Think about this:
Under ‘things in the broadest possible sense’ include such radically different items as not only ‘cabbages and kings’, but numbers and duties. possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic experience and death. To achieve success in philosophy would be, to use a contemporary turn of phrase, to ‘know one’s way around’ with respect to all these things, not in that unreflective way in which the centipede of the story knew its way around before it faced the question, ‘how do I walk?, but in that reflective way which means that no intellectual holds are barred. Knowing one’s way around is, to use a current distinction, a formof ‘knowing how‘ as contrasted with ‘knowing that’. There is all the difference in the world between knowing how to ride a bicycle and knowing that a steady pressure by the legs of a balanced person onthe pedals would result in forward motion (Wilfrid Sellars, Science, Perception, and Reality, [Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Co, 1).
This statement sums up well what we are after when we speak of knowledge. Sure, we want to know about these radically different items Sellars lists but we want to think rightly about them. We want to know the how and the why not the simple what. Cornelius Van Til, reminded us (naggingly at times) that there are no brute facts. In fact, we can go even further: there isn't even brute knowledge of brute facts. To even recognize one fact as seperate from another takes a viewpoint, a perspective - the beginning of doing something with facts. We easily recognize what we are after when we speak of human knowledge - we want to know what to do with facts. But when it comes to speaking of God's knowledge, Christians often forget what's most important. We are often concerned with God's knowledge of facts or perhaps as some might term them (incorrectly in my judgment) propositions. We want to make sure God knows stuff - all about stuff. But when we get the bottom of what this means, it turns out we've found a God who can play a helluva game of Trivial Pursuit. Not exactly a great-making property for God.
I don't want a wikiGod or a supercomputer God. More importantly God does not disclose himself as this kind of God. It's important to make clear what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that God doesn't know all the facts. What I am saying is that speaking of a God who knows all propositions is missing the relevance of knowledge that goes beyond propositions. We often place the weight of what we mean by omniscience on knowing propositions we have misplaced what is significant about God's knowledge.
Suppose God was a supercomputer after all, and that he knew events of what would has happened, is happening, and will happen exhaustively. This hardly would count as knowledge. It wouldn't count as knowledge because it undercuts what is so valuable about real knowledge: usefulness.
This brings us to the goal of philosophy. Philosophers are not concerned with knowing facts as the goal of philosophy. In fact nearly all philosophers grant that we know all kinds of facts. But to know how to know a fact and what to do with the ones you know is a different matter.
God is a God who not only knows things but knows how to know things and knows what things mean. He knows how to 'get around' in the world. His knowledge extends far beyond propositions. It goes into an interpretation that leaves behind the obsession with the propositional "knowing-thats". (For example is a duck's knowing how to swim a metaphorical phrasing of the proposition: "Water supports me"?) Does God know everything? Sure. But he also knows every how, every why, and everyone in a way that isn't reducible or even reliant on propositional knowledge. And this means knowing how to connect the things to the hows and the hows to the whys. It means knowing from a perspective in a non-brutish way. It means having the right take on the facts. It means knowing what makes a fact a fact and knowing how to both relate what should be related and separate what should be separated.
Lest you think I'm attacking a straw man, here a few examples of the ways in which Christians (most egregiously Reformed Evangelicals) commonly speak of God's knowledge:
"The word means to see or know all things....I have recently been going through a box of old newspaper clippings from earlier years. To my astonishment, I had forgotten, not only many things that happened to me, but many of the people involved. Time dims our remembrance of much that has happened. God is not like that. He always knows what is past, present, and future, if he is omniscient" (Joe Nesom, "The Omniscience of God: Does the Lord Really Know Everything" Founders Journal Fall [2001]: 4).
Further examples of this kind of talk in Reformed literature could be multiplied beyond your interest.
This is not a recent way of talking about God’s knowledge either. Irenaeus tells us that God gave us Scripture “in order that our faith might be firmly established; and contained a prophecy of things to come in order that man may learn that God has foreknowledge of all things” (Against Heresies 3.21.9). The benefit of prophecy is that we may learn that God foreknows all things? The common appeal to foreknowledge as “foreloving” doesn’t fit this context. God does not forelove all things because God does not love all things (Prov 6:16)
Notice the concern with knowing facts. But what good are these facts if God doesn’t know what to do with them? Now in defense of the way that people often speak of omniscience they are certainly not denying that God knows how to make use of the facts.
The danger in ignoring this more robust picture of knowledge is that we often assume that God’s interpretatoin of the world is much like ours. The difference being that he knows more. This I think has led to many people who have an easier time accepting a God knows every fact than a God who has the true interpretation and picture of reality. I dare say that most non-Christians find the former more palatable to believe about the Christian God than the latter. A God who knows lots of stuff isn’t the theat to our independence the way that a God who has the only right perspective on everything. I certainly find this more offensive to my attempts to control my reality.
Furthermore, speaking of a God who has the right interpretation presupposes that he has the all the facts down. If he didn’t have all the facts neither we nor God could be sure that he had the right interpretation since some unknown fact(oid) could possibly overturn how he thinks they should be related.
Consider the ways in which Scripture sometimes speaks of God’s knowledge:
Lord, you have searched me and you know me, You know when I sit and when I rise. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways (Ps. 139:1-2a & 3).
