Feigning Ignorance

Why God Pretends Not to Know and What This Means for AI Tutors

The Bible is full of strange questions from an all-knowing God.
“Where are you?” to Adam.
“Where is your brother?” to Cain.
“What is in your hand?” to Moses.
“What do you see?” to Jeremiah.
“Can these bones live?” to Ezekiel—who answers, beautifully, “Lord God, You know.” God “goes down to see” Sodom.
On Moriah, after Abraham has lifted the knife, God says, “Now I know.”

An omniscient being shouldn’t need to ask, descend, or discover.
Yet God keeps staging scenes in which human speech, vision, and judgment are required. Why?

One answer is familiar: anthropomorphism.

Scripture speaks in the language of humans. True enough. But as a total explanation, it is unsatisfying. It treats the divine question as a mere costume.
Let’s consider God’s questions as a display of pedagogy.
In other words, God is not ignorant, but feigning ignorance as a teaching strategy.

Great tutors do not merely deliver answers; they create need for an answer.
They ask a question to lure the student from passivity to agency, from borrowed understanding to owned understanding.

The question is a wedge that opens a space for the student’s mind to arrive. On this reading, God’s questions are not slips in omniscience but acts of restraint—divine “tzimtzum” in the register of knowledge.

God leaves space in the margins for our commentary.

But doesn’t this compromise truth? Isn’t pretending not to know, well, pretending? Two distinctions help. First, feigned ignorance is not lying; it is withholding. The teacher’s question is not “I don’t know,” but “Tell me, in your own words.”

If we push the thesis, even prayer becomes a form of teaching God—not informing God of our needs, but articulating our needs until they become intelligible to us.

The sages say God “longs for the prayers of the righteous.” Why would God desire these prayers if God already knows their contents? Viewed purely through the lens of information theory, the prayer content is redundant. Rather, God, as it were, wants the righteous to benefit from articulating their prayers; God “holds the space” like a good therapist for thought to become speech.

All of this becomes newly practical in an age of AI tutors. A perfect answer engine makes a poor guide. If the system never misreads, never asks back, never withholds certainty, it deprives us of the work of understanding. The design lesson—call it engineered ignorance—is to give learners productive room: ask naïve questions, offer hypotheses instead of verdicts, hold an interpretable ambiguity open for a beat longer than comfort. Not to confuse, but to consecrate effort.

Ironically, people say that with AI, we are “creating God.” But the lesson of the Hebrew Bible is that God is not simply a machine with perfect answers, but one that simulates imperfection and confusion (and may even experience them) so as to help us learn through articulation.