If God is omniscient, as in, if He knows everything that can be known, isn’t he incapable of creative thought?
If he is incapable, how does this affect our understanding of God’s nature? If he’s not incapable, how is he not?
Whether you realized this problem yourself or picked it up from one of my long since closed threads (e.g:
Can God Think) on the issue is no matter. Your question poses a valid contradiction.
The definition of create, for this purpose, is to make something which has never been made, or to think of something which has never been previously thought of. In this sense, some humans are occasionally creative.
I regard local creativity in the same sense as global creativity. That is, if you come up which an idea which
you did not previously know, it is creative, even if someone else already thought of it. Obviously the issue of local vs. global creativity does not apply to God.
If God is genuinely omniscient, He is incapable of creative thought of any sort.
One poster has wisely accepted this simple logic, but dealt with it by belittling the concept that the human ability to create is unimportant to God. Given that the only characteristic which separates man from chimpanzees is creativity, I take his belittlement as a very serious attenuation of God, Who, in the poster’s context, is closer in abilities to a chimpanzee than to man.
In case it is not obvious, I reject that argument. I regard God as many orders of magnitude superior to man, in all respects.
Moreover, an argument commonly used in attempts to convert atheists comes from the remarkable evidence from creation, the beauty of flowers, the complexity of various critters, etc. Those arguments have always worked for me. Well, how can we even be talking about “creation” if God cannot create?
Why call God our Creator if God cannot create? That is absurd!
Given the validity of the contradiction, God either creates or is not omniscient. As I’ve noted previously, I opt for non-omniscience.
This solves lots of problems, and answers old biblical questions like, “Why did God create man in the first place if He knew how awful man would turn out?” The new answer is, He did not know how man would turn out.
Non-omniscience provides a wonderfully logical explanation for the facts of evolution which is far superior to Darwinism. Six-day creationism was invented in the context of an omniscient God— since God knew how to create every aspect of the universe and biological life before He began, naturally He would have done it quickly. A day or two for plants and critters should have been plenty.
However, if God is not omniscient, He probably did not know the first thing about how to create biological life when He undertook the project, and had to figure it out. The process of engineering millions of beasties with different characteristics and different jobs to do, then getting them to function in ecological balance with one another, seems a sufficiently daunting challenge to have taken a non-omnipotent God a few hundred million years.
On the other hand, the proposition that an omniscient God would have taken that much time is impossible to justify competently, and is the kind of absurdity that drives logical people to atheism.
It can also be helpful to consider this issue in the context of the old slogan, “God created man in His own image?” Man is material, God is allegedly a spirit. God is brilliant, and by comparison, the combined intelligences of all humans produce an I.Q. infinitely smaller than God’s. God can create an entire universe with acts of His will, whereas man cannot create anything without bodies and tools. What aspect of man is in any way comparable to an aspect of God, other than creativity?
