Why God is Not All-knowing

Chris Thompson
Understanding Reality
4 min readJan 3, 2019

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When I say God is not all-knowing, I mean His ability to see the future is not perfect. God knows what will probably happen, far better than any human ever could, but does not know anything with absolute certainty… at least where beings with free will are concerned. So, God might know with absolute certainty that a certain star in a certain galaxy will explode today, because that doesn’t compromise anyone’s free will. But if God knew with absolute certainty that you would eat an apple today, that would mean the event was predetermined, and you would have to eat that apple, which would compromise your free-will, which would defeat the purpose of giving it to you in the first place.

I think if God were all-knowing: in the sense of being able to see the future perfectly, He would die of boredom. If He could know everything that was going to happen until the end of time, then, in a sense, everything that was going to happen, would have already happened, and there would be no point in it happening, because God would already know the outcome. There’s no point in having a God in the first place, if all He does is spend eternity getting bored by watching things happen that He already knows will happen. That would be like you or I spending our whole lives watching the same movie over and over. Even if you love your favourite movie as much as I love Star Wars (which I’ve seen over 50 times), you’d soon get…

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Chris Thompson
Understanding Reality

I've been a huge fan of sci-fi my whole life, but recently, I've come to realise that we live in a stranger universe than anything anyone's ever dreamed up.