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The subject that currently interests me is omniscience, and the reason is that the common understanding of the word may be a contradiction. The word means "all knowledge", and is often referred as a pastiche of Bret Hart: knowing everything there is, everything there was and everything there will ever be. This implies determinism and a mechanistic universe that plays itself and abolishes the concepts of free will, morality, responsibility and such. That is because to hold someone responsible one would have to have the ability to do otherwise and in a mechanistic universe that simply is not the case. I instinctively recoil from this understanding of the word as it is in direct contradiction with how I, and everyone else, approaches life. It would also mean that God is the sort of monstrous puppet master who first creates beings He knows to mess up and then tortures them for shits and giggles while being the only one ever making a choice of any sort and thus directly and alone responsible for everything. You know, the sort of God atheists reject, and if it was real, Christianity, or any other religion, for that matter, would make absolutely no sense at all. So my question is: what if "all knowledge" cannot encompass the future, as it does not exist? Sure, one can calculate those things that depend on mechanisms, but not, say, what I shall eat tomorrow, for I have yet to decide that. Having all knowledge cannot mean having knowledge that is not there. This leaves open the possibility of having a free will, moral responsibility et al. It is also supported by our empirical experience of life. If the suggestion my question implies is correct, then God can be both omniscient and omnipotent without being omniderigent (ie. all-acting puppet master). And if so, the Bible would also make sense. PS. I do not subscribe to the usual attribution of God as omniscient, because the Bible strongly implies He isn't. He may well be voliscient (knows what he wants to know) and I'm perfectly ok with that. PPS. No wonder most atheists are so hell bent on determinism; their faux-moral rejection of God depends on it.

Donald Hoffman presents to us a new way on how we perceive reality. Simply put: Instead of our senses developing in order to provide an accurate observation of reality, the mind instead simulates reality according to biological filters that ensure reproduction.