Is the significance of God’s knowledge to be found in knowing that he knows all the facts about me, such that if I were a category on Jeopardy God would clean up on any question (daily double included)? Isn’t the real value of this knowledge found in God’s knowing how I operate, what makes me tick, where I fit into the bigger picture and who I really am afterall?
Wilfrid Sellars speaks of the work of a philosopher as working to see how the work in one field fits into the bigger picture, and thus actually creating the bigger picture. It is not that we approach our study of a subject with an already known big picture, rather we integrate the parts to create a picture. But neither do we know the parts any better than the picture? No. Once again we are up against the one and the many problem. But God is not concerned any less with doing philosophy in this sense. He is a philosopher of the true sort. And any hope we have of knowing how to put together the big picture or know one part of the picture from another is a following after God who has created the picture we seek to understand. Our philosophy is to reflect his philosophy. His is the perspective that we seek to gain, but we can only ever gain perspective as creatures. Our knowledge is at best analagous to his. It is true knowledge, but it is not identical. This is what we should be emphasizing about God’s omniscience and this is I think the greatest challenge to those who cast doubt on the omniscience of God.
Hey John,
I hope things are going well. It has been a little while. Thanks for the insightful post.
I hope I understand you properly, but it seems you are making a distinction between experiential knowledge and propositional knowledge. I think I agree with you, but how do we think about God knowing something such as guilt in an experiential manner that is non-propositional? I understand that Christ was tempted in every respect and thus can sympathize with us (Hebrews 4:15). He also became sin on our behalf (2 Cor. 5:21). So how do we reconcile God’s perfection with His “knowledge” (ie: experiential knowledge) of imperfection?
John,
Great post! This is an interesting issue.
I also have a question for you.
I imagine that you are correct in saying that our interpretations of reality should mirror/reflect God’s interpretation/perspective of things.
Do you think science is one of the ways that we go about gaining (inasmuch as a finite creature can) His perspective? If so, what is it about science that allows for this? Would it be gained by following the “scientific method”? If so, why?
Stated another way: what is it about any inquiry or theory that allows for gaining His perspective?
Kameron,
I beg your pardon for not addressing your questions sooner.
I appreciate your question. I considered including a paragraph or two in the post regarding the issue you raise, but didn’t want to make the post too long. I’m glad you brought it up.
I intentionally avoided distinguishing between experiential knowledge and propositional knowledge. I prefer to distinguish between knowing how and knowing that because it avoids an appeal to divine experiential knowledge. I don’t accept divine experiential knowledge for two reasons: 1) Experiential knowledge implies or perhaps even insists that we know how God comes to know what he knows. 2) Experiential knowledge isn’t necessarily distinct from propositional knowledge since it still leaves open the possibility of God coming to know propositions by experience.
Experiential knowledge depends on a mediation of knowledge. One comes to know what it is like to ride a bike through riding a bike. For humans experience is the only way we can know what it is like to ride a bike. Experiencing guilt is the only way we can know what being guilty is like. But I don’t accept that God’s knowledge depends on mediation. I don’t think God is dependent on his creation in this way for his knowledge. I believe that his knowledge is immediate. He possesses it by virtue of his divine nature and not in tandem with the nature of his creation. Another way to state it is that God’s knowledge is achieved wholly internally and not at all externally.
In saying that God knows everything is not to say that he knows what it is like to have every experience. For example, God does not know what it is like to hate God, or what it is like to be the Devil, or what it is like to be mentally retarded. And I can’t see that knowing what it is like to have these experiences would be a great-making property for God.
The great-making thing about God’s knowlege is that he know how to get around in his world. So it seems to me that far from aiding him in knowing how to get around in his world, knowing what it is like to hate God would hinder him. Especially if he had to know this by experience.
Knowledge of what it is like is knowledge from a point of view and God only knows what it is like from his point of view. The point is not that he occupy every being’s point of view or know what things are like according to another’s interpretation, but that he know how to interpret things in his way. His perspective is the ultimate perspective, and the faultiness of our knowledge is our inability to access this ultimate perspective. If our perspective were the ultimate perspective, God’s knowledge would be faulty since he could not access our perspective.
As you point out Christ did get a human perspective. I think we can say that he knew what it is like to be human in a way that he did not know before (it seems to me this has interesting implications for omniscience), but this is still not the same as him getting my exact perspective. Christ was tempted as I was, but he still never got my perspective of what it’s like to, say, sin by looking at pornography on my 21st-century computer. But since my perspective is not the proper view of things, it is not relevant that God see it from where I am.
I think there is something significant to Christ getting a human perspective and I want to consider further how it relates to this issue, but I still couldn’t see how it could satisfy a person’s demand that God share all experiential knowledge. I think the better thing to do is drop the demand. (I don’t mean to suggest that you were making this demand, only that some people do). This demand is rooted in misunderstanding the importance of the individual’s point of view or interpretation and insisting that God gets some benefit from sharing it.
As I say, the great-making property of God’s knowledge is his knowing what to do with a person like me who holds the interpretation on things that I do. This is a knowing how that a God who simply knew facts could not have.
If you have other things to point out, or things you think I should consider please raise them for discussion.
Great reply! I think that I agree with you. I definitely see the danger in demanding that God share in all experiential knowledge. Thanks for clearing that up. I think I understand your post a little better now. Thanks John.