Jesus could only have knowledge by acquaintance of that limited set of experiences that he had while he lived, so God cannot be omniscient in that respect. Some (most?) philosophers of religion define omniscience more narrowly as knowledge of all and only true propositions.

I agree that Relativist made a good point. If you are only counting singular life that Jesus lived, then God would only have the experience of that one person and would not have all knowledge of every human experience. In this regard, He would not be omniscient.

In addition, I feel that the knowledge of the God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit (the Trinity) is not perfectly shared. I believe that your argument would look like this.
1. If Jesus or the Holy Spirit or God the Father has experienced something, the Trinity has had all those experiences
2. God the Father, other than knowledge of lust, envy, etc., is “omniscient”
3. Jesus knows how it is to be human
4. Holy Spirit knows people’s souls, desires, and virtues
5. If the Trinity has the knowledge of God the Father and the experiences of Jesus and the Holy Spirit, then the Trinity is omniscient
6. Therefore, the Trinity is omniscient

Against premise 5, I believe that the experiences of Jesus and the Holy Spirit still would not qualify as fully experiential as Jesus did not lust or envy (though he was tempted to), still leaving the issue of having those experiences open. In addition, the Holy Spirit runs into a similar issue where the Spirit may know our hearts and desires, but still has not experienced them itself.

I would also argue against the 1st premise. I believe that the characteristics of the Trinity are different enough that they are not able to or are not willing to share all knowledge among themselves. Simply being in the Trinity does not grant each individual being the knowledge of the other two beings in the Trinity. For example, in Matt 24:36, regarding the day of the coming of the Son of Man it is said that “But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only.” This shows that not all information and knowledge is shared among the Trinity and that although one being in the Trinity may have certain knowledge, it does not mean the rest of the Trinity does.

Abecedarian,

Thank you for laying out Play-doh's argument. I partially agree with your argument against the first premise, as it does seem that Matt 24:36 clearly shows that there is at least some lack of information sharing amongst the trinity. Could it be that Father God is the only entirely omniscient being of the trinity and that the omniscience of the Father alone is sufficient to declare the triune God omniscient?

In your example of Matt 24:36, only the Father is aware of the time at which Jesus will return. Elsewhere in the Bible, we see Jesus state that "the Father is greater than I" (John 14:28). Later in that chapter, Jesus says "I do exactly what the Father has commanded Me, so that the world may know that I love the Father" (John 14:31), further highlighting the power differential between God the Father and Jesus. While one cannot be certain, I would be interested in editing the first premise as follows:

1. If Jesus or the Holy Spirit has knowledge, then God the Father also has this knowledge.

Even if I edit premise one and accept premise five (ignoring the potential issues of the experiential knowledge of lust and envy), I'm not entirely sure how to handle the remainder of Play-doh's argument in regard to one element: time. If God the Father requires both Jesus and the Holy Spirit in order to be fully omniscient (relying on the aforementioned information passing from those two to the Father), then I am not sure just how omniscient God was during the time of the Old Testament.

While I recognize that there are differing views of the idea of time, let's accept for the sake of this argument that God is outside of time and is able to be fully present in any moment. If God relies on Jesus and the Holy Spirit as agents of knowledge gathering (for lack of a better term), I am uncertain as to how God was able to retrieve, at the very least, "people's souls, desires, and virtues" (premise four) during the time of the Old Testament. Although there are certainly mentions of the Spirit of God in the Old Testament, the Holy Spirit as we now think of it (found within every Christian believer, defined as comforter, etc.) was not recognized until the time of the book of Acts, thousands of years later.

So, if the Holy Spirit as we think of it now was not around for thousands of years, does this mean God the Father was unable to gather knowledge integral to God's ability to be omniscient during that time? I highly doubt it. Thus, while I do believe the Holy Spirit can provide God with some sort of knowledge (which may or may not contribute to the data bank necessary for omniscience), I would hesitate to rely on premise four as a needed component for the triune God/God the Father's omniscience (as detailed in premise five). Or, perhaps I need to redefine my idea of the Holy Spirit as presented in the Old Testament as a means of recognizing how the Holy Spirit does provide God the Father with knowledge necessary to the triune God's omniscience.

I am still pondering the paradox of omniscience, however, so unfortunately I do not yet have a clear argument to offer to you instead. I welcome your comments and suggestions as I continue to grapple with this issue.

