God's Knowledge

A few questions, in process

I’m going to bring you in to a bit of an intellectual challenge I’m in the middle of. It regards divine omniscience, an invitation I received to contribute an article on the topic, and what I consider one of the inhibiting traits of modern theology.

Divine omniscience concerns “God’s Knowledge”. Already the theologian must make a few choices. It this knowledge that God has of himself, or of the world? And what is the form of this knowledge? And how does God “have” it?

The predominant modern category for “God’s knowledge” has considered this knowledge to be propositional. “Omniscience” means that God has maximal propositional knowledge. For this reason, there is a whole side-conversation among theologians and philosophers discussing whether God might have false knowledge, meaning whether he could have propositional knowledge that turns out not to be true.

This is the kind of side quest that theologians are constantly generating for themselves that is based on a category error and ends up producing more heat than light. It drives me batty.

If a person denies that God has “maximal knowledge” (meaning maximal propositional knowledge), the implication is that God therefore has limited propositional knowledge. It would seem to imply a lack in the quantity or sum of knowledge God has- a no-go for classical theologians.

But to my mind, the first error is not in denying that God has “maximal” knowledge, but in assuming that “God’s knowledge” is propositional. But propositional knowledge is not the only form knowledge must take.

I think this is what Jordan Daniel Wood is getting at here; though I’m certain his angle on this question will be different from mine. Wood calls for a version of what he calls “intersubjective knowledge”, which he does not define. Here’s what he has to say:

The issue here is how God, as subject, can really know us as subjects. I would argue that these two opposing views are but one-sided perceptions of a greater truth: that the very logic of the God-world relation, in all its historical and subjective particularities, is the logic of intersubjective knowing, whereas theologians typically construe this relation in essentialist terms (the God-world relation is either essential or contingent). Until we find a way to “think love” rather than merely think of love in contrast to logic, we will likely never resolve the restive opposition these two views bring to the fore. This is but one example of why the question of subjectivity seems to me utterly necessary for Christian theology, not only to address the world today, but to address itself.

This last bit- finding a way to “‘think love’ rather than merely think of love in contrast to logic” is a really fruitful suggestion- one that I am intrigued by, but also really stuck on. I don’t think its a mere flick of the wrist without substance. But I haven’t gotten very far in figuring out what the substance might be. The feminist and process thinkers of the 1990s took a very similar approach, but ended up with solutions that were metaphysically flimsy, if not completely implausible. But certainly affirming that God knows everything about everything generates few constructive possibilities. At its worse, it conceives of God as a supercomputer- and we already have enough of those. It might render God uneccessary in a world where maximal information is increasingly at our fingertips

So what is at stake in a question of God’s omniscience? This is what I am working through.

By my mind, the question of God’s knowledge has four ways of going wrong;

1. Imagining God’s knowledge is propositional (as I stated above);

2. Imagining that “knowledge” derives from “mind”. This is even more tricky, because defining “mind” is impossibly complex; and ascribing “mind” to God doubly so.

3. Imagining that God having maximal knowledge by necessity has implications for human freedom. 90% of the conversation regarding omniscience ends up adjudicating questions about human freedom and providence. I don’t think this is necessary (ha!), but it is difficult to navigate through this.

4. Additionally, “mind” seems to refer to modern conceptions of the word and not the classical nous. I suspect there is a clue here.

Some of the problem is just derivative of saying that God “has” anything. The ways in which words refer to God must differ from how they refer to humans. I suspect, too, that there is quite a bit at stake in our modern conceptions of knowledge and our obsessions with acquiring it. (My own piece will take up a technological angle relative to knowledge acquisition, and what God might have to do with that.)

In addition to this handbook article, I am working on a short chapter on wonder. I revisited Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Who is Man? for this, and was reminded of Heschel when I read this fantastic piece yesterday in the New York Times about Mendel Uminer and his “too many books”. Uminer, who was evicted from his apartment for possessing 10,000 books, reflects on the role of knowledge in his traditional Jewish upbringing:

In his teens, Uminer attended rabbinical seminary, where he embraced Talmudic study. Lessons began at 7 a.m. and ended with nights of vodka-fueled argument with the rabbis.

“My days were spent studying texts in Aramaic, Hebrew and Yiddish, and I sometimes went a whole year without seeing a woman’s face, but I was also disobedient and incorrigible,” he said. “I was always reading what I wanted to read, not only what they wanted me to read. But that’s where you assert yourself. Where you form your opinions. Where you make your own sense of the world.

The role of not only reading but argumentation reminded me of this distinctive aspect of rabbinic Jewish education. But this rigorous reading and argumentation does not lead to knowledge. It leads to wonder- which leads, in turn, to praise.

For Heschel wonder is what generates the possibility of any real religious thinking; he writes that “A scientific theory, once it is announced and accepted, does not have to be repeated twice a day. The insights of wonder must be constantly kept alive.”^[1] Theories might not need to be repeated twice daily- but prayers do. Prayer for Heschel and for all religious Jews is a necessary response to those things that cannot be nailed down by scientific theories.

To think of God’s knowledge as something concrete misses this dimension of knowledge as the first step in moving our minds beyond themselves. Put another way, God is not found in too many books. He’s found beyond them. But you really can’t get to the “beyond” apart from those 10,000 books.

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^[1] God in Search of Man, 49.