If God is omniscient, He knows everything that happens everywhere, by definition. And if He is omnipotent, He could do so faster than the speed of light.
I do not believe in God, but here’s what the Bible has to say.
God is omniscient:
1 John 3:20 - …God is greater than our heart, and knows all things.
Proverbs 15:3 - The eyes of the Lord are in every place.
Evidence that God is not omniscent:
Hosea 8:4 - They have set up kings, but not by me: they have made princes, and I knew it not.
2 Chronicles 32:31 - God left him, to try him, that he might know all that was in his heart.
There are many other examples I could copy and paste here, but you get the idea. The Bible clearly states many times that God knows the hearts and thoughts of all mankind at all times, no exceptions. Then it goes on and describes instances where he had to test men to find their content, or simply that things happened and he was not aware of what was going on.
So, like most everything in the Bible, God is omniscient depending on what book and verse you are reading. It’s really no more complicated than that.
I’m fine with the second part, but He can only know things that are knowable. If His own physical laws (quantum uncertainty) makes the future literally unknowable, then there’s nothing for Him to know. So, in that case, it’s certainly possible for Him to know everything that has happened but not know everything that will happen. He can even know precisely the probabilities of certain futures. That’s certainly a possible definition of omniscience – knowing all things that are knowable.
Just like omnipotent doesn’t mean He can do paradoxical things (hot burritos, large stones), omniscience doesn’t mean He can know impossible things.
The God as described in the bible is clearly not omniscient. It may claim He is but the actions depicted show otherwise.
He asks questions (Genesis 3:9), runs experiments (Job :) and destroys nearly everyone on the Earth because they aren’t holy enough (Genesis 7:21). An omniscient being wouldn’t be so utterly inept.
If He knew what would happen, why did he have to engage in such a kludgy patch as taking human form and sacrificing Himself to Himself to quench a debt that He was owed by virtue of a decree He Himself made?
He clearly isn’t omnipotent as well, since omnipotence contains omniscience.
And to take Lobohan’s post a bit farther, isn’t a God that knows the future causing possibly unnecessary suffering in the present? For example, Abraham. If God knows that Abraham will sacrifice his son when asked, that trial just becomes pointlessly cruel. And if he does know the answer ahead of time, why bother with the question? It’s only if God doesn’t know what Abraham will do that it becomes a test.
Likewise, the greater sacrifice of Jesus similarly becomes moot if the outcome is already known. If there’s never any doubt of Jesus carrying through, then what’s the point? Doesn’t that rob His sacrifice of meaning? But if God doesn’t know whether the kid’ll go though with it, then that sacrifice becomes meaningful and significant.
IMO, anyway. I’m probably looking at it from too humanistic of terms. But these things don’t make sense to me if God is omniscient - it just makes Him look like an asshole. Which maybe He is, but that screws up the “all loving” thing too.
God would have known the outcome but Abraham wouldn’t have. So the point wasn’t for God to see what Abraham would do in extremis because God already knew. But God wanted to put Abraham in such a situation so Abraham would find out how deep his devotion to God was. (That said, I’ve made the argument in the past that Abraham failed the test.)
Simply put, it is possible to know whether X does Y without X being unfree with respect to doing Y.
Simply knowing what X does does not negate X’s freedom with respect to that action.
It doesn’t matter whether the knowing occurs before the action, after the action, or simultaneously with it. The knowledge is a result of the action, not the other way around.
It’s common to argue as follows:
If God knows X will do Y, then X can’t not do Y.
If X can’t not do Y, then X is not free with respect to Y.
Therefore, if God knows X will do Y, then X is not free with respect to Y.
But this argument fails because it equivocates on the term “can’t.” In the first premise, “can’t” is an “epistemological” can’t. In premise 2, “can’t” is a metaphysical can’t.
In other words, in the first premise, the “can’t” involved means “for all that is known by anyone, the possibilities are constrained thusly.” But in the second premise, the “can’t” involved means “regardless of what is known by whom, the possibilities are constrained thusly.”
If we interpret “can’t” in the argument consistently as the “metaphysical” kind of “can’t,” then we see that premise 1 should be rejected. Just because God knows X will do Y, this does not mean that X couldn’t have done otherwise. X could have done otherwise–and in that case, God would have known X would do otherwise.
