Thursday, September 24, 2015

Omniscience

Omniscience /ɒmˈnɪʃəns/,[1] mainly in religion, is the capacity to know everything that there is to know. In particular, Hinduism and the Abrahamic religions (JudaismChristianity, and Islam) believe that there is a divine being who is omniscient. An omniscient point-of-view, in writing, is to know everything that can be known about a character, including past history, thoughts, feelings, etc. In Latinomnis means "all" and sciens means "knowing".

God created knowledge

Some theists[who?] argue that God created all knowledge and has ready access thereto. This statement invokes a circular time contradiction: presupposing the existence of God, before knowledge existed, there was no knowledge at all, which means that God was unable to possess knowledge prior to its creation. Alternately if knowledge was not a "creation" but merely existed in God's mind for all time there would be no contradiction. In Thomistic thought, which holds God to exist outside of time due to his ability to perceive everything at once, everything which God knows in his mind already exists. Hence, God would know of nothing that was not in existence (or else it would exist), and God would also know everything that was in existence (or else it would not exist), and God would possess this knowledge of what did exist and what did not exist at any point in the history of time.
The circular time contradiction can suppose anything concerning God, such as the creation of life, meaning before God created life, he wasn't alive. Moreover to assume any more attributes, to then say God is merciful, but before the creation of mercy, he wouldn't have been merciful, and before the creation of the concept of negation (meaning to assume something as not), no one would have any concept of what is not. These apparent contradictions, however, presuppose that such attributes are separately defined and detached from God, which is not necessarily so. It is not a given that attributes which can be assigned to or used to describe mankind, can be equally (or even similarly) ascribed to God. Take good and evil for example: goodness is biblically defined as that which is of God; it is intrinsic to his being and is revealed most prominently through his provision of Old Testament Law, the keeping of which is the very definition of goodness and the neglecting of which (on even the slightest of grounds), is the epitome of evil. A similar argument could be laid down concerning God's omniscience (i.e. knowledge). It even eludes the idea a lot more even to assume the concept of "nothing" or negation was created, therefore it is seemingly impossible to conceive such a notion where it draws down to a paradox. Assuming that the creator and creation is separate, and not the same one thing, or process. That it is a "this or that" notion, instead of a "this and that" idea.[citation needed]
To assume that knowledge in Plato's sense as described to be a belief that's true, it then means that before everything came into being, it was all to be conceived as total imagination by God until the set of truth. One verse "God created man in his own Image" states that God imagined the form of humans, taking image as a root word for imagine, mistakenly understood as man to look like God. [this verse from Genesis 1 is in the Hebrew Scriptures. The word 'Image' is translated from two Hebrew words 'demuth' - likeness or similitude and 'tselem'- an obscure word which translates as image or idol.[6] It is difficult, therefore to make a case for the author's reading of this verse to mean 'God imagined the form of humans'.
The above definitions of omniscience cover what is called propositional knowledge (knowing that), as opposed to experiential knowledge (knowing how). That some entity is omniscient in the sense of possessing all possible propositional knowledge does not imply that it also possesses all possible experiential knowledge. Opinions differ as to whether the propositionally omniscient God of the theists is able to possess all experiential knowledge as well. But it seems at least obvious that a divine infinite being conceived of as necessary infinitely knowledgeable would also know how, for example, a finite person (man) dying feels as He (God) would have access to all knowledge including the obvious experiences of the dying human. There is a third type of knowledge: practical orprocedural knowledge (knowing how to do). If omniscience is taken to be all knowledge then all knowledge of all types would be fully known and comprehended.

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