#892 A Know-Nothing God?
June 16, 2024Dear Dr Craig,
I have been a fan of your interventions, for a little while and your responses to some objections have been really helpfull in strengthening my faith. Lately, i decided to intellectually re-evaluate many of my assumption about God, to avoid being left speechless when debating with skeptics and atheists.
So my question is in regard to the attributes of God, mainly his omniscience, the fact he is independant, self-sufficient and transcendant.
I already know God is both the source of truth in relation to our world but also truth itself, which makes truth transcendent and independent, God would still be truth even without a world to which truth statements are applied. But Omniscience doesn't seem to me at least, to be an attribute that is independent of the world. If there is nothing to be all-knowing about then Omniscience as an attribute is not independent, even though it is transcendant, Omniscience seems to depend of the wolrd while being transcendent of said world.
Is it then an accurate statement to say certain attributes of God, are more relational to creation than independent from it? Can i postulate Omniscience as an attribute that God has only in relation to Creation and without anything to be Omniscient about he is not Omniscient while still be God?
Germaine
United Arab Emirates
Dr. craig’s response
A
Nice to receive a question from the UAE, Germaine!
The short answer to your question is that while God most certainly does have relational attributes, omniscience is not one of them. The standard definition of omniscience is that, for any person S and proposition p,
S is omniscient = def. if p, S knows that p and does not believe not-p
The standard definition requires that God, as an omniscient being, knows only and all truths. If you reflect a moment, you will immediately see that in the absence of creation there are an infinite number of truths known by God, for example, mathematical truths, ethical truths, universal generalizations (because they have no existential implications), metaphysically necessary truths, negative truths (e.g., No universe exists, There are no people, etc). Moreover, as a proponent of divine middle knowledge, I think that God knows an infinity of counterfactual truths like If Jones were in circumstances C, he would freely do action A. So I think you can see that in the absence of a world God knows no fewer truths than he actually knows, even if some of these are different truths.
- William Lane Craig