The doctrine of omniscience holds that God knows every truth in one timeless act. The recurring question is how one timeless act bears differentiated, contingent, and temporally indexed content. Knowing requires a knower, content, and epistemic fit; whether it must itself be temporally extended is disputed. A knower with no time of its own can grasp tenseless facts but loses the believer's "you know me, *now*": the very contact the doctrine was meant to secure.

*What the tradition holds.* The classical doctrine of divine omniscience assembles several reinforcing claims. God knows every true proposition (Anselm, *Proslogion*; Aquinas, *ST* I.14; (Richard Swinburne, 1977)): every truth past, present, future, contingent, necessary, modal, and counterfactual. God's knowing is one eternal act of comprehension, not discursive succession (*ST* I.14.7).

On the most developed contemporary refinements, the eternal act stands in ET-simultaneity (a sui generis relation in which the eternal life is cognitively simultaneous with every temporal moment without itself being temporal) with every temporal moment alike (Stump, Eleonore, and Norman Kretzmann, 1981); (Leftow, Brian, 1991); (Leftow, Brian, 2012); (Rogers, Katherin A., 2000); (Helm, Paul, 2010). The totality of truths forms a proper class rather than a set, escaping the Cantorian closure pressure (Alvin Plantinga, 1993); against (Patrick Grim, 1991). Divine knowledge is propositional rather than acquaintance-based, deflecting the worry about phenomenal grasp (Frank Jackson, 1982), applied to omniscience by later defenders. Divine middle knowledge encompasses every counterfactual of creaturely freedom, dissolving the foreknowledge–freedom dilemma (Luis de Molina, 1588); (Flint, Thomas P., 1998); (Craig, William Lane, 1987). Or, on the open-theist alternative, divine knowledge ranges only over what is determinately the case, leaving genuinely open futures genuinely open (William Hasker, 1989); (Gregory A. Boyd, 2001); (Mullins, R. T., 2016).

Each move tries to keep omniscience coherent under the doctrine's other commitments. At its most ambitious, the doctrine names a knower whose contact with every truth is held in one comprehensive act and whose scope reaches what creaturely knowers can at best approximate.

*What cannot be answered.* Eleven questions outrun what the doctrine of omniscience, in the form structural reasoning can take up, is able to answer. At bottom the worry is structural. Knowledge is a triconditional relation: a subject (Φ), a holding across time (T) of differentiated content (S), and a fit between the held and the case. The eleven pressures run three at the level of the predicate, eight at the level of the conditions knowledge-talk runs on.

> [!info]
> **Core concept.** Omniscience says God knows every truth in one timeless act—complete, all at once, taking in nothing. It's meant to be knowing at its maximum. The catch is what knowing involves. To know is to take up what's the case in a way that holds: a knower who bears it, a stretch of time across which the holding lasts, content spread out and told apart. A knower with no time of its own can register tenseless facts, but loses the believer's 'you know me, now'—the very contact the doctrine was built to secure. Push knowing past time, space, and a bearer and you keep the word while removing what lets anything count as knowing at all.

**Q1.** *How does a timeless knower keep contact with every moment, if contact runs through time?* The classical doctrine answers without qualification (Anselm, *Proslogion*; Aquinas, *ST* I.14). God knows every truth in one eternal act, and the *ever* the question places at the verb is, the defender will say, the wrong frame: God knows not at every moment but eternally, in a single act that stands in cognitive contact with each moment alike (Stump, Eleonore, and Norman Kretzmann, 1981); (Leftow, Brian, 1991); (Leftow, Brian, 2012). The reply preserves the doctrine on its own terms, and the present analysis registers it. The concern is not lexical but structural, and it survives the careful distinction the tradition draws between *aeternitas* (the Boethian *interminabilis vitae tota simul possessio*, the complete and simultaneous possession of unending life) and *sempiternitas*, mere everlasting duration. Grant the strict timeless reading of *aeternitas* in full. The doctrine still wants the eternal knower in comprehensive cognitive contact with every moment alike: knowing what is the case at each time, sustaining each creature through its time, answering each prayer in its time. Contact-with-every-moment is the temporal scope the predicate cannot shed: whether or not the knower is *located* in time, the content known ranges over every time, and the relation of knowing has to reach each of them. The atemporalist retreat relocates the knower out of time without relocating the known out of time, and it is the temporal structure of the known (not a temporal location of the knower) that the section will press. Contact with truths about every moment imports temporal articulation into the content. It does not by itself show that the knower's act is temporally successive; the burden is to explain the content–mode relation.

