On Omniscience (or, Getting In Over My Head)

My friend Dan is currently working on his doctorate in astrophysics. (He's smart.) He seems to have resigned himself over the years to the fact that whenever he and I are drinking together (e.g. when we're in the same room), sooner or later I start pestering him to explain ultra-complex physics concepts to a guy who's one high school algebra class short of mathematical illiteracy. Despite my handicaps, however, there are one or two elementary concepts that I've managed to wrap my head around. One of them is that in order to learn things about subatomic particles, it's necessary to smash them into other subatomic particles using gigantic machines that are very, very unlikely to create accidental black holes and annihilate the solar system. By bouncing Particle A off Particle B, you can learn B's trajectory, but at the cost of altering its velocity—or you can learn its velocity, but at the cost of altering its trajectory. You can never know both at the same time. Werner Heisenberg dubbed this the Uncertainty Principle; and the general idea that the act of studying a thing inevitably changes it, has proven relevant in many fields outside the realm of physics.

As a professional idiot floundering through the eldritch morass of theological conjecture, I can't help wondering whether and how that principle applies to the study of God. Obviously God is eternal and doesn't change; but in studying Him—in seeking to know Him—we change our own relationship with Him (hopefully for the better). And because He loves us infinitely, He rejoices when we grow closer to Him and sorrows when we pull away.

Now, to field a potential objection: when we say that the Lord "rejoices," we are using a metaphor from our own terrestrial experience. God doesn't undergo dopamine spikes. He doesn't giggle or grin, He doesn't clap His hands or pump His fists in the air. (Although come to think of it, Jesus is fully Man as well as fully God, so perhaps He does those things after all. But let that pass for now.) Our own experience of joy is rather an echo, a shadow, of the True and Perfect Joy that exists in perpetuity beyond the spheres of time. The joys and sufferings of the Almighty don't constitute "changes" in Him the way they do in us.

But! God, Who exists from all eternity in His ultimate fullness, has always been experiencing, is always experiencing, the daily permutations of my relationship with Him and the attendant joy and sorrow of those permutations, not on a day-to-day basis, but in their single completed wholeness, a four-dimensional diamond or a four-dimensional piece of everlasting trash, depending on my own choices. He doesn't experience those choices and changes in a linear way as I do. But to an infinitesimal degree, that which God is, and "has been" forever and ever, is determined (has always been determined) by the degree to which I manage to accept His overflowing love. The Divine Nature itself, infinitely happy in the Triune Charity, becomes (has eternally become) yet happier if I choose to love Him back. So just as His version of rejoicing is not less but more real than ours, can we not say in a way that His version of being changed by our choices is even more real than anything we know, because it predates the bloody universe?

I can't be sure if this idea is true. I'm not even sure it's coherent. But as Ellie and I enter the tag-end of the third trimester, I continue my bumbling quest to prepare my brain for the questions of the tiny new Toner. One of the hard ones is, how can I have free will if God already knows what I'm going to do? And the answer remains, He knows what you're "going to" do because, to Him, future and past are eternally present and He is watching you do it right now. But that's really hard to put into simple language. Perhaps I'll hold off until Yakko finds a way to explain it.