6.2 Psalm 139 and God's Knowledge

Let me skip a little forward in my Science and Scripture writing to the next topic: Quantum Indeterminancy and Free Will. My last post of these breadcrumbs was here. Earlier ones are here.
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6.2 Psalm 139 and God's Knowledge
Psalm 139 is the locus classicus or "classic text" on God's omniscience and omnipresence in Scripture. Here are some of the key verses to that end:

"You know my thought from afar... Before a word is on my tongue, behold Yahweh, you know it all." (139:2, 4)

"To what place might I go away from your spirit? And to where from your face might I flee?" (139:7)

"You formed my inside parts; you wove me in the womb of my mother."  (139:13)

These are perhaps the closest statements in Scripture to a claim that God knows everything. Certainly, if God knows what I am about to say before I say it -- and God knows my very thoughts -- then God's knowledge is thoroughgoing. It would seem that God is everywhere and knows everything there is to know. 

It is worth noting, however, that the Bible is not very explicit about God's omniscience. It would be nice to have a crisp statement. Psalm 147:5 says that God's understanding is without measure, which indicates that God's comprehension of the world is extremely vast indeed. In John 21:17, Peter indicates that Jesus "knows all things" in relation to his heart. 1 John 3:20 says the same thing about God the Father in relation to our hearts. If we take the words out of their context, we might take them to indicate God's omniscience.

It is a reminder that there is at least a distinction between some of the core beliefs we have as Christians and the actual words of Scripture. Belief in the omniscience of God is eminently reasonable and, as we have argued, is a natural inference of ex nihilo creation. But to some degree, it represents a systematization of biblical thinking more than an explicit teaching of Scripture. Perhaps it is the assumption of the New Testament and the later parts of the Old Testament. It is not clear that it was the assumption of the earliest parts of the Old Testament.

2. Psalm 139 is also the clearest biblical statement of the belief that God is everywhere present. In fact, perhaps the psalm implies that God knows everything precisely because he is everywhere present to observe everything. Does he gain knowledge in the psalm in part from what he sees as he observes everything everywhere?

If the psalmist could ascend up to the skies, God would be there (139:8). [1] If he would go to the farthest reaches of the earth, God would be there (139:9). What about the darkness, might I hide myself in the night? No, God sees in the darkness as if it were light (139:11-12). God is everywhere present.

God is also in our past, present, and future. God knew the psalmist when he was still in the womb. The psalm pictures God knitting the psalmist together as his body was being formed in the womb. We can also assume that God was fully aware of those who never made it out of the womb as well. The point is God's thorough knowledge of everything and his presence everywhere.

3. Why does the psalmist say all these things? We begin to get a sense of the purpose of the psalm when we get to verse 19. God knows everything. God is everywhere present. God knows the heart of the psalmist thoroughly. Will not God destroy the wicked? The evil pursue the psalmist, desiring his blood. 

These wicked individuals are not only after the psalmist, but they have rebelled against God himself (139:20). They have risen against God and set themselves against him. These verses suggest that Psalm 139 is ultimately a psalm of individual lament, calling on God to take action against his enemies, who are more significantly God's enemies.

The bottom line is that God knows that the intentions of the psalmist are pure. "Search me, O God. Know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts" (139:23). The psalmist is convinced that God will see that he is God's faithful and fully committed servant. Therefore, his enemies are in the wrong. They are God's enemies too and should be stopped.

4. We are blessed to have this psalm in Scripture, occasioned as it were by the struggles of a leader -- perhaps King David -- in a narrow window of history. Its message reaches far beyond that moment. This relatively short text more than any other place in Scripture proclaims that God is everywhere present and it gives us the most vivid picture of God's thoroughgoing knowledge of everything that goes on in the world. This knowledge extends to our very thoughts.

It does not, however, picture God determining our thoughts or actions. It portrays God as the weaver of the psalmist's inward parts in the womb but it does not extend that level of determinism to the psalmist's daily life. That is to say, it does not picture God dictating everything that happens. For the most part, God's knowledge in the psalm seems a matter of observation and participation rather than orchestration. The psalmist treats the future of his enemies as a matter as yet undecided. Indeed, the psalm aims to influence God's decisions toward them.

