[xzins]

Is that how you read the above comments? -- as saying that God's knowledge is dependent on his omnipotence?

If so, does that mean that God's omniscience is real, or derived, or redundant, or etc?

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for the ping to this fascinating thread! And thank you for thinking of me, Marmema!

Sorry to take so long to reply, but we’ve been out of town for a family reunion. We’ll be gone again tomorrow and part of the next day. But I went looking for any posts from you, knowing you would ping me to anything particularly fascinating. And, sure enough…

In other words, God is not independently (truly) omniscient; His omniscience would disappear if His omnipotence did not exist.

I agree with your take on the meaning of the article!

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?

”Reality is an illusion, albeit a very persistent one” - Albert Einstein.

We see the world in four dimensions – three of space, one of time – even though our very best physicists find that multiple dimensions are the best explanation for what is actually observed in astrophysics and quantum mechanics.

Truly, xzins, I wish I knew why theologians aren’t meditating on the obvious – that our vision and our minds have been designed to limit our perceptions. (I Cor 13:12) We are functionally blind to other dimensions, hence we are blind to the nature of time – because time is geometric.

What this means is (whether in special relativity, general relativity and most particularly extra temporal dimensions) – time is relative to the observer. From extra temporal dimensions, what we sense as time is actually a plane or planes - and not a "line". In relativity, essentially no time passes at one space/time coordinate while it races along at another – all depending on the geometry (gravity is a space/time indentation).

Even with that limited mathematical understanding, if God were simply an observer (and He is obviously much, much, much more than that) … He would already know the entire scenario, beginning to end. Moreover, when He moves it is over all of space/time – past, present and future. Therefore, He cannot lie – because when He speaks, it is – even though we may not “perceive” it coming into fruition until some distant point in the future because we sense that our lives pass along a timeline.

IOW, what we see as a movie, frame by frame, He sees all at once, as a whole. He is also able to change it, in any direction – and we’d never know He did unless He told us!

Thus, from our frame-by-frame perspective the future is not determined. For instance, we make a free will choice to hear His voice and follow Him, and He (not us) changes the script. Ditto for other free will spiritual choices. Or we make no such choice and we continue on a ruinous path under the dictates of the laws of physics. Likewise we pray – not because we can change the future, but because He can – and not on a timeline either, but all at once.

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