The Philosophical and Logical Problems of an All-Knowing, All-Seeing God (Allah)

Introduction

“God is omniscient”—this assertion is a fundamental belief in almost every monotheistic religion, particularly Islam. The Qur’an describes Allah as ‘Al-‘Alim’ (the All-Knowing), the possessor of all knowledge of both the visible and the unseen. His knowledge is therefore limitless and unconstrained by time and space. Allah’s knowledge is conceived as encompassing everything in the past, present, and future.

But when this concept of omniscience is examined philosophically, particularly in terms of ‘experiential knowledge’ or ‘knowledge by experience’ , a profound problem emerges. Experiential knowledge means directly undergoing an event or personally experiencing a feeling or pain. Consider the following examples:

These human experiences are not merely ‘known’; they are ‘felt’ and ‘experienced.’ Knowing about such experiences does not provide complete knowledge of them. To know them fully, one must also feel and undergo them.

The question, then, is whether Allah merely knows these experiences as concepts or can actually feel them. If He only knows them on the level of information, can He truly be called omniscient? The word ‘omniscient’ suggests not only that He knows the facts, but that He has direct knowledge of human life and experience. If the subtleties of human feeling—pain, love, grief, terror—are merely theoretical knowledge to Him, is He genuinely all-knowing?

This conflict raises a fundamental problem: What does omniscience mean? Does it include only factual knowledge, or does it also include direct experience? If omniscience includes experience, can God’s experience resemble human experience? These questions compel a critical examination of Islamic theology: Is Allah’s omniscience simply an irrational religious claim sustained by blind believers, or does it extend to the experiential depths of human life? This article examines how the Islamic conception of Allah conflicts with experiential knowledge and why that conflict creates a fundamental problem for theology.

What Does Omniscience Mean?

The term ‘omniscient’ is often used casually, particularly in discussions about God. Yet in philosophy and logic, the notion of an ‘omniscient’ being is complex and profound. ‘Knowledge’ here does not merely mean possession of information: there are different levels and kinds of knowledge. An omniscient being is understood as one who knows all truths—past, present, and future—perfectly and completely ^[1]. The scope of such knowledge should include not only external facts but also the feelings, emotions, pain, and pleasure taking place within the minds of every living being. If God is genuinely omniscient, He must not merely know that someone is in pain; He must also experience what that pain feels like ^[2]. Without that experience, His omniscience amounts only to factual knowledge—an incomplete form of omniscience from this philosophical standpoint. The meaning of omniscience must therefore encompass complete knowledge extending to experience, feeling, and every subtle dimension of reality.

Propositional Knowledge versus Experiential Knowledge

For this discussion, knowledge can be divided principally into two categories: propositional knowledge and experiential knowledge ^[3].

Propositional knowledge is knowledge gained through reasoning, evidence, and theory, without necessarily requiring direct personal experience. For example, ‘ice is cold’ is a factual proposition. Suppose there are two containers, each holding two apples. By the rules of arithmetic, the containers together contain four apples. Using the same logical structure, we can conclude that if there are two oranges in each container, the total is four oranges—without personally seeing or testing the oranges. This is an objective, logical inference, founded not on emotion but on mathematical principles.

Experiential knowledge, or ‘qualia,’ on the other hand, concerns knowledge acquired by directly experiencing a sensation or event ^[3]. The sensation of cold produced in the brain when one touches ice cannot be acquired merely through a description. A person who has never experienced cold could be given thousands of theories and still not know what that sensation actually feels like.

To understand how such perceptual or experiential knowledge arises in animals, consider a particular kind of brain cell called the ‘mirror neuron.’ A mirror neuron is active both when an animal performs an action and when it observes another animal performing the same action ^[4]. Researchers at the University of Parma in Italy first discovered these neurons in monkeys during the early 1990s. They observed that the part of a monkey’s brain activated when it picked up a piece of fruit also became active when it watched another monkey pick up that fruit.

In humans and other higher social animals, these mirror neurons act as major contributors to empathy. When we observe someone writhing in pain, mirror neurons in our brains ‘simulate’ that scene of suffering within our own nervous systems ^[5]. As a result, we too feel a form of distress, pain, or a lesser version of the original pain. This is not supernatural; it is a biological mechanism shaped by evolution to strengthen social bonds. These neurons help explain why we cry during a tragic film or recoil when we see someone injured. Understanding and sharing the feelings of others was indispensable to the survival of social animals, and these neural mechanisms made that possible.

