Omniscience Argument Against God's Existence

[FallentoReason]

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.

I don't see the problem with my definition, which by the way isn't as you quoted. What you quoted was my statement of what the maximum possible knowledge was, not my working definition of omniscience, which was "possessing all knowledge".

Oops, my apologies. Then we agree on the definition.

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.

Actually, that is my end game, that any claim to there being a... being who possesses all knowledge is in fact impossible because it leads to an impossible knowledge claim.

I don't think you're picking up on the subtlety here... there's *nothing* you can say about the omniscient being which it doesn't know of. That's a violation of the definition of *omniscience*. Therefore, technically speaking, your argument makes it seem like you're talking about one omniscient mind, but *since* there's a violation of the term "omniscient", what's happening is that you unknowingly swap out the omniscient mind (via this violation) for a non-omniscient mind, which then we get told "doesn't know _____". <<<< that statement *does not* and *will not* apply to an omniscient mind!!!! It's simply *NOT* the definition of omniscience!

Another way of pointing out the problem: you say it can't know that it doesn't know something. The simplest and most obvious rebuttal is "yes it can. It's omniscient. It knows *everything*".

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.

That's what the argument does (I think). Even under the sort of stop-gap definition of knowledge (a justified, true belief) omniscience becomes incoherent, because the being claimed to have omniscience can never justify the belief that there is nothing it doesn't know of, even if the belief were true, hence it couldn't have knowledge of it.

What makes you think having *all* the knowledge possible means you can't intellectually justify any one statement? You *know* every aspect of any statement that could be made, thus a justification could come in a myriad of different ways.

A true belief held without justification isn't knowledge.

And since this being is omniscient, *by default* all beliefs it holds are pieces of knowledge.

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.

Except the being couldn't know that by virtue of it being an incoherent claim. That is literally saying: "I know that there is nothing of which I do not know that I'm unaware of". That's epistemically impossible.

There's no problem there. That sounds like something someone would say who "possesses all 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.

No, it would be about a being who believes it knows it's omniscience, but it is a belief that can never be justified even if it's true, because knowledge of that which you don't know that you're unaware of is a contradiction in terms. Regardless of whether or not there are any members of this set, that is true. In other words, the being could never know this set was empty.

But it does know. It's omniscient.

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.

Or it shows that the definition of omniscience is incoherent if it is "possessing all knowledge". It shows that such isn't a possible attribute to begin with.

The real way to beat the argument is to show that you can know there is nothing you don't know, that you don't know (that there are no 'unknown unknowns').

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But that's easy to do. By virtue of it being omniscient, it **knows** that.