Thinking about God...

I'm sure many of us grew up being taught by our parents and religious leaders that God is this all-knowing and all-powerful being and the creator of everything.

The things we are taught as a child shapes us and get locked up in our subconscious.  Dwelling there, they become part of the emotional bias of how we see, feel, and think about the world.

It is essential to recognize that these ingrained feelings are not proof that the ideas associated with them are verifiably true.  All the feelings show is that you were influenced by those ideas at an earlier and impressionable age.

Let's consider where those ideas of God being all-knowing and all-powerful came from.

Throughout the TaNaK, the Hebrew Bible, the Divine is never credited as or described as All-Knowing and All-Powerful.  This idea only shows up later in Rabbinic literature.  The Rabbis' ideas and understanding of philosophy were powerfully influenced by the Greeks, specifically Plato and Aristotle.  It is from Aristotle that the Rabbis got the idea of oppositional duality in general, specifically between humans and the Divine.

The logic for Aristotle goes like this…

We humans, and all of the physical world, are finite.  Therefore, someone or something must be infinite.  The finite changes.  Therefore, some entity must be changeless.  The finite is unstable and in flux.  Therefore, some beings are forever the same, stable and constant.  We lack knowledge, wisdom, and power.  Therefore, someone must have all knowledge, all wisdom, and all power.  We are many; therefore, this being who has all these attributes must be singular.  Thus, Aristotle imagined the Unmoved mover, the one who started it all.  The Divine One.

Therefore, according to Aristotle, the opposite must manifest in something else.  If we have finite knowledge, finite wisdom, and finite power, then there must, by Aristotelian logic and definitions, be an entity that has infinite knowledge, wisdom, and power.  For Aristotle, this is the Creator, The Prime Mover, Plato's One, or Plato's The Good.  That is where we and all of the Western cultures get the idea that God is all-knowing, all-wise, and all-powerful.  It comes from Aristotle.

From Aristotle and us, Christianity gets the same teaching.  From us, Christianity, and Aristotle, Islam gets the same teaching.  From the interaction and meeting of Christianity and Islam to the rest of the world, India's cultures, and China's culture – that is where they take on the same ideas of an all-knowing and all-powerful God.

We were all taught this idea as children, and it all came from the oppositional dual thinking of Aristotle.  But significantly, it does not mean it is true.

We can determine what a thing is, its attributes, and its essence if the thing is physical.  Then we can use our senses with any augmented tools to aid our senses in verifying a thing's attribute.  Since God/Divine is not physical, its attributes can never be determined.  We can only make them up and imagine what they might be.  Thus, the idea that God/Divine is all-powerful and all-knowing is just some made up map and never can be anything but a made up map.

It is merely Aristotle's map that has been incorporated into our understanding of God.  However, we need to recall that a map is not the Territory.  It is merely a human attempt to understand something.  So, just because someone has invented such a map of God and has been accepted by so many people, that still does not make it verifiably true.  It only makes it very popular.
​
There have been others, like myself, who have described God, the Divine, as finite.  For example, in his writings, William James also considered God as a limited and finite being with limited powers.  God was obviously more powerful than us; it is just that James recognized that God was not all-powerful.