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    Omniscience is incompatible with immutability. — Carmelics
    Home/Divine Attributes
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    Omniscience is incompatible with immutability.

    Divine Attributes
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.As things change over time, propositions reporting what is the case change in truth value.
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    • 2.Being omniscient requires knowing different things at different times.
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    • 3.Knowing different things at different times requires changing, which is incompatible with being immutable.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.An omniscient God can know all tensed truths eternally by knowing the complete four-dimensional structure of time from an atemporal vantage point.
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    • 2.Knowing that 'event E occurs at time T' is a timeless propositional fact that does not change truth value, even as temporal beings experience E's occurrence as present, then past.
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    • 3.Boethius and Aquinas demonstrate that eternal knowledge of temporal events requires no successive acts of knowing and thus no change in the knower.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.The argument assumes that omniscience requires knowing indexical propositions like 'it is now T,' but an atemporal being has no 'now' relative to which such indexicals function.
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    • 2.Norman Kretzmann's own analysis, when extended by Brian Leftow, shows that an eternal God knows all events 'at once' in eternity, making temporal indexicals inapplicable to divine cognition rather than evidence of divine ignorance.
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    Divine Attributes

    Related

    An omniscient God can know all tensed truths eternally by knowing the complete f...As things change over time, propositions reporting what is the case change in tr...Being omniscient requires knowing different things at different times.Boethius and Aquinas demonstrate that eternal knowledge of temporal events requi...
    +4 moreShow less
    Knowing different things at different times requires changing, which is incompat...Knowing that 'event E occurs at time T' is a timeless propositional fact that do...Norman Kretzmann's own analysis, when extended by Brian Leftow, shows that an et...The argument assumes that omniscience requires knowing indexical propositions li...

    Similar

    God cannot change (God is immutable).88%God is immutable with respect to existence.88%God is physically immutable.88%If something is immutable, it cannot be different from what it is85%

    Source

    AI-extracted
    SEP: omniscience
    View source passageHide passage
    Knowledge of all true propositions would seem to include knowledge of all truths about the future, at least if there are truths about the future. Thus omniscience would seem to include foreknowledge. There is a long tradition, however, of philosophers who have thought that divine foreknowledge was incompatible with human free action, or, at any rate, they took arguments for the incompatibility seriously enough so as to require either disarming them or limiting what is involved in divine omniscience. (Similar reasoning might be given to argue that God’s foreknowledge is incompatible with some o...

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit