Doctrine of God (Part 13): Systematic Summary

3 a (2)  Systematic Summary

With that in mind, we want to turn to a systematic summary of this data concerning God’s omniscience in the Scriptures. The attribute of God’s omniscience is one of the most discussed and most fascinating of all of the various attributes of God.

1. Omniscience Defined

Omniscience is usually defined in terms of truth. That is to say, for any true statement or any true proposition, God believes and knows that proposition, and he doesn’t believe any false propositions. We could say this: for any true proposition p, God knows that p (you can fill in whatever you want for that proposition p) and does not believe not-p. For any true proposition p, God knows that p and does not believe not-p. In other words, omniscience means that God knows only and all truths. He knows all the truths there are, and he doesn’t believe any falsehoods. That is the way omniscience is usually defined.

So God knows all past-, present-, and future-tense truths, even before the foundations of the world. Before he created the world, God foreknew the motion of every subatomic particle that would occur in the history of the universe. He knew your very thoughts before you think them. He knows our free choices before we make them. He even knew what we would do under different circumstances than the ones that we will be in. So for any true proposition, God knows that proposition and does not believe the negation of it.

God, then, is omniscient. He knows all truths. He doesn’t believe any falsehoods. This would be an incredibly great attribute for God to possess. But even omniscience does not exhaust the scope and the excellence of God’s knowledge. Philosophers have noted that there is a different kind of knowledge than just propositional knowledge. In addition to knowledge of true propositions, there is also a kind of knowledge which is non-propositional in nature.

Let me try to illustrate this as best I can. Suppose I am visiting Canada and I am chased up a tree by a rampaging moose. While I am in the tree hanging on for dear life I say to you, “Go and tell Jan that I’ve been treed by a moose!” What do you do? Do you run up to Jan and say to her, “I’ve been treed by a moose!”? No! You would say “Bill has been treed by a moose.” You would communicate to her the information that I wanted you to communicate by using different words than I used. I told you to tell her that “I’ve been treed by a moose.” But you go and say to her, “Bill has been treed by a moose.” In other words, the proposition that you are expressing is the same one that I was expressing but we use different words. We use different words to give the same information content. When I say “I’ve been treed by a moose” I express the same proposition that you do when you say “Bill has been treed by a moose.” We both have the same propositional knowledge in this case; namely, that Bill Craig has been treed by a moose. Yet, our knowledge isn’t perfectly the same. There is a difference here. Why? Look at the way we react to it. I react to that knowledge by hanging on for dear life! But you react to that knowledge by running to tell Jan about it. You don’t hold on for dear life because you don’t believe that you are Bill Craig; you are somebody else. So we have different responses to what we know. That shows that what we know is not exactly the same in both of these cases. We also have a different self-knowledge in addition to the propositional knowledge that we share. We have the same propositional knowledge but our self-knowledge is different.

This self-knowledge is essential to timely action in the world. For example, it is not enough for me to believe the proposition “Bill Craig is hungry” in order to be motivated to get something to eat. For suppose I’ve been in a car accident and I am lying in a hospital bed with temporary amnesia so that I don’t know that I am Bill Craig. If someone were to tell me “Bill Craig is hungry,” that wouldn’t do anything to motivate me to ask for something to eat. What I need to have is the self-knowledge either that I am Bill Craig or that I am hungry. Then I will ask for something to eat. This self-knowledge, though it is non-propositional, is vital to getting along in the world and being able to act in a timely way. It is absolutely essential.

If someone or even something, say a supercomputer, had all of the propositional knowledge in the world so that it counted as omniscient because it knew only and all of the truths that there are, it still couldn’t decide to take any sort of timely action because it wouldn’t have any self-knowledge. So if God is to be a “self” or a “person,” he is more than omniscient. In addition to all of the propositional knowledge that he possesses, he also has appropriate self-knowledge. He knows “I am God.” That is a perfection. He doesn’t know “I am Ronald Reagan” or “I am Napoleon.” That would be an imperfection, indeed, because he is not Ronald Reagan or Napoleon. But it is a perfection for him to have appropriate self-knowledge of who he is – that “I am God.” So God’s cognitive excellence exceeds even omniscience. He is more than omniscient, as incredible as that sounds, because he not only knows all truth but he also has appropriate self-knowledge as well.

Let me say one final thing. Even with propositional knowledge and self-knowledge, the excellence of God’s knowledge is still not exhausted. What is also important here is the way in which one acquires one’s knowledge. Suppose there were two beings and each one had all propositional knowledge and each one had appropriate self-knowledge for himself. But suppose that the second one acquired his propositional knowledge only because the first being told him everything that he knew and the first being just had this knowledge innately. Clearly the second being would not be as intellectually excellent as the first being because he didn’t know any of these things innately. He knew them only because the other being told him everything he knew in an innate way. In the same way, as we’ve seen from Scripture, God doesn’t learn anything from anybody. Nobody has instructed the Lord or taught him anything. But I would say that God simply knows all truth innately and therefore is maximally excellent intellectually.

This is, again, just a stunning conclusion. To think God’s intellectual excellence outstrips even what it is to be an omniscient being. It does so in that he has self-knowledge and also he does not acquire his knowledge from others but simply has it himself. It gives an insight into how great God’s intellectual excellence is. I remember when I first realized this in studying the doctrine of omniscience it just floored me, because I never imagined that any person or being could be smarter than omniscient. It seemed to me that omniscience was as high as you can get. Yet, when you think about it, God’s cognitive excellence (his greatness) with respect to his intellectual attributes exceeds even omniscience, which ought to issue in praise and adoration and wonder of the person God is.

I hope that I’ve expanded a bit your view of God’s cognitive excellence. What we will do next week is look at two problems which arise as a result of God’s omniscience. The first will be the relationship between divine foreknowledge and human freedom – how can we be genuinely free to do other than as God infallibly foreknows we will do? Then secondly if we are genuinely free, how can God foreknow that? How can he foreknow what we will do if at the time we are completely free to do or to not do that action? Those will be two questions we will take up next week.