[1] A quick reminder that the headings of the psalms were added later. This is a "psalm of David" by heading, but this is later tradition and is not certain. Additionally, the New Testament never quotes the psalm. We cannot confirm that the psalmist was a "he," but it is by far the most likely option. 

G6. God knows every actual thing to know.

My continued walk through Christian theology in bullet points.
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God not only knows every possible thing to know. God knows every actual thing to know. God is "omniscient" or "all-knowing."

The last article pointed out that if God made everything out of nothing, then he knows all the inner workings of the universe because he designed them. He knows all the possibilities of the universe. He at least has middle knowledge, as we're defining it. He knows every possible universe.

In this article, we want to go a step further and suggest that God not only knows every possible future. He knows the actual future. Admittedly, we are delving into matters we know relatively nothing about. Could there be multiple universes that God created? Could each universe play out a different set of choices and events? We have no way of knowing at this time. In this article, we will simply work off the assumption that this universe can be considered independently of any other universes God has created.

One issue we need to face is the fact that the Bible does not exactly say that God knows everything about the future. True, 1 John 3:20 says that God knows everything, but the context is about God knowing the state of our heart in the present. John is not making a timeless philosophical statement but a comment about God's complete knowledge of us in the present.

Much theology in the past has been based on ripping verses like this one out of context. You take a biblical sentence out of its paragraph, out of its book, out of the situation in which it was written and artificially treat it as an absolute, philosophical statement. Such practices may see truths in the words, but they take those words well beyond the limits of what they actually meant. For example, Psalm 147:5 says that God's understanding has no limit: "there is no number to his understanding." While this statement points to incredible understanding on God's part, it is not a philosophical or propositional statement. It is in a poem, where figurative and even hyperbolic statements are the nature of the game.

Similarly, while much of Scripture makes it clear that God can predict the future, there is no biblical statement that says God knows everything about the future. Even Isaiah 46:10, which says that God can tell things yet to come, is not making an absolute philosophical statement. And once again, we notice that this declaration comes in poetic form.

My point is not at all to argue against God's knowledge of the actual future. I believe that God knows every precise detail of the future. My point is to indicate how indebted we are to church history for systematizing and filling in the details of biblical faith. Orthodox Christian faith begins with the Bible, but it did not end there. We owe much to the Spirit in the early church for working out many of the details that we now see more clearly in Scripture than they originally were. We are playing hermeneutical games with ourselves if we pretend we will find fully mature orthodox faith in the original meanings of the books of the Bible.

Open theism is a fairly recent movement that has arisen primarily for philosophical reasons but that has drawn our attention to the many places in the Bible where God does not seem to know everything about the future. Open theists believe that God has suspended his precise knowledge of the future so that we can be free to make moral choices. Their thinking is that if God knew beforehand whether we would choose to do something, then we couldn't possibly do anything else. Our action would be determined, which would undermine any meaningful sense that we are moral creatures. Accordingly, they suppose that God has by his own free will decided not to know what precise decisions we will make, so that we will be free to make true moral choices for which we are truly accountable.

There are indeed many passages in the Bible where it at least sounds like God does not know certain aspects of the future. Genesis does not picture God as omniscient, for God regrets he has created humanity (Gen. 6:6)--something you can't literally do if you fully knew humanity would do what they did. In Genesis 22:12, God tests Abraham to see how he will respond, and only after the test does God say, "Now I know that you fear God."

Most if not all of the Old Testament speaks of God in similar terms. It is possible that the Old Testament authors themselves did not yet understand God's omniscience. Nevertheless, we should do as most Christians throughout the centuries and take such language as anthropomorphic. [1] It is picturing God in human categories, in categories we can understand and to which we can relate. But God would not be God if such descriptions were literal descriptions. He would just be a really knowledgeable and powerful Guy. Even open theism, while taking such imagery more literally, still interprets it from within a philosophical framework.

