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Lecture 3: The Conception of God and the Meaning of Prayer

Section 7 of 12

Divine knowledge and the open universe

Section summary

In brief

Divine knowledge is not a passive omniscience watching a fixed script, Iqbal argues, but a creative activity in which the future genuinely pre-exists as open possibility. God has freely chosen to share creative power with finite egos — and without this open universe, neither ijtihād nor any other form of human effort would matter.

Section 6 addressed the problem of time and divine eternity. It established that God's time is 'change without succession' — an appreciative duration that appears atomic only through the creative movement of the ego — and that serial time is born with the act of creation. That section resolved the temporal dimension of God's being. Section 7 now confronts the epistemological dimension: what does it mean to say that God knows? And what does the answer imply for the structure of the future — is the universe a closed system whose every event is predetermined, or an open field of genuine possibility?

The question is forced upon Iqbal by the logic of his own preceding arguments. If the Ultimate Reality is an Ego (Section 5), and if that Ego's relationship to time is creative rather than passive (Section 6), then the most natural next question concerns that Ego's relationship to knowledge. Human knowledge is discursive — it moves through time, encounters objects that exist independently of the knower, and is always relative to a confronting 'other'. Can this model of knowledge be scaled up to God simply by extending it to infinity — by imagining an omniscience that knows everything the way we know particular things, only without gaps? Iqbal's answer is an emphatic no: discursive knowledge, however extended, cannot be predicated of an Ego for whom the distinction between knower and known, between thought and object, does not exist.

The section advances through four major movements. First, Iqbal establishes that discursive knowledge is structurally inapplicable to the Ultimate Ego: because the universe is not an 'other' confronting God but exists within God's creative life, the ordinary subject–object structure of knowledge breaks down at the divine level. Thought and deed, the act of knowing and the act of creating, are identical in God. Second, Iqbal considers the most prominent alternative — the idea that divine knowledge consists in a single, indivisible act of perception that grasps the entire sweep of history in an eternal 'now', as proposed by Jalāluddīn Dawānī, ʿIrāqī, and Josiah Royce. He concedes that this view contains an element of truth but diagnoses its fatal defect: it implies a closed universe, a fixed futurity, a divine consciousness that is merely a passive mirror reflecting a predetermined structure. Third, Iqbal advances his own position: divine knowledge is a living creative activity in which the future pre-exists not as a fixed order of events but as an open possibility. He illustrates this with a striking analogy — the fruitful idea that reveals its applications only through advancing experience, whose possibilities are all present in the mind of its conceiver but not yet intellectually worked out because they do not yet exist as specific possibilities. Fourth, Iqbal draws the consequences for the problem of predestination: if divine knowledge is creative and the future is genuinely open, then creation includes real novelty, and the theological controversy over predestination is exposed as the product of 'pure speculation with no eye on the spontaneity of life'. The section closes with Iqbal's boldest theological claim: that finite egos endowed with the power of spontaneous action are not a limitation imposed on God but a limitation chosen by God — born out of His own creative freedom, whereby He has elected finite egos to be 'participators of His life, power, and freedom'.

The section is pivotal within the lecture's arc. Having established what reality is (ego), what it moves in (creative duration), and how it is structured (spiritual pluralism with degrees of reality), Iqbal must now show that the God who grounds this reality is not an omniscient spectator watching a predetermined script unfold but an active creator whose knowledge is itself creative — and who has freely chosen to share that creative power with finite beings. This is the metaphysical foundation for human freedom and for the concept of ijtihād: if the future were closed, independent reasoning would be a futile exercise in discovering what was already determined. Only in an open universe does thinking matter.

Original text

The word ‘knowledge’, as applied to the finite ego, always means discursive knowledge — a temporal process which moves round a veritable ‘other’, supposed to exist per se and confronting the knowing ego. In this sense knowledge, even if we extend it to the point of omniscience, must always remain relative to its confronting ‘other’, and cannot, therefore, be predicated of the Ultimate Ego who, being all-inclusive, cannot be conceived as having a perspective like the finite ego. The universe, as we have seen before, is not an ‘other’ existing per se in opposition to God. It is only when we look at the act of creation as a specific event in the life-history of God that the universe appears as an independent ‘other’. From the standpoint of the all-inclusive Ego there is no ‘other’. In Him thought and deed, the act of knowing and the act of creating, are identical.

It may be argued that the ego, whether finite or infinite, is inconceivable without a confronting non-ego, and if there is nothing outside the Ultimate Ego, the Ultimate Ego cannot be conceived as an ego. The answer to this argument is that logical negations are of no use in forming a positive concept which must be based on the character of Reality as revealed in experience. Our criticism of experience reveals the Ultimate Reality to be a rationally directed life which, in view of our experience of life, cannot be conceived except as an organic whole, a something closely knit together and possessing a central point of reference. This being the character of life, the ultimate life can be conceived only as an ego. Knowledge, in the sense of discursive knowledge, however infinite, cannot, therefore, be predicated of an ego who knows, and, at the same time, forms the ground of the object known. Unfortunately, language does not help us here. We possess no word to express the kind of knowledge which is also creative of its object.

The alternative concept of Divine knowledge is omniscience in the sense of a single indivisible act of perception which makes God immediately aware of the entire sweep of history, regarded as an order of specific events, in an eternal ‘now’. This is how Jalāluddīn Dawānī, ʿIrāqī, and Professor Royce in our own times conceived God's knowledge. There is an element of truth in this conception. But it suggests a closed universe, a fixed futurity, a predetermined, unalterable order of specific events which, like a superior fate, has once for all determined the directions of God's creative activity. In fact, Divine knowledge regarded as a kind of passive omniscience is nothing more than the inert void of pre-Einsteinian physics, which confers a semblance of unity on things by holding them together, a sort of mirror passively reflecting the details of an already finished structure of things which the finite consciousness reflects in fragments only.

Divine knowledge must be conceived as a living creative activity to which the objects that appear to exist in their own right are organically related. By conceiving God's knowledge as a kind of reflecting mirror, we no doubt save His foreknowledge of future events; but it is obvious that we do so at the expense of His freedom. The future certainly pre-exists in the organic whole of God's creative life, but it pre-exists as an open possibility, not as a fixed order of events with definite outlines.

An illustration will perhaps help us in understanding what I mean. Suppose, as sometimes happens in the history of human thought, a fruitful idea with a great inner wealth of applications emerges into the light of your consciousness. You are immediately aware of the idea as a complex whole; but the intellectual working out of its numerous bearings is a matter of time. Intuitively all the possibilities of the idea are present in your mind. If a specific possibility, as such, is not intellectually known to you at a certain moment of time, it is not because your knowledge is defective, but because there is yet no possibility to become known. The idea reveals the possibilities of its application with advancing experience, and sometimes it takes more than one generation of thinkers before these possibilities are exhausted.

Nor is it possible, on the view of Divine knowledge as a kind of passive omniscience, to reach the idea of a creator. If history is regarded merely as a gradually revealed photo of a predetermined order of events, then there is no room in it for novelty and initiation. Consequently, we can attach no meaning to the word ‘creation’, which has a meaning for us only in view of our own capacity for original action. The truth is that the whole theological controversy relating to predestination is due to pure speculation with no eye on the spontaneity of life, which is a fact of actual experience.

No doubt, the emergence of egos endowed with the power of spontaneous and hence unforeseeable action is, in a sense, a limitation on the freedom of the all-inclusive Ego. But this limitation is not externally imposed. It is born out of His own creative freedom whereby He has chosen finite egos to be participators of His life, power, and freedom.

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6. The problem of time and divine eternity

8. Divine omnipotence and the problem of evil

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