by sabastious 35 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
Could you please explain the distinction you are making between "all-knowing", "know all things," and "knowing all"?
Quite! LOL
Here's the definition from my Mac Dictionary.
omniscient |?m'n?s??nt|
adjective
knowing everything : the story is told by an omniscient narrator.
By the way, omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence are all linked. You cannot know everything without being everywhere. If you know everything and are everywhere you are all powerful.
Blessings in Christ,
Stephen
If you know everything and are everywhere you are all powerful.
That's not necessarily true. This omniscient and omnipresent entity could merely be designated to an observer and nothing else.
-Sab
Heaven,
Don't you think the question in Genesis to which you refer might be similar to a parent saying, "Johnny, have you been playing outside when I told you to stay in?" knowing full well what the facts were but wanting Johnny to admit his disobedience?
Ding, yes, perhaps. But this has never been my thoughts when reading Genesis. It was the same thing as God not realizing Adam would be lonely. Why would you make a mate for everything on the Earth BUT the man?
SABASIOUS,
I don't remember if the bible says that but what I do remember is that I learned in Catholicism is that God is all-knowing and all-powerful (omniscient and omnipotent). I don't really believe this and I think this teaching was designed to make little kids feel guilt and fear over what they were thinking. Because, if God is all-knowing, then he knows all your sinful thoughts.
I have a problem with this.
I guess we are knee deep in semantics.
To KNOW one must know SOMETHING.
Things which have not become.....which do not yet exist....may be predicted in advance without actually being KNOWN.
You plan a baby, for instance. You and your wife want to have a son and will name it Fred and will send the child to college to become a doctor.
Are these things you KNOW in advance?
Certainly not in the purest sense of KNOWING.
The child might be a girl. Might not want to go to college and might even have an accident before reaching college age.
Parents who PLAN the identity and career of a child do so---not in terms of knowledge--but, in terms of a plan of purpose which suits their personal goals.
Making out GOD to be Ominiscient is creating a category filled with superlatives incarnate. Stands to reason people get carried away with the declension of good/better/best and project ALL-KNOWING onto this being.
But, God---were he to be a reality--would be constrained by what does not yet exist or come to pass.
IF MAN TRULY HAS FREE WILL---God could only know in terms of branches of CONTINGENCY. These contingencies would render actual KNOWLEDGE as mere speculative countermeasures like a chessplayer. This is distinctively separate from actual knowledge of fact.
But, discussing these matters with religious people is about as productive as writing your memoirs with your finger in lake water.
I have to agree with Terry as regards on what it is like discussing these matters with religious folk, especially since we’re talking about viewing things through the very thin and flimsy JW philosophy of “where is that in the Bible?” There's no productivity in discussing thus on this level because most religious people don't understand what it means to have a belief system with holy writings. You find no “omniscience” of God in Scripture not because it isn’t there but because you can’t see the forest through all those ‘trees’ you keep complaining about blocking your vision.
It’s a convenience that the Watchtower leans too heavily on: true religion has to be based on Scripture. Baloney! To do so implies there were no truly religious people before the Bible was written, completed, and canonized. If one has to have everything spelled out in the Bible, then one needs to admit that no doctrine could be verified without it completed as a whole. This would mean all religious understanding was grossly lacking and there was no means of revelation for the Jewish religious system then or now because they never received the Christian Scriptures as canon. This would also mean that the faith of all Christians before the Bible was complete was also lacking because, according to this philosophy, one must wait for the Scriptures before one can verify a teaching as so. Even if one does not believe in Christianity or the Bible or in religion this creates a very problematic scenario, a logical paradox, and in the face of Jewish, Christian, and even secular history is totally wrong.
Sorry to say this to all you JWs and those who still can’t let go of this once you leave the “compound,” but the Bible did not create religious people. It’s the other way around. Religious people created the Bible. The cart does not pull the horse.