Let us return to the philosophical issue that underlies the drive to open theism. Does God's "foreknowledge" of the future imply determinism? The school of Christian theology known as Calvinism would say, "Yes." Calvinism would say that God both knows the future and determines it. Indeed, they would say that God knows the future precisely because he has determined it. The open theist would say that God does not know the precise future because he does not want to determine it.

But in the end, this would seem to be a silly controversy. The reasoning here only makes sense to people because they limit God to the same flow of spacetime that we experience, where the future inevitably comes after the present. Relativity has drawn our attention to the fact that spacetime is not an absolute framework. Indeed, time can move faster for one part of the universe than it moves for another, and it may be possible for spacetime to bend such that we in effect can even look at the past.

What if God is "outside time," a notion that may have become fully grown in medieval theology but that fits well with the robust sense of creation out of nothing that has only become possible in the twentieth century?  If God has already observed the future, then his knowledge of it now does not precede it happening but comes after it happening. He has observed it, not determined it, like someone who watches the recording of a game at which they were present. They know what will happen in the recording because they have already seen it and are not determining it in any way.

The essence of God is not located within our spacetime continuum. True, God's Spirit walks through history with us from past to present to future. True, Jesus, God the Son, entered history with us and suspended his foreknowledge while on earth (e.g., Mark 13:32). But what mortal could say how it is that God knows all things or "when" he knows them?

What we can say with reasonable certainty is that Christian arguments over what "must" be the case about the relationship between foreknowledge and determinism appear foolish because, even from a human standpoint, they seem to assume that God is confined to the creation. But God existed before there was a creation. He is thus, in his essence, "outside" of the universe.

What then of emotion? Does God have emotions? We can of course become emotional because of the interaction of chemicals in our bodies. We can assume that God has no emotions of that sort. More generally, emotions are our reactions to experiences. But we remember from the last article that there is no distinction in God between head knowledge and experiential knowledge. He knows all things entirely at all points of his existence.

He responds but cannot literally be surprised. A fact cannot "come home" to him. He cannot literally be reminded of a past experience. Surely biblical pictures of God getting angry, being sad, being surprised, regretting, and so forth are all anthropomorphisms to some degree, meant to help us understand him in terms we can grasp. Again, we are not surprised to find that the Old Testament, which has a less precise understanding of God than the New, has more intense imagery of this sort.

Jesus, of course, had the normal range of human emotions. God the Son suspended his omniscience while he was on earth. For Jesus, there was a distinction between experiential and cognitive knowledge. We are not in a position to know whether God the Spirit also suspended his full knowledge of the future to walk through history with us. One can only speculate whether the biblical pictures of God's emotions might relate more to God as he inhabits this universe (God in his "immanence") than to God as he exists outside this universe (God in his "transcendence").

But we can be certain that God not only knows every possible thing that might happen in the universe. He knows the precise details of every actual thing that will happen from now to all eternity.

Next Sunday, G7. God can do anything he wants.

[1] Or more accurately, anthropopathic. An anthropomorphism is a portrayal of God in human form. Anthropopathism is portrayal of God with human emotion.

G5. God knows every possible thing to know.

Last week was about God's omnipotence. This week we move on to omniscience. Here's the developing map.
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God knows every possible thing to know. He knows every possible thing that could happen in this universe.

That doesn't quite get us to "all knowing" yet. That's the next article. God's "omniscience" is the Christian belief that God knows everything, both possible and actual.

We know that God knows everything that is possible because he created the world out of nothing. Creating the world out of nothing--including the emptiness--is not like when you or I make something in the kitchen or when some architect designs things. We not only have inherited the materials from the creation but we have inherited the laws of physics and chemistry that set the boundaries for what we can create and how materials interact with one another.

Not so for God. When God created the universe out of nothing, he created the laws of physics and chemistry. He created the boundaries for what materials can and cannot do. There is nothing that exists in this universe that God did not completely and utterly design. He therefore knows everything it is possible to know and even more.

