Who is the all knowing being

But then, in view of 6 , no one, not even Jones himself, is able to make it false that Jones will mow his lawn tomorrow. If there is nothing Jones can do to avoid mowing his lawn tomorrow, then he does not do so freely.

This action was chosen arbitrarily, and so the argument is supposed to show that no action that God knows ahead of time will be performed is free; divine foreknowledge is incompatible with human free action. This argument requires a number of nontrivial assumptions. So there is no lack of places for an objector to attack, and, in fact, philosophers have tried various ways of discrediting the argument, none of them entirely convincing. But it has proven remarkably difficult to provide clear and persuasive principles for determining which propositions apparently about the past are not completely or really about the past.

An alternative defended by the sixteenth-century Jesuit, Luis de Molina, is to deny 5 , the principle that accidental necessity is closed under entailment of contingent propositions Freddoso Of the assumptions required for the argument, however, 5 has seemed to many to be the least controversial, at least if we really do grasp the modality of accidental necessity.

For a simple argument against 5 , see Wierenga Finally, it remains open to deny 6 , to hold that even if it is already accidentally necessary that Jones mow his lawn tomorrow, he nevertheless has it within his power to do something, for example, spend the day indoors, which is such that if he were to do it, it would be false that he mows his lawn Plantinga Jones can remain indoors tomorrow, and if he were to do that, the past would have been different; in particular, God would never have believed then that Jones would mow his lawn tomorrow.

See also Mavrodes for a defense of the claim that events of the past are now preventable. Some philosophers object, however, to this sort of counterfactual power over the past. We have just looked at three strategies for rejecting the argument. Some theistic philosophers, however, are happy to accept it.

Plantinga , Zagzebski , and others claim that an exactly analogous argument could be constructed using the premiss that 80 years ago it was then true, and so now accidentally necessary, that God eternally knows that Jones mows his lawn tomorrow.

According to this revision of the argument, divine eternal knowledge would be as incompatible with human free action as divine foreknowledge is; so the Boethian response leaves the argument unchallenged. In recent years perhaps the most widely accepted response to the argument is to accept it but to deny that omniscience extends to knowledge of the future.

Swinburne and holds that omniscience does not include foreknowledge of future free actions. Hasker , has been a leading figure in this group, as have been the contributors to Pinnock We saw at the outset of this essay that one of the motivations for attributing omniscience to God is to be able to develop a doctrine of divine providence.

For a fuller discussion of these issues, see the entries on foreknowledge and free will and medieval theories of future contingents. Philosophical issues involving foreknowledge and free action are of long-standing interest, with a history of discussion from late antiquity through the present day.

Several other questions about omniscience are of more recent vintage, some of them raising more technical issues. This section will consider four more recent objections. As time goes by, many things change. It is tempting to think that as things thus change, propositions reporting what is the case change in truth value. In a provocative paper, Kretzmann argued that being omniscient requires knowing different things at different times, and thus is incompatible with being immutable.

This would constitute an objection to classical theism, according to which omniscience and immutability are both taken to be central attributes of God. If anything changes, then it is not the case that all truths are eternal. God knows all truths, hence also those which are such only for today. He could not apprehend these truths yesterday, since at that time they were not truths—but there were other truths instead of them. Thus he knows, for example, that I write down these thoughts, but yesterday he knew not that, but rather that I was going to write them down later.

And similarly he will know tomorrow that I have written them down. Brentano, Philosophische Untersuchungen , English translation in Chisholm According to this objection, then, some propositions change their truth values over time, and a being who knows all true propositions accordingly changes beliefs.

Variations on this objection have also been given by Kenny , Prior , and Grim That is the subject of the next section; it will be convenient to consider replies to the two arguments together.

Kretzmann raised a second problem for omniscience. He illustrates this with the example of what Jones knows when he knows that he himself is in the hospital. What Jones knows is not simply the proposition that Jones is in the hospital, for he might fail to believe this proposition if his hospitalization is for amnesia. Thus, what Jones knows is supposed to be something other than the proposition that Jones is in the hospital and something that no one other than Jones can know.

Accordingly, if omniscience requires knowing everything that anyone knows, God cannot be omniscient without being identical to Jones. Put more carefully, the objection purports to show the incompatibility of divine omniscience with the existence of persons distinct from God who have self-knowledge.

In the version advocated by Grim , given that we do have first-person or de se knowledge, there is no omniscient God. Given the structural similarity between the objection from present-time knowledge and the objection from first-person knowledge it is not surprising that philosophers have given parallel replies. See Sosa a,b on the analogy between first-person and present-time knowledge. What is perhaps more surprising is that it has, for the most part, been opponents of the argument who have attempted to supply the details of exactly what the objects of knowledge and belief are in the case of knowledge of the present and of oneself.

On the one hand, perhaps the propositions we know when we know what day it is are eternally true. In this case, what changes is our access to the propositions in question, rather than the propositions themselves. Wierenga 48—53 has proposed an account of the objects of present-time and first-person belief according to which these propositions involve haecceities or individual essences of persons and times.

On this view, one gets a first-person belief by believing a proposition including his or her own haecceity, and one gets a present-time belief by believing a proposition involving the haecceity of a moment of time at the time in question. This leaves it open that God believes the same propositions we do. He does not get a first-person belief about someone else, because the relevant propositions do not include his own haecceity.

Means of processing all the information that he is observing at once to know. To do that he would have to take up all the space in that universe, and be universe itself bigger the universe, larger the being has to be to observe and process everything what's going on. This could be reduced to: that being that is the only thing in the universe that he is in that knows everything about itself could be considered 'all knowing'. He would then be all knowing as there would not be anything he does not know in that universe.

The possibility of an all-knowing being appears to lead to a contradiction because the being would have to have a "mental" representation that included itself including the "mental" representation and any parts of itself that are not part of that representation and of any parts of the universe that are not parts of the being itself. In short, the being would have to be bigger than itself, which is a contradiction.

The concept of an all-knowing being is therefore not logically contradictory, although it does have some major implications for what such a being could be like. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Is the concept of an all-knowing being logically impossible?

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