About Omniscience

A simple question: How can a being know it's omniscient?This has been running through my mind for a while, and I can't seem to figure out an answer. How could the being tell the difference between thinking itself omniscient and actually being omniscient? If it's impossible, then is the being really omniscient?

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A simple question: How can a being know it's omniscient?

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That is a good question. I always like an analogy . . .Pretend that there is a colony of blind people. No one has ever been able to see. One day there is born a person who can hear better than everyone else: hear farther, hear clearer, and hear across more frequencies. He is able to absorb more information from his environment than anyone else. However, being blind he can't see anything, and since no one else can see either, no one even considers that there is such a thing as light or sight. However, compared to the rest of the colony he is omniscient, able to be present and have knowledge of things that no other colonist is able to experience.It could be the same with an omniscient being. There could be activities that the omniscient being is not able to detect, but since no one else is able to either, is incapable of knowing that something is happening outside of it's experience. I would say that omniscience is a comparative issue. That is, it is in relation to two separate frames of reference where one is limited but one is unlimited in areas that they can both experience.Again, nice question. It is nice to stretch one's philosophical legs once in a while.

This sort of reminds me of a very good episode of the twilight zone, A teacher is tempted by the devil.The Devil offers to release him, if he can come up with a challenge that he can't solve.The teacher simply says get lost .

Does this any implications for the classical Christian conception of God? According to your "comparitive omniscience", does God just know more than everybody else, but not necessarily know everything? Should we think of the Christian God as very knowledgable, very powerful, and very good instead of omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolant.Is it possible for your hypothetical person with great hearing abilities to know he is hearing all possible frequencies anymore than it is was possible for the average people to know that they weren't hearing all possible frequencies?This is where I get stuck. If he is omniscient, then he would know he is omniscient. But how can he know he is omniscient rather than just thinking himself omnicient? Well, if he was omniscient then he would necessarily know he is omniscient and not just thinking himself omniscient. But is it even possible to know whether you are omniscient or you just can't think of anything you don't know?

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Is it possible for your hypothetical person with great hearing abilities to know he is hearing all possible frequencies anymore than it is was possible for the average people to know that they weren't hearing all possible frequencies?

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That is why I say omniscience is a relative term. The "omniscient" hearing man can hear more than anyone else, so when he describes these sounds to the other people in the colony he appears to be omniscient. That is, he can hear everything that is going on in the colony at any moment and no one else is able to do that. Also, (adding to the analogy) no one in the colony has ever ventured away from the colony, so for all they know the colony is all that exists. In this case, the man with super hearing knows about all happenings in the entire world, and none of the other colonists have this ability. However, none of them have any clue that they can not detect light, and ALL of them will continue in this ignorance until a sighted person comes to the colony. So it would seem to me that you can't know that you are omniscient if you are able to exceed the abilities of all others.

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But is it even possible to know whether you are omniscient or you just can't think of anything you don't know?

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I personally think it is impossible to judge if anything or anyone is omniscient. The best that anyone can claim is that they know everything that their senses can distinguish. However, omniscience is always limited to what you can not detect, and there is no way of knowing if there is "something else" that your senses can't distinguish.

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Should we think of the Christian God as very knowledgable, very powerful, and very good instead of omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolant.

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In relation to human senses and knowledge, God could very well be all three of those things. However, in relation to all possible things, I don't think that those terms should necessarily apply. I will say this though, the Bible is about the relationship between God and Man, so I think that omniscient is consistent with christian theology and relativism. Everything that is knowable or observable by man is known to God: this statement is consistent with being omniscient as I have lain out above, and it is consistent with christian theology.

Loudmouth states: You'd be wrong. Just ask serveral regular posters here and they will certainly tell you they are omniscient or at a minimum, always right.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

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You'd be wrong. Just ask serveral regular posters here and they will certainly tell you they are omniscient or at a minimum, always right.

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Hehe, that is about right. So I could also add that the track record for people claiming omniscience is pretty poor. Of course, there could be a bunch of people flying in the Halle-Bopp commet just laughing their asses off.

Omniscient means "all-knowing". If understanding of one's self is something to be known, then I'd say an omniscient being would have to know itself and therefore understand that it is omniscient. You're implying that the being is not really omniscient. If it thinks it is omniscient, but in reality is not, then it is deluding itself and is divorced from reality. How do you know it's impossible?

Right. Right. OKAY... I think I get the jist of your conundrum. Is there a limit to God's knowledge? If there is a limit, then there would be SOMETHING he couldn't know. Since he is omniscient, there is no boundary to his knowledge.

