I will be giving my commentary on a video by Warren McGrew on the issue of whether God has perfect knowledge. This is because he has nothing written and readily available to read and critique. He is an Open Theist that affirms a position called “Dynamic Omniscience”. The only information on what this view is that he gives is that is a mixture of Open Theism and a position called middle knowledge.

He states that there are some people that think that God doesn’t have the ability to have new thoughts and that he can’t know probabilities. There are people that think all sorts of things about God. Frankly, I don’t care so much about the plethora of opinions in the world. I’ll state my thoughts about the nature of God’s knowledge. I think God knows everything exhaustively. That future propositions have truth values and God knows them because he is a se. Here are more in-depth takes on the knowledge of God:

http://spirited-tech.com/2019/02/19/gods-knowledge/

http://spirited-tech.com/2021/04/22/the-omniscient-lord-how-does-god-know-things/

There is also equivocation that exists here. He claims that non-open theists (and possibly other open theists of different kinds) think that God can’t know probabilities and possibilities. That is to conflate the object of knowledge with the mode of knowledge. God knows things in a divine way, unlike the way creatures know things. God knows the probabilities of things in another way. It doesn’t entail that his knowledge is probabilistic. He knows possibilities, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t know which possible is actual. If God knows things like humans, then God is dependent on the same rules of human knowledge.

He states that every conditional statement is a “conditional decree”. I’m not really against it, but it seems loaded. That being prone to an equivocation between what I mean to say a decree is and what he means a decree is. I think of a decree as being a verbal pronouncement by some authority. This is different than the systematic meaning where God “decrees” all events in space in time because he is the king of the universe.

Warren states that his opponents are influenced by Plato and Plotinus. That greek category is influencing the Calvinist’s minds. The issue is that it seems to pick and choose what greek notions are fine and Calvinists cannot. For example, McGrew affirms Eternal Generation. I maintain that Eternal Generation is influenced by Plotinus through Origen. It is later on canonized at Nicea for being a solution for why there are distinct persons in the Trinity.

At this point, he states that his view is just God knows the probabilities of future events, but not which events will actually happen. There really seems to be nothing to do with the notion of middle knowledge.

He seems to make the same unconvincing argument from the incarnation that Will Duffy uses:

http://spirited-tech.com/2020/06/12/duffy-on-the-incarnation/

This also is consistent with exhaustive foreknowledge via Dr. Oliphint’s view. It seems if that view is true, then no passage the Open Theist can ever use is able to show that their position is correct because the covenantal view equally explains each passage:

http://spirited-tech.com/2020/01/29/open-theisms-underdetermination/

Even Dr. Steven Nemes didn’t have any noticeable objections to the position:

Warren overstates his case when he states that determinism is a denial of notions like probability, possibility, and only leaves the certain. The notion of probability is knowable to God even if God knows what will occur. Secondly, the notion of possibility is also not an issue. The only issue is how we cash out the notion of possible worlds. They think you need to have an open future in order to have possibility, but a divine conceptualist might say that it is a hypothetical idea in God’s mind. Or the various other accounts that exist to explain abstract objects.

He states that the question of whether we can trust a God that doesn’t know everything is just to assume a Calvinist perspective. I don’t think this is the case, but we all still have to wonder what the answer is. There are many epistemological and ethical issues with supposing God doesn’t know everything exhaustively. The first is just how do we know that God isn’t a bad epistemological source for our beliefs? It seems that skeptical scenarios are possible given such a notion.

His retort is that we can’t trust God because he causes evil things to happen and that leads us to doubt his character. This is only an issue if we grant that God causes evil in such a way that he is also morally responsible. That is a stronger case and we have responded to Eric Hernandez on the issue.

After a bit of victim mentality, we finally arrive at an argument that is common in these debates. It is a question of whether God needs to know indexicals in order to be omniscient. The issue with indexicals is that their truth is dependent upon the speaker. There are indexicals that God cannot know because they are not true of him. Take for example, “I am married to my wife”. It is clearly not the case that God is married to my wife. We usually recognized that God knows that I am married to my wife. There have been other good things written on temporal indexicals on other sites, here and here. I wish to also share the thoughts of a friend on the issue. Jimmy Stephens states:

Having not read this objection since freshmen year in college, it seems intuitive that we could take the strategy I hinted at Socratically. God knows indexicals sans indexicality. In other words, indexicality is cashed out in terms of knower relations and not as proper qualities of propositions. An indexical, then, is a proposition which can be known in different modes. We could compare this to an object which could be viewed from several different angles.

So God knows I am eating, but in the intuitive sense of the sentence. God knows that I am eating at time-space location x. He does not know, “I am eating,” because “I am eating,” is not, strictly speaking, a proposition at all. To know, “I am eating,” is knowledge by acquaintance or recognition: its object is not a proposition but a person.

The “something new” is not a proposition. It’s an identity relation between a person and a proposition about the world or a state of affairs or however we cash out facticity.

This is a way that comports with what I said about indexicals. The last relevant argument to say what I think my position is was the argument from the term from for foreknowledge (proginōskō) in the Bible. He seems to ignore that the term can take on a different meaning as to whether it is a verb or noun or if it is in reference to God or man. This is something that James White (someone that Warren is already familiar with) has rightfully pointed out.