Consequently, only the mother whose neural networks have undergone the experience of losing a child can truly understand that particular anguish. Seeing another person’s pain can activate our mirror neurons and give us an impression of it, but the totality of the experience—the qualia—is accessible only through direct experience. Without that direct experience, the knowledge remains fragmentary and cannot be complete. To possess complete knowledge, God would have to feel precisely the pain that mother felt.

This scientific and philosophical context raises a fundamental question: If a being, such as a creator, is not a product of biological evolution and possesses no neural architecture or mirror neurons, can that being truly apprehend the ‘feeling’ of human physical and psychological suffering? If Allah has never personally experienced human sorrow, hunger, sexual desire, or mortal fear, can He know what those feelings are really like? If He knows only the proposition ‘this person is suffering,’ that is propositional knowledge. But is it logically possible to acquire the ‘taste’ or subjective feeling (qualia) of suffering without bodily experience? If He does not feel it Himself, can He be called fully acquainted with experience—or genuinely omniscient?

The Problem of First-Person Knowledge: Norman Kretzmann’s Argument Against Omniscience

Philosopher Norman Kretzmann advanced an important argument against the concept of omniscience. In his 1966 paper Omniscience and Immutability, he showed that a person’s direct knowledge of themselves is not identical to another person’s knowledge about them. In philosophy, this special form of knowledge is called Knowledge de se, or first-person, self-locating knowledge. It is not merely information about a person’s identity, location, or mental state; it is knowledge possessed from the very standpoint of being that experiencing subject. According to Kretzmann’s argument, such exclusively first-person knowledge creates a fundamental problem for an omniscient God. ^{[6] [7]}

He held that each of us possesses special “first-person” knowledge, knowledge not available to anyone else.

Kretzmann illustrates his argument using someone admitted to a hospital. Suppose a man named Jones is hospitalized. His physicians, nurses, and other observers may know perfectly well that Jones is in hospital. They may know every detail of his physical condition, treatment, location, and illness. But Jones’s own knowledge is: “I am in hospital.” This statement contains more than the fact of Jones’s location; it expresses his direct awareness of his own identity. Someone else might know all the facts about Jones without knowing them from Jones’s first-person standpoint. This is the central difficulty in Kretzmann’s argument: How can a wholly distinct being possess the very same first-person knowledge that belongs to the person themselves?

When applied to Allah’s omniscience, the difficulty becomes sharper. A bereaved mother knows, “I have lost my child; I am feeling this unbearable grief inside me.” If Allah knows all truths, He certainly knows that this woman has lost her child, that she is grieving, and that she is experiencing a particular form of anguish. But the mother’s first-person knowledge consists in experiencing that grief from within her own existence. If Allah is a being distinct from her, possessing all the facts about her experience is not the same as possessing the mother’s own first-person knowledge. The statement that Allah knows the mother is suffering does not entail that Allah experiences that suffering from the mother’s own standpoint.

The same issue applies to hunger, fear of death, bodily pain, sexual pleasure, humiliation, and terror. A person subjected to torture does not merely know that their body is being harmed; they experience the pain from inside their own body. The first-person character of that experience is not equivalent to a third-person observer’s description. If an omniscient being claims complete knowledge of all such experiences, does that include the distinctive first-person knowledge of each conscious individual? If not, a form of knowledge possessed by others is missing from that being’s knowledge. If so, an account is needed of how the distinct first-person consciousnesses of countless individuals can all be present in a single divine consciousness.

According to Kretzmann’s argument, Allah’s omniscience conflicts with the assertion that He is a person distinct from every human being. If all knowledge includes every person’s own first-person knowledge, Allah must know not merely about Jones but from Jones’s own standpoint. Similarly, He must possess the first-person experiences of every bereaved mother, every abused child, and every person terrified of death. Knowing every fact about every human being is not the same as possessing full knowledge of each person’s own experience. Treating these two things as identical in a claim of omniscience denies the fundamental distinction of first-person consciousness.

The Conception of Allah in Islamic Theology

In Islam, Allah is described as incomparable—“لَيْسَ كَمِثْلِهِ شَيْءٌ” (There is nothing like Him) ^[8]. He is without beginning or end, transcends time and space, and possesses all knowledge and awareness. According to the Qur’an, Allah knows everything, from the innermost workings of the mind to every other fact. He knows the finest details of human feeling. The question is: What kind of knowledge is this without direct experience?

