Attributes of Allah – Unlimited in His Knowledge

The lecture focuses on that God is unlimited in His knowledge; He knows everything about everything with complete and direct knowledge, while human knowledge is limited and requires steps, devices and experiments.

Main points:

• No human knows everything even about one field, and human knowledge is limited by specialization, experience and means.

• God knows the inner things: examiner of hearts and kidneys and reader of thoughts and intentions, and this is something only God can do.

• God’s knowledge includes the unseen and the future; what is future for us is present before Him in one page.

• Astrologers and fortune-tellers and those who speak of the unseen do not know the true unseen; what they do is inference or guesswork or amusement.

• God’s knowledge is direct without devices or procedural experimental steps; He knows where resources and creatures are because He placed them.

• The devil and shrewd rulers can sometimes make rational inferences about the future, but their knowledge is uncertain and limited compared to God’s knowledge.

• Prophecies are sometimes written in the past tense because God sees the future as if it were past, and therefore they resolve issues of election and predestination in Scripture.

Spiritual and educational dimension from a Coptic Orthodox faith perspective:

• This truth calls us to humility before God’s knowledge and to avoid trust in sorcerers and fortune-tellers.

• It reminds the believer that God inspects intentions and thoughts, making a call to sincerity of life and purity of heart.

• Understanding that God’s knowledge includes the future explains God’s choice of people before their coming, and gives us hope that God is a wise governor over creation.

• The lecture encourages developing a theological mind that understands the differences between divine appearances and the divine nature itself, and distinguishes between limited human knowledge and absolute divine knowledge.

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