#911 God’s Timeless Knowledge of Events in Time

Dr. craig’s response

Your question makes perfect sense, Matthew! In my view, God is timeless sans creation and in time since the moment of creation. As partisans of divine timelessness recognize, a timeless God cannot have knowledge of tensed truths. So, as you say, “in God's timeless phase, since time doesn't exist yet, God does not have tensed knowledge because there are no tensed truths.”

Now your question is: “How do we reconcile this with omniscience?” Well, for an agent S and a proposition p,

In other words, an omniscient person knows any and all truths and believes no falsehoods. So, yes, it is my view “that God does not have foreknowledge, in the sense of tensed truths like , until he becomes temporal at the creation moment.” That is necessarily the case, since in God’s timeless phase there are no true future-tense propositions such as Adam will name the animals. That proposition is false in God’s timeless phase and suddenly flips its truth value from false to true at the first moment of time. So in a literal sense “God can't really know what is gonna happen” until the moment of creation, since sans creation, there are no future-tense truths, and so nothing is going to happen. To say that something is going to happen or will happen implies that time already exists, in contradiction to the hypothesis.

But, as you know, that does not imply that God is ignorant of the events in history, for as an omniscient being, “God would have tenseless knowledge” of historical events, such as “Columbus discovers America in 1492,” where the italics indicate that the verb “discovers” is tenseless. So God would have detailed knowledge of every event in history. This is the sort of knowledge that defenders of divine timelessness typically ascribe to God. Since tenseless truths are true both timelessly and in time, God must know them.

So far, so good! Now you ask, “how would God differentiate between the various tenseless propositions concerning other possible worlds vs what is going to eventually be the actual world?” (Let’s overlook your slip about what “is going to eventually be.”) Easy! Tenseless propositions about what happens only in other possible worlds are false, not true, and so are not known by God. Rather what he knows are world-indexed propositions like “In world W* Columbus drowns on his voyage to the New World.” That proposition would be true in God’s timeless phase, even though the non-indexed proposition is not true. Since God believes no falsehoods, he does not believe any of those non-indexed propositions about what happens only in other possible worlds. So he can have tenseless knowledge of the actual world without having future-tense beliefs in his timeless phase. Petty cool, eh?