I think this raises another, related question about God’s omniscience. If he already knows everything, then it doesn’t matter if he’s watching us, he knows what we’re going to do. Personally, I don’t buy that, since I think we’re constantly astounding God (by the things we do right and inventive ways we find to sin) and the whole “He knows us so well that he knows precisely what we’ll do even if it hasn’t happened yet” argument doesn’t really make sense to me, either.

I think of God watching me like I watch over my kids sometimes–they fall down and start crying and I say, “You’re okay” and go back to what I was doing.

(Of course, if the Savior stood beside me, I would probably walk over to the kid and inform them they were okay instead of just yelling it from across the room or the playground or whatever.)

LOL, Jack. You mean to tell me that God has superpowers? Now I’m really in trouble.

It doesn’t help, Jacob. God has a pair of these.

I called my father, who said my keys were not where I would have left them. I remembered I had put the keys in my laptop backpack, where they would be out of the way but I’d be certain to remember them. And there they were.

All I could think was, “Dude, sorry. I hope you didn’t hear that.”

Starfoxy, that’s a really interesting question about having the capability to be omniscient, versus actually putting that into practice. Which is maybe somewhat related to what Th. is saying about simply being conscious of things, versus something more active. This is making me think more about what it means to be aware of something on some level, as opposed to actively paying attention to it, and where we see God’s observation of the universe fitting into that.

Smallaxe, I hadn’t thought of that angle. I like the post you linked–I’m also quite intrigued by the role of memory and forgetting in faith. And I can see how that might tie into this question–the famous “forget yourself and get to work,” as you said, doesn’t mean literally forget that you exist, but pay attention to something different.

Stephen and Ziff, thanks for the laugh–that would be great if at the Last Judgment God was saying things like, “you made the terrestrial kingdom! (p < .01)” or “you’re on your way to hell! (p < .00001),” so that we would at least know the probability that his judgment was accurate.

ed42, all I can say is that I haven’t yet made up my mind about the existence of Santa, or I might be blogging about his omniscience problem (does he really know if I’ve been naughty or nice, and just how is he defining those terms, anyway?)

Chelsea, you win the “name that movie” prize! I wouldn’t have gotten that one.

Jacob J, I’m glad to hear that you’re taking this modesty thing seriously, and not letting the devil convince you that there are situations when you can relax your standards.

Thinking about this more, I’m wondering to what extent this idea is actually all that motivating. I’m remembering that as a kid, I figured that God was watching me carefully take the vegetables off my plate and hide them. But that didn’t worry me too much, just so long as he didn’t rat me out to my parents.

Th. (8) You said exactly what I was going to say.

We sure do screw up our children’s minds: “Santa knows if you have been naughty or nice”, “God is watching you”. Hmm, the child thinks Santa must be God. “Oh, BTW child, Santa isn’t real”.