What is omniscience?
Most classical conceptions of God
view God as omniscient. Most religious believers would struggle to accept a God
that was ignorant of some states of affairs or certain important facts about
the world or our selves. That God be omniscient therefore seems right; however,
the notion of omniscience is more problematic than it first appears. Take an initial
question: what does God being omniscient actually mean? In other words, what
does God have to know to be omniscient?
One of the biggest challenges to
the coherence of omniscience concerns the compatibility between omniscience and
human freedom or free will. Suppose that tomorrow you decide to eat pizza for
lunch. It follows that there is now a true proposition to the effect that you
will eat pizza for lunch tomorrow. Propositions of this kind are known as
future contingents. If God is omniscient, and if omniscience requires knowledge
of all true propositions (as many would argue it does) then God now knows that tomorrow
you will eat pizza for lunch. But if God now knows that you are going to eat
pizza for lunch then you cannot do so freely for if this decision were free
then you could refrain from making it. But, if you were able to refrain from
making such a decision then you would be able to make it the case that God has
a false belief. However, you are not able to make it the case that God has a
false belief for that would be inconsistent with the fact that God is
omniscient, and essentially so. The dilemma then is this: either God isn’t omniscient
or genuinely free action is not possible. Most religions require the possibility
of free agency and so this problem of foreknowledge and freedom threatens to require
theists to reject God’s omniscience.
Here are two of the most common
attempts to resolve the problem. The first response takes issue with the
assumption that there are propositions about future contingents. According to
this line of thought, first popularised it seems by Aristotle in his sea-battle
argument and adopted now by the contemporary philosopher of religion Richard
Swinburne, if the future is genuinely open, in other words to revert to our earlier
example, if it is now possible for you to eat pizza for lunch and also possible for you to refrain
from such a decision (i.e. by choosing to have soup for lunch instead) then it
is not the case that there is now a true proposition to the effect that
tomorrow you will eat pizza for lunch. And so it follows that if there is no
such proposition then there is nothing for an omniscient being to know (or for
that matter, fail to know). It is only when you actually consume pizza for
lunch that the relevant proposition comes into existence.
From a theological perspective,
does this argument make sense? One of the problems with this argument is that
if future contingents fall outside the scope of God’s knowledge, then creation
was a huge gamble, for God didn’t know what human beings would do with their
capacity for free agency. But if Einstein is right that God doesn’t play dice
with the universe, this argument seems unsatisfactory from a theological
perspective.
The second response to the
problem seeks to contest the notion of foreknowledge itself. The problem of
foreknowledge and freedom presupposes that God is temporally bound or located
in time just as we are. This view of course requires that some events take
place in God’s present, others take place in God’s past and still others take
place in God’s future. Many theists have argued that this view is mistaken and
that God’s relationship to time is utterly unlike our own. Boethius, famously
argued, for example, that God’s eternity consists in the ‘complete possession
of an endless life enjoyed as one simultaneous whole’.
The argument here is that God is
not like humans who exist wholly at each finite moment in time and endure through
time. A human possess his or her life only in a small finite window which we
call “now” – the past life is no longer possessed but gone, the future is not
yet realised. Since our human life is lived in a finite “now”, it is never full
and complete but is fragmented. God, however, is perfect and God’s life is not
fragmented like the life of a temporally enduring human. He lives in the
eternal “now”. His “now” streteches over our past, present and future. Our
finite present is representative of God’s eternal present, but our finite
present is only a faint and imperfect model.
This view of God as existing
outside of time holds that God’s properties are not indexed to particular times
in the way in which our properties are. We have properties at particular times –
for example, you have the property of being asleep at some times but not at
others- the atemporalist argues that God does not have properties at particular
times. God no more has a history or a future than abstract entities such as
numbers do. Just as it is incoherent to ask how long the number eight has been
in existence or to wonder how long it will continue to exist, so too the
atemporalist thinks that such questions are incoherent when asked of God. Let’s
reflect for a second on how this atemporalist account of God could solve the
problem of foreknowledge and freedom. To revert to our earlier example, suppose
that you do indeed have pizza for lunch tomorrow. This event occurs in the
future relative to your current temporal perspective, but it is not and never
was, future relative to God’s perspective, for God has no such perspective. God
is only ever aware of the temporal relations between events in absolute terms.
Now to be clear, God is aware of the order in which various events occur, for
example, God knows that you eat pizza for lunch a day after you read this blog
post, but on the atemporalist account, God does not cognize this event as
occurring in the past or the future.
Are there any problems with this
account? Some have argued that the atemporal conception threatens God’s
omniscience for there appear to be certain things that only a temporally
located creature can know. Could an atemporal God know what time it is now?
Many have argued not, on the grounds that one can grasp temporally indexed
claims (such as ‘it is now 9 a.m.’) only if one is in time, and by hypothesis
an atemporal God is not in time. I am not sure this objection is decisive. Any facts
that can be represented indexically can also be represented non-indexically.
Suppose, for example, that you ask yourself: ‘what time is it now?’ on 1 January
2019. Arguably, this fact is captured by the non-indexical proposition, ‘On 1
January 2019 you asked yourself, ‘what time is it now’?’ and even an atemporal
God could know that proposition. In other words, the atemporalist might grant
that although certain ways of representing temporal facts are unavailable to
God, there are no temporal facts that are beyond God’s ken.
There is, however, a more serious
theological objection to the atemporal account. The atemporal account seems
difficult to reconcile with the claim that God is personal. Grace Jantzen, for
example, argues: ‘a timeless and immutable God could not be personal because he
could not create or respond, perceive or act, think, remember, or do any of other
things which persons do which require time’.
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