Abstract

Mawson recently argued that since a temporal God can’t know what we’ll freely choose, so he’s not completely omniscient and hence not omnipotent, whence his beneficence is a matter of luck. However, even (transfinite) arithmetic is inde-finitely extensible and only an everlasting, changeable God could learn forever. Furthermore an epistemically perfect being would hardly, I argue, be completely certain that there were no other perfect beings, because such negative empirical be-liefs could hardly be fully justified. So if God could learn, then heavenly souls would probably ask to be born into a world this far from heaven (causally and epistemically) because that would probably help God to learn more about such matters. And since an omnipotent God’s perfect goodness is most likely to lead to human suffering and divine hiddenness if omnipotence includes the power to change, so it probably does