**Q2.** *When does a timeless knowing itself occur?* The interrogative sharpens the previous question by demanding a temporal anchor rather than a yes-or-no on temporal reach. The defender's available reply is the same atemporal one (Stump, Eleonore, and Norman Kretzmann, 1981); (Leftow, Brian, 2012): God knows in no *when*; the eternal act has no temporal location at which it occurs, and the question's presupposition does not apply. The reply is candid, and the present analysis registers it. The concern is the structural condition the predicate runs on. Creaturely episodes of knowing arise and persist in time. A standing disposition or proposed timeless cognitive state need not take a moment to come into being, so the section cannot assume episodic temporality as part of the predicate. The *when* the question asks for is the temporal anchor at which the holding occurs: not the *when* at which the holding's content is indexed, but the *when* of the holding itself. To answer "in no *when*" is to deny that knowing has a time at which it obtains, which removes the temporal anchor creaturely holdings supply. The doctrine cannot supply a *when* without temporalizing God, and cannot deny one without explaining what does the anchoring instead. The proposal instead owes a positive account of timeless cognitive bearing and epistemic fit.

**Q3.** *How does a knower with no now of its own know the present as present?* The *Kretzmann–Prior puzzle* (Kretzmann, Norman, 1966); (Prior, A. N., 1962) raises a question the doctrine has answered with care. The defender will grant that an atemporal knower cannot host the indexical *now* in the first-person way a temporally located knower hosts it, and will reply that an atemporal knower can know all token-reflexive facts as facts indexed to whoever occupies a given temporal location: God knows that *the believer at t says or thinks 'now'*, that *t is Tuesday at 3 PM in the temporal manifold*, and that the manifold contains the moment so indexed. The reply is genuinely available, and the present analysis registers it. The concern reformulates. The believer's confession that God *knows me now* is not the confession that God knows the indexed proposition *the believer at t thinks 'now'*. It is the confession of being attended to *as* the believer is at the moment they are. The devotional vocabulary (*known, attended to, heard, responded to, present with*) turns on a relation that is itself temporally indexed at both poles, not on a tenseless registration of a fact about an indexical token. Aquinas's eternal single act (*ST* I.14) preserves comprehensiveness; what it does not preserve, on the present analysis, is the temporal index that makes the believer's *now* the believer's, in any sense distinguishable from the eternal act's tenseless grasp of every *now* alike.

**Q4.** *From when does a timeless God foreknow?* The question asks for the vantage from which the *fore* operates: a position relative to which the foreknown is later, the cognitive contact prior to the contacted. The available reply on the strict atemporal reading is candid (Stump, Eleonore, and Norman Kretzmann, 1981); (Leftow, Brian, 1991); (Leftow, Brian, 2012): there is no *from when*; the eternal pole stands outside the temporal manifold and contacts every moment alike. The reply concedes that *foreknowledge* on this reading does not name an antecedent grasp; it names tenseless cognitive contact relabeled. The present analysis registers the concession and asks what the doctrine is left holding. *Foreknowledge* in the tradition's load-bearing uses is not a relation that incidentally involves time. Those uses include Boethius's reconciliation of divine knowing with creaturely freedom (*Consolation* V), Molina's middle knowledge antecedent to creation (Luis de Molina, 1588); (Flint, Thomas P., 1998), and the prophetic literature's *I knew you before I formed you in the womb*. It is a temporally-asymmetric relation in which the knowing is prior to the known and the prior is operative as prior. Strip the asymmetry and the doctrine retains the word and discards the relation it names. The believer who is told that God *foreknew* their prayer is being told that the divine attention to the prayer was anterior to its making. The atemporal defense preserves attention without anteriority. What remains is contact, not foreknowledge.

