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. Because God is eternal, not created nor bound by the created, the implication would be that what he knows, he always knew. It's part of his timeless 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 which came to be in time.

If that were the case, sin's expression in creation could only be the instantiation of what was in the thought of God himself, 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 that were the case, our lives would be authored by God in the same way fictional characters' lives are authored by the writer of the fiction. 

Interestingly enough, there is no actual, practical difference in respect to this issue whether God's omniscience is described by Essential Omniscience or by Divine Determinism. In either case, every act of even apparently free creatures is not actually the acts of those creatures but God's. He would have thought them up prior to their existence and then actuated them through creation. Under either regimen there is no actual freedom, so no blame could 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 apart from him 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 about God and his purity. 

On Omnitemporal Observation, 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.

When Something Dawns on the Mind of God

There is life outside of this universe. God lives that life. His life existed when the universe did not, and would still exist if the universe dissolved into nothingness tomorrow. God is, everything else is made by him and exists at his pleasure. Therefore, there is something in and about God which has nothing whatsoever to do with creation, and which creation does not affect nor which creation orders.

God is perfect. He is entire within himself and in need of nothing. His perfections were as they were without creation, they are what they are upon creating, and they are what they would be if creation ceased to be. Therefore, God's perfections are not reliant in any respect upon creation. It could come and go but God would be the same.

When God created the universe and established something other than himself, of necessity, changes occurred within him due to his relation to that reality. That reality could have nothing to do with his perfections or else he wouldn't have been perfect apart from creation. The changes that reality caused upon its coming into existence, likewise, could have nothing to do with his perfections. So even though God does not change in regard to perfection, change is still part of his experience.

Before or apart from the decision to create, God had no relation to creation. If that reality was in his mind eternally (as would be the case on Essential Omniscience, Determinism, or Molinism) but undone, he would have been less than perfect apart from creating. He would have needed to create in order to fulfill that unfulfilled ambition, or to instantiate that knowledge in his mind which had no source in existence. Therefore, when creation did not exist God had no knowledge of it--there was nothing to know.

In his eternal perfections apart from creation, he did not know creation, created beings, nor the things that created beings did. Once he decided to create, he knew creation entirely. He knew created beings and all the things created beings did, completely, utterly, exhaustively. He did not and does not know them because he pre-conceived them in distant ages of eternity, but that in instantiating what he did conceive he knew them entirely through his omnitemporal omniscience. He knows them from the the foundations of the world, even though he wouldn't have know them "before" the foundations.

God can change in regard to thought or notion and still remain eternally perfect, as odd as that might sound. It is not at all necessary that God would have to know everything about creation before he conceived it and said, "Be." Theological conceptions which deny the first and insist upon the second lead to bizarre conclusions. In those cases the picture of God gets painted with inappropriate colors (as in Calvinism) or self-descriptions in the Word of God inspired by the Holy Spirit get denied (as in Impassibility).

That something dawned on the mind of God (like creating), and represented a change for him-- a change which affected him, should not be too difficult a concept to grasp given the testimony of scripture. The alternative is to not see God as he's shown himself to be.

A Moment In the Mind of God

We experience, act and think sequentially, in a time-bound fashion, which seems to demand that the entire concept of change be placed squarely within the domain of time. God is not time-bound and sees omnitemporally, and yet presents himself to us within creation as one experiencing change. The paradox is confusing to say the least. Nonetheless, unless we are willing to discount God's self-revelation in scripture, it's a paradox we should accept as true.

I've written previously concerning God's experience of the moment within creation. His timeless experience of the moment in creation means that he's not only always here now, but that what was then is now and what is to be is now for him. We wait on time to unfold--past opening up to present, present becoming future. God sees the beginning from the end and the end from the beginning. He sees all things in motion through time, at once, and he interjects throughout time to affect and influence where things go, at once, and leaves no scar on time to trace that he ever did so.

It is not necessary that he dreamt all this up in the misty ages of eternity, as if he always, forever had a plan to create, and then decided to instantiate it in the moment of creation. He need only to have had a thought and said "be," and in that instant all was what it is in all its time at once before him. From his perspective, all stuff, all time, all the us there will ever be came about with one all-wise, all-seeing, all-knowing decision (or perhaps six day-long decision). The thought that precipitated that decision has not passed: this, right now, is that thought, not the echo of it as it would be if he had to perceive it through the long ages of eternity before he acted.

Really, that precipitating thought was the only one necessary for God to have undertaken regarding all creation throughout its time. Extended pre-planning, meticulous preparation, experimentation, and trial and error were not necessary to bring creation into being. God is wise enough, knows enough, is powerful enough, and is unaffected by time enough to put all this into play, and to still allow creatures free will within time. We are in that moment, the very same moment, and the only moment within the mind of God that produced all creation and in which creation is sustained.

Omnipresence and Omniscience Entail Omnitemporality

If it is true that God is both omnipresent and omniscient, then he must also be omnitemporal.

Omnipresence requires that each point in creation (or space, if you'd like) is accessible to God with equal facility. More to the point, everywhere is actually always before God, though God himself is not circumscribed by creation or in any way actually "in" it. God is transcendent and immutable, so for every point in creation God is what he is at once without variation or locus.

Everywhere in space is in a state of fluctuation from the quantum level up. Nothing is static, everything is in motion and changing. To be omnipresent and unchanging, God has to be the same everywhere despite that constant fluctuation. Change, itself a time construct, is experienced with time relative to motion (which we know thanks to Einstein). As a result, I am led to the conclusion that God must be omnitemporal if he is omnipresent.

Omniscience requires that everything that can be known is known by God. If, in any instant, God is unaware, or ignorant of some knowable thing, he would cease to be omniscient. Omniscience, it would seem, precludes discovery. If that is so, it follows that God knows all that he has known or will ever know at once, or at least at once upon any decision to act.

Knowledge grows with the passage of time. Not in the sense that new facts come to light as time goes on, but that new facts, correlated with time passing, come into being. There is constantly, in every instant, something new to know. The result, I think, is that God could not be perfect in knowledge if his knowledge was dependent upon time. Therefore (by definition alone), God must be omnitemporal if he is omniscient.

Therefore, omnitemporality is entailed in omnipresence and omniscience. We can't have one without without the others. To that end, God's omnitemporality could be understood to be that such that every instant in time is before God at once. God is not "in" time nor subject to it, but rather is transcendent to time and unfettered by it, and he knows its entirety from start to finish.