omniscience

   Omniscience is easily defined as the knowledge of all truth (though we should also add that God has personal knowledge of everything). Christian philosophers have wrestled, however, with various problems that have been posed: one is the famous problem of foreknowledge and freedom, another is the problem of indexicals - can God know what I know when I know that I am sitting here now? The point is that it is not merely an arbitrary matter of expression that I report what I know by the words 'I am sitting here now'; no, this reflects part of my knowledge, since I might have forgotten my name and know myself only as 'I'. It appears that only I can know myself this way (God knows only himself as 'I') and, consequently, it appears that there are truths that I, but not God, can know. One response to these problems is to say that an agent is omniscient if and only if that agent knows all that it is possible for him or her to know, but this is unsatisfactory since it appears that there are many truths that it is impossible for us to know (for example, about God's nature) and one naturally assumes that, even if we knew everything possible for us to know, this ignorance would still be enough to prevent us from being correctly counted as omniscient.

   See foreknowledge and freedom, problem of; God, nature of

   Further reading: Craig 1987 and 1991; Hill, Daniel J. 2005; Rudavsky 1985