Is God's Knowledge Dependent on God's Omnipotence?

Wycliffe Dictionary of Theology | Loraine Boettner

[betty boop]

I agree with you absolutely – God is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent and none of these are mutually exclusive.

And not only not mutually exclusive, but also not in any way contingent on each other. They are simply the simultaneous expressions of the One God Who transcends the Universe, and yet acts within it, refracted for us by means of your beautiful symbol, the seven-faceted diamond.

Alamo-Girl, you wrote:

It is evidently very common for theologians to presume that God is limited to a timeline, i.e. He knows the future because He foreordained it. All I can figure is that, since they can only conceive of existence on a timeline, that they have presumed God must be limited in the same way. Doesn’t make much sense when it is stated that way, eh?

Certainly not! And I think marron’s point goes directly to this issue:

“When we say that God is perfect, all powerful, all knowing, these are descriptions that just make sense to us, but these are our terms, he is neither defined nor contained within such terms.”

To put it another way, God is not reducible to the categories of the human mind, which he utterly transcends. So when a person tries to imagine God, inevitably he stubs his toe on a fundamental epistemological fact. To make God understandable to ourselves on our own terms is to “deform” God by rendering him intelligible within the space-time categories of human ken, which is not (shall we say) his “natural habitat.” A God who is everywhere and everytime at once present seems to me to be ultimately indescribable in terms of any human language.

marron continues:

“I will agree that he is my creator, he is the creator of everything we know. I agree that he is everywhere present in his creation.”

“I believe that he has created us for a purpose, with power and authority to act in our individual corners of the created universe, he has given us the ability to act in the face of the local circumstances as we find them, based on reason that is a part of our design, and part of the universal design, and he has granted us the further gift of the shared wisdom of our fellows, and the capacity by spirit to further harmonize our actions with God's intent.”

Mankind puts its faith in God. Or at least some of us do. Many times I have marveled that God seems to have placed his own faith in man – certainly that must be the key meaning of the free sacrifice of the Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ. God works through human souls, in whom he endued reason and free will. I believe the entire purpose of both is to enable man to collaborate and “further harmonize our actions with God’s intent.”

Which is why I believe God’s statements to us about our creation in his image, as reflection of the divine nature, are so very telling. Certainly it must be important to God to make this information known to us, for he actually did so, in Genesis, the Gospel of St. John, and Revelation. To me the extraordinary point is that immediately after creating man in his image and likeness, God gives man dominion over creation. We are meant to be his faithful stewards, sustaining ourselves by the fruits of creation, but ever maintaining it in good order and improving it for the benefit of succeeding generations of men and other creatures.

So it seems to me that the Holy Scriptures aren’t “just” about God; they are about man as well, with particular emphasis on man’s relationship with his Creator.

And so this statement of marron’s seems true to me:

“God’s design is dynamic, and the agents of his creation are several billion little creative spirits churning away like there was no tomorrow, driven by a hunger that he instilled in them, a hunger to build, a hunger to know, a hunger to love, a hunger that in the end could be described as a hunger for God.”

In short, it is because He is who He is that I love him. It is only in the spirit, and by the Spirit, that we can truly “know” God – and not in the sense of knowledge or information, but in the sense of personal acquaintance or relationship (if I might put it that way).

Alamo-Girl, I really liked the symbol of the seven-faceted diamond. It provides a fine metaphor for the different religious traditions that have emerged out of the different ways human beings have responded to God’s Word in history. Moreover, it makes for a great “construct” for meditation, by which to conceptualize extra dimensions of space and time.

I think this diamond symbol is a deeply interesting “model” of the universe. We might say each of the diamond’s seven facets dovetails “downward” to a unity that might be conceptualized as a single point, and the crown of the diamond circumscribed by the joining of their “tops” opens out to a transcending reality that is spatially and temporally “beyond” the diamond itself.

In gross terms, the diamond is a geometrical object. That is, an object that can be fully described in terms of geometrical relationships, an object in which a virtual infinity of unique events take place that can be located at addresses that can be mathematically described.

What I mean by “beyond” is not that the transcending reality is located in a different physical location “outside” the diamond. That would define the relationship between the transcending reality and the physical diamond as essentially relativistic. But I suspect the relation between transcendence and physical reality is actually essentially substantive. For the transcending “beyond” actually acts within the created world also; so it has the quality of immanence as well. But in both its transcendence and immanence it constitutes a “beyond’ to physical nature because it is an entirely different order of being than physical nature. Yet all of physical nature actually depends on it in order to come into existence and to maintain its existence.

