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Old 10-20-2005, 05:25 PM   #214 (permalink)
asaris
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Sorry Mantus, I missed one of your posts. There are two reasons why my knowledge is the same as that of an omniscient being. One is the simple observation that if we're going to be consistent here, the word 'know' is the two sentences "I know x" and "An omniscient being knows x" has to mean the same thing. The second is that a necessary condition for something's being knowledge is that it has to be justified true belief. But it's the true belief part that's the sticking point here, so we don't need to worry about whatever else it is that makes something knowledge. Of course, the omniscient being knows a lot more than I do, but that hardly entails that I don't know anything.

Of course, God also has a whole lot more second-order knowledge than I do, especially about the future. He not only knows everything, he knows that he knows everything. But if we postulate that I know some things about the future, this isn't really a problem for this discussion.

You write in another post that I missed "The only real possibility for omniscience would be total knowledge, which would require the universe to be finite, yet if knowledge is finite then it's based on faith." It's probably worth saying that omniscience is simply knowing everything there is to know. If there's no such thing as middle knowledge, it hardly impeaches our hypothetical being's omniscience that she doesn't have it. But further, I don't know why omniscience requires the universe to be finite. We've traditionally said that God is infinite, and he's omniscient, so he could presumably know an infinite amount of things. But then it must not be impossible for a being to know an infinite number of things. But even if this isn't true, I was under the impression that the universe was in fact finite, so the omniscient being doesn't have to have infinite knowledge. And I have no idea why you say that if knowledge is finite it has to be based on faith.
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