ABSTRACT
Omniscience is one of the primary traditional attributes of God. In common parlance, God is ‘all-knowing,’ a being who knows everything there is to know, past, present, and future. Omniscience is one element of intellectual perfection, but an especially interesting element because it raises a number of questions and puzzles. One set of problems is that omniscience seems to con ict with other divine attributes such as timelessness, perfection, and immateriality. For example, it appears that a timeless being could not know that the test is over since a timeless being would never be later in time than the test. A perfect being could not know that something is frightening since he would never feel fear. An immaterial being could not know that the fabric is scratchy since he has no skin to feel the scratchiness of the material. These considerations lead to another problem. It is not clear that it is possible for any being to be omniscient if knowers in different positions in time or space know different things, each of which differs from what is knowable by a being outside of time and space. Further, some things may be possible objects of knowledge only for a certain person, such as knowing what it is like to be me. A third problem arises if divine omniscience includes infallible foreknowledge: knowing the future in a way that cannot be mistaken. Infallible foreknowledge appears to make it impossible for the future to be otherwise than the way God knows it to be, thereby con icting with human free will. The puzzles above might pressure us to narrow the scope of knowledge of a maximally perfect being, such as eliminating knowledge of the contingent future, or eliminating knowledge that is temporally or spatially relative or relative to beings with the dispositions of nite creatures. But there are other considerations that might lead us to expand the scope of what an omniscient being knows. Knowing the entire past, present, and future might not be suf cient for omniscience. Possibly, an omniscient being not only knows what did happen, but also what would have happened if certain other things had happened instead, and an omniscient being not only knows what will happen, but also what would happen if certain other things happen rst. So omniscience might not be limited to knowing the actual path of the history of the world,
but might include knowing the paths of the other histories that might have occurred, including those paths that branch off at any time in the future. If the omniscient being is also the creator of the world, he would know the entire history of each world he could have created. We think a perfect being is omniscient because omniscience is a cognitive perfection, but omniscience is not the only cognitive perfection. Whatever reasons we may have to think that God is omniscient may also lead us to think that God has the perfection of other states of intellect such as understanding and wisdom. These features of the divine intellect get very little attention in the contemporary literature because they do not lead to the puzzles that arise from the idea of knowing everything, but they are arguably even more important than omniscience.