Often when we think about God, we mistakenly assume that his knowledge is similar to the way we know things. For example, for us, there is a difference between knowing things with your head and knowing things experientially. But since God created the universe out of nothing, he created any experience you could possibly have.

This is a significant point. God created even experiences like suffering and sinning. The humanity of Jesus learned obedience and suffering on the cross (Heb. 5:8), but God the Father and God the Spirit did not learn anything on the cross. God created the possibility of experiencing suffering. God created the possibility of learning obedience.

Similarly, God created Satan and the angels who fell from heaven. God created the possibility that Satan would fall. God created the possibility that Adam would sin. Later, we will look at the question of how a good God could create the possibility of evil. For now, however, we need to point out that God must know what it feels like to sin because God created this possibility out of nothing. He designed the universe to have this possible experience in it.

If a person believes that God has built some freedom into the creation, which I do, then the causes and effects of the universe can play themselves out in more than one possible way. There become, as it were, multiple "possible universes." I believe that God has made it possible for human beings to make more than one possible choice, despite the causes working on them. It may even be possible on the subatomic level that God has put some indeterminacy into the creation itself. [1]

Because God created the universe, he at the very least knows every possible eventuality. He knows how the universe can bend because he created all those possibilities. This knowledge is sometimes called "middle knowledge." [2] He knows every possible world that could exist depending on the choices people make.

There are two other forms of God's knowledge that are sometimes discussed. Certainly God knows how he will freely act in this world, his "free knowledge." However, it is important to realize that what are sometimes called "necessary truths" (e.g., 2 + 2 = 4) are also products of God's creation. Some Christian philosophers inadvertently blur God with the creation by forgetting that, when he created the universe out of nothing, he freely created all the possible axioms, postulates, and consequent theorems of math and other so called necessary truths. Necessary truths thus exist as an act of God's free will just like all other truths.

An argument for the existence of God that fits with his knowledge of the world is the so called "argument from design" or "teleological" argument for God's existence. The idea is that the complexity of the universe, its design, suggests that it had an intelligent designer.

The argument was classically set forth in the 1700s by William Paley along in the lines of a clockmaker. [3] The idea is that when you find a clock, you assume there was a clockmaker that made it. So Paley argued that something as complex as the universe must have had a universe maker.

The theory of evolution at the very least made it more difficult to make this argument. Nevertheless, there is more to the design of the universe than the specific complexity of life. There are the rules of the universe itself, the laws of physics and chemistry, for example. [4] Whether you find this argument convincing or not as a proof, Christians have no problem seeing the order and complexity of the universe as a reflection of God's omniscience.

Next Sunday, G6. God knows every actual thing to know.

[1] The current consensus in the field of quantum physics is that there is a fundamental indeterminacy to the universe on the subatomic level. The beginnings of this trajectory in physics trace back to the "uncertainty principle" of Werner Heisenberg first set out in 1927.

[2] The idea of middle knowledge can fit both with those who believe God determines all human choices and those who believe God gives humans some freedom in their choices.

[3] In a work called, Natural Theology.

[4] Richard Swinburne has made this argument in The Existence of God, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University, 2004).

Practical Theology 5: God as All-Knowing

My series on theology that is practical continues...

Introduction
1. Is Theology Practical?
2. Why Believe in God?

God as Creator
3. God as Other
4. God as All-Powerful

5. God as All-Knowing (omniscient)
The fact that God created the world out of nothing has massive implications in relation to God's knowledge. As human beings in the world, we can accidentally invent or discover things because we did not create the elements of the creation or the rules for how they interact with each other. As human beings, we can know about things in theory from a far but then gain experiential knowledge of them up close.

Suffice it to say, none of these scenarios apply to God, who created the elements and created the rules for how they interact.  He created feelings. He created the possibility of sin. He created these out of nothing, meaning that he could have created them completely differently. The law of gravity, the law of the conservation of matter and energy, God does not operate within these rules. He created them.

