RE: Omniscience Argument Against God's Existence
September 21, 2013 at 12:54 am
(This post was last modified: September 21, 2013 at 1:08 am by MindForgedManacle.)
(September 20, 2013 at 11:25 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: To "know everything" is shorthand for "knowing everything that is capable of being known." If something cannot be known for logical reasons then it does not fall within the scope of omniscience. I also point this out to my Calvinist friends who think God knows the future. God cannot know the future because it does not yet exist and you cannot have knowledge of something that does not exist. Likewise you cannot have knowledge of something that logically cannot exist, like a one-sided coin. So your argument is correct, God cannot logically have meta-knowledge. That does not disprove God or His ability to know everything that it is capable of being known.
Your response is actually inapplicable to the argument. I specifically worded the 4th premise to be explicit about what I meant. We can call the set referring to things a being is unaware of Set X. The status of the number of members in that set is always going to be unknowable, by sheer virtue of one not being able to know that they aren't aware of something that can be known about.
The problem is that it is possible to discover things that you were previously unaware of and gain knowledge of them. Hence, God coukd never know whether or not he had exhausted the members of Set X that could be known, but that he simply hasn't yet discovered. That's the argument's real thrust.
(September 20, 2013 at 11:33 pm)FallentoReason Wrote: Awareness ~ the act of attaining knowledge where this knowledge was previously unknown to the individual
By this I mean e.g. I could become aware for the first time of some tragedy that happened in a country via the news, and so now I have obtained that knowledge whereas before I was unaware of it. Under this view of "awareness", I would reject (P4) due to the fact that it misunderstands (P1): the first premise states that an hypothetical omniscient mind *already* possesses *all* knowledge.
Actually, P1 is just the definition of omniscience, it does not entail that omniscience is a possible attribute. P4 is just a demonstration that a mind cannot possess all knowledge, because that would be to claim that you can know that there is something you are not aware you can have knowledge of, yet you know of it.
Quote:Therefore, it's impossible for such a mind to even become aware of more knowledge, as there is no more knowledge *to be aware of*. Therefore, I reject (P4) simply because an omniscient mind would *know* that there is no more knowledge to become aware of.
Again, that would be to say that it's possible to be aware of the possibility of attaining knowledge of something you aren't even aware you can have knowledge of.
Quote:Another way of highlighting the issue is that (P2) & (P3) are describing difficulties associated with a *non-omniscient* mind, which by default won't apply to an omniscient mind, and thus the rest of the argument is a non-sequitur.
The issues in P2 & P3 apply to any mind, because it's an epistemic barrier that is in principle impregnable.
