Omniscience and Divine Foreknowledge

Omniscience is an attribute having to do with knowledge; it is the
attribute of "having knowledge of everything." Many philosophers
consider omniscience to be an attribute possessed only by a divine
being, such as the God of Western monotheism. However, the Eastern
followers of Jainism allow omniscience to be an attribute of some
human beings. But what exactly is it to be omniscient? The term's root
Latin words are "omni" (all) and "scientia" (knowledge), and these
suggest a rough layman's definition of omniscience as "knowledge of
everything." Yet even though this definition may be somewhat useful,
there are a number of questions which the definition alone does not
address. First, there is the general question of what exactly our
human knowledge is and whether or not an understanding of human
knowledge can be applied to God. For example, does God have beliefs?
And what kind of evidence does God need for these beliefs to count as
knowledge? There is also the question of what exactly this
"everything" in the definition is supposed to mean. Does God know
everything which is actual but not all that is possible? Does God know
the future, and if so, how exactly? This last question is a perennial
difficulty and will require a thorough investigation.

1. Introduction

There are a number of scriptures that remark on the vastness of God's
knowledge. For instance the Qur'an (alt. Koran) states "[W]hat the
heavens and earth contain [is God's], and all that lies between them
and underneath the soil. You have no need to speak aloud; for He has
knowledge of all that is secret, and all that is hidden. . . . God has
knowledge of all things." (Suras 20:5ff; 24:35). Psalm 139 expresses
similar thoughts:

Even before there is a word on my tongue,
Behold, O LORD, You know it all. . . .
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
It is too high, I cannot attain to it.
Where can I go from Your Spirit?
Or where can I flee from Your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, You are there;
If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, You are there. (NASB, vs. 4, 6-8)

These and many other passages from the sacred scriptures of Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam all hint at the awesome breadth and depth of
God's knowledge. God is said not only to know the daily activities of
his creatures but to know even their thoughts. God as creator knows
about the heavens, the earth, and the whole physical cosmos. This much
at least is supported by scriptures. But the scriptures are for the
most part not philosophical texts and do little to offer a rigorous
analysis of omniscience, a task that largely has been left to the
philosophers within the traditions. This entry will navigate through
the landscape of arguments presented by those theistic philosophers
who have tried to make further progress in comprehending this
attribute of God.

The first few sections analyze the concept of knowledge itself with
particular application to God. After getting clearer on the different
components of God's knowledge, a number of different analyses of the
quality and scope of God's knowledge are considered in an attempt to
sort out some plausible definitions of omniscience. The final sections
take up one of the most difficult aspects of understanding God's
knowledge, his knowledge of the future. Several models are presented
with an eye toward seeing whether or not the models can be reconciled
with human freedom, divine providence, and a robust account of God's
omniscience.
2. The Components of God's Knowledge
a. A Preliminary Account of Knowledge

It will be helpful to begin an exploration into God's knowledge with a
very brief account of human knowledge. Typically, knowledge has been
thought of as a certain kind of belief. For starters, it must be a
true belief. It would be a mistake to claim to know that "2+2=5"
because 2 and 2 equal 4, not 5. Similarly one could not know that
humans lived on the moon during the Clinton administration, because
none did.

But is a true belief the same thing as knowledge? No. Here is an
example to motivate why this cannot be. Suppose that a friend of yours
has a broken compass that is no longer polarized so that the needle
can spin freely. Your friend likes this compass a lot and even though
he realizes that it does not work, sometimes he uses it to give people
directions. One day, a stranger comes to your friend and asks for
directions, specifically where north is (it's a very cloudy day and
there is no moss around). Your friend graciously pulls out his compass
and proceeds to spin the needle. It lands on north. And, as it turns
out, the compass is right. Question: Does your friend know where north
is? It seems not. Why? Because your friend has really bad evidence for
believing this since it is far more likely that his compass is
pointing in the wrong direction. Your friend has a true belief, but he
does not have knowledge. Something else is needed, namely, good
evidence. Although it is debatable that all beliefs which count as
knowledge must be based on good evidence, all knowledge is usually
thought as a true belief that is either based on sufficient evidence
(or a proper ground) or is formed in the right sort of way.

This is a rough account of what human knowledge is often thought to
be. But there are additional complications when trying to apply this
account to God. In what follows, a more thorough discussion of each of
the elements of knowledge (belief, truth, and the way beliefs are
grounded) will be undertaken in order to get clearer on what God's
knowledge may be like.
b. Beliefs, Sentences, Propositions and God's Knowledge

Some argue that, strictly speaking, at bottom it is not beliefs which
are true; instead it is sentences or propositions. When we believe
that "Snow is white" we believe that this sentence (or proposition) is
true. Thus God's knowledge is ultimately of sentences, propositions,
or whatever the real truth-bearers turn out to be. (See also What
Sorts of Things are True (or False).)

First, consider the possibility that the truth-bearers are sentences.
Sentences are essential components of a language. Here it is useful to
distinguish between sentence-types and sentence-tokens. A
sentence-token is a concrete entity such as some ink on a paper,
pixels on a screen, a sound uttered by someone's voice, or some other
physical object. The sentences being read on your computer screen are
all sentence-tokens. Sentence-tokens are instances of sentence-types.
A sentence-type is an abstract entity that is multi-exemplifiable,
that is, it can have instances in more than one place at a time. The
sentence-token on your screen "Tully is the author of this article"
and the ink blot in English on my desk (which reads: "Tully is the
author of this article") are both instances of the same sentence-type.

One objection to the theory that sentence-tokens are truth-bearers is
that if there had never been anyone uttering a sentence, there would
be no truth. Yet this is very implausible for surely it was true that
there were plants before there were humans and other language users.
This is a strike against sentence-tokens as the ultimate bearers of
truth.

The truth-bearers of God's knowledge do not seem to be sentence-types
either because of an objection that might be called "the problem of
indexicals". For suppose God at some time expresses this proposition
audibly in English, "I am God," and Jim Morrison also says "I am God."
Spoken by God, this is evidently true but for Morrison this is false.
It would seem, then, that the sentence-type expressed by both of these
propositions would then bear two contradictory truth-values, that of
being true and false—an absurd consequence. Therefore sentence-tokens
and sentence-types should both be rejected as ultimate constituents of
God's knowledge.

In order to solve these problems, many have turned to propositions as
the objects of God's beliefs. Propositions are non-linguistic,
abstract objects. Both of the following sentences can be thought to
express the same proposition: "The father is a father by paternity";
"Pater paternitate est pater." The advantage of holding that
propositions are truth-bearers is that the abstract character of
propositions does not commit one to thinking that God must be
essentially related to time nor speaks in an ineffable divine
language. (He might, but the propositional account does not entail
this.) Additionally if the truth-bearers are propositions, it can be
thought that when God and Jim Morrison both say "I am God" they are
expressing two different propositions and not just the same
sentence-type.
i. Beliefs, Propositions, or Both?

Ordinarily, in contrast to beliefs, propositions are to be thought of
as non-mental entities. If propositions are truth-bearers, then it was
true that "There are dinosaurs" when there were dinosaurs and no
humans or other smart creatures around to believe this. So
propositions have an advantage over beliefs as truth-bearers, because
if propositions do the truth-bearing then there can be true statements
when there are no believers.

But since God has always existed and been aware of everything, it may
be that God's beliefs are good enough to do the trick and there is no
need for propositions, just so long as God believes all the facts. So
for the theist who believes that everything is dependent on God in
some sense—and thus at least partially on God's mind—it may be
appropriate to adopt the view that the propositions which humans
believe are just God's beliefs. After all, the only significant
difference between propositions and beliefs is that propositions are
ordinarily thought of as non-psychological, mind-independent entities.
Positing beliefs rather than "free-floating" propositions as the
truth-bearers of God's knowledge is a more natural way of deferring to
God as the source of all knowledge. Perhaps a theist can say with
Berkeley, "Esse est percipi"—to be is to be perceived, or more
precisely, "Esse verum est Deo credi"—to be true is (just) to be
believed by God. God is the source of his beliefs and God's beliefs
are the source of what is true; false beliefs arise from creatures
mistakenly believing to be true what God believes is false.

Whether or not propositions are just God's beliefs will not be fully
settled in this entry. Since much of the literature on omniscience
understands the concept as knowledge of true propositions, the
remaining sections of the article will not suppose that the ultimate
truth-bearers of God's knowledge are beliefs or propositions and the
two terms will be used interchangeably to refer to whatever the
truth-bearers happen to be.
ii. Beliefs: Occurrent or Dispositional?

Another distinction is useful in getting clearer on the nature of
God's beliefs. This is the distinction between occurrent and
dispositional beliefs. To have an occurrent belief that something is
true is to be actively thinking that something is true. For instance,
supposing that person P believes in God, P is only currently believing
in God if P is actively thinking that this proposition is true, "God
exists."

But sometimes we are inclined to say things like this too, "Yes, I've
believed that all my life. I've always believed God exists, even if I
haven't always been actively thinking this." If this way of describing
beliefs is right, what we are talking about cannot be an occurrent
belief since we have not spent all of our life thinking about this or
any other proposition. Rather, we have what is called a dispositional
belief. If a person has a dispositional belief this means she would be
disposed or inclined to have an occurrent belief in a proposition if
she were to think about the proposition.