God is — Play-doh

How do you know? This is a philosophy forum. It's standard form to offer definitions of your terms - unless you have reason to believe they're well understood - to facilitate an accurate understanding of your argument. How about starting with what you understand, even if just for present argument, by "God."

The question I have asked and never got a decent answer to is how can people believe that god has no knowledge of some part of the universe, if he created the it he must know everything on a personal level.

The Paradox of Omniscience sets up the argument that because God is omniscient, He must know how to learn what he doesn’t know and therefore know by acquaintance lust, envy, and other such things He can’t know. — Play-doh

Where did the idea that god cannot know about these things come from?

Just saying that he cannot know about lust rules out omniscience. Knowing by association is not knowing. You can listen all day to people lecturing about lust, even watch people experiencing it but that does not mean that you know it.

if he created it, he must know everything on a personal level.

- @Sir2u

I agree with you in that experiential knowledge by association is not truly knowing. However, I may have a better answer for how God may not know something on a personal level if He created it. In short, I do not believe that the creator of something necessarily must know everything about that created thing.

I believe a regimented form of your argument would look like this:
1. If a creator created something, the creator must know it on a personal level.
2. God is a creator and He created everything.
3. Therefore, God knows everything on a personal level (1&2 MP)

I would have to disagree with your first premise. I do not think that by virtue of being a creator, you would automatically know everything about what you created. It may be true that the creator could know everything that was put into making the creation or even knowing how it would work. However, truly understanding what it is like to be that creation or feeling what that creation is feeling is a different matter. For example, a person could build an incredibly intelligent robot with AI that would pass any Turing Test, yet the person would not know what it is truly like to feel or think as that robot. The creator might know every mechanical piece in the robot and how it works, but that would not give the creator a personal level in terms of experiencing the same things that the robot experiences. Similarly, God as a creator would not have that ability. If God did know his creations on a personal level, it would not be through His characteristic as a creator, but rather His characteristic of being omniscient. To summarize, God being a creator does not signify that He knows His creations on a personal level, that knowledge (or lack of) would fall under the question of His omniscience.

For example, a person could build an incredibly intelligent robot with AI that would pass any Turing Test, yet the person would not know what it is truly like to feel or think as that robot. The creator might know every mechanical piece in the robot and how it works, but that would not give the creator a personal level in terms of experiencing the same things that the robot experiences.

To summarize, God being a creator does not signify that He knows His creations on a personal level, that knowledge (or lack of) would fall under the question of His omniscience. — Abecedarian

Your explanation is reasonable with a robot and the creator, but the god of the bible is supposed to know the thoughts of everyone. That is the basis of his omniscience.

So to declare that god cannot know about lust is either just plain silly or an admittance of his lack of omniscience.

I have understood your argument about the Paradox of Omniscience in favor of God being omniscient to be as the following:

1. Either God is omniscient because he is a three-part God or He is not omniscient.
2. God is but one part of the Holy Trinity consisting of the Father, the son, and the Holy Spirit.
3. These three parts put together equate to having all knowledge through knowledge by acquaintance–God’s knowledge of himself and his “limitations”, Jesus’s knowledge of mankind and human experiences, and the Holy Spirit’s knowledge of the soul in relation to desires and faults.
4. Therefore, God is an omniscient three-part God through knowledge by acquaintance because he is part of the Holy Trinity.

I object to premise three in the argument for the following reasons. When God created the sun, heavens, earth, animals, water, mankind, and everything else in Genesis, he had no prior knowledge of these elements or living creatures. None of these things existed before creation. The Holy Spirit and Jesus were not yet created. So where did he draw his knowledge by acquaintance from when he was designing Earth and mankind? He couldn’t consult Jesus or the Holy Spirit when he made Adam and Eve in his image. God is not omniscient for the sole fact that he is part of the Holy Trinity. He knows all knowledge on his own because it is evident that he had this knowledge during when he was designing the world.

Perhaps a way to strengthen this argument would be to drawn on examples about God’s creation without any prior knowledge or experience that I mentioned earlier to refute omniscience through knowledge by acquaintance. God was able to not only create the existence of life, but was also able to experience his creation before he created Adam and then Eve.

I think there’s a major problem with your interpretation of the argument. Another way to formulate the argument is:
If God is omniscient, then God would know each individual’s action before it happens
If Individuals can freely choose their actions, then there can’t be any foreknowledge of what they are going to do
Either God is omniscient and individuals don’t truly have free will or individuals have free will and God is not omniscient.

You take the side of the conclusion that includes free will, but the conclusion could just as easily say that God IS omniscient.