A omniscient 'being' would by definition of the word have full knowlege of 'It's self'. And in knowing itself would be omniscience. God is said to be omniscience. Transcendant of time, the universe and yet removed from the universe. Being itself, from which all things are actualized. Having perfect being and perfect knowlege of itself brought forth the next entity of the trinity the son and the perfect love generated between the son and the father brought forth the holy spirit. Read The Summa Theologica by Saint Thomas Aquinas for these matters were discussed in detail by him. All of this is of course is merely a matter of faith and bias interpretation and assume one believes Catholic Dogma.This message has been edited by 1.61803, 07-31-2004 12:46 AM

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"One is punished most for ones virtues" Fredrick Neitzche

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OKAY... I think I get the jist of your conundrum. Is there a limit to God's knowledge? If there is a limit, then there would be SOMETHING he couldn't know. Since he is omniscient, there is no boundary to his knowledge.

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Let's not start off thinking this being is objectively omniscient.If there was a being that knew everything it could possibly think of, and "knew" itself to be omniscient, but is wrong, is there anyway for it to know that it is not omniscient but just limited by its thoughts?Is there anyway for us or God to know that the previous scenerio isn't the true scenerio, and that God simply can't ask the question, "Is there anyway for me to know I'm not omniscient but just limited by my thought process in such a way that I can't think of something I don't know?" in order for him to know whether he is omniscient?I'm probably just making grievous semantical errors or have a fatal flaw in my reasoning somewhere when thinking about omniscience.

What do you think God's "thought process" is like? Is it a process? Processes take time. Time is a property of the physical universe which he created. If you think of it as a "thought process", then you would have to imagine, God dreaming up new knowledge for an infinite period of time and at an infinite speed to keep knowing everything that could be known. That's a very poor way to think about it.Omniscience implies infiniteness. Which makes sense, since finite carries a meaning within space-time, which God created. So by being infinite God is not bound by anything. Since his knowledge is infinite, there is nothing he cannot know.

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What do you think God's "thought process" is like? Is it a process? Processes take time. Time is a property of the physical universe which he created. If you think of it as a "thought process", then you would have to imagine, God dreaming up new knowledge for an infinite period of time and at an infinite speed to keep knowing everything that could be known. That's a very poor way to think about it.

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So God doesn't think? He just is? If so, then how does this being know, or how do we know for that matter, that he has a finite or infinite amount of knowledge?Also, I don't think it's fair to criticize me for assuming some sort of temporal dimension when thinking about God, since you seem to do the same thing when you say he "created", which implies temporality.

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Omniscience implies infiniteness. Which makes sense, since finite carries a meaning within space-time, which God created. So by being infinite God is not bound by anything. Since his knowledge is infinite, there is nothing he cannot know.

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Isn't this just saying, "Omniscience means he knows everything, so he knows everything?"I'm suggesting we don't assume this beings omnsicience from the get go. What if this being just knew a lot, and didn't know it didn't know everything? How could this being tell the difference between omniscience and its current state of affairs? If it can't, then how can we know, or a being itself know, that it is omniscient or not?Does anybody else on the board have any thoughts on this conversation? Am I making sense? I have a tendency not to so if you think I am or am not, input would be appreciated.

Thank you for your reply. But now you're looking at it from the complete opposite viewpoint. God does not "think" for infinite periods of time, nor does he simply "exist" for an infintessimally small period of time. He does just "exist", but not for any amount of time and his "thought" is not bound by time. I'm not trying to criticize you, honest! I'm just trying to point out that most of our misconceptions about God are related to time and space, which he created and exists apart from. Well, its pretty dang hard to remove time from our thinking and vocabulary. From our perspective creation happened in the past. God's perspective does not follow a timeline like ours. He doesn't say, "I remeber back in the good ole days when I created the heavens and the earth..." In God exists all reality at any time. The reality we experience now is a result of his action to continue this reality by keeping natural laws in place and functioning. Again, "current" implies that something could happen in the future that he doesn't know about. If he transcends past and present this is not possible. You are also implying that there exists a reality outside of the reality he creates. But if he transcends time and never bumps into alternative realities created by some other supreme being, then I think it would be safe to say, he's omniscient.If a more supreme being than he somehow has more power than he and is able to keep him from knowing any other reality than himself and the reality he creates, then I suppose he could not tell the difference between being omniscient and just knowing everything about himself and his realities. But it seems kinda strange for supreme beings to not get to know each other... So I think its pretty safe to assume there is only one supreme being and all reality exists through him.