But how best to describe God's beliefs? The downside of the
dispositional account of God's beliefs is that dispositional beliefs
entail that God is not always aware of all that is true. A
dispositional account of beliefs is suitable for making sense of
limited human cognitive activity but would be deficient for a perfect
thinker. If it is possible to make sense of a being who can be aware
of all propositions simultaneously it is preferable to think of all of
God's beliefs as occurrent. Dispositional beliefs are adequate for
finite humans, but the goal is always to be aware of everything that
one believes. [For arguments in favor of dispositional beliefs see
Hunt (1995)].
iii. Does God have Beliefs?

Not all describe God's knowledge in the typical way of God having a
very large set of justified, true beliefs. William Alston has argued
that God's knowledge should be characterized in a different way
because, no matter how one understands God's knowledge, it can be
shown that God has no beliefs (287-307).

According to Alston, there are two plausible ways to characterize
God's knowledge without beliefs. The predominant view in contemporary
philosophy of religion is that his knowledge is propositional in
content. Alston thinks God's knowledge may be thought of as
propositional without God having beliefs. Call this the propositional
view of God's knowledge. An alternative view is that God does not
grasp the truth of propositions; rather he is immediately and directly
aware of the world without any propositional intermediaries that are
about the world. This is the non-propositional view of God's
knowledge.
1) Non-propositional knowledge

Beginning with the latter position, Alston takes Aquinas to be one of
its chief representatives. According to Aquinas, God is not dependent
for his existence on anything, including his attributes. God is
thought of as absolutely simple, not having any real parts distinct
from God's essence. God's simplicity encompasses every attribute of
God including his knowledge. To put it crudely, there is no difference
between God, his knowledge, and the objects of God's knowledge. So the
object of God's knowledge turns out to be God's own essence. God's
essence contains within it the likeness of everything and God knows
everything by knowing his own essence.

Alston admits that this way of knowing is very mysterious and we will
never be able to adequately understand how it is that God knows
everything. But he thinks we can liken God's knowledge to our initial
perceptual vision of a scene, where we have yet to extract from the
scene separate facts. We have an awareness of things but the awareness
is without a propositional structuring. In this initial perception,
there is a unity present in which we have yet to separate subject from
object, knower from things known. For humans, we do not have
understanding until we begin to separate our knowledge from the things
known and separate the scene into a distinct set of facts. Yet we lose
and long for the underlying unity of the initial awareness. God, it
may be thought, retains the unity and can have understanding without
piecemeal, discursive thought present in human reasoning.

That is a rough description of what non-propositional knowledge is
like, perhaps not fully illuminating, but not incoherent. If one
accepts divine simplicity, one has a pretty strong argument against
knowledge as propositional beliefs:

1. God is simple, including God's knowledge.
2. Propositional thought structure is complex.
3. If God's thought structure is propositional, this means that either
God's beliefs just are propositions or the content of his beliefs are
of mind-independent propositions.
4. Either way, God's knowledge cannot be composed of beliefs.

If one balks at the idea of divine simplicity, there is a second
argument for why God's knowledge is non-propositional. We humans are
limited. We cannot understand any concrete thing without abstracting
from it and formulating propositions about its abstract features. For
example, we cannot fully understand Jimmy Carter but only various
aspects of him, that he is a Democrat, that he is human, and so forth.
But God is not limited. His knowledge is complete. God can understand
everything about Jimmy Carter all at once without separating aspects
of him from Jimmy Carter. He does this by knowing Jimmy Carter
himself. So there is no reason for God to employ propositions if his
knowledge is unlimited in the way just described. Since God does not
have to employ propositions, he has no need of beliefs.
2) Propositional Knowledge without Beliefs

If a propositional account of God's knowledge is to be preferred,
Alston thinks that this too can be described without the employment of
beliefs. He calls this view the "intuitive" conception of knowledge.
Instead of having a belief that p is true—where p is a proposition
that is true if it corresponds with some fact F—he thinks that God
could be directly aware of the fact, F, with no belief about p at all.
(Even though God is directly aware of facts, and not propositions, he
still thinks that this can rightly be called a propositional way of
knowing because the facts which would correspond to true propositions
have the same isomorphic structure. For more on facts and
correspondence, see Truth as Correspondence). Knowing something would
then be a completely different kind of psychological state than
believing something. One can have a belief without the belief being
true. However if knowledge is a state of awareness of a fact, there is
an intrinsic relationship between awareness of facts and truth that
beliefs do not have. All of God's knowledge would be infallible in a
very strong sense.

Alston thinks that if we compare this kind of knowledge with human
knowledge (true belief grounded in the right way) we can see that the
former is better because "[t]here is no potentially distorting medium
in the way, no possibly unreliable witnesses, no fallible signs or
indications" (190). We humans have a lot of beliefs that we are not
always immediately aware of and could be wrong about many of them. We
would gladly trade this kind of knowledge for always being directly
aware of the facts. Intuitive knowledge just seems like a superior
kind of knowledge. Since God is perfect he should be thought of as
having this superior kind of knowledge, a knowledge without beliefs.
[For objections to this view see Hasker (1988)].
c. Truth and God's Knowledge

A discussion of all of the different theories of truth is well beyond
the scope of this entry. Instead only two theories will be discussed
which present the most likely candidates for the kind of truth
involved in God's knowledge. Since the belief and justification
components of knowledge provide more complications for a theory about
God's knowledge, this section will be relatively brief. For additional
complications, see Truth.
i. Truth as Correspondence

The most widely held account of truth is that truth is a relationship,
namely one of correspondence (See Correspondence Theory). A belief is
true if the proposition held to be true corresponds with some fact.
"2+2=4" is true if it is a fact that 2+2=4. "John McCain is now
President of the United States" is true if right now it is a fact that
he is the president and it is false if this fact does not now obtain.
What is a fact? This is an area of current debate. Some think of facts
as concrete entities like events which contain substances and their
properties as constituents. But it is doubtful that a theist can
maintain this understanding of facts since it is often thought that
God could know propositions about God's thoughts or about uncreated
creatures. Yet there seems to be no concrete entity or entities which
these kinds of propositions could correspond with to give them their
truth value. Thus for many theists, facts have been understood like
propositions as abstract entities—states of affairs that are either
actually, possibly, or necessarily existing.
ii. Truth as a Clear and Distinct Perception

Above it was mentioned that William Alston proposes that God does not
have beliefs. Instead, God has knowledge by either being directly
aware of facts or by being directly aware of his own essence. If
Alston is right, then the truth element involved in God's knowledge is
not truth as correspondence since there are no beliefs or propositions
as constituents of God's knowledge to correspond with facts.

Alston at one point appeals to Descartes' formulation of knowledge as
a clear and distinct perception to clarify his view that God can have
knowledge by a kind of perception without beliefs. Although Alston
does not do so explicitly himself, Descartes' thoughts can also be
used to illuminate what truth would be in the absence of beliefs.
According to this understanding, perceptions or "awarenesses" are true
if and only if they are clear and distinct. Moreover, we might just
hink of truth as this quality of being clear and distinct. For humans,
not all of our perceptions are clear and distinct, so some of our
perceptions will not be true. But God's perceptual faculties do not
suffer from human limitations—all of his perceptions (of either his
own essence or of mind independent facts) would be perfectly clear and
distinct. Thus built into God's perceptual faculties is that they
yield qualitatively perfect perceptions and thus everything which is
perceived must be true.
d. Cognitive Faculties and God's Knowledge

The traditional account of knowledge is true belief plus something
else. What this something else is has often been called justification
(or sometimes "warrant"). From the time of the Ancient philosophers to
the present, there has been an endless debate on the nature of this
third component of knowledge. Some have even thought that
justification, being an essentially normative (and perhaps moral)
notion, should not be attributed to God who is the author or ground of
normativity and does not need to justify his beliefs.

This debate about what justification is and whether God needs it will
not be resolved here. Even if God does not have to have justified
beliefs and does not need reasons for all of his items of knowledge,
God still needs cognitive faculties to provide him experience or a
proper ground for at least some things. Thus we can understand this
third component of knowledge less controversially in terms of the
kinds of cognitive faculties needed to yield a wide scope of
knowledge. A cognitive faculty is simply a particular ability to know
something. Perception is an example of a faculty of human cognition
that allows us to know about the physical world. Memory is the faculty
that allows us to know about the past. Below, each of the classical
faculties which have been thought to provide humans with evidence for
their beliefs will be discussed in relation to God's knowledge.
i. Inferential Faculties

Most often when we ask for evidence for someone's belief, it is
propositional evidence that we are asking for. We are asking for
propositional reasons to believe something. Many times, we will use
our beliefs that certain propositions are true as evidence for some of
our other beliefs. Using beliefs as evidence for other beliefs is
using inferential evidence. Here is an example. In order for Jane to
justifiably believe that Brutus killed Caesar, Jane may need to know
that the history book that she is reading was written by a credible
historian. To know that cigarettes cause cancer, Jane would perhaps
need to know that studies have shown this to be true. When we are
reasoning inferentially, we are employing arguments. Thus inferential
evidence can come as a deductive, inductive, or abductive argument.
1) Deductive Reasoning

A deductive argument which provides knowledge is one in which the
premises guarantee the truth of the conclusion such that if the
premises were true it would be impossible for the conclusion to be
false.