Your solution sounds good and maybe a nice way to think about it, but when people say “God knows what you are going to do before you do it,” they are referring to a specific action that you will take, not all the possibilities.

True free will and omniscience cannot co-exist. Either God does not know all things, or we do not truly have free will. However, this does not release us from the burden of choice, it ’s obvious that we know our actions and choose them when the moments arise. So while God may know each decision we make, WE do not, and we have to choose between right and wrong, good and evil. It’s not a problem that God knows what you will choose; it’s that you choose at all.

Since God can rationalize all possibilities that could be chosen, he can predict the action of each person — Iwanttostopphilosophizingbutikant

Incorrect. I know all the possible locations an electron can appear in a quantum system yet I cannot predict where the electron will actually appear. Knowing the options does not mean prediction that's like saying that seeing all of the possible answers in a multiple choice test automatically leads you to know the right one (how I wish this was the case)

If Individuals can freely choose their actions, then there can’t be any foreknowledge of what they are going to do — lupac

Let's say that you're talking to one of your best friends, and as they're talking, you realize that they are about to say one of their common catchphrases. You know with confidence that they're about to say this catchphrase--and sure enough, they say it two seconds later. Did you, through your foreknowledge of their speech, impede their free will? Certainly not.

Now think of how much more certain God is, through his foreknowledge. The only difference in my analogy is that God does not doubt his knowledge of our decisions, like you might maintain an ounce of doubt that your friend could say something unexpected instead. This difference in analogy does not impact the conclusion, though.

God can know what we will decide, the consequences of each decision, and all the processes and thoughts that led to our decision. But how does this knowledge exclude free will? God, in his omniscience, would know every detail about every detail of our lives. He would therefore know every emotion, passing thought, dwelt-upon idea, and influence that impacts our decisions. This omniscience is what allows him to have foreknowledge of our actions; but it does not change our free will. If God were communicating the contents of his foreknowledge to us ("I am God, and I know you will eat cereal for breakfast because I know everything") that would change the outcome because he would actively be influencing our decision-making process. But simply knowing the decision based of his perfect and complete knowledge of everything we draw upon to make our decision, including our personalities and preferences, does not negate free will.

In general I do not find the concepts of divine omniscience and divine omnipotence to be of much religious value.
Omniscience creates an immediate problem with "free will", determinism and personal responsibility.
Omnipotence creates the problem of divine evil or failure to act to prevent extreme evil.
I much prefer religious conceptions (process theology) in which such concepts are abandoned and God does not know the future but rather takes in and responds to the experience of the world by providing opportunities for creative advancement. God is persuasive but not coercive and agents are free to accept or reject the divine lure.

To put the paradox of omniscience as the way you summarized in an argument form:

1. If God is omniscient, then He must know how to learn what he doesn’t know.
2. If God knows how to learn what he doesn’t know, he must know how to learn knowledge by acquaintance.
3. God can’t know how to learn knowledge by acquaintance.
4. God can’t know how to learn what he doesn’t know (2&3, MT).
5. God is not omniscient (1&4, MT).

I think your argument is only relevant if premise 1 from the paradox of omniscience is true, which argues “if God is omniscient, then He must know how to learn what he doesn’t know”, which indicates that God’s knowledge, at least some of what he knows, is acquired through learning. Your argument provides an answer by changing the one-part God in the argument to a three-part God.

I don’t think such substitution successfully solve the paradox. For certain knowledge to be new, it must be the case that the Trinity did not know it before, but then acquired through certain means, either through Jesus’s incarnation or the Holy Spirit. A being can have the attribute of omniscient only if this being knows all that is knowable. If knowledge by acquaintance such as envy and lust existed before Jesus’s experience on earth, then the Trinity had no knowledge by acquaintance until Jesus’s experience as a human being, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in us. Then it follows that the Trinity was not omniscient before the incarnation and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. This seems to be a problematic statement to the Christian belief.

If premise 1 is true, then the Trinity was learning at some point. Learning entails a change of state from not knowing to knowing (if certain new knowledge is successfully acquired). The scripture tells us that God does not change (in Malachi 3:6, “For I the LORD do not change; and in Hebrews 13:8, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever). If it is the case that God does not change, then there’s certainly no such change or transition from not being omniscient to being omniscient. Since learning entails change, then it follows that it’s not the case that the unchanging God, either as a one-part or three-part being, acquired knowledge by acquaintance at some point through any means.

Or, maybe God’s way of knowing is not through learning?