Theology Club: What determines the Omniscience of God
- Thread starter Bright Raven
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This is like saying God is powerless if He cannot cease to be eternal, God, sovereign, loving, etc. An omniscient being cannot be ignorant of knowable things. In your view, finite Satan or men know things that the Judge does not?! God can handle seeing things and cannot chose to know something that is recorded for the universe in a newspaper. Open Theists are right to not make literal things figurative (God changing His mind), but that does not mean that some verses are not figurative and should not be taken as wooden literalisms leading to theological compromise.
God cannot be the opposite of who He is: God.
I am not making the same implication you are.
I'd say you can't pour out of a thing more than was in the thing, as one principle. Another would be even more pragmatic. Any being capable of creating the sum total of all physical and moral law is necessarily so unimaginably more intelligent than we are as to make the question of omniscience a bit of a moot point.
Now I can watch my son as he's about to get himself in trouble and see that moment coming a mile away. Were I to believe in the arrow of time and the privacy of mind I'd still believe God to be practically omniscient in extension of my own experience in relation to my son, as limited as I am by comparison to God and as sharp as Jack is relative to his age (he's reading letters and small words, humming bits of Miles Davis jazz as he walks around the house at sixteen months of age
).Beyond that I'd say that unless you only believe in oral prayer you have to believe in omniscience and something like omnipresence.
Foreknowlege gets into the question of the reality of time. I suspect we're mistaken about that one and there are both physicists and biologists making that case by degree. MTF
My open view:
God is as powerful as he needs to be.
God knows everything he needs to know.
God is everwhere he needs to be.
God is as powerful as he needs to be.
God knows everything he needs to know.
God is everwhere he needs to be.
Son of Jack
New member
Okay. Thinking specifically about Omnipresence. Is there anywhere that doesn't need God to be there?
Speaking of omnipresence, I see omnipresence in the same way as omniscience.
Omnipresence: God can be anywhere He chooses...unless the place doesn't exist. Then, He would have to create that place if He wanted to be there.
Omniscience: God can know anything He chooses...unless that thing doesn't exist. Then, He would have to create that thing/event if He wanted/needed to know it.
Is. 46
10. Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure:
11. Calling a ravenous bird from the east, the man that executeth my counsel from a far country: yea, I have spoken it, I will also bring it to pass; I have purposed it, I will also do it.
10. Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure:
11. Calling a ravenous bird from the east, the man that executeth my counsel from a far country: yea, I have spoken it, I will also bring it to pass; I have purposed it, I will also do it.
My worthless fraction of a penny,
Randy
You're asking an absolute question. Or at least one which expects an absoute answer. The ethos of openness is that God is relational. Absolute statements like God is omniscient or omnipotent don't sit well within this ethos. They are non-questions or non-issues.
You can't supply an absolute definition of God any more than you can of yourself. You exist in time and your existence is in relation to others and to other things. It's all in motion, it's all fluid. The idea of having a fixed or absolute definition of something (let's say of God) kills off the openness because that's what 'openness' means. When we say God is open we are exactly asserting that any absolute statement we may make about him is either irrelevant, false or meaningless.
Hell
Shasta
Well-known member
Foreknowing something as a POSSIBILITY is not the same as KNOWING it . If that were true then I would have made 100% on every multiple choice quiz I have ever taken.
Shasta
Well-known member
If, therefore, in the present time also, God, knowing the number of those who will not believe, since He foreknows all things, has given them over to unbelief, and turned away His face from men of this stamp, leaving them in the darkness which they have themselves chosen for themselves, what is there wonderful if He did also at that time give over to their unbelief, Pharaoh, who never would have believed, along with those who were with him?
Against Heresies (Book IV, Chapter 29)
Irenaeus I know, Justin Martyr I know, Who is Boyd?
:up: AMEN!
We’re not talking about only one right answer on a quiz—God is not taking a quiz. No parallel here.
God is just as prepared for my choices as if they were the only choices I could ever make. For you, possibilities are not the same thing as “knowing” because you’re finite, but for God, who is infinitely wise and omnipresent (knowing all things at once), possibilities are “knowing” as if the possibilities are certain.
Sorry, which book of the Bible was that from?
Jesus I know and Paul I know but who are you?
God cannot do the logically impossible/absurd. An omnipotent being cannot create square circles.
Like Augustine, these guys were philosophically influenced and not right about everything, including the above statement.
Nang
TOL Subscriber
All that God has done and all that God has determined, is logical, legal, and good.
To say all things that prove to be evil, illegal, and irrational, is supposed proof that God's will is not settled, is to side with the devil in intellectual and spiritual denial of God's absolute sovereignty over all things created.
AKA = such is an advocation of the sin of unbelief and a promotion of a false "dualism."
:nono:
Nang
Impugning the character, ways, revelation of God is your problem, not mine. You have elevated a wrong view of sovereignty as meticulous control above more explicit revelation on the love and holiness of God (even Reformed Francis Schaeffer would concur).
Evil, sin, Satan, etc. are contrary to God's will, not consistent with it. Jesus opposed evil, but did not affirm it as God's will.
My view is not unbelief or rejection of God/Word, but a rejection of a wrong view called Calvinism (manmade).