**Q5.** *What makes foreknowledge "fore," if the knower comes before no moment?* Stump and Kretzmann -(Stump, Eleonore, and Norman Kretzmann, 1981) define ET-simultaneity as a sui generis relation in which the eternal life is cognitively simultaneous with every temporal moment without itself being temporal. Leftow -(Leftow, Brian, 1991); -(Leftow, Brian, 2012) gives the most careful contemporary development. The doctrine does the work the tradition asks of it: keeps God in operative cognitive contact with every moment without temporalizing the divine pole. The concern here is the one [§6.3.2](<6.3.2 Eternity.md>), Q2 presses: ET-simultaneity is introduced precisely as a cross-mode relation and does not presuppose ordinary shared time by definition. Its burden is whether the technical relation explains cognition and causation without covertly temporalizing God. The believer's prayer at 3 PM Tuesday was offered after their morning confession and before their evening weeping; the temporal asymmetry of the offering relative to the surrounding life is part of what the prayer is. ET-simultaneity preserves God's contact with the prayer by setting the asymmetry aside on the divine side. What remains is contact with a temporally undifferentiated correlate of the prayer rather than with the prayer as the believer made it.

**Q6.** *Where is a knowledge held, if there is no being anywhere to hold it?* The question asks for the locus of the holding: the being in whom omniscience persists. The doctrine answers without spatial commitment. God's knowledge is held *in God*: not in a region, not at a place, but in the divine essence that grounds the knowing without itself being a containing thing (Aquinas, *ST* I.14.4). The reply denies the question's spatial presupposition and relocates the holding from a spatial being to an essential ground. The present analysis registers the relocation and notes its cost. The being the predicate runs on (the Φ among the structural conditions of [§1.4](<1.4 Three Conditions.md>)) is what stands under the persisting and lets it persist. Bearing knowledge need not require spatial location: minds and abstract informational states are commonly modeled non-spatially. The relevant requirement is a determinate subject or ground of cognitive content, not a literal where. Grounding identifies what makes something the case; it does not perform the holding the predicate names. The divine essence as ground stands as that on which the grasp depends, not as that which stands under it. The doctrine's available answer denies the *where*; whether the essence-as-ground can also stand under the grasp is the open question, and until it is answered what remains is grounding, not holding.

**Q7.** *How does a single act hold all truths at once, if the truths form no whole to be held?* Grim -(Patrick Grim, 1991) raises the *Cantorian difficulty*: the truths form no set, since for any set of truths *K* the power set ℘(*K*) contains more truths than *K*. No unified cognitive grasp of every truth is therefore available as a totality. Plantinga -(Alvin Plantinga, 1993) replies that divine knowledge is proper-class: not bounded by the power-set limit because not a bounded object at all. The reply is the strongest contemporary response to the Cantorian pressure, and it turns on a distinction the present concern has to honor rather than run past: *comprehending* is not *containing-as-totality*. A proper-class grasp can be read distributively (for each truth, that God knows it) without positing a completed whole, *all truths*, that some single act holds as one object. Read that way, Plantinga's reply does not need the totality the Cantorian result denies, and pressing it as though it did would miss it. So the concern is put to the comprehending mode directly. Distributing the grasp truth-by-truth relieves the set-theoretic bound but not the structural condition the predicate runs on: each severally-known truth is still a holding, and the believer's prayer, known severally, is still something that has to be *held* by a knower if *known* is to keep the devotional sense the doctrine trades on. Omniscience is commonly defined distributively — for every truth, God knows it — and need not require all truths to form one set-like object. A separate simplicity question remains about how one act grounds all those differentiated knowledge relations, returning the pressure in the Eleventh interrogation's form: registering a manifold *as* the differentiated manifold it is requires differentiation within the knowing itself ([§6.2.1](<6.2.1 Simplicity.md>)). Whether the grasp is read as a totality or as distributive comprehending, the believer who hopes to be known is hoping to be held in mind: not to be a member of a class, and not to be one more value over which their knower's quantifier ranges.

**Q8.** *How does a being that knows everything know what it is like to know nothing?* Jackson's -(Frank Jackson, 1982) *Mary* distinguishes propositional knowledge from acquaintance: a knower may know every true proposition about red without ever having seen it, and may know every true proposition about pain without knowing what pain is like. Propositional omniscience does not by itself include every phenomenal acquaintance or ability. Whether perfect divine knowledge must include those modes is a theological and conceptual question. The concern invoked by Hebrews 4:15 (NRSVUE) is that the high priest who is *able to sympathize with our weaknesses* is doing more than holding propositions. The pastoral and devotional vocabulary the tradition has performed for two millennia turns on a sense of being known closer to acquaintance than to propositional grasp. Nagasawa -(Nagasawa, Yujin, 2008) and Stump -(Stump, Eleonore, 2010) develop contemporary positions that try to preserve some experiential dimension of divine cognition; the present analysis registers them as the most serious attempts and notes that each preserves the experiential dimension by reintroducing structural conditions the strict atemporalist reading had removed.