The implication is that God thoroughly knows everything about this universe, the way it works, and the way it feels. God knows what it feels like to sin because he created, out of nothing, the possibility of sinning. The fact that God created the universe out of nothing implies that he knows every possible eventuality in this universe and that there is no distinction for him between theoretical knowledge and experiential knowledge. God does not learn anything when he becomes human as Jesus nor when he dies on the cross.

Christians throughout the centuries have also believed that God not only knows every possible eventuality in the world but every actual event that will take place in history. Does God only know every possible universe or does he know the actual universe as it will unfold in history? Does this question even make sense or are there multiple universes playing themselves out right now with different eventualities?

A group of Christian thinkers called "open theists" have suggested that God has decided not to know the future so that he can experience it with us and so that we can have free will. They are following a line of thought we will discuss in the next section as well, a line of thought that believes that if God knows the actual future, then that future is determined for us, and we cannot have free will. Those who think this way thus fall into two camps--those who then conclude that God has already decided the future and knows it and those who believe God has not decided the future and thus doesn't know it.

We take the orthodox position of the centuries that God knows the actual future yet does not determine it.  It is probably important to point out, however, that the open theists have strong biblical evidence in their favor. That is to say, if you take the Old Testament literally, it often does not present God as knowing everything that is going to happen.

God does not seem to know where Adam is in the Garden of Eden (Gen. 3:9). God is sorry that he created humanity right before the Flood in Genesis 6:6--something that cannot be literally true if God knew ahead of time that humanity would do what it did. Indeed, emotions are responses to experiential moments, which God does not have if he knows the actual future from eternity past. In that sense, all the presentations of God's emotions in Scriptures, if taken literally, would preclude total omniscience.

While we thus are sympathetic to the desire of open theists to take this biblical imagery literally--after all, the biblical authors themselves probably understood it that way--it is probably better to take this biblical language as more figurative and anthropopathic. It is God speaking to us in terms we can understand. It reminds us of the fact that God is "other" and that even the Bible often does not give us a fully literal picture of him.

Indeed, this is probably another area where parts of the Old Testament do not have as full an understanding of God's knowledge as parts of the New Testament.  Psalm 139 only talks about how immense God's knowledge is. It does not say it extends to every single thing, including everything that will happen in the future.

Even further, it took later Christianity to fill out the picture of God's omniscience in philosophical terms. A comment like 1 John 3:20 that God knows all things was made in ordinary language, not the absolute language of philosophy.  When you consider the immensity of Scripture and then consider how few comments like 1 John 3:20 there are, you begin to realize how much we are reliant on the church of the centuries in addition to Scripture, even on as central a belief as God's omniscience.

There are serious practical implications to this realization. It gives us a more balanced understanding of Scripture, particularly of how figurative some of its statements are.  It gives us a sense of the flow of revelation and how the prophets of the Old Testament did not understand as much as the apostles of the New Testament. No verse of Scripture should be read and applied in isolation from consideration of all the others. It gives us a sense of how important the earliest centuries of Christianity were in refining what we believe as Christians. The failure to realize such things arguably is one of the most significant reasons for the immense disunity of Christian denominationalism today.

The practical implications of God's omniscience are immense.  God is not only powerful enough to help us in any situation, he knows exactly what to do.  Romans 8:26 tells us that when we pray, the Spirit intercedes for us because we do not have enough knowledge to be able to pray as we should. God's knowledge of all things actual is part of his sovereignty. God not only has the power to be in charge of the universe. He knows exactly what to do in the implementation of that power.  It implies that God's will will always be effective.

We are also reminded of how so many Christians--including Christian thinkers--do not realize the full implications of God creating the world out of nothing and God thus being "other."  We tend to assume without realizing it that God is part of the universe and that the way of this universe is a given. We ascribe aspects to God's "nature" that are really aspects of this universe.  In reality, we have no conception, no point of reference to realize how differently God could have created things in every way--and perhaps has in other universes.


6. God as Eternal
7. God the Spirit
8. Three in One
9. God as Love
10. God as Just