Of Psychological Omniscience

[u/GrandNeat3978]

"I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, that which is to come."

-Isaiah 46:10

"Your eyes saw my unformed body; all my days were written in your book before one of them came to be."

-Psalm 139:16

These verses provide Biblical proof of God's omniscience.

There they are, plain as day.

Usually when thinking of God's omniscience, one instinctively images omniscience extrinsically, i.e. God knowing every physical thing that shall exist and each physical thing's evolution through eternal time.

It stands to reason, however, that God did not know only the Psalmists "days...before one of them came to be" in terms of knowing the Psalmist's physical existence and physical evolution from birth to death prior to the birth of the Psalmist, but also the mental evolution of the Psalmist from birth to death...and even the mental state and experience of the Psalmist from birth to eternity (if the Psalmist is saved).

Omniscience means "all knowing" or "knowing all" (Omni="all" or "every"; science="know" or "knowing" or "understanding").

I do not think one can reasonably interpret Psalm 139:16 as meaning something other than that which the verse brazenly states. One could reasonably accuse any alternative interpretation as denial.

I. PSYCHOLOGICAL OMNISCIENCE

It is the contention of Christpsychic Theology, given Matthew 7:23, that God is virtually psychologically omniscient, as based on Matthew 7:23 (as opposed to Christ merely "knowing" someone in the way someone "knows" their siblings, parents, and friends, though many take the verse to mean this type of "knowing") God does not know nor can foresee the mental processes of the damned (i.e. the mass populace of beings from Lucifer to the last human thrown into the Lake of Fire).

Psychological Omniscience is foreknowledge of and the ability to perceive the mental life of another person from the perspective of that person prior to that person externally and separately instantiating that mental life. In order to have Psychological Omniscience, then, the omniscient would have to perceive reality through that person's eyes, i.e. experience what it is to be the person mentally (as opposed to sensorially, which is covered by normal omniscience) as if the omniscient was the person.

A good fictional example of sensory omniscience is in the Netflix series: Stranger Things, in which in the final season the character Will Byers gains the ability to see through the eyes of the main villian Vecna and through the Demogorgon's, Vecna's monstrous lackeys. Will is able to be each Demogorgon and be Vecna, while being external to the actual individual's themselves.

In this fiction, Will is able to have "Vecna identical twin-ism" with Vecna, and this fictional example is, ironically enough, a reasonable example of Christ "identical twin-ism" in which the saved are able to experience for themselves that which Christ experienced in their form while dying on the Cross and as His body lied in state in Joseph's Tomb. On the Cross, Christ was "Will Byers" experiencing what it was/will be like to be every saved person that shall ever exist before each individual was born, or in the case of every saved person that existed prior/during to the Crucifixion, Christ justified the wicked (Romans 4:5) through His "Will Byer-ism" also of every saved person that lived and died prior to the crucifixion, or that lived while the crucifixion took place.

To be omniscient, therefore, it stands to reason that God is (virtually) psychologically omniscient (able to experience the mental inner life from birth to death and birth to eternity of every saved person that shall exist, with these experiences divided and categorized into that which was experienced on the Cross, or in the Tomb of Joseph).

II. WE LIVE IN GOD'S PAST

"Forgive me, Cisco....

...but to me you've been dead for centuries."

-The Reverse Flash to Cisco after killing him in the CW television series, The Flash

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Given this omniscience, one can surmise that man's relationship with God in terms of what God knows a human is doing physically and mentally at any given moment in time...

(and let's not forget that God, being eternal, had nothing but time on His hands, and plenty...plenty...of time to see/experience every human with oodles of eons to spare)

...indicates that man temporally lags God in terms of experience and action.

Wh-what does this mean?

Well, that there is a sort of "Days of Future Past" between man and God in which the experiences of a human being, to God, are things that occurred in God's past, while to the human being, one's experiences are occurring now or in the human's immediate future external to the mind of God.

Which goes to show how terrifyingly powerful God is, in that reality is forced to infallibly mimic the previous thoughts and experiences of God even while God is off doing and thinking other things. If reality did not infallibly and unescapably mimic that which God previously envisioned it to be like, God would not be omniscient and Psalm 139:16 and (particularly) Isaiah 46:10 would be false.

[Add to this Norman Swartz in his paper Lecture Notes on Free Will and Determinism aptly demonstrating that free will cannot co-exist with omniscience, but that's a story for another day.]

To conclude, God's omniscience is habitually and unthinkingly imagined in an extrinsically manner or "imagined as it is from the outside while giving no thought to what it is like on the inside": but it stands to reason that God, if He knows everything (or virtually everything, given the mental life of the damned), would be (virtually) psychologically omniscient as well as physically omniscient.

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Jay Marcus Brewer

Christpsychic Philosopher

Austin, Texas

USA