Let’s reflect on how God is all knowing.

I’ve heard some very erudite Christians quote Isaiah 1:18 “Come now, and let us reason together,” as proof of God’s has some limitation in viewing the future. They usually go on to explain His method of presenting the future to the prophets in one of two ways. The first is what I would call the deterministic butterfly effect. God can see everything, and He is capable of seeing how the most seemingly inconsequential action multiply over time to have massively Biblical affects. In other words, He can do the math of how the vibration of a butterfly’s wings in Indonesia can hundreds of years later cause the locust plague in Egypt. The second is what I dub the actuarial explanation. In this one God knows the probabilities of something happening to the point of exactness. In this theory the betrayal of Jesus was just that God knew that out of twelve people it was virtually guaranteed that someone would betray him. It just happened to be Judas.

I (and I think most Christians) intuitively feel something wrong with these interpretations of omniscience. Both see God as trapped with in the universe and the limitations of space and time. They fail to realize that God created the universe outside of Himself. Note that space and time are often spoken of together. That’s because they are intertwined. Time is measured by passage through space and space is measured by the time it takes for light to pass through it.

God being the creator of this universe is a being who transcends the universe, and as such transcends space and time. His existence is outside of the universe and from time to time He will reach into it like an artist adding a brush stroke, but He is not of this universe any more than an artist is physically part of his painting. This means that God views all space and all time in the same way we would look on a painting. He sees everything everywhere all at once. He can interact at one place and time, and He can see how it ripples through the rest of eternity. Or He can decide how and when He wants something to occur and then set the situations in the past to assure it happens. It is this aspect of being outside the universe that allows Him to be everywhere all the time at once. This coupled with Him giving us freewill means that from time to time we do surprise Him when we react in a way He did not expect. It is in those times He smiles and says, “Come let us reason together.”

#God, #TimeAndSpace, #Omniscience