An omniscient god cannot be intelligent

[I_am_not_mafia]

Intelligence means being able to adapt to unknown environments or tasks. If you know everything there is to know then you have no chance to adapt.

You may disagree that this is what intelligence means but think of what the alternative is. IQ tests would be no use if they were also supplied with the answers. You'd just write the answers down and everyone would get the same score. There is a reason why children are not given the answers during exams. If a computer program has all the answers mapped out already then it's not intelligent, it's a simple look-up table.

Even with natural forms of intelligence there needs to be some limit to mapping out all the possibilities of an environment for intelligent decision making  to take place.

Feeling our way to decision

In his earlier book, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason And The Human Brain, Damasio described trying to set up an appointment with an emotionless patient: alternative dates are suggested and the patient pulls out an appointment book and consults the calendar. For 30 minutes the patient enumerated reasons for and against each of the two dates: previous engagements, possible meteorological conditions, virtually anything that one could reasonably think about. "He was now walking us through a tiresome cost-benefit analysis, an endless outlining and fruitless comparison of options and possible consequences. It took enormous discipline to listen to all of this without pounding on the table and telling him to stop," Damasio wrote.

So by talking about an omniscient god, if you truly believe that one exists, then it would be more accurate to refer to it as a universal look-up table.

[Mister Agenda]

A being with true omniscience cannot have free will. It can only do what it has foreseen that it will do. If it did otherwise, that would prove it is not truly omniscient. Also at odds with omnipotence, if you can't even get out of your own prophecies, you're not truly omnipotent.

[I_am_not_mafia]

A being with true omniscience cannot have free will. It can only do what it has foreseen that it will do. If it did otherwise, that would prove it is not truly omniscient. Also at odds with omnipotence, if you can't even get out of your own prophecies, you're not truly omnipotent.

Yes. An omniscient creature will know the entire range of actions it can take, but also the optimal action. So why choose something other than the optimum? Religionists will say because of free will, but this doesn't explain why one would deliberately choose a sub-optimal action.

[emjay]

God is an Excel spreadsheet... now there's a bumper sticker

[ignoramus]

What if God's a giant quantum computer whose job it was to design and kick off "this" universe with the aim of eventually creating life.

Praise God, the super computer!

[vorlon13]

A being with true omniscience cannot have free will. It can only do what it has foreseen that it will do. If it did otherwise, that would prove it is not truly omniscient. Also at odds with omnipotence, if you can't even get out of your own prophecies, you're not truly omnipotent.

{waiting for Drich's obfusculation refuting that trimodally in honor of the Trinty}

[Mister Agenda]

I was trying to get at the idea that an omniscient being doesn't have any options from which to choose. It knows the future, so it already knows which what it is going to do in the future, and that's the only thing it CAN do. It cannot choose an action different from that that which it foresaw itself taking. Given a truly omniscient being, it's all foreordained and there's no such thing as free will for anyone if the future is knowable in perfect detail. We all can only do what the omniscient being always knew we would do.

I'm not sure 'being' is the right word for such a thing. It not only can't be intelligent, it would not think at all as we understand the process...it already knows all the 'thoughts' it will ever have, so it never actually 'thinks' them, just remembers them.

[Anomalocaris]

omni-this ans omni-that are just the result of the infantilization of adult mind by religion. They are the equivalent of words made up by children to encompass a vaguely defined concept of lots and lots of a childishly badly thought out fantasy thing.

[The Grand Nudger]

"Oh yeah, well my god's peener is even bigger than your god's..it's an omnipeener!"

[Angrboda]

That God is omniscient only makes intelligence unnecessary. The problem comes in that reasoning to a conclusion is always less efficient than appealing to something already known. Because God is perfect, he would never appeal to his ability to reason rather than his omniscience. So his ability to reason is rendered unnecessary by his perfection, but that doesn't rule it out, either. All we can say is that God doesn't employ his intelligence and is thus indistinguishable from an automaton which simply chooses the best available option based on his knowing what that option is at every moment. This doesn't rule out an intelligent God, but it does mean that no natural theological argument can prove the Judeo-Christian God because intelligence is a requirement of that God, and no fact can demonstrate that any effect of God required intelligence (as I pointed out to Steve in The Absurdity Of God thread). So it takes a whole lot of theist arguments off the board, including the Kalam cosmological argument, as well as Aquinas' five ways.