Have you heard it said that God is all knowing? The fancy word for this is omniscient. The idea is that God knows all things in the past, present and future. The Bible speaks to this in several passages:
Do you know the balancings of the clouds, the wondrous works of him who is perfect in knowledge, you whose garments are hot when the earth is still because of the south wind? Job 37:16-17
O Lord, you have searched me and known me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O Lord, you know it altogether. You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it. Psalm 139:1-6
Great is our Lord, and abundant in power; his understanding is beyond measure. Psalm 147:5
Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. Isaiah 40:28
What are the implications of an all-knowing God? One question might be how does God know or in what way does God know everything?
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle represents the idea that we as humans cannot know everything through observation. In the experiment we are able to measure the location or momentum of a particle but not both at the same time. The implication being that we need a different method for thinking about how information about the universe is represented.
Schrödinger’s cat presents a conceptual or statistical way of thinking about the universe at the quantum or microscopic level. The concept, albeit grim, is that a scientist places a cat in a box with a container of poison. The box is closed and no one can view what occurs in the box. Schrödinger’s thought experiment then states that without observation the cat there is no way to know if the cat is alive or dead; in this way both outcomes exist at the same time until the box is opened and an observation is made.
I propose that God’s omniscience can exist in form analogous to the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment. The following diagram presents some choice you have on how to spend your Friday night:
On each path there are two decisions to make and four possible outcomes:
- Attend the football game and eat nachos
- Attend the football game and eat a pretzel
- Attend the concert with Michael
- Attend the concert with Dwight
Before making these decisions, all of these four possibilities exist conceptually at the same time. Only until those decisions are made are the four possibilities collapsed down to the one path that was selected.
This is a trivial example, but now consider such a diagram that consists of all possible decisions of every human that has has existed, currently is alive, and will exist in the future. The decision tree would be incredibly complex and interwoven within itself, and beyond something that we as humans cannot represent or consider. However, it would represent all possible outcomes that can exist within the universe. I propose that this could be a way the Lord is all-knowing. That He knows all possible decision points and their possible outcomes.