Reality is not omniscient by choice
For here I take a leap. To what I have thought but not said. The notion of God requires the notion of something outside reality. I am tolerably convinced that all there is is reality and that what we think of as transcendence is within reality, not beyond it.
I further surmise that reality is conscious and that it moves. If I believe that, I am also conceding that there IS an outside.
This fact I take to be the Burning Bush. The Burning Bush is the entity which Moses encountered and which refused to give its name when Moses asked who she was or who he was. Who shall I say, said he.
Tell them I am has sent you.
Some devout souls are wise enough to use this when referring to a deity they cannot know by name directly.
Now we face a double mystery.
There is first the actual pervasive and omnipresent mystery of everything we do not know. For all our vaunted knowledge, we are in the infancy of knowing. Most of what goes on we neither see nor comprehend.
Then there is this more or less forbidden thing beyond the flame.
I take the flame to be the very place where a universal voice speaks.
We go to this side of the flame. We cry out. We hear back. The speaker is what we take to be our higher self (by any name or none}. Our listening and conversing suggests to us that we are in touch with a force that means well, that gives us the dignity of freedom and that REFUSES us the vagaries of omnipresence.
Omniscience is sort of like messianism, a reality to whom we give power in an inappropriate and self-demeaning manner. A tool of priesthood. A denial of freedom.
I conclude that reality, all there is, is our moving being, whatever it may be. It cannot be omniscient.
Why?
Time, friends. Time and chance.
Time and the fact that we affect what happens.
The fact that there are a multiplicity of wills involved.
If reality is not omniscient, it is not omnipotent.
Peirce knew to his sorrow we are a sorry lot. But he also knew more than almost anyone what a treasure we possess. He writes of it now and again.
Reality is all. No one has ever gotten past that burning bush.
Peirce: CP 2.136 Cross-Ref:††
136. … One might urge, for example, that there can be nothing of which God is ignorant. Even if there be no God, there can be nothing of which an Omniscient God would be ignorant, if there were such a Being. But whatever the Omniscient may think is ipso facto so. Consequently, the idea of Truth, in the sense of that which is so whether the thinker thinks it so or not, must be foreign to the mind of God. Of such truth Omniscience must be ignorant, and since He is by hypothesis ignorant of nothing, there is no such thing. Another argument is that if there be anything which is so, in spite of what be thought, there may be something which cannot be thought. For it is conceivable that all who could think it were destroyed. But it is inconceivable that there should be anything that cannot be thought, for to conceive this would be to think the very thing supposed to be unthinkable. Hence it is inconceivable that there should be any Truth independent of opinions about it.
