Knowledge and God’s Simplicity

Source: iep.utm.edu

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.