Example:
1.If John Sidoti is Sicilian, then John Sidoti is Italian.
2.John Sidoti is Sicilian.
3.Thus, John Sidoti is Italian.

Deductive reasoning is an excellent way to come to a conclusion
because the premises necessitate the truth of the conclusion. Since
deductive arguments provide an infallible guide to knowledge of the
conclusions, if God reasons inferentially there is little reason to
think that he does not reason deductively.
2) Inductive Reasoning

An inductive argument which yields knowledge is one in which the
premises do not guarantee the truth of the conclusion but make it very
likely that a conclusion is true.

Example:
1.98% of the students at the Ohio State University have high school diplomas.
2.Titus is a student at the Ohio State University.
3.Thus, Titus has a high school diploma.

The conclusion of this argument does not necessarily follow from the
premises. Inductive reasoning is thus a fallible way of reasoning, and
as such, most have not attributed this kind of reasoning to God. Since
the truth of the premises does not guarantee that the conclusion is
true, God could be wrong if he reasoned inductively—an unfortunate
feature of a perfect being. But as will be seen below, there are some
who think that God is omniscient yet could be mistaken about some
things. For example, if the future is to some degree indeterminate,
God could possibly be mistaken about its outcome. Still, God could
make reasonable predictions about the future if he reasons
inductively. Thus an inductive account of some of God's knowledge may
be attractive as a way of granting the most and qualitatively best
knowledge possible given necessary limiting conditions which are
thought to inhere in the world.
3) Abductive Reasoning

An abductive argument is an argument to the best explanation.
Inferential knowledge of a proposition via an abductive argument would
be such that the conclusion yields a true and epistemically plausible
explanation for the facts provided in the premises.

Example:
1. There are things which came into existence.
2. Whatever comes into existence is caused to exist by something or other.
3. There cannot be an infinite series of past causes.
4. Therefore, there was a first uncaused cause.
5. Thus God exists (because the best explanation for this first cause is God).

Like inductive reasoning, abductive reasoning is thought to be
fallible, again, a serious drawback in attributing it to a perfect
being. One important difference between inferential and abductive
reasoning that counts even more against the possibility of God
reasoning abductively is that while inductive reasoning is forward
looking, abductive reasoning is present or backward looking and may be
unnecessary for God to have. There might be good reasons to think that
God can only have fallible knowledge of the future, but there are few
reasons why God could not have infallible knowledge of the present and
past so long as (a) there has never been a time in which God has not
existed and (b) God has perfect "vision" of all that is present to him
or that he remembers. Presumably God would never need to make a best
guess about why something is the way it is, since he has "seen" all
that has been before and all that is now. So it is unlikely that God
reasons abductively if he has the sorts of cognitive faculties like
perception and memory which will be discussed below.
One final thing should be said about God's reasoning in general. When
humans reason by inference, they do so discursively with a temporal
lag between seeing the premises as true and using the premises as
bases for the conclusion. In other words, we reason piecemeal and
working through our reasoning by way of an argument takes time. Most
who think that God can reason inferentially do not think his reasoning
is discursive like this. God can see the argument all at once and see
immediately that certain premises lead to a conclusion. The premises
are evidentially prior to the conclusion but he does not think of them
temporally prior to believing the conclusion.
ii. Non-inferential Faculties

Not all evidence comes from inferential cognitive faculties. More
often than not, we take direct experience as evidence for the truth of
propositions and think that we have faculties which can provide us
this more immediate kind of evidence. The perception of a watch on
your neighbor's hand is taken as evidence that "Your neighbor is
wearing a watch" is true. The feeling of a sharp pain in my leg is
evidence that "I am hurting" is true. The feeling of one's legs being
crossed under the desk is evidence for the belief that "My legs are
crossed." At a minimum, perceptual, introspective, and kinesthetic
experience seem to count as evidence for some beliefs. In addition,
memory, testimony, and a priori intuitions have been thought to yield
immediate evidence as well.
1) Perception

Many theists speak of God as "seeing" the world, "hearing" their
prayers, and "feeling" sad for sin. Less often is God spoken of as
smelling or tasting something. But in general, it is thought that God
can perceive the world. (See The Epistemology of Perception.) Since
most theists think of God as non-bodily, God's perception will only be
analogously like human perception. God's sight, for example, will not
involve the reception of light into the eye and his sight will never
yield misleading or "fuzzy" data. Accordingly having perfect
perception would seem to involve removing all of the limits of human
perception. For instance, God's seeing would not be limited to seeing
the surface of material objects but could penetrate through the solid
objects to what is beyond. He would lack unclear, peripheral vision
and instead would be able to focus on everything clearly all at once.

God's relationship with time will also affect the scope of God's
perceptions. If God is atemporal, God's perceptual faculty should be
thought of as God's ability to perceive all of time all at once. If
God is temporal, his perception would best be thought of like human
perception, as awareness of only what is present.
2) Introspection

The introspective faculty provides direct insight of one's own
internal thoughts, feelings, and emotions (See Introspection). That I
am now in pain can be known just by experiencing pain. That I am now
thinking is also known by introspection. Since God is traditionally
thought to be personal—enjoying psychological faculties involving
beliefs, feelings, thoughts, and so forth—there is little reason to
think that some of God's knowledge is not gained by something like
human introspection.
3) Kinesthetic awareness

Kinesthetic awareness is an experience of one's bodily movements and
the location (and perhaps feeling) of one's bodily parts. Whether or
not kinesthetic awareness is a type of introspection or something
different entirely is a matter of debate. But either way, it would
seem that God would lack this type of evidence and its corresponding
faculty since God is usually not thought to have a body. If God did
have a body (say, as Jesus), then God could have kinesthetic
awareness.
4) Memory

The faculty of memory provides immediate knowledge of the past. The
question of whether or not God remembers things is essentially tied to
questions about God's relationship to time. If God is atemporal, then
he would have no memory, since memory consists of being aware of a
past experience. But if God is atemporal, then he would have no past
experiences to recall. Thus God only has memory if God is a temporal
being.
5) Testimony

Some think that humans have a testimony faculty which enables them to
have knowledge of some propositions just by hearing certain kinds of
testimony that something is true. It is not clear why God could not
have testimony as evidence but there seems to be no reason to think
that he does. This is because God would already have overwhelming
evidence from his other faculties for whatever a creature testified to
be true. Since there are no circumstances in which testimony would be
needed by God in order for him to have knowledge, there is little
reason to suppose that God ever has knowledge which is based on
testimony.
6) A priori intuition

Finally, God is thought to have knowledge of all necessarily true
propositions such as "2+2=4," "God exists," and "if x is a bachelor,
then x is an unmarried male." God does not reason by inference that
these propositions are true nor does he experience that they are true.
God just intuits they are true by an a priori intuition (See A Priori
and A Posteriori).

There is wide debate about what a priori intuition is for humans so it
is even more difficult to explain what it is for God. Some have
thought that having a priori knowledge just amounts to understanding
the meaning of the terms in a statement; if one were to understand the
terms, then one would know that it is true. Others have suggested that
it is a kind of grasping of abstract objects and their relations
between them (for instance, grasping the numbers 2 and 4 and the
relations of adding and equaling in the proposition 2+2=4). Whatever a
priori intuition turns out to be for God, most think that God enjoys
this cognitive faculty.
3. Analyses of the Scope & Power of God's Knowledge

How great is God's knowledge? How much does he know? In order to
answer these questions it is not enough just to offer an analysis of
the components of God's knowledge; one must also specify the scope of
his knowledge. There are a number of ways this might be done.

The first three attempts at an analysis of the scope of God's
knowledge listed below have been called non-comparative notions
because they specify the range or amount of God's knowledge without
comparing God's knowledge to the knowledge of any other being. The
final four are comparative accounts of God's knowledge. Proponents of
these views recognize God's knowledge as perhaps more limited than the
non-comparative notions allow but still think that omniscience can be
explained in terms of a comparison with other beings, even if God's
knowledge is significantly restricted. The last of the four also
stands out as not only being a non-comparative account, but as the
only analysis which does not state that it is necessary for an
omniscient being to have knowledge. Rather it is sufficient to be
omniscient if one has a significant degree of power to have knowledge.
a. Non-comparative Analyses of Omniscience
i. Having knowledge of all propositions

In spite of an initial feeling of piety that might accompany embracing
this definition, it should be rejected. Why? Recall what knowledge is.
It requires at a minimum holding what is true. But some propositions
are false such as 2+2=5. Since it is false it cannot be known by
anyone, especially God who most think could not even believe something
that is false let alone know it.
ii. Having knowledge of all true propositions

According to this clause, God knows a lot—in fact he knows all that
could possibly be known. This is a very strong version of omniscience
and in all likelihood has been the one most widely held among theists.
On this interpretation, God knows all the present truths and all
truths of the past and future. God also knows the propositions that
must be true or are merely possibly true. For instance, God knows that
"necessarily, all humans are not triangles" and "possibly, the
Steelers sign a linebacker named Tristan this year." Furthermore, many
who hold to this definition think that God knows all of the
subjunctive propositions which are sometimes of events that are not
actual but could have been as in the statement "if the U.S. had not
entered World War II, Germany would have won."
iii. Having knowledge of all true propositions and having no false beliefs

Many have proposed (iii) [i.e., Having knowledge of all true
propositions and having no false beliefs] instead of (ii) [i.e.,
Having knowledge of all true propositions] in order to make clear that
an omniscient being not only believes all true propositions but is not
mistaken about any beliefs either. But as Edward Wierenga has pointed
out, adding this clause in (iii) is at least redundant and possibly
incoherent (39) for it seems to presuppose it is possible that for
someone to know all true propositions and yet have a false belief.
Suppose that God could. If God knew all true propositions, he would
know that he believed some false proposition. But it may not be
coherent to both know p and know that you believe not-p.

