Omniscience

In this extract God’s omniscience is defined and considered by two scientists.  For the full article, click here.

God’s omniscience is generally interpreted as knowledge of all things past, present, and future. Many have pointed out the difficulties in reconciling the doctrine of God’s foreknowledge with the notion of free will or agency. In particular, if God (or any entity, for that matter, including a future super-powerful computer) has the ability to know future events in arbitrarily fine detail, then it is hard to argue against the conclusion that only one future course is logically possible. The resulting determinism has troubling inferences, such as that human free will is at best an illusion, that humans are not fundamentally responsible for their actions, and, even more radically, that the ultimate responsibility falls upon God. We should also add, in this context, that there are additional difficulties in reconciling the doctrine of perfect foreknowledge with modern physics. Specifically: (1) quantum mechanics asserts that it is fundamentally impossible for position and momentum (or other pairs of “conjugate variables”) to be known to unlimited accuracy; and (2) chaos theory asserts that microscopic alterations or uncertainties of the present state can be amplified to produce arbitrarily large changes in the future course of the physical world. Combining these two wellestablished notions, many argue that it is impossible, within the realm of currently understood scientific laws, for the future to be predicted with unlimited precision—even if the general course of human events proceeds as anticipated, particular events beyond a certain level of detail cannot be foreseen.

Fascinating as these questions of God’s foreknowledge are, we will not pursue them further in this article. Instead, we restrict ourselves to God’s knowledge of the past and the present. We assume that knowledge is composed of data, facts, and ideas, all of which are, at the most basic level, forms of information. We will also assume that atoms, humans, and other physical entities in the universe are composed of bits of information. Some writers argue, by the way, that entities of the physical world are nothing but information or data, and that every human activity, including thinking and  possibly life itself, is merely a form of information processing, that could, at least in principle, be perfectly replicated in some sufficiently powerful computer [Tipler, pg. 124]. Indeed, this is the basic assumption of researchers in the field of artificial intelligence. But we will content ourselves with the somewhat more limited assumption given above.