Omniscience Argument Against God's Existence

[FallentoReason]

Again, this is a misunderstanding. The argument is that omniscience (meaning possessing all knowledge) is impossible. The maximum possible knowledge a mind could have is that there is nothing it is aware of that it doesn't fully understand. But a being could never know that there is something it doesn't know of (nor how much it doesn't know), because by definition it wouldn't know about it. The being in question could only believe that it's omniscient, but it couldn't know it.

I'd have to disagree with your definition of omniscience: "The maximum possible knowledge a mind could have is that there is nothing it is aware of that it doesn't fully understand." I'd say omniscience is simply when the set of all possible knowledge also happens to be the set of what an entity/mind knows. Under this definition, the statement "what this mind doesn't know is ____" never applies to a mind which is omniscient. This leads me to your statement: "But a being could never know that there is something it doesn't know of (nor how much it doesn't know), because by definition it wouldn't know about it." So if "by definition" it "doesn't know about [something]", then it was never omniscient to begin with i.e. your argument concerns a non-omniscient mind, which of course isn't your desired end game.

I think it's simply not possible to take omniscience alone and show that there's a logical contradiction. Or if it's possible, you'd have to use a different route other than purely knowledge, as knowing everything by definition doesn't seem to cause any problems.

The argument is that omniscience isn't possible, not that there is a being who possesses omniscience and thus knows my argument to be faulty. There is always at least one thing that a mind could never know, and that is whether or not there is something it doesn't know of. And since that is always unknown, the being also can never know whether or not there is something that it doesn't know of, but could potentially know of.

An omniscient mind would know that it knows everything. A simple proof of this is that knowing that you know everything is itself a piece of knowledge, and the attribute of omniscience would entail that this mind knows that already, thus the set of potential knowledge that it could acquire about absolutely *anything* is the empty set.

I don't get your response, honestly. It boils down to that omniscience is impossible because of an inherently unknownable answer to the question "Is there anything of which I don't know that I'm unaware of?", which further means the being doesn't know that it's acquired all possible knowledge.

To me it sounds like your hypothetical being is one which *worked* its way up to an alleged state of omniscience. This is the only way I can make sense of certain statements you make about this being. But when it comes to the *definition* of omniscience, I just don't see how your argument applies to it. *By definition*, this hypothetical mind knows all that there is to know, and thus implying that it can't know ______ is either a false statement OR you're referring to a different being altogether - one that is non-omniscient.