Yet even if this is coherent, says Wierenga, the additional clause
about God not having false beliefs can be shown to be redundant.
Presumably God has deductive cognitive faculties. Now if God both
knows p and believes not-p, then God believes a contradiction, and
anything whatsoever can be validly deduced from a contradiction. So if
God did know p and believed not-p, God would deduce all propositions
from this and believe everything. But this seems impossible. Thus
there is no reason to add the additional clause "having no false
beliefs" because knowing all true propositions seems to be
incompatible with having false beliefs.
b. Comparative Analyses of Omniscience
i. Having knowledge which is not actually surpassed

Although holding this definition is consistent with believing that God
knows all true propositions, it leaves open the possibility that God
does not know everything. Those that prefer this analysis of
omniscience think that there are some propositions that likely God
does not know.

Recall the discussion above about indexicals (See Beliefs, Sentences,
Propositions and God's Knowledge). Some have argued that it is
impossible for God to know the proposition expressed by Jones when
Jones says "I am thinking." The idea is that such propositions
involving an indexical term like "I" are not identical with
propositions involving proper names such as "Jones" in the sentence,
"Jones is thinking." God could know "Jones is thinking" but
propositions with an indexical like "I" can only be grasped by whoever
is expressing the proposition, in this case, Jones.

In response, some have argued that "I" refers to a haecciety, a
mysterious entity that individuates Jones from other humans, but an
entity nonetheless that God can know (Wierenga, 50-6). Jones and every
other human have in common "humanity" but differ by having individual
haeccities. In knowing "I am thinking" when thought by Jones, God
knows the act of Jones' thinking & Jones' haecciety and thereby knows
that this proposition is true. But there are questions about whether
or not God could know haeccities of persons or objects other than God
(Rosenkrantz, 220-4).

Another set of propositions that God may not know are propositions
about causally undetermined, future events. Examples are random events
at the quantum level or free creaturely actions. Whether or not God
has knowledge of the future will be discussed below.

It should be reiterated that proponents of this limited view of
omniscience still want to maintain that omniscience can be
characterized quite sufficiently as a comparative notion. They are not
denying that God is omniscient. They simply think that omniscience
need not be thought of as necessarily having knowledge of every true
proposition. True, it may seem strange that God learns things.
Nevertheless, they insist, no one who exists knows as much as God. God
still knows a lot more than anyone else.
ii. Having knowledge which could not possibly be surpassed

This definition is also compatible with the second non-comparative
definition above (having knowledge of all true propositions) and
proponents of this definition typically think that God does not know
all true propositions. But this analysis is stronger than the previous
comparative analysis (i) because it states that God knows everything
that any being could possibly know. The problem with the previous
analysis of omniscience is that it leaves open the possibility that
there is a possible being whose knowledge could exceed God's
knowledge. But at least since the time of Anselm, God is thought of
not only as the greatest actual being, but the greatest possible
being. As such it should be the case that God has knowledge which no
one could possibly surpass.
iii. Having knowledge which could not possibly be matched by another

Note that both (i) and (ii) state that no one can know as much as God
but they allow for the possibility that there can be more than one
omniscient being. But most theists are uncomfortable with this
possibility and (iii) rules this out. In support of (iii) a theist
could appeal to the doctrine of divine simplicity, the doctrine that
God is perfectly simple (as mentioned above).

Since the Medieval era, a number of theologians have proposed that God
is absolutely simple and that in reality, (on a very popular
interpretation) all of God's attributes are really identical with each
other and God. This is a difficult doctrine to understand for it
forces one to say that God's omniscience is really identical to God's
omnipotence, God's omnipotence is identical to God's justice, and so
forth. But if the doctrine is embraced, it seems to be incompatible
with analyses (i) and (ii). For if God is the greatest possible being,
and God is the greatest in virtue of having the great-making
attributes of omniscience, omnibenevolence, and so forth, (which turn
out to all be identical with each other and with God), then it is
impossible that any other being have omniscience, for to be omniscient
is to be identical with God. [For more arguments for a comparative
analysis of omniscience see Hoffman and Rosenkrantz (2002)].
iv. Having the most actual, or unsurpassable, or unmatchable cognitive power

The final analysis of God's omniscience is really a group of three
related views which could be parsed in terms of God having the most
actual power or possible power. But for brevity sake the three views
have been lumped together leaving it to the reader to understand "most
actual", "unsurpassable", and "unmatchable" along the lines discussed
in the previous three analyses. What separates this kind of analysis
from the former ones is that the idea of omniscience is understood
strictly as a function of God's omnipotence and not in terms of the
scope or content of God's knowledge. The concept of omniscience, it is
thought, is only a concept about what God is able to do and not about
what he knows. So this view is neutral on the scope of God's actual
knowledge—there may be some things that God does not or cannot know.

One virtue of this view for Christian theists is that it may provide
resources for making sense of how Jesus was God even though he seemed
to grow in knowledge and wisdom during his life on earth. If to be
omniscient, it is sufficient to have a superior kind of cognitive
power without thereby exercising that power, Jesus could be said to be
divine even though he did not fully exercise his power to know many
things. In becoming a man, Jesus relinquished the full exercise of his
omnipotence and with it his vast knowledge, nevertheless retaining his
power. This position of course leaves one with the curiosity that one
can be a human and be omniscient, but perhaps this can be defended.
Furthermore, there is a question about whether omniscience is an
attribute of only God considered as a complete substance or an
attribute of each person. [For more on this understanding of the scope
of omniscience see Kvanvig (1986), (1989), and Taliafferro (1993)].
4. Divine Foreknowledge

Quite possibly the most contested area of God's knowledge has been his
knowledge of the future. On the one hand there is the problem of how
God's foreknowledge is possible without canceling the possibility of
his creatures' ability to act freely. If God knows that some event E
will happen in the future, there is a sense in which E must happen.
But if God knows the future exhaustively, then it seems as if the
entire future is fixed and humans are not genuinely free (See
Foreknowledge and Freewill). On the other hand, if creatures are free
and act indeterminately then it may be that God cannot know what
exactly his creatures will do and this lack of knowledge may limit his
providential care for them. The theist is thus forced to try to retain
a strong sense of (a) God's knowledge of the future and (b) God's
providence, while at the same time not excluding the possibility of
(c) free creaturely action.

There have been many ways of trying to hold on to all three and
sometimes the attempts end up diminishing the extent of one at the
expense of another. Some begin with a strong sense of God's
sovereignty and then try to explain God's foreknowledge and creaturely
freedom in ways which may end up limiting one or the other. Others
begin with a strong sense of creaturely freedom and then explain God's
sovereignty or foreknowledge.

In order to sort out the different views, it will be helpful to offer
an argument against the compatibility of God's foreknowledge and human
freedom. The argument will serve as a heuristic device for showing how
competing views of God's foreknowledge have developed at least in part
as a way of solving this dilemma. After the argument is presented,
four types of foreknowledge which are modeled after human cognitive
faculties will be explained as responses to the argument. [For a good
introduction to different views about God's foreknowledge see Beilby
and Eddy (2001)].
a. Argument for the Incompatibility of Omniscience and (creaturely)
Freedom (IOF)

The following argument is about a fictional person, Ryan, who we are
to imagine freely refrains from watching TV on his day off from work.
A worry is that if God knows what he will do ahead of time, then Ryan
is not really free to refrain from watching TV. Even though this is a
fictional account, one can see that if this argument is right it would
additionally apply to real people and could be generalized to show
that either no one is ever free, or God is not omniscient since he
does not have foreknowledge. [For other incompatibility arguments see
Fischer (1989)].
God essentially exists in time and is essentially omniscient.
Now suppose someone, call him Ryan, gets a call from his boss on
Thursday that he should not come to work, and Ryan stays home from
work on Friday but freely refrains from watching TV on Friday even
though he could have watched TV.
Principle of Freedom: An act, A, is freely performed by a person S,
only if S's performing the action is not wholly determined by anyone
or anything other than S and S could've done other than A.
Suppose also that God knows on Thursday that Ryan does not watch TV on Friday.
If Ryan were to have freely watched TV on Friday, then God would have
had a false belief on Thursday.
But if God would have had a false belief on Thursday, then God would
not have been omniscient on Thursday.
Thus if Ryan were to watch TV on Friday, then God would not have been
omniscient on Thursday; in other words, God wouldn't have existed,
since being omniscient is an essential part of what it is to be God.
Thus either Ryan is never free to do things like watch TV (or any
other free action for that matter) or Ryan could have brought it about
that God did not exist.
b. Perceptual Knowledge of the Future

One way to challenge the conclusion of the IOF argument is to reject
the clause in the first premise that God is essentially in time. A
number of philosophers have postulated that God is not in time but
"sees" all of time from his eternal perspective. Boethius is a good
representative of this contingent of philosophers and is one of the
earliest philosophers to devote much thought to the question of how
God knows the future. God is able to know the future because of the
way that God exists, eternally. Boethius describes God's eternal
existence as follows:

"Eternity is a possession of life, a possession simultaneously entire
and perfect, which has no end. . . That which grasps and possesses the
entire fullness of a life that has no end at one and the same time
(nothing that is to come being absent to it, nothing of what has
passed having flowed away from it) is rightly held to be eternal."
(Consolation CV 6.4, 144).

