Let's Talk About Dynamic Omniscience

There are really four distinct views on Divine Foreknowledge:

1. Simple Foreknowledge

2. Open View

3. Middle Knowledge

4. Augustinian-Calvinist

In this episode, Warren discusses Dynamic Omniscience, what it entails and what it does not. This is a long episode where viewer questions are included in the mix, some on topic, many are not.

Essentially, Dynamic Omniscience is the belief that God knows all things. However, here knowledge is not viewed through Platonist lenses where "perfect knowledge" equates to knowing only facts, but also includes "would counterfactuals" as well as "might counterfactuals". Therefore "perfect knowledge" is considered perfect in an epistemological sense.

Think of Dynamic Omniscience as approaching God's Middle Knowledge from an Open starting point. Thus Dynamic Omniscience can properly be called "neo-Molinism" or the "Infinite Mind" of God. God genuinely knows possibilities, their associated probabilities, He can know impossibilities and He can know His own decrees and whether they're conditional or unconditional.

While God knows of possibilities, His knowledge is not faulty and thus He doesn't know this in the same sense or epistemological category as He would a fact, or an unconditional decree.

Dynamic Omniscience recognizes that the future is partially fixed as it pertains to God's unconditional decrees, while it is also partially open as reality allows and accounts for genuine possibilities. Thus, it can be argued that Dynamic Omniscience incorporates the best of the four main views while not harming either the holiness and good nature of God, nor harming his perfect knowledge, nor denying Him the ability to decree what He wishes, nor falling into fatalism inherent in theistic determinism and thus recognizing that man is responsible.