**Q9.** *How is a free future act known, before there is any fact of it to know?* The dilemma is ancient (Boethius, *Consolation* V; Aquinas, *ST* I.14.13). If *the believer will pray on Tuesday at 3 PM* is true antecedently, then antecedent truth fixes the action, and the action's freedom in any libertarian sense (the freedom to have done otherwise) is hard to recover. Three positions, each well-developed, address the dilemma. Molinism introduces *middle knowledge* of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom (Luis de Molina, 1588); (Flint, Thomas P., 1998); (Craig, William Lane, 1987) and faces the grounding objection: what makes the counterfactuals true antecedently to the actions whose ground they are (Adams, Robert Merrihew, 1977); (Hasker, William, 1986)? Atemporalism removes the *fore* by removing the temporal location relative to which the foreknowing would be antecedent; the structural concern is Q1's. Open theism (William Hasker, 1989); (Gregory A. Boyd, 2001); (Mullins, R. T., 2016) accepts that genuinely open futures are not yet there to be known. Each preserves a different commitment by surrendering another, and each has serious defenders. The present analysis is that the dilemma reflects a real tension in the doctrine, and the three positions are the three ways the tension can be relieved given the classical bundle. None of the three preserves the bundle intact.

**Q10.** *What determines that God determines all facts, if that itself is one of the facts?* The deepest version of the doctrine extends divine knowledge to every modal fact: God knows what is necessary, what is possible, what is impossible. Modal Constitution / S5 invariance ([§2.1.3](<2.1.3 Modal Constitution.md>)) and [§6.3.1](<6.3.1 Necessity.md>) establish that modal status does not vary across worlds and is not a product of any agent's exercise. Divine knowledge of the modal structure is, accordingly, knowledge of a structural fact about how possibility works — not a sovereign reach into a domain the knower has authored. Leftow's -(Leftow, Brian, 2012) modal grounding is the strongest contemporary attempt to make the modal frame a product of divine activity; it is addressed from the necessity side at [§6.3.1](<6.3.1 Necessity.md>), Q6. The point this section adds is that even granting the comprehensiveness of divine knowledge, what omniscience reaches at the modal level is the structure that conditions any knowing whatsoever: Nature that omniscience operates within rather than over.

**Q11.** *How does a partless knower hold a manifold of truths as the differentiated manifold it is?* The pressure is internal to the classical bundle, where omniscience stands beside divine simplicity ([§6.2.1](<6.2.1 Simplicity.md>)): the God of classical theism is without composition, and the divine knowing is not an attribute added to the divine being but is identical with the divine essence (Aquinas, *ST* I.3; I.14.4). The doctrine has a developed answer. God knows the manifold of creatures not by being informed by them but by knowing his own essence as the imitable source from which each derives, so that the multiplicity falls on the side of what is known and not in the simple act or the simple knower (Aquinas, *ST* I.14.5–6; I.15; (Dolezal, James E., 2011)). The reply is the most developed the tradition offers, and the present analysis registers it in full: a simple knower can know many things, the defender holds, because the manyness is in the objects while the knowing stays one. The question is whether *knowing the manifold as the manifold it is* can be had on those terms. To know every truth is to know, among the truths, that this one is distinct from that: to register the differentiation, not the items alone. A knowing that carries that differentiation has differentiated content within it, which is the composition simplicity was framed to deny; a knowing with no differentiation within it registers the items without their distinctness, which leaves unknown the very truths about distinctness omniscience was framed to include. The eminent-containment move (the essence holds all it knows virtually, in a higher unity that is not composition) is the move [§6.2.1](<6.2.1 Simplicity.md>) runs against classical simplicity directly: either the contained perfections collapse to a single nameless point and the differentiation is lost, or the essence carries the differentiated content the doctrine was built to deny and composition is readmitted. Knowing requires a manifold differentiated enough for what is taken to be the case it is: the condition any knowing whatever must meet, the differentiation (S) among the structural conditions [§1.4](<1.4 Three Conditions.md>) derives. A partless essence is the one thing that cannot host it. Either simplicity gives, to make room for the manifold the knowing carries, or omniscience gives, to keep the knower partless. The classical bundle cannot retain both.

