regards to the relationship between essential goodness and sadism (or any other emotion that is wrong or unjust). The objection that God cannot experience an emotion that is unjust ignores the possibility that unjust emotions are complex states made up of morally acceptable components wrongly combined or wrongly directed. Arguably, a morally perfect being who hates no one can grasp what it is like to hate persons by grasping the concepts of persons and hate (there is nothing wrong with hatred per se, as in the case of hatred of evil). A good God could grasp the concept of sadism by grasping such concepts as pleasure, pain, subordination, and power. (Incidentally, the supposition that a person must himself be tainted or vicious if he grasps what it is like to be vicious would condemn many truly great artists. In Shakespeare's construction of Iago in the play Othello, did he somehow himself share in Iago's venomous malice? Not necessarily.)
But apart from these ways of replying to the argument from concept empiricism, one may well challenge the first premise (that a being must have an experience of x to understand x).
First, there is no proof that an incorporeal agent cannot experience sensations. In fact, a number of philosophers today (but not a majority) think that sensations are mental properties and not identical to the products of the senses (of the retina, for example) or brain states, though they are caused by both. If this is possible, the argument fails because God could (in theory) experience sensations.
Second, even if human creatures cannot grasp x without experiencing x, is this a self-evident principle that governs all possible forms of knowing? Presumably one does not always need to be in a state of x to know x: I do not need to be a square to know about squares, to be hot to know that something is hot, or to be hateful to know that someone is hateful, and so on. Conceptual empiricism seems to be built on a premise that knowing something involves a kind of melding in which the x that is known is somehow made integral to the knowing subject, as though x comes to define or mark the knower. Something like this was in fact proposed by David Hume, who held that ideas of sensations were faint or faded sensations. But there seems to be little reason to accept this. An idea about, say, economic recession, is not a faded sensation of any kind. There are limits to what we humans can visualize. We cannot form a visual image of an object with a thousand sides, but we can conceive of such an object and reflect on its properties.