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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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I'm going to start referring to the philosopher's God as pGod, to disambiguate and maybe help distinguish the idea in your mind from any religious upbringing you might have had.

I have no idea what the difference between "God knows all its actions" and "God does not know its actions" are. What does it actually mean for an unchanging system to "know" a thing?

I think it can only be discussed analogously, and determined negatively. Meaning, we can be certain of what pGod isn't, and use all those "isn'ts" to develop an "is." It is so far outside our realm of experience as temporal, complex creatures.

When we know something, we are grasping its form and holding the form somewhere inside our self. As the originator and grounds of all forms, pGod grasps these forms in their most perfect way. That is what is meant by pGod knowing everything.

Also, is there any particular reason that we would expect that the universe we live in is one that is causally downstream of an instance of this specific type of god?

What specific type of god? pGod, the First Cause God? The arguments from casualty, rationality, motion, essence, etc all point to the same type of pGod. They are all arguments for the same God that Is, Existence itself, formulated differently to avoid different objections as they arise, to try to express the idea more clearly.

Or do you mean the omniscient, omnipotent, divinely simple God? The same arguments that make the case for pGod are then continued to require such things. As you can see above, the omniscience follows from the nature of the pGod as the ground of all things, that which is "proved" (philosophically, proof just means a logically coherent argument given certain starting positions) in the argument for pGod.