ABSTRACT
This chapter is a response to a paper by Murray MacBeath in which he argues that a timeless God cannot share in our relief that some event is over because he cannot believe that it is over. Since relief is conceptually tied to knowing what it is like, and knowing what it is like is, according to MacBeath, a distinctive, non-propositional form of knowledge, God’s failure to experience relief means that he cannot be omniscient.
Three different interpretations of MacBeath’s argument are considered. First, that the doctrine of divine timelessness leaves no room for God to know certain tensed truths directly for himself, and hence leaves no room for the concomitants of such knowledge, such as relief. In response, it is argued that on this interpretation God would have to be me, and if God were me then some version of either pantheism or panpsychism would be entailed.
The second interpretation is that only a God who is in time can himself experience relief and so know what it is like when we experience it. But this, it is submitted, would require God to experience limitations and frustrations quite incompatible with his perfection.
Finally, the third interpretation is that only a temporal God can know indirectly what it is like to experience relief. It is responded that MacBeath has not shown that God might not, by the use of creative or imaginative projection, know for himself sufficient about my predicament to sympathize with me. On this account, God would know his creatures’ reliefs in the way in which, according to Aquinas, the creatures’ knowledge of God’s goodness is based upon their knowledge of their own.
In conclusion, it is suggested that MacBeath’s problems may have originated from his searching for the wrong kind of thing, for a formal or topic-neutral account of omniscience, an account that would apply to a knower abstracted from all other considerations than having the power to know.
