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Originally Posted by Liraiyu
Are you a Panda?
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Yes.
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When you sneeze, is it adorable?
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Yes.
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How does God know he's omniscient?
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Let us first define omniscience.
Omniscience is defined herein as the knowledge of all facts. Presumably, any God with a reasonably close resemblance to the God of Theism knows everything there is to know about himself by virtue of being himself, and he knows everything about his creation based on the fact that he created it all and continuously sustains its existence.
In particular, what allows him to determine that he and that which he created do not exist in a sort of "causal enclosure", a self-contained system which is really just a small part of a larger world that it is causally unrelated to? If an omniscient God is possible, there must be some logically-conceivable mechanism which would allow him to know that he is not inside such an enclosure, and that the limits of his awareness are in fact the limits of existence. But it seems to me that there can't be such a mechanism, since all his mental inputs and the resulting beliefs could easily be the same whether he's lord of everything or whether he's just the God of a small sub-universe.
I assume here that knowledge, whatever else it may be, is at least a form of true belief which has a particular kind of causal relationship with the thing that it is about. Knowledge can't be just any true belief; if I believe something that just so happens to be true, but my belief was arrived at arbitrarily and has no basis in reality, then that's not knowledge, it's simply coincidence. If we have knowledge of some particular fact of reality, which knowledge we will call "x", that means there's some causal connection which we can trace from x to the thing that x is about, and the nature of that connection is such that it justifies x and disconfirms ~x. Furthermore, this connection must be such that it would not serve to justify x if x was false.
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