(September 30, 2013 at 2:52 am)Rational AKD Wrote: I thank you for your attempt at a logical argument, though I find some problems with your argument. firstly, that premise 2 is not a true premise. you can very well be aware of what you are unaware of. the definition of aware as I understand it is "having knowledge or perception of a situation or fact." now, it is certainly possible to be aware of knowledge you do not possess concerning a situation or a fact. say you walk into the middle of a conversation and end up confused. you don't know what's going on and thus you are very well aware that you are unaware of the situation you walked into. concerning matters of fact, you can very well be aware that you are unaware how a car works. you may say that's lack of knowledge, not lack of awareness; but keep in mind being aware is possessing knowledge, so being unaware would be not possessing knowledge which is effectively lack of knowledge.
As noted on an earlier page, Premise 2 in my original post is unclear. I wasn't referring to awareness of ignorance, I was referring to being unaware that you were unaware of something, or not knowing that something was unknown to you.
Quote:the next objection is on premise 1. keep in mind this objection is independent of my prior objection so even if you find fault with my first objection this objection will still stand. the problem is you are using a faulty definition of omniscience and applying it to God. the definition applicable to God is "to know everything that can be known." the definition you used is inherent omniscience, but the definition applicable to God is total omniscience. you may think even with that said you can revise the definition then the argument will still be logically sound, but that's not the case. even if it is logically impossible to know what you don't know, or as you put it be aware of what you are unaware, you can still know everything that can be known. this means omniscience doesn't entail knowing what is impossible to know. it's knowing everything that is possible to know and thus there is no logical contradiction within the nature of omniscience.
The problem is that we've already gone over this objection in the thread. Even if your definition of omniscience is to 'know everything that can be known' (as ChadWooters earlier tried to run), that still falls short of the argument's intention. Since it's seemingly incoherent to say you know that there is nothing of which you don't know that you don't know (an 'unknown unknown'), you run into an issue. Since unknown unknowns are in potential knowable in some circumstance (this bit is inductive, by the way), the supposedly omniscient being could never rule out whether or not it had attained all possible knowledge. So the point of the argument would, I think, still stand with your definition or not.
Vinny, I'll respond to your last questions in a bit.
