Omniscience: by nature and decree

The essential fact of God’s omniscience is one of his best known attributes. This, and other ‘omnis’ are often listed together (omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence). The term omniscience is made up of the stem ‘omni’ meaning all and ‘science’ referring to knowledge. This fact about God simply means that he knows everything. A question you may or may not have asked is this: how is God omniscient?

As we have already established, the simplest answer is that he is omniscient by nature, that is, part of what it means to be the Triune God of Scripture is to be all-knowing. His omniscience is not a contingent reality but an essential reality. To labour the point only a moment longer, he couldn’t be other than that because he would cease to be who he is.

The second element, which we shall now interrogate, is that of omniscience by decree. To put it as simply as possible by way of analogy, he knows the whole story because he wrote the whole story. He knows the whole painting because he painted the whole painting. The Christian religion is a Theistic religion, though many today flirt with Deistic concepts. In Deistic thought, ‘God’ is thought of as transcendent but not immanent. That means that ‘God’ is thought of as existing and having created the world, but not being directly involved in it, or in any way accessible, and certainly not offering a relationship. However, many folks today, and even some professing Christians, think of God as acting this way. Let’s stage a hypothetical dialogue:

Deist: I believe that if there is a God, or something like that, that it created the initial conditions and created the world, but otherwise has basically no involvement in the goings on down here. It’s like winding up a clock or spinning a spinning top, ‘God’ starts the process and then sits back and watches. I suppose it would have the ability to have vast knowledge, if not all knowledge, by virtue of being able to see and watch all that happens on Earth.

Theist: God not only created all that exists, but he has perfect knowledge of all things because they exist by his decree, similarly to how an author has perfect knowledge of their story because they are the one that wrote it all. We know this about God because he is involved in his world, indeed not only did he take on flesh in the person of Jesus and live life with us, but he has preserved for us his word, the Bible, in which we can learn these things about his character and nature.

If my esteemed reader is more thoroughly versed in Deism than I, and would like to suggest a correction on that model, by all means! If I have strawmanned that position, it has been by accident.

One critical distinction between these two models is the means of knowledge. The Deistic model has God knowing by watching, that is, learning. The Theistic model has God knowing by decree. If the attention to this point seems repetitive, it is owing to the complexity of what comes next.

Some believe that some of God’s knowledge is learned. There are many systems that philosophers have come up with to try to rationalise and defend these models, but to boil it down, most systems incorporate at least one of the two follow propositions:

1. God is eternal and therefore has perfect knowledge of the future before it happens, so he can look into the future and know what certain outcomes will be on that basis.
2. Before God has decreed anything, while there is still nothing in existence apart from the Triune God, he can know the potential and probable actions of the creatures he would create, though they have not yet been created.

There is one essential problem common to both of these ideas. In both of them, God learns. In the first model, he learns by looking down the corridors of a universe he has actually created to see (and learn) what actions or outcomes will take place. In the second, he is looking down the corridors of a universe he hasn’t actually created, which brings up challenging philosophical problems.

To put it simply, that’s like an author reacting to the independent thoughts and actions of a character she hasn’t yet created to form the basis of her decision to write. The existence of the character must logically precede the actions of the character, and the character’s existence is contingent upon the author decreeing them.

If you have made it this far, congratulations. We shall hasten to pick up these various strands we have been throwing about and draw some conclusions.

Firstly, it must be understood unequivocally that God cannot learn. Omniscience is essential to God, and so learning is impossible for him. He has, and must have, perfect and infallible knowledge of all things, past, present and future. If you are presently flicking through your Bible to proof-text Jesus ‘learning obedience’, then perhaps we should dedicate a subsequent reflection to the realities involved in the hypostatic union.

Secondly, it should hopefully be seen by now that the Triune God revealed in Scripture is a wonderful God whose wisdom surpasses comprehension, and whose εὐδοκίαν (good pleasure) is the revealed basis of his will, by which he decrees all that comes to pass. (Eph 1:9, Ps 115:3, 135:6, 2 Chronicles 20:6, Ps 22:28, 1 Kings 22:20-34, Acts 2:23-24, 4:27-28, Gen 45:5, 50:20, Exod 4:21, John 15:16, Eph 2:10).

I have included here a number of references throughout Scripture, and they are only a small sample, showing how God is the ultimate determiner of the course of history, even down to apparent accidents and coincidences.

O Christian, how great and mighty a God you worship! Praise him, all creatures here below.