In Islamic theology, Allah cannot undergo human bodily or psychological suffering. God is supreme, perfect, and free of limitations. He transcends time and space and is omnipotent and omniscient.

Imagine a child suffering severe abdominal pain. The intensity, location (whether on the left or right side), and character of that pain are known directly only to the child. This is an intimately private experience that no one else can compare with their own experience in precisely the same way. It cannot be given an exact measure or recorded as an experience itself. What, then, could Allah’s knowledge of the most subtle aspects of that child’s pain be like? If Allah merely ‘knows’—that is, possesses factual information—can He truly be omniscient in the sense of encompassing the depths of all experience? Does He perceive those depths? Does Allah actually feel the child’s pain?

If Allah does not feel that pain, He cannot possess full experiential knowledge of the child’s suffering. In that case, Allah’s ‘omniscience’ is reduced to a grandiose slogan that never touches the depths of human experience and perception. The argument raises a fundamental problem for Islamic theology: How can omniscience exist without experience?

Allah’s Illness, Hunger, Suffering, and Joy: The Problem of Experience in Islamic Narrations

The hadith literature presents a striking contrast between Allah’s omniscience and direct human experience. On one hand, Allah is described as a being who neither eats nor sleeps and is subject to no bodily need. On the other, hadiths employ Allah’s own first-person words about being ill, asking for food and drink, being hurt by human conduct, and rejoicing at particular human actions. These narrations raise a fundamental question about the character of Allah’s experience: If Allah does not feel hunger, illness, and pain as humans do, how can He possess complete direct knowledge of those experiences? And if joy, suffering, and emotional change are genuinely present within Him, what is the relationship between such experiences and His supposedly immutable nature, free from human limitations?

Narration of Allah’s Illness and His Requests for Food and Drink

In Sahih Muslim 2569, Abu Hurayra reports Muhammad saying that on the Day of Resurrection Allah will address a human being and say that He was ill, yet the person did not visit Him. The person will express astonishment because Allah is the Lord of the worlds. Allah will reply that one of His servants was ill and that, had the person visited that servant, they would have found Allah with him. In the same narration Allah also speaks of asking for food and drink, later explaining that it was His servant who had asked for them. Allah thus expresses human illness and need through His own first-person speech. ^[9]

إِنَّ اللَّهَ عَزَّ وَجَلَّ يَقُولُ يَوْمَ الْقِيَامَةِ يَا ابْنَ آدَمَ مَرِضْتُ فَلَمْ تَعُدْنِي

English translation: Allah will say on the Day of Resurrection: O son of Adam, I was sick, but you did not visit Me.

In the full course of this hadith, illness, hunger, and thirst are attributed to Allah’s servants. Allah speaks in the first person of sickness and need, but identifies human beings as those who actually undergo these conditions. That is precisely where the question of direct experience becomes important. A sick person feels pain, weakness, and discomfort within their own body. A hungry person’s sensation of hunger is an experience of their own body and consciousness. When Allah says His servant was sick or hungry, He reveals knowledge of the servant’s condition. But is such knowledge equivalent to the sick person’s own pain or the hungry person’s own experience of hunger? The hadith declares a relationship between Allah and the suffering servant; it does not describe Allah personally undergoing the servant’s bodily experience.

Qur’an 6:14 describes Allah as the One who provides food but is not Himself fed. Qur’an 2:255 states that neither drowsiness nor sleep overtakes Him. Such statements place several fundamental human bodily conditions outside Allah’s existence. Yet hunger, exhaustion, the need for sleep, and illness are real parts of conscious human life. How is it established that a being who never feels hunger possesses direct experiential knowledge of every hungry person’s hunger? Knowing every fact about the causes of hunger, the body’s responses, and the person’s behavior is not the same as experiencing hunger oneself. Denying this distinction conflates factual knowledge with direct experience. ^{[10] [11]}

Humans Hurt Allah: The Hadith’s Direct Statement

In Sahih al-Bukhari 4826, Muhammad quotes a statement from Allah in which He says that the son of Adam hurts Him. In the relevant narration, people curse time, and Allah says that authority over time rests in His hands: He alternates night and day. The Arabic expression «يُؤْذِينِي» means ‘hurts Me’ or ’causes Me harm or offense.’ The word directly expresses a relationship between human conduct and harm directed toward Allah. ^[12]

قَالَ اللَّهُ عَزَّ وَجَلَّ يُؤْذِينِي ابْنُ آدَمَ، يَسُبُّ الدَّهْرَ وَأَنَا الدَّهْرُ، بِيَدِي الأَمْرُ، أُقَلِّبُ اللَّيْلَ وَالنَّهَارَ

English translation: Allah said: The son of Adam hurts Me. He curses time, whereas I am Time; authority rests in My hand, and I alternate night and day.

