How Does God Know Our Thoughts?

Does God know our thoughts, all of them from start to finish, before we even think them? Of course he does, but how?

Perhaps he knows them by the brute fact of his essence, i.e. everything knowable is necessarily known by an omniscient God. If God knows everything essentially, just because he is the omniscient God, there would be some issues. The implication would be that what he knows is timeless, part of his very being. Our thoughts-- the good, the bad and the ugly-- would be part of who and what God is from all eternity quite apart from our existence.

If that were the case, sin's expression in creation could only be the instantiation of what was in the thought of God apart from creation. Our thoughts would be, in fact, the very thoughts of God and there wouldn't be any way to prove them otherwise. Could our actions be free or blameworthy in the sense of being ours and not his? In the chicken or the egg argument about the matter, I think we would have to conclude that everything in our lives was an expression of the essence of God, including sin. 

If God knows our thoughts because he has predetermined them along with all else that occurs, there are some issues as well. In that case, every act of even apparently free creatures is not actually the acts of those creatures but God's. He would have first thought them up and then actuated them through creation. Under this regimen too, there is no actual freedom, nor could any blame be ascribed to anyone other than he who premeditated those actions and then enacted them. God would be the only sinner.

God contemplating evil or cogitating sin within himself apart from the existence of creation is a biblical impossibility. Even premeditating a plan which would pick and choose the temptations which would fill the ensuing history of mankind is out of the question. God is not against himself, ever! He's not divided or impure. Those things which are contrary to him could only have come into existence after an agency independent of him in will existed. Therefore any conception that has God, within himself, developing, planning, cogitating, or strategizing about evil apart from it actually having come into existence in creation fails.

God could know, in a general sense, that if he created beings possessing freedom they would exert that freedom in opposition to him, but he wouldn't have known to what degree or how deep or to what end until he actually created them. Then he would see it, transparently, all at once from outside of time. So, if God knows all our thoughts through all time by omniscient, omnitemporal observation there are issues for our comprehension, but none at all in regard to what is revealed in the scriptures. 

In that case, God sees all that happens in time without regard to time passing. All time is equally before him and accessible to him. He is neither in time nor constrained by it anymore than he is by space. He knows all that will ever be in time because he is "already" at each millisecond of time that will ever be in the fullness of his timeless being. All time was before him, at once, from the instant he created.

This is not the quaint notion of God "looking down the corridors of time." "Looking down a corridor" implies a helplessness in waiting that isn't part of God's omnitemporal governance. God has chosen for creation to elapse in time while he is outside time seeing all at once. When it comes to time we have to wait for the future, but in any moment in time, God as he is now is already there, and he's there "now." From such a vantage he is certainly free to affect the entirety of time in any way he wishes in order to cause whatever end he desires.

 

On this view, it is true that God does come to know something by creating that he would not have known apart from creating. Of course, if that isn't the case, then God ends up being the author of sin despite one's view of omniscience and sovereignty, without exception. That God comes to know something given his decision to create doesn't at all impinge upon his sovereignty nor his omniscience. It may have the appearance of contradicting aseity, but God's essential being is not made dependent on something else by this. 

Can there be any real issue with saying that God would not have known the details of humans' thoughts apart from his decision to create humans? I think not, for if he had not made that decision there would have been nothing to know.