Dr. N.L. Kachhara
In this section, I present the philosophical view of Omniscience. Omniscience is the attribute of "having knowledge of everything." Is true belief the same thing as knowledge? Not all knowledge is usually considered to be a true belief if it is either based on sufficient evidence (or a proper ground) or is formed in the right way. "Some argue that, strictly speaking, at the bottom it is not beliefs that are true; instead, it is sentences or propositions. When we believe that "snow is white" we believe that this sentence (or proposition) is true. Thus, God's knowledge is ultimately of sentences, propositions, or whatever the real truth-bearer turns out to be." "If a person has a dispositional belief, this means he should be disposed or inclined to have an occurrent belief in a proposition if he were to think about the proposition." "A dispositional account of beliefs is suitable for making sense of limited human cognitive activity but would be deficient for a perfect thinker. If it is possible to make sense of a being that can be aware of all propositions simultaneously it is preferable to think of all of God's beliefs as occurrent. Dispositional beliefs are adequate for finite humans, but the goal is always to be aware of everything that one believes."
God has no beliefs. "Alston thinks that God's knowledge may be thought of as propositional without God having beliefs. An alternative view is that God does not grasp the truth of propositions; rather, he is immediately and directly aware of the world without any propositional intermediaries that are about the world."
There is no difference between God (jnata?), his knowledge (jnana?), and the objects of God's knowledge (jnayeya?). So, the object of God's knowledge turns out to be God's own essence. God's essence contains within it the likeness of everything and God knows everything by knowing his own essence.
"For humans, we do not have understanding until we begin to separate our knowledge from known things and separate a scene into distinct sets of facts. Yet we lose and long for the underlying unity of the initial awareness. God, it may be thought, retains this unity and can have understanding without the piecemeal, discursive thought present in human reasoning."
"We humans are limited. We cannot understand any concrete thing without abstracting from it and formulating propositions about its abstract features. For example, we cannot understand Jimmy Carter but only various aspects of him: that he is a Democrat, that he is human, and so forth. But God is not limited. His knowledge is complete. God can understand everything about Jimmy Carter all at once without separating aspects of him from Jimmy Carter. He does this by knowing Jimmy Carter himself. So, there is no reason for God to employ proposition if this knowledge is unlimited in the way just described. Since God does not have to employ propositions, he has no need of beliefs. "
"Intuitive knowledge just seems like a superior kind of knowledge. Since God is perfect he should be thought of as having this superior kind of knowledge, knowledge without beliefs. "
"A cognitive faculty is simply a particular ability to know something. Perception is an example of a faculty of human cognition that allows us to know about the physical world. Memory is the faculty that allows us to know about the past."
"When we are reasoning inferentially, we are employing arguments. Thus, inferential evidence can come as deductive, inductive, or abdicative argument."
"The faculty of memory provides immediate knowledge of the past. The question of whether or not God remembers things is essentially tied to questions about God's relationship to time. If God is atemporal, then he would have no memory, since memory consists of being aware of a past experience. But if God is atemporal, then he would have no past experience to recall. Thus, God only has memory if God is an atemporal being."
A number of philosophers have postulated that God is not in time but "sees" all of time from his eternal perspective. Boethius describes God's eternal existence as follows: "Eternity is a possession of life, a possession simultaneously entire and perfect, which has no end. That which grasps and possesses the entire fullness of a life that has no end at one and the same times (nothing that is to come being absent to it, nothing of what has passed having flowed away from it) is rightly held to be eternal."
"God is not like humans who exist wholly at each finite moment in time and endure through time. A human possesses life only in a small finite window, which we call "now." The past life is no longer possessed; the future is not yet realized. Since our human life is lived in a finite "now," it is never full and complete but fragmented. God, however, is perfect and God's life is not fragmented like the life of a temporally enduring human. He lives in the eternal "now." His "now" stretches over our past, present, and future. Our finite present is representative of God's eternal present, but our finite present is only a faint and imperfect model. Thus, by being eternal the future is not off in the distance for God but is subsumed under his eternal presence. Since God wholly exists at all times in his eternal "now" he can know what happens at every time "(compare this with kevali).
The eternity attributed to God, or the Omniscient, can be understood by reviewing the concept of time in Jainism. Jainism describes two types of time: absolute time, or nischayakala, and empirical time, or vyavaharakala. Absolute time is held to be a passive agent for the change of modes of dravyas, or substances. Absolute time does not change the modes, but its existence is assumed to be necessary for substances to change their modes. Absolute time is the auxiliary cause of the change of modes; the main cause of change is the substance itself. Empirical time measures the duration of events and is defined by the movement of some preferred object. For example, on planet Earth time is defined with respect to the relative movement of the Sun and Moon; correspondingly, we have a solar calendar and a lunar calendar. It is obvious that on any other Earth-like planet in the universe, empirical time as defined with respect to some local object may be entirely different from the time we are familiar with. It must be noted that empirical time is defined by pudgala for pudgala, and it has no relevance to non-physical substances. As we know that a living being is a combination of a soul and a body, the notion of time as experienced by us is due to the presence of the body. If the body were absent, the jiva would not experience empirical time. For example, in the liberated state the jiva does not have such an experience; it only experiences eternal existence. The same holds good for the omniscient or kevali when he experiences the transcendental state, losing consciousness of his body and mind; in this state he knows the self by the self and the body is no longer in the range of his consciousness. Thus, the omniscient is an atemporal being and for him the past and future are eternally integrated into the present. In the absence of psychical karma, the soul is in a very pure state; all objects in the loka are reflected in this soul due to the properties and powers described in Chapter 1. The pure soul knows everything in the loka as they are, as well as their past and future modes, since empirical time is meaningless to the Omniscient.
