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Nator7821
Sat Jan 07, 2006 7:08 am


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Firstly, very interesting topic.  As I am somewhat familiar with the work and arguments of Krueger, I may from time to time jump in here to assist in the understanding of his case, and to help hone your skills against it.

One point that Krueger has commonly made time and again is that there are different kinds of knowledge.  There is for example book knowledge, that is knowledge acquired by learning or some other means.  And then, there is also experiential knowledge, that acquired by the act of doing something.

So, while one can have knowledge of the sport of tennis, for example, through learning in the formal sense of the word, one would lack the experiential knowledge of having played the game, and thus would lack some knowledge.

The typical atheist tack with this line of reasoning is to show that God, through virtue of His inability to act in the human sense, cannot have experiential knowledge in the sense that humans do, and since there would be a set or subset of knowledge that God cannot know, then God cannot be omniscient.

Krueger takes this even further by using experiential knowledge to set up contradictory attributes, thereby disproving that definition of God.  I think this is what he is after when he allows for God to have the experiential knowledge of taking pleasure in killing innocent people.

The point being made here is that if God has experiential knowledge of taking pleasure from killing innocent people, then at some point God must have experienced this knowledge, as the only means of acquiring said knowledge is through experience.  However, since taking pleasure in killing innocents is generally considered to be malevolent, if God were to have this type of experiential knowledge, then God could not be said to be omnibenevolent.


Our counter-claim is that the generally accepted concept of God's omniscience within Christianity is that He is aware of, and is able to "follow along with", the experiences of all human beings throughout time, but that His experiences of those things are in response to (or in reference to) His own pure and good spiritual nature.

While this counter is a good one, it skirts the issue of what experiential knowledge means at its base, and thus only partially answers the problem presented.

I hope this proves helpful to your endeavor.