Well that was not clear at all, was it? But it’s basically right.
It isn’t free will if one says you have the free will to do something I don’t want you to do, but if you do it I will kill you! If God didn’t know that Adam and Eve would disobey him, then it is God’s fault that he created a monster that would destroy his children. Why did this loving being allow a monster such powers, but punish two ignorant people if they wanted to know the difference between good and evil? Perhaps God was remiss in not teaching them the difference?
Well, that’s how I see it, too! It makes God into an awful Bluebeard. “Don’t look in this locked room… Oh, you looked! Now I will kill you!”
Why not start Adam and Eve out with lesser temptations, as a kind of practice, the way we teach kids? Start with, “You shall not eat too many peaches, lest ye shall become sick to the stomach!” And they do, and it happens, and God says, “I told you so! Now won’t you listen to me?” So that, when the life-and-death issues come up, the human race has some experience in making wise decisions!
I mean, if your kids are naughty, and peek at the Christmas presents ahead of time…do you throw them into the fireplace?
There is a quote in the OT, that Godi is said to have said..even before Abraham came to be I knew you…or something like that It has been many years since I read it, but it sounded to me (at the time) that God was saying he knew the future as well as the present or past!
If God knows what we will choose, and he punished Adam and Eve,for wanting to know the difference between good and evil, but let a monster like Satan, Hitler etc,exist he was not very wise,or loving of his other children.
I would think it is more important that God love his children,and why should he need them to love him back? To me it is more important that I love my children and do what is best for them( when I know what is best, as a human I don’t always know). God is supposed to know more than me, and care more than me,so if God is love he doesn’t need more love he is complete in himself, according to Paul, Love is not self seeking.
Oh, the bible says a lot of conflicting things. I wasn’t really limiting my comment to the God of either the old or new testament, but to a general omniscient being, trying to respond to the OP. That is, does an omniscient being know the past, present, and future by definition. I think it might make sense to define omniscience as knowing all knowable things, and the future (due to quantum effects, for example), may not be knowable.
For example, does an omniscient being know the last digit of pi? Well, there is no last digit, so that’s not knowable, although such a being could give you any given digit of pi. Maybe knowledge of the future is similarly impossible.
Because you’re assuming God is some guy standing over there, next to the Brixx pizza. That’s not what Christians believe. Christians believe God is good itself.
If you don’t love God back, you cannot love anything, and you must ultimately decay. And we do mean everything good. In the end, you can’t be satisifed with food, or drink, or sex. You can’t be satisfied with achieving some personal goal or garnering some award. You can’t even be satisfied doing good for others, though that’s getting closer. Either you accept God inside you, or you’re going to waste away. To Christians, the entirety of human life upon this earth is a pursuit of just that - everythign we have, are, see, and experience has been created for that purpose, or is a corruption designed to tempt us away.
There is nothing good outside of God. Everything posessed by evil men, or even death and disease themselves, are nothing more than gifts of god broken by people (of the human or angelic variety) choosing to do evil.
God, however, does not need our love, though he does want it. He is complete and perfect. But unlike, say, the Buddhist self-nihilism, we say that God does choose one thing over another, choose one good in preference to another. We say he does enjoy our company, and would very much like us to join him on a more consistent arrangement. It’s not all that different from parents: you want your children to grow, hoping to see the day the toddler learns to crawl, and then walk, and then talk, and then one day far off holds a long, intelligent conversation while going mountain climbing or somthing. It is different of course, in that the natural gulf between infinite in scale, and in that we tend to grow up closer to our parents and then move away, whereas we grow up distant from God and then hopefully move closer.
And people wonder why atheists feel directly insulted when some Christians expound on their faith. I’ll let someone else talk about the arrogance of speaking for all other Christians as to the nature of God. What upsets me is crap like this:
How dare you presume that I do not love my wife, my family or life itself. That I am incapable of feeling satisfaction for my personal achievements. That mankind is responsible for disease and even death because we somehow “broke” some rule and/or gift.
BTW, “Buddhist self-nihilism”? Strychnine icing on the arsenic cake.
