The Conception of Omniscience According to theism, God is all knowing or omnisicient. Theologians have for for hundreds of years quarreled over what one means by saying God is omniscient. What has resulted from this controversy is that God has knowledge of all that has happened, all that is happening now and all that will happen. How is that possible? Theism claims that God is present in all time and space; there is no time or place where God is not present. It is that eternal presence which makes it possible for God to have knowledge of everything. One can, however, ask oneself the following: A fundamental principal of theism is that God created man with a free will. But if theism is correct on that point, then one can pose the question, does man have a free will if God is omniscient? Can one maintain that man has a free will if God already knows how he or she will act? In other words, God already knows which decision man will make when faced with a choice. Despite his or her free will, man cannot act otherwise. The idea of free will is problematic for theism's God. If God is faced with a choice, does he already know beforehand what he will decide? If he doesn't know, can he really be omniscient or all knowing? If he knows ahead of time what he will choose, can he make a different choice? If he can't choose otherwise, does he really have a free will? Something else to think about is the relationship between being omniscient and being moral. If the theistic God has knowledge not limited by time or space, why doesn't he stop or ease the suffering in which he is therefore present? Does God have a moral responsibility? One of mankind's founding principles is that with knowledge comes a moral responsibility. If one maintains that God is beyond that insight and that God's ethics are different from mankind's, then how can man form a moral code based upon God? This relationship between omnisciences and ethics only becomes more problematic when theism maintains that God is a personal God and performs deeds or actions. |