The statement about being hurt bears directly on Allah’s self-sufficiency and immutability. For a human being, being hurt is an affective state. A person who was previously at ease and then becomes wounded or insulted by another’s conduct has undergone a change in mental condition. If «يُؤْذِينِي» refers to genuine affective pain in Allah’s case, human behavior is connected to Allah’s own experience. If the statement instead merely expresses religious condemnation of human behavior, it establishes no actual experience of pain in Allah. In the first case, Allah’s affective condition comes into question; in the second, the statement does not establish His complete firsthand knowledge of human experience.

Allah’s Joy: The Question of Feeling and Immutability

Sahih Muslim 2747 contains a particular comparison concerning Allah’s joy. Muhammad said that Allah rejoices greatly when a servant repents to Him. To illustrate the intensity of that joy, he described a traveler who loses his camel, carrying his food and drink, in the desert. After abandoning hope of survival and lying down in the shade of a tree, the traveler suddenly recovers his camel and feels overwhelming joy. Muhammad stated that Allah rejoices at a servant’s repentance even more than that person does. Allah’s joy is thus compared with the human experience of passing from utter despair to intense relief and happiness. ^[13]

لَلَّهُ أَشَدُّ فَرَحًا بِتَوْبَةِ عَبْدِهِ حِينَ يَتُوبُ إِلَيْهِ مِنْ أَحَدِكُمْ

English translation: Allah rejoices at the repentance of His servant when the servant turns to Him more intensely than any one of you rejoices.

Here Allah’s joy is described not merely as an abstract attribute but as a feeling associated with a specific human action. The servant’s condition changes between the moment before repentance and the moment after it. Allah’s joy is described in relation to that event. This raises the question: Is this joy an actual experience in Allah’s consciousness? If it is, what is its phenomenal character, and how does it relate to the servant’s changed behavior? Nor does comparing Allah’s joy with human joy automatically mean that human first-person joy is present in Allah’s own experience. Comparing the intensity of two instances of joy and asserting that the experiences of two distinct subjects are identical are entirely different things.

Taken together, these three hadiths reveal an important epistemological problem in Islamic theology. In speaking of illness, hunger, and thirst, Allah expresses human experiences in His own words; He also speaks of being hurt by human conduct and of rejoicing at a servant’s repentance. None of this, however, establishes that He possesses full first-person knowledge of every experience of every human being. Feeling something oneself, knowing about someone else’s feeling, and expressing another person’s experience in one’s own speech are three distinct conditions. Allah’s claim to omniscience does not eliminate these distinctions. Rather, it leaves a need for a coherent account of the relationship between His freedom from bodily needs, the affective states attributed to Him, and direct knowledge of the experiences of every conscious being.

Tanzih versus Omniscience

In Islamic kalam, Allah is generally understood through the concept of tanzih , or transcendence of all attributes associated with created beings ^[14]. He is not embodied; He does not become hungry, feel sexual desire, grow tired, become helpless, or fear death ^[15]. But here lies the problem: Allah does not participate in any of the experiences that define human existence. At the same time, He is said to know the most intimate human experiences completely. Islamic theology thus makes two conflicting claims: Allah is unlike human beings, and yet He fully knows every human experience ^[16]. If He is unlike humans, He lacks the inner form of human experience; if that form is present within Him, He is not entirely removed from the experiences of created beings.

The Problem of Omniscience Without Experience: The Epistemological Argument Examined by Yujin Nagasawa

A major philosophical examination of the conflict between God’s omniscience and His other divine attributes appears in Yujin Nagasawa’s 2008 Cambridge University Press book God and Phenomenal Consciousness: A Novel Approach to Knowledge Arguments. Chapter Three of the book, The Argument from Concept Possession (1), examines an argument based on the claim that, if acquiring full possession of a concept of a particular experience requires undergoing that experience, then a being inherently incapable of undergoing it cannot possess complete knowledge of it. The argument exposes a conflict between God’s omnipotence and omniscience. An omnipotent God, it holds, can never occupy the conditions necessary to experience fear, despair, or helplessness, although these are real and distinctive phenomena within human conscious experience. ^[17]

God’s other attributes preclude Him from understanding fully certain concepts, possession of which requires Him to have particular experiences.

