Here Jimmy Stephens explains God’s knowledge, answers whether God has beliefs, and explains the role of God’s thoughts.

(Posted on behalf of Jimmy Stephens.)

God’s knowledge is twofold. God knows Himself. This knowledge consists of thoughts about Himself. Such self-attending thoughts have unique characteristics not shared by any other person. God’s thoughts about Himself are as immutable as the Person to whom they refer. God’s thoughts bear a unity; they cannot be divided into atomic propositions. God’s self-oriented thoughts are innate, entailed by what it means to be God. More examples can be given, but it should be apparent that God’s self-knowledge is characterized by his divine perfections in general. Importantly, God’s self-knowledge is Trinitarian. God’s thoughts, their content, object, and context are personal. In thinking of Himself, God represents Himself. The Representer, the Represented, and the Representational are all present in this knowledge transaction. More simply, in His mental self-reference, God is both object and subject without destroying their unity and He is one Knower without destroying the distinctness of the Person knowing (subject) and the Person known (object) and the Person transacting this knowledge (context). While all this needs a great deal of editing and unpacking, the two greatest principles of talk about God’s knowledge are consideration of His divine perfections broadly and consideration of the Trinitarian system of God’s knowledge. Then we must consider God’s free knowledge. “Free” here refers to God’s creational choice, His voluntary decision to have other thoughts, to think about something other than Himself. In the nature of the case, these other-centric thoughts will have to comport to Himself and so have a broadly self-centered track. They will be circular throughout. The idea is that God cannot fail to think of Himself alongside of and to think of Himself through things-not-Himself even as He accurate thinks of things-not-Himself. God’s free knowledge consists in His thoughts on creation which are objects “x-of-God” and so are no more construable apart from God’s self-knowledge than they are possible apart from God’s hand. 

Second, the ladder is split. All of it consists of God’s thoughts about creation generally, but out of God’s plan comes God’s accommodated version, sort of the human copy, as it were, of God’s blueprint, no less written by the divine hand. Regenerate man climbs the ladder to worship the God beyond it. Fallen man tries to build his own ladder and reside beyond it, never able to hold it up, always climbing off its foundation, and all the while hopping back to God’s ladder whenever needs must.

1.) Contingency. Human beliefs are distinct from human thought as genus-species. That is, what distinguishes thought from belief is that “thought” is a broader category. The riches of human cognition offer a panoply of thought content we would not consider beliefs: reminiscing, dreaming, arguing, perception, and so forth. Thought and belief are conceptually distinct. No doubt, all of these imply the presence of beliefs, but dreaming about apples is not itself a belief about apples. To have a dream means more than just having a belief. Moreover, while dreams presuppose beliefs, they do not necessarily grant any. According to modern psychology, humans experience thousands of dreams over the course of our lives that we immediately forget. Likewise, when we attend an experience of nostalgia as part of our consciousness, we are not “practicing” belief, as if that were intelligible to say. In fact, for the great majority of human beliefs, they are a passive affair. They are unconscious attitudes which can be realized as propositional affirmations given the appropriate introspection and properly functioning cognitive faculties.

This somewhat explains why human beliefs are passive. Namely, our entire life, but especially the theater of the human mind, presupposes the world of God’s creation as the infinite resource of beliefs. We do not create beliefs. We acquire them. We do not decide to have beliefs; we can try to force them, but inevitably we will have to rely on the world and beliefs about it to try and force new ones. Even beliefs about ourselves, even those thought to be incorrigible, Beliefs are unique to creatures because beliefs, even construed as active propositional affirmations, are conceptually tied to and dependent upon externality to help cause and inform them.

Now consider God’s knowledge, God’s thoughts about Himself and the world. God’s natural knowledge does not have a “direction” of contingency. The subject does not precede the object and the object does not precede the subject. God thinks what He is and He is what He thinks; the rational is the real and the real is the rational. There is no way to distinguish thought and belief here (so the word is meaningless at best, confusing at worst). God is His thoughts and His thoughts are God just as they are of God. What about God’s free knowledge? Unlike beliefs, God’s thoughts create the world. God does not believe it is raining when it is as if there were rain about which to have beliefs. Rather, His thought is precisely what causes there to be rain in the first place. The precedence here is exactly the opposite of what we know of human beliefs. Our beliefs constitute mental states about something independent to said mental states, at least to some extent. But God’s “beliefs” have nothing independent of them – all things depend upon them. How bizarre it is to call these creative thoughts “belief.” Now, there is one caveat. God does have beliefs in His condescension. In His immanence, as Emmanuel, God takes on creaturehood without giving up His Godhead. As the economic Trinity, God has beliefs – yes, even the Father and the Spirit, for we see that much in the baptism of Jesus. But what is vital is the presupposition of the ontological Trinity by the economic Trinity. The latter can only have creaturely beliefs because the former lacks them.