Omniscience

Omniscience is the attribute of knowing all truths. Its scriptural expressions are pervasive and vivid: "you know my sitting down and my rising up, you understand my thought afar off" (Psalm 139:2); "even the hairs of your head are all numbered" (Matthew 10:30); "with Him are the keys of the unseen; none knows them but He... not a leaf falls but He knows it" (Qur'an 6:59).

The sharpest problem it raises is the relation of divine foreknowledge to human freedom. If God knew infallibly a thousand years ago what I will do tomorrow, it is difficult to see how I could do otherwise; and if I could not, it is difficult to see how the act is free or how I can justly be judged for it. Four families of answer recur.

The first is that God is outside time. Boethius, in the Consolation of Philosophy, and Aquinas after him, held that God knows all events in an eternal present rather than in advance, so that divine knowledge is more like observation than prediction and no more determines its object than my seeing you sit down makes you sit. Critics object that this relocates the problem rather than solving it, since eternal knowledge is still fixed.

The second is Molinism, from the sixteenth-century Jesuit Luis de Molina, which posits middle knowledge: God knows what any free creature would freely do in any possible circumstance, and can therefore providentially arrange circumstances without determining choices. The ensuing De Auxiliis controversy with the Dominicans was so bitter that Rome eventually forbade either side to call the other heretical and left the question open.

The third accepts determination. Strands of Calvinist theology and the Ash'ari tradition hold that God's decree settles what happens, and locate freedom in acting according to one's own will rather than in the ability to have done otherwise, a compatibilist move. The Ash'ari doctrine of kasb, acquisition, attempts a middle way in which God creates the act and the human being acquires it and is answerable for it; critics from the Mu'tazila onward have questioned whether the term names anything.

The fourth denies that there is anything there to be known. Open theism, developed in the 1990s by Clark Pinnock, John Sanders and Gregory Boyd, holds that future free acts are not yet determinate and that not knowing them is therefore no failure of omniscience. It has been sharply contested within evangelical theology, where its opponents regard it as a diminishment of God and its defenders regard it as the honest reading of the biblical narratives in which God responds, relents and is grieved.

Article one reports the historical De Auxiliis dispute between Jesuit Molinists and Dominican critics, a controversy Rome eventually declined to settle. The objection that keeps Molinism contested among philosophers today is different from, and sharper than, the one the Dominicans originally pressed, and it is worth stating on its own terms.

Robert Adams's 1977 paper on middle knowledge raised what is now generally called the grounding objection. Molinism requires that there be, prior to God's decision to create anything, definite truths about what any possible free creature would freely choose in any circumstance, the "counterfactuals of freedom" that supply God's middle knowledge. Adams's challenge is to ask what makes such a counterfactual true before the creature exists and before the choice is ever made. An ordinary truth is grounded in something, a fact about the world, a law, an actual event, but a counterfactual about a genuinely undetermined choice seems to have nothing available to ground it: not the creature's actual choice, since it never occurs in that circumstance, and not the creature's nature, since a free choice is defined as not settled by prior facts about the chooser.

Molinists have replied in more than one way, some denying that such counterfactuals need external grounding at all, others proposing they are brute truths built into the space of possible worlds from the start. Neither response has persuaded critics generally, and the debate remains substantially where Adams left it: a live and unresolved technical dispute, distinct from the older theological worry about grace and merit that drove the original sixteenth-century argument article one describes.