Consider the experience of fear and helplessness. A person who fears being killed does not simply entertain a proposition about the possibility of death. Their consciousness includes the threat to their existence, uncertainty about the future, helplessness in the face of circumstances beyond their control, and intense bodily reactions. This combination has a particular subjective character. An omnipotent and immortal God, by contrast, cannot face a genuine threat to His own existence. No force can overcome Him; no event can take His life against His will. The conditions that give rise to human fear of death—helplessness and the threat of annihilation—are therefore absent in God’s case.

The distinction is crucial. Knowing every fact about what causes fear of death, what changes it produces in the human brain, and how frightened people behave is not equivalent to experiencing fear of death firsthand. Someone who has never been hungry might learn everything about the physiology of hunger, the functioning of the stomach, and the consequences of malnutrition. But such knowledge is not the experience of hunger. Likewise, a scientist who has been unable to feel pain since birth might know every neuroscientific fact about pain without experiencing the direct sensation of pain in their own consciousness. This distinction lies at the center of the problem of experiential knowledge.

The problem is still broader in Islamic theology. Allah is held to transcend hunger, thirst, exhaustion, sexual desire, fear of death, and other bodily needs. He is never helpless, depends on no one, and cannot have His existence endangered. Yet much of human life is constituted by precisely these experiences. The anguish of a starving child, the terror of a dying person, the bodily pleasure of sex, the unbearable grief of a mother who has lost her child, and the shame of someone humiliated all have their own distinctive phenomenal character. If Allah never experiences any of these conditions Himself, on what basis is it claimed that He possesses firsthand knowledge of all experiences? And if He does undergo each of them, how can He simultaneously remain completely beyond every bodily need, weakness, and experiential limitation?

A further conflict arises between omniscience and omnipotence. One defining aspect of fear and helplessness is awareness of the limits of one’s control. But no such loss of control can exist for an omnipotent being. How could a being who can never be defeated experience a real expectation of inevitable defeat? How could someone whose existence cannot be destroyed feel the terror of their own inevitable death? If first-person knowledge of these experiences belongs within omniscience, omnipotence itself prevents the conditions for acquiring that knowledge. One divine attribute thus obstructs the complete realization of another.

The problem of omniscience is therefore not merely a question of how many facts Allah knows about human suffering. The issue is how coherent it is to claim complete knowledge of an experience that depends on a particular affective state without ever undergoing that state. If omniscience truly encompasses the fullness of every kind of knowledge, these distinctive dimensions of human experience cannot simply be excluded. And if God’s immutable, incorporeal, immortal, and omnipotent nature makes direct experience of them impossible, the unconditional claim to omniscience comes into conflict with His other attributes.

Reconstructing Human Experience

Imagine that a machine could be created—this is a hypothetical thought experiment—to record every sensation, emotion, and sensory experience of a person: the feel of touch against the skin, tears in the eyes, terror in the heart, the heat of falling in love, the trembling sensation of holding a first lover’s hand, the feeling of holding one’s daughter for the first time, or the unbearable grief of losing a child. Suppose it could analyze all that data and determine every subtle detail of the person’s mental state. That machine would then ‘know’ every aspect of the person’s experience. Its knowledge would not be merely external observation but a reconstruction of inner experience. Nothing would escape it; it would be compelled to know everything.

This raises a profound philosophical question. In his celebrated paper “What is it like to be a bat?” (1974) , philosopher Thomas Nagel argued that every conscious being’s experience has a ‘subjective’ aspect: there is something it is like to be in a particular mental state, and this cannot simply be captured or recorded as external information. Nagel argues that the inner ‘what it is like’ of another creature’s experience cannot be known fully through external facts alone ^[2].

No matter how much data a machine gathers, it cannot thereby grasp the true depth of experience, because experience is not merely information: it is an immediate felt quality associated with processes within the brain ^[18].

If God is truly omniscient, His knowledge must also include this inner point of view. No experience, however painful or shameful, can be left out. Otherwise divine omniscience is only partial knowledge, limited to information.