God is not like humans who exist wholly at each finite moment in time
and endure through time. A human possesses her life only in a small
finite window which we call "now"—the past life is no longer possessed
but gone, the future is not yet realized. Since our human life is
lived in a finite "now", it is never full and complete but is
fragmented. God, however, is perfect and God's life is not fragmented
like the life of a temporally enduring human. He lives in the eternal
"now." His "now" stretches over our past, present, and future. Our
finite present is representative of God's eternal present, but our
finite present is only a faint and imperfect model.

Thus by being eternal, the future is not off in the distance for God
but is subsumed under his eternal presence. Since God wholly exists at
all times in his eternal "now" he can know what happens at every time.
Boethius says that God's foreknowledge "looks at such things as are
present to it just as they will eventually come to pass in time as
future things." (Consolation CV 6.21, 147). Boethius' explanation for
how God knows the future is a kind of perceptual model. Foreknowledge
is a simple awareness of the future, not involving any complex
deductive or inductive reasoning. If having knowledge of something
before it happens is like looking far off in the distance, having
knowledge in the "eternal now" is like perceiving something
immediately before one's eyes. God "sees" with the divine mind all of
existence immediately in one eternal moment. [See Marenbon (2003)].
Objections

Obviously this perceptual model of God's foreknowledge represented
here by Boethius is not meant to be taken literally in the sense that
God has eyes and really has a vision in the same sense that humans do.
Still, there are other worries besides how to make sense of the way an
immaterial being perceives. For one, there are problems about what
kinds of propositions God could be justified in believing from his
vantage point. It seems that from the perspective of the eternal
"now", God's knowledge of temporal statements is limited to tenseless,
time-indexed propositions—propositions that specify the time a certain
event occurred such as "In 1994 Pink Floyd goes on tour" but do not
change their truth value over time such as the proposition "Pink Floyd
will tour next year." This latter proposition is true in 1993, but
false in 1995.

But God could not know this latter kind of tensed proposition. This is
because these kinds of statements describe events relative to the time
they are spoken, written, or in general, expressed by creatures. But
for God, all time is "now" and it makes no sense to say that something
will happen or did happen in relation to God's temporal "now," since
his temporal "now" subsumes all times. All tensed propositions will be
reduced to tenseless propositions. For example, when Jane thinks "Pink
Floyd will go on tour next year" what God knows is that "In 1993, Jane
thinks that Pink Floyd will go on tour in 1994" and "In 1994, Pink
Floyd goes on tour."

Defenders of Boethius argue that tense is a creaturely fiction; tensed
statements only express psychological attitudes but nothing about time
itself. As such, there is nothing that God fails to know since time is
not really composed of a real past, present, and future. But this
debate is yet to be settled.

There is another related problem having to do with the relationship
between God's eternal "now" and every other "now." The problem can be
seen by considering the transitivity of the relation "happening now."
Here is a definition of a transitive relation: x is a transitive
relation, if and only if for any A, B, and C, if A stands in x to B,
and B stands in x to C, then A stands in x to C. "Being to the left
of" is a good example of a transitive relation. If A is to the left of
B, and B is to the left of C, then A is to the left of C.

"Happening now" also seems to be transitive. If I am now typing while
my wife is writing, and my wife is writing while my daughters are now
playing, then I am now typing while my daughters are now playing. Here
is the problem for Boethius' position. For God, I am now typing while
he is now seeing me type, and God is now seeing me type while he is
seeing Rome burn. But this means that I am now typing while Rome is
burning! This seems absurd. The Boethian defender is thus faced with
the difficulty of explaining how God's eternal "now" does not lead to
this absurdity. An adequate explanation will need to provide an
account of the kind of "now" which is special for God that both meets
at least some of our intuitions of what "now" means while avoiding
complications which arise from the transitivity of our "now" with
God's "now."

Another substantial problem with the perceptual model has to do with
making sense of God's providence. If the perceptual view is right, it
would seem that God is taking a very large risk in creating. This is
because his creative activity must be in some sense prior to his
knowledge of his creation—for he cannot be said to know the happenings
in the world if it does not exist! In other words, God creates the
whole world all at once—past, present, and future—then sees the world
from his atemporal vantage point. But if God's creative activity is
logically prior to God's knowledge of the world, it would seem that
God's creative activity is done in the blind. Thus God runs a risk of
creating a world in which tremendous evil occurs.

In response to this objection, an argument might be developed against
the notion of "risk" utilized in the objection. If it can be shown
that risks imply temporal priority and not just logical priority in
actions, then the Boethian understanding of God's knowledge of the
future can be preserved because, since God is outside of time, his
creative activity is not temporally prior to his foreknowledge. If
this cannot be shown, then the theists who want to maintain God's
future knowledge and God's providence might move to either of the next
two models which have a more straightforward way of preserving God's
providence.

A final problem for this view is with reconciling Boethius'
understanding of foreknowledge with the divine attribute of
immutability—God's changelessness. If God creates the world logically
prior to his knowing about the world, then it appears that God learns
about what he creates. But to learn of what he creates is for God to
change. Hence if Boethius is right, it either means that God is not
immutable or that Boethius' view is internally incoherent.

At least two things could be said in response to this charge. First,
typically since at least the time of Aristotle, a change has been
thought of as the acquisition or loss of a property from one time to
another. If I gain the property of "being 5 feet 11 inches tall" then
I have lost some other property, say, "being 5 feet 10 inches tall"
and thus have changed. But since God is atemporal, there is no time in
which he gains or loses a property. His creation is logically prior to
his knowledge, but not temporally prior. Of course, this response
hinges crucially on the notion of logical priority—if some sense can
be made of it and it can be separated from temporal priority then this
objection seems to have been met. A second response is to concede that
God has changed, but retort that this kind of change does not affect
the doctrine of divine immutability. God does not change with regard
to his moral character, but can change in other ways. This response
would weaken the doctrine of immutability as it has traditionally been
held. [For further objections see Marenbon (2003) and Hoffman and
Rosenkrantz 2002].
c. Deductive Knowledge of the Future
i. Deterministic Knowledge (DK)

The DK model for the most part embraces the reasoning of the IOF
argument but rejects the Principle of Freedom. Being free is
compatible with being determined. Some DK advocates also reject the
idea that God is temporal. Both the temporal and atemporal versions
are discussed below.

The DK view has been attributed to a number of philosophers and
theologians, most notably to the Christian Father, Saint Augustine,
and the Protestant Reformer John Calvin. The basic idea is relatively
simple. According to DK, God is completely in control of the unfolding
of time including everything that happens in the future. This is
because he predestines the future. Here, "predestines" means that God
determines the outcome of the future. Since the future is determined
by God, once God initiates his plan for the future, necessarily, his
plan unfolds and there is no possibility of any divergence from the
plan. Thus, once God knows his plan and initiates it, God can deduce
any event which follows from it because he knows either self-evidently
or a priori, (1) the plan prior to its unfolding, (2) that he wants it
to unfold, and knows (3) that God gets exactly what he wants.

The DK view is consistent with both an atemporal understanding of God
as well as a temporal one. On the atemporal view, God is outside of
time and determines the world via one eternal act. Since God is
outside of time there is no prior time when God formulates and
initiates a plan. Nevertheless it is still right to say that there is
a causal or logical priority in this instance and that God's
initiating a plan for the world is logically and causally prior to the
unfolding of that plan. So God deduces, logically prior to his one
eternal act, everything that will occur given his plan and his intent
to create the future.

The temporal view is basically the same. God knows his plan, that he
wants it, and that he will get it if he wants it. The only difference
is that God has always known this in his infinite temporal existence.
God is everlasting and his knowledge of the future is not only
logically prior to the future but is temporally prior to the future as
well. God deduces what will happen both logically and temporally prior
to the future occurrences. For present purposes, the only significant
difference between the temporal and atemporal DK model is that the
atemporal position can, with the perceptual model, reject the first
premise of the IOF argument about God's essential relationship to
time. [For Augustine's view see Augustine (1979) and Wetzel (2001);
for a defense of the DK model see Paul Helm's chapter in Beilby and
Eddy (2001)].
Objections

The DK model has a clear way of preserving God's providence. Since God
causes the future by bringing about his perfect plan, there are no
surprises like there seem to be if God knows the future via
perception. The model also has a clear way of explaining how God
knows, namely by deduction—an infallible guide to a conclusion. So the
most substantive objections to this model of knowledge are not
epistemological, rather they are metaphysical. One fairly obvious
worry is that this view relies on a very tenuous view of freedom,
namely that freedom is compatible with determinism. But for many this
sounds crazy. What could be any less free than being wholly
determined?