*What is required.* Across the eleven pressures, what *know* runs on becomes visible. Grant the strict timeless reading of *aeternitas*: omniscience still ranges over temporally articulated content. The scope sits in the known, but it does not follow without further argument that the knower instantiates the content's temporal mode. *Know* also asks for a temporal anchor at which the holding obtains (not the time the holding's content indexes, but the time of the holding itself), and a knower that denies the anchor still owes the positive account of timeless bearing. The believer's *known now* is a relation indexed at both poles; an atemporal grasp of an indexed token reaches the correlate and leaves the index unattended. The *fore* in *foreknowledge* operates from a temporal vantage, and ET-simultaneity preserves the term by setting aside the frame the term presupposes: contact without anteriority is contact, not foreknowledge. The holding needs a bearer: grounding is what makes something the case, and bearing is what stands under the persisting, so relocating the holding from the second to the first preserves the word and not the relation. A unified cognitive grasp differs from both distributive comprehending and open-ended class-membership: the believer hoping to be known is hoping to be held in mind, not to be a truth their knower commands severally and not to be a member of a proper class. Pastoral acquaintance does more than propositional grasp: the high priest *able to sympathize* is doing more than holding propositions, and propositional-only omniscience keeps the word by trading away the experiential dimension the tradition has performed for two millennia. The compatibility of foreknowledge with the freedom of the foreknown is real tension, and each of Molinism, atemporalism, and open theism preserves one commitment of the classical bundle by surrendering another. Modal knowledge operates *within* the modal structure rather than over it: the deepest reach of divine cognition turns out to be Nature, the structure that conditions any cognition whatsoever. And the partlessness the classical bundle prizes is the one constitution that cannot host a differentiated manifold: a knowing that registers the distinctness among truths carries differentiation within it, so either simplicity or the reach of omniscience gives ([§6.2.1](<6.2.1 Simplicity.md>)). Knowing, finally, is reflexive in form: taking up what is the case in a way that holds, where the taking requires a manifold differentiated enough for what is taken to be the case it is. Knowing, on the positive account §8 develops, is what Nature does when the loop in it takes up what Nature itself contains, and T, S, and Φ are the conditions under which that taking-up holds.

> [!info]
> **Natural worry.** The best modern defense keeps God outside time yet in contact with every moment at once, so nothing is lost. But weigh what the believer means by being known now. Their prayer at 3 PM Tuesday was offered after the morning's confession and before the evening's weeping—that place in the flow is part of what the prayer is. A timeless knower can grasp the tenseless fact that someone prays at that index, but grasping a dated token isn't attending to them as they are, when they are. The contact reaches the correlate and leaves the index unattended. Being known, in the sense the believer lives on, is a relation timed at both ends—which is time doing exactly what the doctrine set out to remove.

*What is inverted.* Knowledge is Nature with the loop in it taking up what Nature itself contains. The English *know* descends through Old English *cnāwan* from the Indo-European *gnō*-, the same root that gives *gnosis*, *cognition*, *recognize*. To know is to *take up* what is the case in a way that holds. Acquired knowledge involves movement from not knowing to knowing; standing or timeless knowledge does not. Every model still requires a bearer, differentiated content, and epistemic fit, while the stronger temporal claim must be argued separately. The positive account is developed in §8: knowledge is what Nature with the loop in it does when the loop's content fits what Nature itself contains. Several of the pressures above are eliminative before they are relocative: the believer's *known now*, the demand for acquaintance, and the anteriority the *fore* in *foreknowledge* requires tell against any knower's supplying them in the devotional sense (the classical God included) and do not, on their own, show that Nature supplies them. That Nature supplies what survives of *know* is the separate, positive claim §8 must earn, not a verdict these pressures deliver by themselves. The classical tradition reaches for a knower whose grasp would be more comprehensive than the believer's, and names a relation whose conditions for holding have been removed at every level. Nature with the loop in it is the one knower-candidate whose conditions remain intact; if §8 earns the positive claim, what the doctrine of divine omniscience has been formulated to track is what Nature with the loop does, not a feature of a being beyond Nature.


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← [6.4.1 Awareness](<6.4.1 Awareness.md>) | [6.5 Intrinsic Value](<6.5 Intrinsic Value.md>) →