This also brings to mind René Descartes’s Cartesian dualism, which holds that mental experience is distinct from the physical body. If God is merely an external observer, He cannot fully know another person’s inner mental experience.

The Conflict Between Immutable Omniscience and Changing Experience

The relationship between omniscience and divine immutability is an important philosophical problem. If a being always possesses perfect knowledge of every truth, what happens to that knowledge as reality changes over time? A person suffers now, but later the pain ends; a child is hungry now but becomes satisfied after eating; a mother is devastated by grief after losing her child, although her experience was different before the child’s death. These changes are not merely external events: they are changes in the actual experience of conscious beings. If an omniscient God possesses complete knowledge of all truths and experiences at every moment, the relationship between His knowledge and changing reality becomes a fundamental philosophical question.

In his 1966 paper Omniscience and Immutability , Norman Kretzmann developed an important argument about this problem. A central issue is that propositions about the present continually change their truth conditions. What is future today becomes present tomorrow and past the day after. To know all truths at every time, an omniscient being must know the changing temporal facts. But if God’s knowledge never changes in any respect, how can His knowledge of the changing present be determined? The argument directly challenges the combined claims of omniscience and immutability. ^{[6] [19]}

The Claim of Immutable Divine Knowledge in Islamic Theology

Islamic theology also describes Allah’s knowledge as predetermined and immutable. Islamweb’s discussion no. 54532 cites al-Nawawi, Ibn Hajar, Ibn Taymiyya, and al-Sa’di on divine foreknowledge and changing earthly events. According to Ibn Hajar’s account as cited there, what is contained in Allah’s prior knowledge does not change; change may occur in human actions or the records of the angels. A statement attributed to Ibn Taymiyya makes the claim even more explicit: Allah’s knowledge does not change, and nothing previously unknown to Him becomes newly apparent. Thus, even as events change in human life, Allah’s knowledge is declared fixed and beyond such change. ^[20]

وأما علم الله سبحانه فلا يختلف ولا يبدو له ما لم يكن عالما به فلا محو فيه ولا إثبات.

English translation: As for the knowledge of Allah, exalted is He, it does not change, nor does anything that He did not already know become apparent to Him; there is therefore neither erasure nor new inscription in it.

Two claims now stand side by side. First, Allah’s knowledge is immutable. Second, Allah knows every person’s complete experience at every moment. Each moment in which a person’s pain begins, increases, reaches its greatest intensity, and finally ends constitutes a distinct state of actual experience. The time-sensitive propositions ‘I am in pain now’ and, later, ‘My pain has stopped’ do not have the same truth conditions. If omniscience includes knowledge of each present experience, Allah’s knowledge must register the present identity of every changing condition. Yet on the doctrine of immutable knowledge, His knowledge enters no new state. How can knowledge of every changing present coexist with the claim that the state of knowing never changes? That is the central inconsistency.

Ebrahim Azadegan’s Study: A Direct Recognition of the Conflict in Islamic Philosophy

The same problem has been examined directly in contemporary academic work on Islamic philosophy. Ebrahim Azadegan, in his study On the Incompatibility of God’s Knowledge of Particulars and the Doctrine of Divine Immutability: Towards a Reform in Islamic Theology , argues that God’s knowledge of changing particular events is incompatible with the doctrine of divine immutability. He examines the historical debate between Avicenna and al-Ghazali and also considers later discussions in Sadrian philosophy. His proposed resolution is to reject the doctrine of divine immutability. Rather than treating the issue as a merely verbal distinction, he identifies a conflict between two traditionally ascribed divine attributes. The study was published online in 2020 and appeared in 2022 in volume 58, issue 2, of the journal Religious Studies. ^[21]

Affirming that divine knowledge of occurrent changes among particulars is incompatible with the doctrine of divine immutability

The significance of Azadegan’s work is that it directly identifies the conflict between omniscience and immutability within the framework of Islamic philosophy itself. The dispute between Avicenna and al-Ghazali likewise concerns the nature of God’s knowledge of particular things and events that change over time. How could Allah’s knowledge represent a person’s present condition and then the person’s changed condition? This is not simply a question invented by modern philosophy. The relationship between knowledge of particulars and an immutable divine being has been debated for centuries within the Islamic philosophical tradition. Azadegan reevaluates that longstanding problem through the framework of contemporary analytic philosophy.