Another problem is that it seems that God is the author of not only
the good and redemptive acts in the world, but also pain, suffering,
and in general, all the evil. Since God's plan includes evil, human
actions as a component, and God's will is sufficient for bringing
about his plan, it would seem that God is the ultimate cause of evil.
Although this problem of evil is something that all theists must deal
with, it is particularly difficult for the determinist. A defender of
DK will either want to argue that this is the best world God could
create, or that even if we cannot show that it is, there may be
reasons of which we are unaware for why God permits so much evil. [For
further objections see remarks against Paul Helm's view in Beilby and
Eddy (2001) and also see Craig (1999)].
ii. Molinism (Middle Knowledge)

Middle knowledge or as it is often called, Molinism, after the 16th
century Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina, is also a deductive model
(See Middle Knowledge). Like the previous two models, Molinism is not
committed to the idea that God is essentially in time. However,
Molinists want to maintain a strong view of human freedom and reject
the idea that human freedom is compatible with determinism. Their
response to the IOF argument is to show that it is invalid because God
can know the future, whether in time or not, and humans can still be
significantly free. (More will be said below to flesh out precisely
how they would respond.)

Like most theories of God's omniscience, Molinism says that God knows
a number of things a priori or self-evidently, for example, necessary
mathematical and logical truths, as well as truths about God's nature,
the nature of uncreated creatures, and so on. This is God's natural
knowledge. God also has free knowledge. This is knowledge of
contingent truths, such as the truth that "God creates this world,"
that "Adam eats the fruit," and that "the Steelers win the Super Bowl
in 2006." God's free knowledge is known by God subsequent to acts of
God's free will.

But the Molinist account of how some of this free knowledge is arrived
at is different than the account given by some DK advocates who allow
that the future is contingent. On the (non-fatalistic) DK model, all
of God's free knowledge of contingent truths is arrived at because of
the contingency of God's causal activity. It is contingently true (and
not necessarily true) that Adam eats the fruit only because it is
possible that God determine Adam not to eat the fruit. The Molinist
rejects this deterministic way of thinking about God's knowledge and
instead posits that God arrives at free knowledge of creaturely
actions by deducing it from (a) God's free knowledge of his own
actions and from (b) his middle knowledge of what creatures would do
in certain situations that God could place them in. Thus a proper
description of God's knowledge of the future crucially hinges on an
account of God's middle knowledge.

Like natural knowledge, God's middle knowledge is known prior to God's
free knowledge. But middle knowledge is like free knowledge in that
the truths of middle knowledge are contingent and not necessary. Here
is an example: "If Eve were in the garden in the circumstances in
which a serpent tempts her to eat fruit, then Eve would freely choose
to eat the fruit after being placed in these circumstances." (More
generally, items of middle knowledge are subjunctive conditionals of
the form "if x were in circumstance C, x would do A.")

Using this example we can see how God uses it in order to deduce
knowledge of the future:

1. Natural Knowledge: It is possible that Eve and a snake are created
in a garden and possible that Eve will freely choose to eat the fruit.
2. Middle knowledge: If Eve were in the garden in the circumstances in
which a serpent tempts her to eat fruit, then Eve would freely choose
to eat the fruit after being placed in these circumstances.
3. Free knowledge: God creates Eve in the garden in the circumstances
in which a serpent tempts her to eat the fruit.
4. Free knowledge (of the future): Thus Eve will freely choose to eat the fruit.

The argument is stated in the logical order of God's knowledge. First,
God surveys all the necessary truths which reveals all the possible
circumstances that he can create, in this case that it is possible
that God create the garden with Eve and the snake in it. God then
surveys his middle knowledge to see what Eve would freely do if placed
in these circumstances. He then elicits an act of will to create this
world or some set of circumstances in the world and thus knows the
actual circumstances of the world. Since he knows the circumstances of
the actual world and what will happen given those circumstances, he is
able to deduce the future.

Middle knowledge (allegedly) gives God perfect providential control of
the future. To see how, we must make a distinction between different
kinds of conditional statements known by Middle Knowledge. All
conditionals about what creatures would freely do are subjunctive
conditionals and can be called "subjunctives of freedom." Within
subjunctives of freedom it is worth distinguishing between what might
be called factuals and counterfactuals of freedom. A factual of
freedom is a true conditional statement about a creature in which the
antecedent (the first half of the conditional) and the consequent (the
second half of the conditional) are both true. Factuals of freedom are
what God uses to deduce knowledge of the future. A counterfactual of
freedom is a conditional statement in which the antecedent is
(contingently) false and describes a set of circumstances that is
contrary to fact, for example, "If Eve were alive today, she would be
the First Lady." According to Molinism, God knows both factuals and
counterfactuals of freedom. His knowledge is comprehensive. He knows
what people will do when placed in actual circumstances and he knows
what they would choose to do if they were placed in other
circumstances that God and his creatures never bring about. Knowing
both kinds of subjunctives of freedom enables God to see what his
creatures would do in any kind of circumstances and allows God to
survey all the possible worlds that he might create and choose one
that he thinks is good enough to create.

Molinism has a number of attractive features if correct. First, it
offers a clear way to describe God's knowledge of the future as
deductive. Second, it retains a robust theory of human freedom. But
perhaps just as important, it does not sacrifice God's providence at
the expense of freedom. God is still free to create whatever sorts of
worlds he deems feasible by surveying what any particular creature
from any species would do if placed in certain situations by God. Thus
when God creates, he is not at all surprised by anything about his
creation or any actions which his creatures will do because he knows
all the circumstances that he will create them in and by his middle
knowledge knows exactly what they will do in those circumstances.

To return now to the IOF argument against the compatibility of God's
omniscience with human freedom, we can now give an account of the
complex response the Molinist has at his disposal. (For a more
in-depth response see Foreknowledge and Freewill).

Although Molinism tends to lend itself to the view that God is
atemporal, there is nothing about the position which entails that it
must take a position on God's relationship with time as the perceptual
model must. Thus the following response to the IOF argument is
presented on behalf of Molinists who believe God is in time (since the
atemporal Molinist could simply reject the first premise that God is
essentially in time).

The strategy for the temporal-Molinist is to accept the premises of
the argument, but object that once the argument is fully understood it
will be found to be invalid. There is nothing in the argument that
leads to the conclusion that either people are not free or that God
cannot have knowledge of free actions. To see how this reply works, it
will be useful to first present the problem from a DK model
perspective only now cast in Molinist terms. According to the DK
advocate, God knows the future exclusively just by knowing his free
knowledge of God's decision to determine the kind of world he wants.
His knowledge of what he will do is logically prior to his creating
and his knowledge entails what will unfold in the world. So God's free
knowledge does in some sense determine everything and limits human
freedom.

But for the Molinist, God knows prior to any decision to create what
his creatures would freely do in all circumstances by way of Middle
Knowledge. His free knowledge of the future is posterior to his
knowledge of what creatures would freely do. So God's Middle
Knowledge, which is only of what creatures would freely do, does not
determine what they in fact do. Nor does God's free knowledge
determine what they would freely do since his free knowledge is
posterior to God's Middle Knowledge.

Returning now the IOF argument, prior to Ryan's actions, God knows
what Ryan would freely do if Ryan were placed in certain
circumstances. But this knowledge in no way causes Ryan to do what he
does, for it just says what Ryan would freely do, not what he must do.
Ryan is the cause of his actions, and it is the fact that he does
freely choose to refrain from watching TV that makes God's belief true
from all eternity that Ryan would freely refrain from watching TV if
given the day off from work. [For a defense of Molinism see Craig
(1999) and Flint (1989)].
Objections

There are two problematic questions for Middle Knowledge. One is, on
what basis are these conditionals of freedom known? This is an
epistemic question about how God is justified in his knowledge of
subjunctives of freedom. Second, what are the truth-makers of these
conditionals? This is a metaphysical question about the explanation
for what makes these conditionals true.

Consider first the epistemic problems having to do with God's evidence
for knowing the future. According to Molinism God knows the future by
deducing it in part from factuals of freedom which are contingently
true. But factuals of freedom are not themselves deduced from
anything, they are known directly by one of God's Non-inferential
Faculties. But by which one? As contingent truths they cannot be known
a priori, since a priori knowledge is only of necessary truths.
Moreover they are obviously not known by perception, memory,
kinesthetic awareness, or testimony. This leaves introspection as the
last option. Yet it is a complete mystery what God could know about
himself that would yield evidence of what his creatures would freely
do if placed in certain circumstances. So it looks as if the Molinist
must posit some unknown faculty by which God knows factuals of freedom
(as wells as counterfactuals of freedom). But then this account of
God's foreknowledge which started out as a deductive model—modeled
after human knowledge—is at bottom wholly inscrutable. Why not, then,
just say that God somehow knows the future instead of complicating
things with a deductive account?

