An Omniscient God is Sinful
Kirk Straughen (Investigator 158, 2014 September) Can god be omniscient and yet free from sin? In my
opinion a
contradiction exists between the belief that the biblical god is
perfect (free from sin) and the additional assumption that this being
is omniscient - a claim that the bible makes as shown below.
Qualities unique to God:
1: having infinite awareness, understanding, and insight If god possesses
complete knowledge then god must not only know what is
sinful, but experience sin as well. Consider the Seven Deadly Sins:
1. Pride is an excessive belief in one's own abilities. It is not
enough for god, for example, to know what lust is; god must
also experience the emotion of lust, for if god does not experience the
emotion of lust then god can have no real knowledge of lust. Therefore,
if only humans experience the emotions of the Seven Deadly Sins, then
humans know something that god does not. Ergo – god is not omniscient.
However, if god knows lust, then how can god be considered free from sin, and if god is not free from sin then god is not perfect. References 1. http://www.bible.ca/trinity/trinity-definition-god.htm 2. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/omniscient 3. http://keeptencommandments.info/keep/the_7_deadly_sins_of_the_bible.phtml OMNISCIENT BUT SINLESS
Anonymous (Investigator 159, 2014 November) OMNISCIENT
Mr Straughen says that an "omniscient" (all-knowing) God cannot "be free from Sin": If God possesses complete knowledge then God must not only know what is sinful, but experience sin as well… if God does not experience the emotion of lust then God can have no real knowledge of lust. (#158 The Penguin
Dictionary of Philosophy (2005) under "Knowledge"
says:
"The two statements A knows that p and B knows that not-p cannot be
true together, for the first implies that p and the second implies that
not-p. People can know different things, but they cannot know
incompatible things."
Consider a gambler named Steve. For God to lack knowledge of Steve's
gambling, the following two statements have to be incompatible:
No. God knows more than Steve knows, but none of what God knows contradicts what Steve knows.
Consider also a murder trial with the accused found guilty beyond
"reasonable doubt", even "beyond any doubt". The jury therefore have
"full knowledge", as full as it gets, of the murder. Is the verdict
wrong because to have full knowledge the jury must also commit murder?
MENTAL
Gambling and murder are physical actions but Straughen is concerned
with mental sins such as "lust". To have "full knowledge" about
someone's lust must God "experience" lust?
To "experience" something can mean (1) doing it, (2) feeling it, or (3) being a victim of it.
Straughen seems to accept "2" so that having
"full knowledge" of another's emotion involves experiencing the other
person's emotion by feeling it ourselves.
However, once we feel something it is our feeling, not the other
person's feeling — which leaves us without "full knowledge" by
Straughen's definition. It seems, therefore, Straughen's definition
leads to a contradiction and may require a philosopher to sort out.
Common sense tells us that people can "experience" or feel another's feeling by empathy, imagination, and analogy. None of these are necessarily "sinful".
An "omniscient" God would also have "full
knowledge" of biochemical and electrical events that generate feelings.
Future brain scanning technology might do that too — i.e. describe the
biochemical equivalents of feelings. Would that make the technician,
who reads the printout, guilty of the thought-sins it reveals? No.
A SIMPLER RESPONSE
A simpler response to Straughen is that the word "omniscient" is not in
the Bible but is a concept philosophers debate about.
The Bible states that God sees every bird and every star; everyone's thoughts, deeds and words; embryos and how they grow; every hair on every head; and is able to restore every dead person to life:
Much of
this is within sight of future human technology, but none of it
implies that the human technician has to commit other peoples' mental
sins.
CONCLUSION
The Bible teaches:
a) God knows the words, deeds and thoughts of every
person;
b) God is "Good", "upright", and without "sin". Statements "a" and "b" are compatible i.e. without contradiction. Omniscient but Sinless – a Reply to Anonymous
Kirk Straughen (Investigator 161, 2015 January) Anonymous, in his reply to my article (Inv 159, page
48), seems to be
suggesting that God can have full knowledge of sin without being
sinful. At the moment I'm not sure his argument succeeds, for having
knowledge of something indirectly (God's knowledge of sin through
awareness of the biochemistry of emotions, as Anonymous suggests) is
not to have full knowledge of that thing.
Consider the following thought experiment: Let us suppose that
intelligent life exists on Mars and that these beings experience an
emotion they call tamaz - an emotion that we cannot experience due to
physiological and psychological differences between humans and
Martians.
Now, we can know something of tamaz, for a Martian can tell us when it
is experiencing this emotion and we can record its physiological
reactions using positron emission tomography (PET) scans,
electroencephalography and so on, and based on this data know what
biological reactions occur when Martians are experiencing tamaz.
However, knowing what tamaz looks like in terms of Martian biochemistry
and neural activity is not the same thing as knowing what it is like to
experience the emotion of tamaz.
Similarly, if God does not know what it is like to experience lust
— knowledge that can only be gained (as with tamaz) through
direct experience of the emotion, then God does not know what it is
like to experience lust. Therefore, humans have knowledge of something
that God does not.
Anonymous seems to suggest that God can have knowledge of lust through empathy. But the reason we can empathise with others and know how they feel without a direct experience of their emotions is because we have ourselves experienced the emotions that they are experiencing at some point in time. If God can empathise then God must have experienced these emotions.
If God exists and is omniscient then God knows all things, and this
would include the sinful emotion of lust. However, if God is not
omniscient then there are some things that God does not know and the
sinful emotion of lust may be one of them.
OMNISCIENT BUT SINLESS
(Investigator 161, 2015 March) Mr Straughen's further attempt to deny that "God can
have full
knowledge of sin without being sinful" (#160 p. 46) was answered in
#159 p. 49 in the paragraph beginning "However…"
If Straughen is still unsatisfied, there is a "Simpler Response" on the same page. The simpler response avoids the word "omniscient"; avoids trying to define "full knowledge"; and avoids the problem of how one person's feeling can be another person's feeling. Anonymous |