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Is God Omniscient or Omniaware?
Should we change our language?

Daniel of the Reformed Apologetical and Theological Society has written an interesting post concerning our description of God as "omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent." He focuses on the third of these three qualities, attempting to clarify what we mean by that term. He notes:

[T]he eternality of God negates a temporal understanding of omnipresence; and the immateriality of God negates a spatial understanding of it. Analysis has left us with a blank term, an empty signifier. The idea of omnipresence simply does not make sense when applied to God, the only being for whom it is supposed to be applicable.

One of the first arguments I had with an atheist concerned his disagreement with the idea that God could be omnipresent and his challenge to me to try to make sense of the Biblical teaching. As a result, I think that this is a topic of concern to apologists, and while I don't see any reason to discontineu using the term "omnipresent", I agree that apologists as a whole should do more thinking about the meaning of these terms.

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