This kind of objection can be put in a slightly different way. How is
it that God knows which of the true subjunctives of freedom are
factuals rather than counterfactuals of freedom? Recall that a factual
of freedom has a true antecedent and a counterfactual of freedom a
false antecedent. But the truth or falsity of the antecedent cannot be
known prior to God's creative activity. For instance, God only knows
that it is true that "Eve is in the garden in the circumstances in
which a serpent tempts her to eat fruit" after he creates her in these
circumstances and knows that it is false that "A Martian is in the
garden in the circumstances in which a serpent tempts her to eat
fruit" after he decides not to create Martians. But then God cannot
know which subjunctive of freedom (that has either the information
about Eve or the Martian in the antecedent) should be used in an
argument to deduce what will happen in the future prior to his
creating.

It might be tempting for the temporal-Molinist to think that someone's
past actions or present character will provide sufficient evidence.
But again, this will not help God prior to his decision to create his
creatures. His creative act must first be known in order to know what
kinds of characters his creatures end up having.

Turning now to the metaphysical side of the problem, there is the
difficulty of explaining what it is that makes subjunctives of freedom
true. It cannot be a fact about the creatures themselves, for God is
supposed to have Middle Knowledge before there are any creatures.
Perhaps, then, it is a fact about uninstantiated creaturely essences.
God might know a lot about Eve and Martians even before he creates
them because he knows the essence of these creatures just like he
would know the essence of plants and other kinds of animals before he
creates them. But it is strange to think that Eve's essence could
provide knowledge of what she will freely do in certain circumstances.
If she is free and not determined to act by the circumstances in which
she is created, there is some possible world in which she is placed in
the same set of circumstances and freely does not eat the apple. But
then there is nothing about her essence which necessitates what she
will in fact do when placed in those circumstances—for Eve is
essentially Eve in the circumstances in which she freely eats of the
fruit and freely refrains from eating. But if not creaturely essences
as the ground of the truth of subjunctives of freedom, what then?

It needs to be pointed out that none of the objections to middle
knowledge show that God could not have deductive knowledge of the
future. At best what the objections show is that Middle Knowledge
bottoms out in a mystery. In order to offer a satisfying explanation
of how God knows the future, a Molinist must provide an answer to
these questions. [For objections to Molinism see Hasker (1989),
(2000), and Beilby and Eddy (2001).]
d. Intuitional Knowledge of the Future

Of the three theories presented so far, the only one which has been a
model of direct knowledge of the future has been the Boethian
perceptual theory. The other two models describe God as having
indirect knowledge of the future via deduction. The intuitive model is
another account of how God might have knowledge of the future
directly. But instead of God having this knowledge via perception God
has the knowledge either innately or as a kind of immediate a priori
grasp of the truth about the future.

The intuitive model is compatible with God being temporal or
atemporal. If the atemporal model is preferred, the intuitionist can
respond to the IOF argument in the same way that Boethius does by
rejecting the first premise of the argument which says that God is in
time. If the temporal model is preferred, the intuitionist can argue
like the Molinist that the argument is invalid. The intuitive model of
God's foreknowledge offers no unique objection to the IOF argument.

Here is an account of God's intuitive knowledge. Intuitive knowledge
is knowledge which is in some sense internal to the knower. One can
have intuitive knowledge of something without external evidence to
justify it. Many have thought that mathematical knowledge is like
this. Yes, a human might need external objects to become aware of
certain propositions, but they do not need external evidence to be
justified in believing the propositions. For instance, it may be true
that children need to have symbols of numbers written on a chalk
board, or have two blocks presented to them with two other blocks
presented to them in order to at first become aware that 2+2 really
does equal 4. But the chalk and the blocks are not evidence that
2+2=4; they are more like physical tools (like their own brain) that
gets their mind to be aware of the proposition 2+2=4. But once they
become aware of the proposition, they just see that it is true. They
may even think, "Of course, I've always known that!" Some truths we
just seem to know in this intuitive way.

If it is true that humans know some things intuitively, it would seem
that God does too. Moreover it would seem that unlike humans, God
would not even need physical objects like chalk and toy blocks to
become aware that 2+2=4. God, it is assumed, could have innate
knowledge of mathematical and logical truths without physical objects
either helping him to become aware of propositions, making the
propositions true, or justifying God's belief in the propositions.
But, the intuitionist argues, if God can know a number of propositions
intuitively, why not think that God knows the future intuitively too?

One advantage of the intuitionist position is its flexibility. For
instance, since the intuitionist position is silent with regard to
God's relationship to time the intuitionist is able to adopt whatever
theory seems best on its own merits and can respond to IOF type
arguments with many of the previously mentioned replies. Similarly,
the intuitionist position itself makes no claims about the
compatibility of God's actions with human freedom leaving the
intuitionist unconstrained in adopting a libertarian or compatibilist
view of freedom. Finally, if the future is known exhaustively by
intuition, then it would seem that God's providential control would
not be restricted. [For a brief defense of intuitive knowledge of the
future see Craig (1999)].
Objections

As just mentioned, the advantage of the intuitionist position is its
ability to be flexible and meet a wide range of objections. But this
is taken by some as insight into its weakness. The reason why the
intuitive account might seem invulnerable to objection is because it
can hardly be considered a theory about how God knows at all. The
perceptual view and the deductive models at least offer a model of
understanding with which we are all quite familiar. This is why it
seems that most defenders of God's knowledge of the future begin with
the previously mentioned models and only give them up after much
resistance. The intuitionist model seems like a last ditch effort to
retain an explanation of God's foreknowledge if the other models fail.
How does God know the future, if the other models fail? He just does,
the intuitionist answers, in the same way that we know 2+2=4. But
without anything further to add, it can hardly be thought to be an
explanation for how God knows the future.

Another reason to think that the intuitionist model is an ad hoc
explanation is because most of our intuitions which we count as
knowledge are necessary truths, like 2+2=4. Thus intuitive knowledge
is often characterized as a priori knowledge (See A priori intuition
above). Often it is argued that such truths are either known by
knowing the meaning of the terms or are known by grasping the abstract
objects involved (in the example, numbers and their relations). But,
unless one adopts a fatalist version of the DK model, truths about the
future are thought to be wholly contingent. But a priori knowledge is
not of contingent truths and thus cannot be how God directly intuits
the future.

A second way of characterizing intuitive knowledge is as a kind of
introspection. As was discussed above, William Alston recently has
appealed to Aquinas' view, which says that that God knows the future
by knowing creaturely essences which are ultimately contained in God's
essence (See Does God have Beliefs? above). This is a very mysterious
doctrine (For further elaboration of Aquinas' view, see Stump).

A final reply is to treat God's intuitions like intuitions of people
who are clairvoyant or psychic. A few studies suggest that some humans
have abilities to know extraordinary things by being presented with
images of the future or some event taking place well beyond their
vision. Such knowledge is of contingent truths. Still, the skeptic may
balk at using such questionable instances of knowledge as an
illustration analogous to God's infallible grasp of the future.
e. Limited Knowledge of the Future: Open Theism

Like Molinists, Open Theists are strongly committed to the idea that
humans have libertarian freedom. However Open Theists are skeptical
that God has the kind of comprehensive knowledge that all of the
previous views claim. If faced with the IOF argument given above, the
Open Theist will give up the idea that God exhaustively knows the
future or will argue that even if God knows the future, his certainty
of the future is not strong enough to cause problems for human
freedom. Open Theists think that God is in time and that there are at
least some tensed and non-tensed statements that God does not know
with absolute certainty.

At a minimum, Open Theism is the doctrine that the future has not yet
been fully decided, it is "open" to what is not yet completely known
by God or anyone else. There are a number of different ways that this
"openness" can be explained and defended, some more radical than
others. We will first turn to the more radical position and then the
more moderate.
i. No Knowledge of the Future

An Open Theist could think that God has no knowledge at all of the
future for several reasons. One is because there is no future to know
anything about. On either a Presentist view of time (only the present
exists) or an Expanding Universe view of time (the growing past is
real as well as the present), the future is denied existence. Only
what is present exists, or perhaps the past along with the present.
But if the future does not exist, then there is nothing to make the
following sorts of propositions true "In 2021, a Republican is
President;" or "A Republican will be President in 2021." There is no
future to ground the truth of the propositions, so the propositions
lack a truth-value.

In response it is fair to note that this position is somewhat radical
because it forces one to deny a widely held principle called The
Principle of Bivalence: For any proposition, it must be either true or
false. The Open Theist of the sort being described can accept that
there are propositions about the future but must deny that any are
true because there is nothing to make them true. But this does not
mean they are false either since there is no contradictory future
state of affairs to render the propositions false. The propositions'
truth-values have yet to be decided, but in the present, they lack a
truth-value. To fully meet this argument from the Open Theist, one
must either defend the view that the future does exist in some sense
or that there can be abstract future facts which make propositions
about the future true, even if the future does not exist.

A second way to argue that God cannot know the future is to deny that
there really are propositions or beliefs about the future. If there
were no propositions/beliefs about the future then there could not be
knowledge of the future. In order to make sense of what seem like
perfectly good claims about the future that we ordinarily make, it can
be argued that claims seemingly about the future are really only about
the past or present. For example, a statement such as "Amy will go to
the store this Tuesday" really just expresses the proposition "Right
now, Amy's dispositions are such that, if it were Tuesday, it would be
likely that Amy would go to the store." So on this view, all
statements about God's purported future knowledge are really just
statements which express propositions about the present or the past.