The only way to clear up such an apparent self-contradiction is to posit extra dimensions beyond the familiar four of our space-time block, and in particular, one or more of time.

Each of the facets represents a perspectival “plane” of observation. But the only reason we can see that the facets are irregular “planes” is due to the structure of the thought experiment itself. Because in our thought experiment we posit our position as being somewhere outside the diamond (i.e., in another dimension relative to it), and thus become enabled to view it in its totality which, as human observers presumably living in one of the facet-planes, we would not normally be able to do.

Even within our facet-planes, we do not normally sense time as planar – we experience it as linear and unidirectional, whereas to imagine time as a plane would open up the possibility of other directions for time. But this tends to be resisted, for if time were non-unidirectional, this would wreak havoc on all known theories of causality. (My suggestion would be that physical effects may ultimately “result from” either a non-physical cause; or if physical, a cause that does not lie in the same dimensional space as its effect. What we apparently observe to the contrary may be Einstein’s “persistent illusion.”)

Anyhoot, your diamond symbol makes for excellent “food for thought" Alamo-Girl! I’m still working through the implications and so will continue to grapple with it. Thank you so much for proposing it, and for writing!

[Alamo-Girl]

What a marvelous essay and meditation! And I very much agree with your views and marron's concerning the limits of our ability to describe God. He is incomprehensible and all that we can know of Him is what He Himself reveals, everything else is a reflection or effect.

Mankind puts its faith in God. Or at least some of us do. Many times I have marveled that God seems to have placed his own faith in man – certainly that must be the key meaning of the free sacrifice of the Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ. God works through human souls, in whom he endued reason and free will. I believe the entire purpose of both is to enable man to collaborate and “further harmonize our actions with God’s intent.”

Sometimes I meditate on how the angels must love Jesus and how they must long to tell the story but that the Father has chosen to give us fallible mortals that honor. And not only that, but He receives us as His own children, heirs and joint-heirs with Christ (Romans 8). His love for us is breath taking.

Which is why I believe God’s statements to us about our creation in his image, as reflection of the divine nature, are so very telling. Certainly it must be important to God to make this information known to us, for he actually did so, in Genesis, the Gospel of St. John, and Revelation. To me the extraordinary point is that immediately after creating man in his image and likeness, God gives man dominion over creation. We are meant to be his faithful stewards, sustaining ourselves by the fruits of creation, but ever maintaining it in good order and improving it for the benefit of succeeding generations of men and other creatures. So it seems to me that the Holy Scriptures aren’t “just” about God; they are about man as well, with particular emphasis on man’s relationship with his Creator.

Indeed. The Scriptures reveal God truly but not fully and are instructive to man, describing his place in Creation, his responsibilities, what the future holds and what hope he may realize.

I'm so glad you have taken the diamond metaphor to this more expansive level. It rings true to my Spirit and is a powerful meditation.

What I mean by “beyond” is not that the transcending reality is located in a different physical location “outside” the diamond. That would define the relationship between the transcending reality and the physical diamond as essentially relativistic. But I suspect the relation between transcendence and physical reality is actually essentially substantive. For the transcending “beyond” actually acts within the created world also; so it has the quality of immanence as well. But in both its transcendence and immanence it constitutes a “beyond’ to physical nature because it is an entirely different order of being than physical nature. Yet all of physical nature actually depends on it in order to come into existence and to maintain its existence.

Amazing. I did a terrible job of describing it at the time, but this is the form of the visualization I tried to explain months ago when I had been meditating on your meditation of the Cross. It was as if, at the moment Christ commended His Spirit into the Father's hands, a great Light sprang from the Cross flooding over all of space/time. Sigh, if only I were an artist ... it was a beautiful sight. Even so, I’m not sure how one could caption the motion of it on canvas – it was active.

Each of the facets represents a perspectival “plane” of observation. But the only reason we can see that the facets are irregular “planes” is due to the structure of the thought experiment itself. Because in our thought experiment we posit our position as being somewhere outside the diamond (i.e., in another dimension relative to it), and thus become enabled to view it in its totality which, as human observers presumably living in one of the facet-planes, we would not normally be able to do.

So very true. I would wager that Einstein was uniquely able to contemplate such perspectival planes of observation without being anchored by his own senses. Sadly, most of the recent theories lack that kind of detachment – instead they begin with a prejudice.

My suggestion would be that physical effects may ultimately “result from” either a non-physical cause; or if physical, a cause that does not lie in the same dimensional space as its effect.

Excellent. Yes, I think you have hit the home run. This is the only solution which makes sense across the board from theology to philosophy to cosmology to physics.