ABSTRACT
Most people agree that any being that could count as God would have to know everything there is to know. But how is God supposed to know what he knows? Obviously, not by beginning with sensations, the way human beings generally do, since, as perhaps even more people agree, God is not corporeal and so cannot have sensations. Conceivably, material objects might make some other sort of cognitively effective causal impression on an incorporeal God, but it’s not easy to imagine what that might be. Besides, any account of such an impression would face the apparently insuperable obstacle of the absolute impassibility that is often included among standard divine attributes.1 Still, if a person’s moving her hand from here to there cannot causally affect the mind of God, how does God know that she is moving her hand? ‘He just does!’ has some appeal as a response on behalf of an omnipotent being, but it’s no answer.