The inconsistency becomes deeper when the problem of immediate human experience is added. Every conscious person’s mental experience changes over time. Someone is terrified now and feels safe the next moment; someone experiences sexual pleasure now, but the feeling later ends; someone writhes in unbearable pain and subsequently loses consciousness. Such changes are not merely changes in external facts about a person; their internal conscious experience changes as well. If Allah directly experiences every person’s experiences Himself, the relationship between the emergence, disappearance, and alteration of those feelings and His own experience must be specified. But if His own affective condition is held to be entirely immutable, the claim that He directly participates in changing experiences creates a further inconsistency.

The problem of first-person knowledge is also bound up with this conflict. A child’s present terror is not merely a fact about that child; it is an event in the child’s own consciousness. What the child experiences during terror differs from what the child experiences once the terror subsides. An omniscient God is said to know all truths concerning both states. Yet if complete knowledge includes first-person experience, knowledge of the child’s changing condition is not sufficient by itself: the inner character of that experience must also be accounted for. The philosophical basis for the combined claim that Allah’s knowledge is immutable while every conscious being’s changing immediate experiences are completely present within it has not been established.

Omniscience thus confronts a serious problem. If Allah’s knowledge changes along with every changing present, the claim that it is immutable does not remain intact. If His knowledge remains eternally unchanged, an account is required of how He knows the present condition of each changing experience and each person’s first-person awareness in that moment. Knowing the facts of every event determined in advance is not the same as directly participating in the lived experience of every event. The former is a claim to knowledge of events across all time; the latter is a claim to complete awareness of the changing experiences of countless conscious beings. The fundamental epistemological problem in conventional accounts of omniscience lies in treating those two kinds of knowledge as interchangeable.

A Moral Tale: Birbal and the Palace Guards

A clever folk tale is relevant here. It is said that Akbar first encountered Birbal while on a hunting expedition. Impressed by a display of wit, the emperor gave him a ring and asked him to come to the palace. When Birbal arrived at the main gate in shabby clothes, the guards refused to let him enter. On seeing the imperial ring, they realized he was entitled to a reward from the emperor. They agreed to admit him only on the condition that he give them half of whatever reward he received.

When the emperor asked Birbal in court what reward he wanted, Birbal requested a hundred lashes for himself. Asked to explain this astonishing demand, he recounted the encounter at the gate. Birbal had asked for this reward to teach the corrupt guards a lesson. Amazed by his presence of mind, Akbar immediately ordered fifty lashes for each of the two guards and appointed Birbal as one of his advisers.

This tale teaches a profound philosophical lesson: whoever claims to possess knowledge of an experience must also bear the burden of that experience. If God claims supreme knowledge of human experience, He must encompass not only its conceptual content but also its pain, grief, despair, shame, and humiliation.

Understanding the Suffering of a Bereaved Mother

If Allah is omniscient, He must possess a complete awareness of the agony, grief, and unbearable suffering of a mother who has lost her child. It is not enough merely to say that Allah ‘knows’: the experience itself and its internal, felt quality must be present to Him at the same depth.

The philosophical concept of ‘introspection’ is relevant here ^[22]. Introspection is the process through which one gains knowledge of one’s own mental states and feelings. A bereaved mother experiences her own internal anguish directly, in a way that external observation or factual information alone cannot fully know, understand, or apprehend.

Theories of empathy likewise indicate that understanding another person’s experience requires more than mere information: it involves, at least to some degree, feeling the experience ‘from within.’ Truly understanding another’s suffering therefore calls for a psychological re-experiencing of that suffering ^[23]. If Allah cannot experience the bereaved mother’s pain—if He lacks the affective empathy that includes such internal mental feeling—then His omniscience is incomplete. This brings the concept into conflict with Islamic theology, which describes Allah as all-knowing and all-seeing.

Understanding a Gay Man’s Sexual Pleasure

Consider a gay man who experiences sexual pleasure through penetration by another man. Suppose he has intercourse with multiple partners, and every instant of each sexual encounter—the emotions, arousal, bodily sensations, internal pressure, and feeling of release—is registered in his brain. Does every one of these experiences fall within the knowledge of an omniscient Allah? Does Allah apprehend them? Does He feel them? If Allah does not possess those sensations, experiential knowledge, feelings, and their finest details, how can He claim to be all-knowing? Each time another man penetrates him, Allah too must, under this conception of omniscience, experience the identical sensation and awareness.

