Propositional knowledge and omniscience

Some theologians define divine omniscience as God's knowing all and only those propositions which are true. I call this the 'propositional' conception of omniscience. I think it's crap. Why?

Think of the widely different kinds of knowledge human beings have. I know that there was a French revolution. I know my wife. I know how to play guitar. I know where my school is. So, though I certainly do have 'propositional knowledge' (knowledge that something is or isn't the case), that is only a tiny piece of my knowledge. Much of my knowledge is in fact skill at navigating the world, or a certain relational one-ness with the object of my knowledge.
I can form propositions about my wife if I have to, but my knowledge of her is primarily a function of my having lived with her day to day for the past 3+ years.

So what happens when traditional epistemologists privilege propositional knowledge? Well, they take it to be the only form of 'true' knowledge, and therefore attribute IT and only IT to God (since God is, after all, a perfect being--wouldn't want to attribute improper forms of knowledge to the deity, right?). And what we end up with then, is a picture of God 'knowing' the world, and 'knowing' us at arm's length. God knows us propositionally.
But think about how omniscience could better be described relationally. Instead of my relationship with God being mediated by those pesky propositions, God could know me immediately, like I know my friends and my world. Propositions are a byproduct of the world and of thought, not the primary instance of knowledge. Therefore God's omniscience isn't primarily a doctrine about God's relationship to the set of all true propositions, but is rather a doctrine about God's relationship to the world.

God is all-loving, therefore God knows all, and this kind of knowledge is also presence with--God knows us because God lives in our midst, so to speak. God's omniscience is not the knowledge of a distant sovereign, but is rather the deep knowledge of love. God loves us and the whole Creation. Therefore God's omniscience cannot be divorced from God's omnipresence (both are aspects of God's love for the world). Propositional renderings of omniscience however, assume that God's knowledge of the world and presence in it and with it can be separated.

The truth is much more beautiful.

Peace,
-Daniel-

Death and the Tree of Life

(1) The central theological assumption of the second Creation story (Genesis chap. 2ff) is that death is bad.
(2) The Tree of Life thus guarantees the man and the woman's immortality, so long as they can eat it.
(3) Procreation, that is, multiplication, is in principle pre-Fall.

I take (1), (2) and (3) to be uncontroversially part of the narrative declarations or assumptions of the second Creation story. A problem appears when these three points are combined with the observation that the Earth is finite. That is, (1) (death's badness) stands in tension with the combination of (2) and (3). The solution requires (in the narrative sense of necessity) a change in either (2) or (3). That is, either procreation must come to an end, thereby preventing overpopulation, or immortality must come to an end, again thereby preventing overpopulation.

All of this is a way of saying that, so long as procreation is possible, death must enter the world. The narrative logic requires it.

Or to put it more negatively, the woman and the man were screwed from the get-go.

The 'goodness' of Creation held within it the seed of its own undoing.

There was, as it were, a shrewd serpent in the Garden.

Boyd on foreknowledge in the philosophical tradition

Greg Boyd shares some helpful reflections on the question of divine foreknowledge over at his blog (see here). More specifically, he highlights the historical background to contemporary formulations of this idea. In brief, visual metaphors for knowledge (which we still have many of in English) encouraged a misconception of foreknowledge on the basis of (largely incorrect) views about how vision works.

"[S]everal Neoplatonistic philosophers (Iamblichus, Proclus and Ammonius) used this theory of eyesight and knowing to explain how the gods can foreknow future free actions. They argued that the nature of divine knowledge is determined not by what is known but by the nature of the knower. Since they assumed the gods were absolutely unchanging, they concluded that the gods knew things in an absolutely unchanging manner, despite the fact that the reality the gods know is in fact perpetually changing. This allowed them to affirm that the future partly consisted of indefinite [...] truths (viz. open possibilities) while nevertheless insisting that the gods knew the future in an exhaustively definite, unchanging way." (emphases his)

I should note that this is precisely how Thomas Aquinas thought about foreknowledge (something he inherited partially through the Islamic Aristotelians--al-Kindi, Avicenna, Averroes, et al.--and partially through Boethius, who got it from the Neoplatonists). That is, roughly speaking, Aquinas construes knowledge as occurring according to a mode of being appropriate to the knower. It's easy to see how a doctrine of divine timelessness and impassibility (which goes back, generally speaking, to Aristotle) would thus lead to the traditional conception of foreknowledge, in spite of the future's open-endedness (typically affirmed in Arminian or Arminian-friendly circles).
Boyd's assessment is, in this case, spot on:

"The view is, I’m convinced, completely incoherent.
[...]
Once we abandon the ancient view of seeing and knowing as active processes, it becomes clear that God’s knowledge is perfect if, and only if , it perfectly conforms to the nature of what is known. So if possibilities are real, then God’s knowledge is perfect if, and only if, God knows them as possibilities." (emphases his--I would qualify his bit about seeing and knowing as encouraging us to abandon viewing them as purely active processes; they're partially passive and partially active processes I would argue)

Read the whole thing. I've come to reject some aspects of Boyd's libertarianism concerning free will, but I do believe indeterminacy and open-endedness are woven into the fabric of Creation, and so his conclusions concerning divine foreknowledge seem to me quite correct.

Peace,
-Daniel-

Wright on sex and wealth

I recommend to my readers the unofficial NT Wright page. Bishop Wright is one of the foremost orthodox Jesus and Paul scholars of the world, and many of his writings have been very helpful for me. On said page, you can find a link to his 'Communion and Koinonia' sermon, which includes the following incisive remark:

"A footnote on sexual behaviour in Paul’s world. If one looks at the ancient world there is of course evidence of same-sex behaviour in many contexts and settings. But it is noticeable that the best-known evidence comes from the high imperial days of Athens on the one hand and the high imperial days of Rome on the other (think of Nero, and indeed Paul may have been thinking of Nero). I have argued elsewhere, against the view that Paul was quiescent politically, that he held a strong implicit and sometimes explicit critique of pagan empire in general and of Rome in particularly; and clearly denunciation of pagan sexual behaviour was part of that (e.g. Philippians 3.19-21). I just wonder if there is any mileage in cultural analysis of homosexual behaviour as a feature of cultures which themselves multiply and degenerate in the way that great empires are multiply degenerate, with money flowing in, arrogance and power flowing out, systemic violence on the borders and systematic luxury at the centre. Part of that imperial arrogance in our own day, I believe, is the insistence that we, the empire, the West, America, or wherever, are in a position to tell the societies that we are already exploiting in a thousand different ways that they should alter their deep-rooted moralities to accommodate our newly invented ones. There is something worryingly imperial about the practice itself and about the insistence on everybody else endorsing it. It is often said that the poor want justice while the rich want peace. We now have a situation where two-thirds of the world wants debt relief and one-third wants sex. That is, I think, a tell-tale sign that something is wrong at a deep structural level."

(Zing!) Read the whole thing.

Peace,
-Daniel-