The Omniscient Lord: How Does God Know Things? by Chris Matthew
In this limited treatment of God’s knowledge, I hope to begin by discussing the accommodated nature of propositions, followed by an excursus on God’s self-consciousness, and close with an application of these aforementioned principles to God’s act of predication.
PROPOSITIONS
Although it is not technically wrong to say that God’s omniscience entails that God knows all true propositions, I do not believe that this is the essence of God’s omniscience. Notice that propositions are divisible units of reference (or thoughts or speech acts or abstract objects). Just as God’s self-consciousness is not a process that develops through time and just as it does not depend on external laws of thought, so also God’s omniscience is one. That is, it is an indivisible unit itself, as simple as God is simple. God’s omniscience precedes propositional knowledge altogether, though it guarantees exhaustive propositional knowledge once creation comes into the picture. At the same time, propositionality is really the nature of human thought. It is how we as humans parse claims, beliefs, statements, and arguments. As part of human experience, propositions are comparable to little photographs. Useful and God-ordained, but inherently limited.
How does one sum up everything about, say, an apple with a proposition? It’s not possible. You need a great many propositions to talk about apples. But two conundrums occur when you do this. First of all, the more propositions you have, the clearer the idea of an apple may become (though not necessarily), but it also becomes less feasible to hold all those propositions in the mind at once. We can only contemplate so much information at a given moment. Secondly, in using more and more propositions to detail the apple, you’ll bring in new concepts ─ colors, shape, food, life, seeds, etc. ─ and each of these will come with its own rabbit hole of propositions to follow. So the very nature of propositions makes it impossible for humans to have an all-encompassing concept of reality. We can never comprehend the whole story. We can only apprehend its thesis, the mystery of God revealed in Christ.
All this to say, God’s knowledge is not primarily propositional. His omniscience should not be defined in terms of propositional knowledge ─ at least, not primarily. Yes, God knows all true propositions, but that is a result of His archetypal self-awareness that is as manifestly possessed as is His omnipotence or immutability or love.
God knows Himself because of Who is thinking, about Whom He is thinking, and through Whose thought the transaction is born. Even here, the Trinitarian perichoresis sheds light.
GOD’S SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
Now we go back. Before time, before space, before propositions, before creation, there was only God. There was not even nothing; that is, there was no non-being surrounding God like some star in a midnight backdrop. No, God was all there was, and God knew everything there was to know and everything there was to know was just Him. “Flatness” does not yet exist. “Numbers” do not yet exist. There are no “laws of thought” yet. There is only God, holy and perfect.
Notice that God’s knowledge of flatness, tables, numbers, and so forth, are all implicit in His creative act. In God’s creative act, all predicates and concepts (eg., flatness) are first conceived ex nihilo. The very concept is born from the eternal counsel of God willing it to be. So God cannot fail to know it because the facticity of flatness is only a fact because it is part of God’s creation. Those are the only kinds of facts after all: God and creation, Creator and His world.
Van Til writes,
“His knowledge of himself is therefore entirely analytical. By that we do not suggest that God had to go through a process of looking into himself and finding information with respect to himself. For analytical knowledge, in distinction from synthetic knowledge, means knowledge that is not gained by reference to something that exists without the knower. God knows himself not by comparing and contrasting himself with anything, not even non-being, outside himself. He knows himself by one simple eternal act of vision. In God, therefore, the real is the rational and the rational is the real.” [The Defense of the Faith, 38.]
Let me summarise what I have said so far. Omniscience goes much deeper than knowing all true propositions. God and His self-consciousness precede propositionality altogether. In fact, propositionality is constitutive of our limited psychology. Omniscience has primarily to do with God’s personal self-awareness. Propositional knowledge arrives as a result of God’s creative decree and so is ad extra, a covenantal property, a knowledge characteristic of God’s entering human space and so accommodating Himself for our sake.
GOD AND PREDICATION
Now we seem to be in a position to directly explore the nature of predication. How does God work with predication? That is, how does a predicate ─ say, “flatness” ─ connect with a subject ─ say, “table” ─ for God? After all, God would not go about this predication inferentially. He needs not time, nor external laws, nor even propositions, as I have just contended.
The answer is twofold.
First, God knows “flatness” and “table” as part of the same act that creates flatness and tables. Namely, God conceives of those things ex nihilo, and so has both their place in His narrative and He has the narrative laid out in terms of tables and spatial properties like flatness. God has written the whole story, and so all the props, characters, and chapters line up with the motifs, arcs, and clinchers, just as the clinchers, arcs, and motifs are aligned to the individual chapters, props, and characters. Where we can only see a table as flat by putting together our photographs over time, God has the blueprint from which the objects photographed gain their reality in the first place. He needs not any rabbit holes of propositions because He possesses the one singular vision before which every fact is related to the table and the table is related to every other fact ─ even my biking gloves.
Second, can God then not perform propositional inference? By all means, He can. Christ displays this for us. By condescending, God can be a burning bush, a glowing cloud, smoke, a strange visitor, or the one and only anointed God-man. In these manifestations, God does not lose His deity, does not cease to be omniscient. Rather, He takes upon Himself the tenderness of creaturely noetic frameworks. Christ, who is the Son of God, can predicate flatness of a table just as we do in his human nature.
So it seems that God predicates flatness of a table in two ways. First, by being the creator of flatness, tables, and the intersection of the two. We can only form propositional pictures of those intersections because He first mapped them out of nothing. Second, God can predicate flatness as a creature, even as a human, in the hypostatic union. And as should be obvious, Christ’s ability to think, “The table is flat”, presupposes His divine omniscience which timelessly thinks the flat table, its propositional conceivability, and all human minds that come across it into existence.
The Council 
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