This question exposes an uncomfortable but unavoidable dimension of theology: Does the claim to omniscience require knowledge of experiences and sensations that religion regards as ‘sinful’ or ‘impure’?

In philosophical terms, this raises the distinction between “knowledge by acquaintance” and “knowledge by description” ^[24]. Bertrand Russell drew an important distinction between them. On this account, the true knowledge of a person’s inner feelings and experiences can be acquired only by the person who has directly undergone them. Description yields merely a shadow, not the original experience.

If God only knows those experiences ‘by description,’ His knowledge is limited—His experience is secondhand ^[25]. If, on the other hand, He truly knows them, His knowledge must encompass the gay man’s internal sensations of excitement and pleasure. There would then be a kind of participation in that sexual pleasure within God’s own consciousness.

This gives rise to another problem, particularly for Islamic theology: Allah is holy, sinless, and free from ‘impurity.’ How, then, can He fully possess an experience that Islamic morality treats as forbidden?

The conflict leads to a profound philosophical conclusion: Omniscience that includes experiences considered ‘unseemly’ or ‘undesirable’ for God brings the ideas of divine purity and omniscience into contradiction.

Omniscience can therefore be described as a kind of philosophical curse—a condition in which God cannot, even by His own choice, refrain from knowing something, including experiences at odds with His own nature and moral standing.

Understanding the Experience of a Child Who Has Been Raped

Suppose a five- or six-year-old child at a madrasa is raped by a teacher. The assault tears the child’s anal tissue, causes bleeding, and inflicts terrible pain. Only the child can know exactly what that feels like: the particular intensity and character of the suffering. Someone who has never undergone that experience cannot know it completely. Merely watching the child suffer cannot reveal the full inner quality of the pain. If Allah knows that experience, then the experiential knowledge itself must also be present to Him as felt awareness. The subjective sensation of the child’s bodily agony must exist within Allah’s knowledge. Allah must feel exactly the same pain; otherwise, on this conception, His knowledge cannot be complete.

Three Impossible Alternatives for Omniscience

At the heart of the argument is a simple but devastating philosophical division. There are no more than three logical alternatives regarding Allah’s omniscience. First, Allah knows every human experience only as information: He knows that someone is suffering from hunger, that a child is shattered by the terror of rape, or that a mother is overwhelmed by grief after losing her child—but He does not know what those experiences feel like from within. His knowledge is therefore factual but not experiential, and His omniscience is incomplete. Second, Allah genuinely feels all these experiences from within. In that case, His consciousness must contain the terror of every raped child, the burning hunger in every starving person’s stomach, the bodily sensations of every sexual experience, the shame of every humiliated individual, and the fear of every dying person. The conception of Allah as holy, impassible, incorporeal, and absolute then collapses. Third, one might assert that Allah’s knowledge is unlike human knowledge. But that answer does not solve the problem: it conceals the problem in a fog of language. The claim ‘He knows, but we cannot understand how He knows’ is not an explanation; it substitutes mystery for explanation.

The Incompleteness of Knowledge Without Experience and Perception

Whether the completeness of knowledge depends only on information is a classical philosophical controversy. Examining the claim that a being, such as God, is ‘omniscient’ reveals several serious logical and scientific difficulties.

Logical conclusion: If a being does not directly experience intense bodily and mental sensations such as anger, hatred, sexual pleasure, or helplessness, then its ‘omniscience’ is confined to theoretical or database-like knowledge. Such knowledge cannot be called ‘complete knowledge,’ because the essence or qualia of conscious beings’ experiences across the universe is missing.

Conclusion

The Islamic conception of Allah is thus caught in a severe philosophical trap over omniscience. If Allah knows human sorrow, terror, hunger, sexuality, humiliation, the trauma of rape, and fear of death only as information, He is not omniscient; He is merely a cosmic database. If He genuinely feels these experiences internally, His consciousness is continually permeated by every agony, sin, shame, forbidden pleasure, and helplessness taking place on Earth. His characterization as holy, impassible, absolute, and incorporeal then breaks down. If the claim instead is that Allah knows all this ‘in some other way’ that human beings cannot understand, that is not an explanation but a religious strategy for evading the logical difficulty. In this context, the claim of omniscience is therefore not a testament to divine greatness; it is a stark disclosure of the internal inconsistencies of theology.