God’s Immutable Grasp on Changeable Realities

How can an unchanging God know contingent truths?

The argument from God’s contingent knowledge against God’s immutability has seen several formulations, but the basic thrust is simple enough. Classical theists claim that God is simple and immutable, yet creation (which God presumably knows) is contingent. It is something God need not have known. It would thus seem that God comes to know something he did not know in some (even just logically) prior moment. So, God has undergone change, accrued to himself some metaphysical accident or other. Thus, God is not strongly immutable and classical theism is false. 

The basic — and I think, ultimately correct — response from the classical theist is to insist upon an extrinsic model of divine knowing and contend that all difference between God knowing this world and some other world is accountable for entirely by what is (or isn’t) in those worlds, exterior to God. Like a Chevy Kingswood Estate. In other words, nothing about God needs to change intrinsically for God to know contingent realities.

This position is best explicated by distinguishing between God’s knowledge and God’s act of knowledge. God’s knowledge we can say refers the content of what God’s knows, whereas God’s act of knowledge (which is the divine essence) is that in virtue of which God knows what he does. With these distinctions in place, we can say that God’s knowledge actually is mutable, since it includes contingent factors external to God — namely, created realities. Nevertheless, God’s act of knowledge is immutable, intrinsically the same across all possible worlds; it just stands in relation to different objects. So, one act of knowing, different objects of knowledge. Moreover, a multiplicity of knowings, without a multiplicity of acts. 

This hasty sketch presents the most plausible model for how the classical theist can maintain immutability is not incompatible with contingent knowledge. Of course, the classical theist should also include the fact that God is eternal and knows the entire created temporal sequence atemporally. Moreover, while God knows all true propositions, he knows them non-proportionally.

More on this topic soon. In the meantime, this and other objections to classical theism are considered in my just released book The Best Argument for God.

Here’s the cumbrous link: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0CL2P973T/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?ie=UTF8&qid=&sr=#aw-udpv3-customer-reviews_feature_div