This position is fairly radical and has a limited number of proponents
(See Fischer, 23-24). The basic reason against it is that most think
that they really are saying something about the future and not just
the present. It is very hard to believe that most humans are this
confused about what they are saying. Surely even if they are wrong
that what they are expressing is true, they are saying something about
what will happen and not just about they way things currently are.

Finally, a third line of argument that God cannot know the future at
all accepts that there are true propositions about the future but
denies that God is or could be justified in believing these
propositions to the extent that this justification yields knowledge.
For instance, a person could have a true belief that it will rain
tomorrow but not know this because the inductive evidence for this
belief is just too unreliable. Accordingly, there may not be enough
current evidence for God to know with certainty what the future holds.

The trouble with this position is that it seems unlikely that God
could not know at least some propositions about the future. It is
likely that God could know with certainty some propositions about what
he will do, for instance that "God will create plants on the third
day," and also some propositions which are entailed by the present
state of affairs taken together with the laws of nature. If God knew
all the laws of nature that he established involving gravity and saw
at time t1 that a rock is falling, that the wind is blowing at such
and such a speed, and so forth, God could know with certainty where
the rock will be at some subsequent time t2.
ii. Limited Deductive and Inductive Knowledge of the Future

Some Open Theists think that God has some knowledge of the future but
not exhaustive knowledge. God knows with absolute certainty some
things that he will do—such as judge the righteous and the wicked—even
if he may not know exactly who all those righteous and wicked people
will turn out to be. God also knows some future events that are
determined by past events taken together with binding laws of nature.
He knows exactly where the sun will be in 2025 because he knows where
the sun is in 2020 and knows what the laws of nature will determine
the sun and every other planetary object to do. In general, God can
know everything about the future which can be validly deduced from the
present or past.

But as has been noted previously, there is a class of propositions
which God cannot know with absolute certainty, perhaps some
indeterminate events which take place on the quantum level and future
free actions by God's creatures. Those that think that God cannot know
these future events at all, appeal to arguments raised above by the
more radical Open Theists—only applying the arguments just to this
class of propositions.

An even less radical kind of Open Theist will grant God exhaustive
knowledge of the future—or something close to it—but will insist that
God's knowledge of free creaturely actions is never infallible. How
then does God know what creatures will do in the future? He knows by
induction rather than deduction (See Inferential Faculties above). God
can know the characters of people by perceiving the way they are
presently disposed to act. He also has memories of what particular
creatures have done in past situations. Given all this knowledge, God
can know with a high degree of epistemic probability what will happen
in the future.

But God may end up having some false beliefs. Someone's past actions
and present character are good indicators of what creatures will do,
but if they are genuinely free they could always act differently or do
something uncharacteristic. Thus, if God reasons inductively, it is
quite probable that he gets some things wrong. But even if he does
not, his knowledge is still fallible because his evidence never
guarantees its conclusion.

Above it was mentioned that this view "will grant God exhaustive
knowledge of the future—or something close to it." But it is highly
probable that God could not have exhaustive inductive knowledge of the
future because of the problem of dwindling probabilities. To see the
problem, consider God's knowledge that the Eiffel tower will be built.
It is hard to see how God could have inductive knowledge of the Eiffel
tower two hundred years prior to its being built. For instance, God
would need to know which couples would be married in the future and
which will have grandchildren that will be engineers, how Paris's
economy will shape up, whether Paris will be bombed to smithereens in
two hundred years and so forth.

Each item in the previous list will need to be assigned some epistemic
probability reflecting the likelihood of its truth. Suppose God sees
that it is highly probable that Paris' economy will have sufficient
resources for the Eiffel tower, say, he is 90% sure of this. Allow
also that God thinks it is highly probable that there will in fact be
a good number of engineers in France in two hundred years; again, he
is 90% sure. But notice that God will be less sure that both of these
things take place. The probability that both will take place can be
figured by multiplying the percentages of each which yields an 81%
probability. But there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of factors
which need to be considered to determine if the Eiffel Tower will be
built. And there are millions of free decisions which will be made.
Once all of these probabilities are taken into consideration, the
probability that the Eiffel Tower will be built must be extremely
small. What this example shows is that if God does have inductive
knowledge, it is probably only of a very limited number of things
which are not very far into the future. [For a more extended defense
of Open Theism see Hasker (2002), (2000), (1989), Hasker et al.
(1994), and Hoffman and Rosenkrantz (2002)].
Objections

Some objections have already been mentioned against the arguments that
God has no knowledge of the future. The objections to the more limited
view will also be objections against the more radical position. Here,
then, are a few more problems leveled against Open Theism as a whole.

First is the basic complaint that Open Theism has a new and unorthodox
view of God's knowledge. Of all the views presented, it is the one
which thinks of God's knowledge as most limited. This not only puts
constraints on the scope of God's foreknowledge but this will normally
entail a revision of the traditional conception of omniscience as
Having knowledge of all true propositions. (Thus Open Theists find
Comparative Analyses of God's Omniscience more conducive to their
position).

Open Theists will argue that there are numerous scriptures which
support their view—passages which suggest that God regrets creating
people, that he changes his mind if people will repent, and that God
interacts with his people, responding to them as he learns what they
will do. Opponents protest that these readings are anthropomorphic.
But the ambiguity of the passages suggests that the disagreement can
only be settled by philosophical considerations.

Another problem is that since God learns, God changes. As was already
mentioned above this entails that Open Theists must deny God's
immutability. Again, the Open Theist may reply that God's immutability
allows for some changes in God, just not changes involving his
impeccable character and love for his creatures.

A third objection is that Open Theism diminishes God's sovereignty and
providence. The Open Theist thinks that it is an advantage of his view
that God can relate to and respond to creatures. But the problem with
this is if God does not know the future exhaustively, he cannot be of
as much help to his creatures since he will be surprised about some
things that happen. He can only react to terrible circumstances, but
cannot prevent all of them.

Finally, a reoccurring objection is that, if anything, arguments
presented by Open Theists just show that competing views have problems
and that there is no fully satisfying way of explaining in human terms
how God can know the future. But this does not show that God does not
know the future. The Open Theist is thus mistaken in concluding that
God does not know the future from her failure to understand how it can
be known. [For further objections to Open Theism see Flint (1989) and
Beilby and Eddy (2001).]
5. References and Further Reading
Alston, W. P. (1987). "Does God Have Beliefs," Religious Studies, 22,
287-306; reprinted in Divine Nature and Human Language: Essays in
Philosophical Theology, Cornell University Press, 1989.
Augustine (1976). On Grace and Free Will, in Basic Writings of Saint
Augustine, vol. I, ed. W. J. Oates, Baker Book House.
Boethius (2001). Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Joel C. Relihan,
Hackett Publishing.
Beilby, J. K. and P. R. Eddy, eds. (2001). Divine Foreknowledge: Four
Views, InterVarsity Press.
Craig, W. L. (1999). The Only Wise God: The Compatibility of Divine
Foreknowledge and Human Freedom, Wipf and Stock Publishers.
Craig, W. L. (1988). The Problem of Divine Foreknowledge and Future
Contingents from Aristotle to Suarez, E. J. Brill.
Fischer, J. M. (1989). God, Foreknowledge, and Freedom, Stanford
University Press.
Flint, T. (1989). Divine Providence: The Molinist Account, Cornell
University Press.
Hasker, W. (2002). "The Antinomies of Divine Providence," Philosophia
Christi, 4: 361-376.
Hasker, W. (2000). "Anti-Molinism is Undefeated!" Faith and
Philosophy, 17: 126-131.
Hasker, W. (1989). God, Time, and Knowledge, Cornell University Press.
Hasker, W. (1988). "Yes, God Has Beliefs!" Religious Studies, 24: 385-394.
Hasker, W., C. H. Pinnock, R. Rice, J. Sanders (1994). The Openness of
God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God,
InterVarsity Press.
Hoffman, J. and G. S. Rosenkrantz (2002). The Divine Attributes,
Blackwell Publishing.
Hunt, D. (1995). "Dispositional Omniscience," Philosophical Studies,
80: 243-278. The Koran (1999). Trans. N. J. Dawood, Penguin.
Kvanvig, J. (1986). The Possibility of An All Knowing God, St. Martin's.
Kvanvig, J. (1989). "Unknowable Truths and the Doctrine of
Omniscience," Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 57:
485-507.
Marenbon, J. (2003). Boethius, Oxford University Press.
McCann, H. J. (2001). "Divine Providence," Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/providence-divine/
de Molina, L. (1988). On Divine Foreknowledge: Part IV of the
Concordia, tr. A. J. Freddoso, Cornell University Press.
Rosenkrantz, G. S. (1993). Haecceity: An Ontological Essay, Kluwer.
Stump, E. (2003). "Chapter 5: God's Knowledge," in Aquinas, Routledge.
Taliaferro, C. (1993). "Unknowable Truths and Omniscience: A Reply to
Kvanvig," Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 61: 553-566.
Wetzel, T. (2001). "Predestination, Pelagianism, and Foreknowledge,"
in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, N. Kretzmann and E. Stump
eds., Cambridge University Press: 49-58.
Wierenga, E. (1989). The Nature of God: An Inquiry into Divine
Attributes, Cornell University Press.