The Jewish religion was around first and composed, collected, and edited the volumes which would later be accepted by their community as holy and inspired. The same thing goes for the early Christians. A book didn’t start their religion, a man did. He selected others to carry on his work and they in turn developed the religious community from which religious writings were developed and collected that would later be accepted by the Christian community as holy inspired.
But those religious communities came first. What they wrote down only reflected what they already believed, not what they should come to believe. These weren’t creeds or catechisms or encyclopedias or lengthy pontifications of technical theology. They were books, poems, songs, letters, and prophecies. They didn’t invent religious ideas, they recorded them. Not everything the Beatles sang was pressed onto a vinyl record.
Beliefs about God’s omniscience precede most of the Hebrew writings, and definitely all of the Christian ones. The history is not static. You can look it up. It was a philosophical understanding about YHWH that both the Jews and later the Christians accepted. Sorry that it’s not explicit in Scripture, but neither is there anything explicit in Scripture that gave Christians the authority to add books to the Scriptures.
Jesus didn’t tell people to write anything down. He never said that all truth would be found in these writings and that people would be judged according to how well they followed what would be inscribed and claimed as inspired by his followers. The Scriptures themselves have Jesus telling his followers that there would be a lot more revelation coming that he couldn’t tell them yet. Nowhere in any of the Christian texts is there an explicit statement claiming that all that information was already had by the time they wrote the last book that the Christian community canonized. In fact, nowhere does the Bible explicit list what makes a book worthy of inclusion in the Bible and what does not.
You won’t find a lot of things in the Bible that Christians have traditionally passed down. They didn’t include it because they never thought in a million years that someone would act as if this book just miraculously fell out of the sky and that a group of “students” would stumble upon it, read it and conclude: “Hmm, this sounds good. Let’s build a religion based on it.” The Bible didn’t invent Jews and Christians. Instead Jews and Christians invented the Bible. The horse pulls the cart. Religious groups accepted what books reflected their beliefs and rejected those that didn’t. Christianity defined the Bible, and not the other way around no matter how much the Watchtower wants to wash people’s brains into believing.
You will have to study religious history and theology to find out why Jews and Christians believe this. It did not originate with the Scriptures, but the understanding is reflected within it, kind of like “it’s a given.”
But if everlasting life is based on how many people read and study the Bible and follow it word-for-word then humanity is doomed. Not many have. Most of the apostles didn’t. Many of the first century Christians didn’t. Most of them were martyred before all four gospels were written down.
And if truth is based on how well one creates doctrine out of these religious texts, then the entire Christian religion—especially the Jehovah’s Witnesses—are dead men because it’s foundation of the apostles and first martyrs was not made up of people who had a complete Bible to read and study.
And what building do you know can stand without a foundation?
(And just because some of the Beatles songs weren’t released to the public doesn’t mean they didn’t sing them.)
Oh, and P.S.--For those of you who really want to belong to a religion that bases all its beliefs on a "book they just stumbled upon," they have one of those that you can join. They're called the Mormons.
God sent messengers to see if Sodom and Gomorrah were really as bad as all that was reported to him (why did he need anything to be reported to him?).
He sent them so "he could get to know it."
This story always stuck in my mind as odd for someone who knows everything all the time.
If it was just so the angels could feel worth something, then God was patronizing them by using them when he didn't need them.
My mom said it was so he could show to the angels that he needed them.
Then, in another discussion, she says that God needs no one as he is complete unto himself.
A know it all thinks they know everything. An all knowing being knows everything plus what is happening at the moment as it's happening without reporters to tell the person that.
White Dove, it is one of those funny conundrums, if God is everywhere why does he need angels flying around inside himself conveying messages about what's going on inside himself.
Maybe its like the Administration's policy of To Big to Fail.
It doesn't; and God is NOT omniscient!
Omnipresent, Omniscient, Omnipotent.
The WTS re omnipresent
http://www.watchtower.org/e/20050308a/article_01.htm
Omniscient
