When traditional Christian theology asserts that God is omniscient, it means that God knows every and all true proposition and no false proposition. God thus knows all things which are true, extending exhaustively to the very depths of His own Being.
I was taught “traditional” Catholic theology differently by priests and nuns who did not equivocate or pretend that their beliefs were other than what they were, simply to beat down an argument. They were honest men and women who taught me their version of truth as they had been taught it.
I’ve visited this argument before. Other Catholics treat the omniscience definition as I did.
Your statement is an invented opinion which makes no sense, for it implies that God cannot know what is false. That is nonsense. I, for example, am capable of knowing about Ptolemaic astronomy, Darwinism, phlogiston theory, all which are false. I simply discriminate between things that are, or seem to me to be valid, and those which seem otherwise. Surely the mind of God knows both truth and falsehood, and like mine, and presumably yours, discriminates.
I’m sure that God does know Himself exhaustively. So what? Are you of the opinion that because you can make such a statement, you also know Him?
Your objection that God cannot “have a new, creative thought five minutes from now” fails to recognize other attributes of God, namely, His timelessness, His aseity, and His perfection. Thus, it is not proper to say that God has “future knowledge of His thoughts” because all of His thoughts are “present” to Him, i.e., His thoughts are known in the eternal now.
I addressed a single item of dogma from the perspective of simple, time-dependent logic.
You’ve responded with a barrage of dogmatic assertions. Be my guest. Use them to support whatever you want. No point in me or anyone trying to argue with dogmatic assertions using such a flaccid tool as logic. You’ll simply invent whatever dogma you need to support your beliefs.
Your argument seems to assume that God can “improve” Himself with “new” and “creative” thoughts. Since God, by definition, cannot “improve,” but is rather Perfection itself, your argument misses its intended mark (how do you propose that Perfection be made more perfect?).
My argument did not
assume that God can improve Himself, but it certainly implies that He could change, and in a variety of directions. “Improvement” is a subjective evaluation.
For example, most of my creative thoughts turned out to be very bad ideas. Presumably God is also capable of generating ideas which seemed good at the time. According to the O.T. Bible, mankind was high on the
ooops list, and according to the N.T., still is.
Again, the rest of your statement is simply dogma, which is unresponsive to discussion.
Would you say that God’s creation of the universe *ex nihilo *(out of nothing) is a fairly good demonstration of His “imagination”?
The notion of creation from nothing is also dogma. It defies all known principles of action as well as those of logic, so I decline to accept it.
However, it is obvious to me that we live in a created universe, which of course implies at least one Creator. I’m willing to accept the term “God” to name this Creator and however many others He enlisted in that magnificent project. However, my understanding of the nature and properties of God are not the same as those of established religions.
My experience with various engineering projects has shown me that imagination is essential to their success. I use the common sense of the word, “imagination,” as something which has never been thought of before by the person doing the thinking. Therefore I regard the idea of an unimaginative God as patently absurd.
It has been argued that no humans actually have genuinely imaginative thoughts, but are only picking up old thoughts from a mysterious aether of universal understanding. Even if one buys that argument, it cannot apply to the entity who created the universe the first time. Therefore I have adopted the understanding that God is genuinely imaginative.
Since omniscience and imagination are contradictory, I am logically required to reject the notion that God is also omniscient.
The concept of omniscience is unnecessary to the construction of the universe, and is contradictory to Biblical tales which include several examples which seem to show a confused, dithering God, who cannot make up His mind even when He’s supposed to know the exact outcome of every choice He makes.
I’ve studied some stuff. Out of it I have too much respect for Creation to believe that it was accomplished by the entity humans have defined to meet their needs.
