known to knower is reversed in God's case. If God's understanding the fact that it rained
last night is God's will that it rained last night, then the divine noetic/volitional activity is
the cause of the fact; the fact is not the cause of the activity (see Mann 1985).
end p.51
Even if we accept all this, the critic may persist, will it not be true that to be omniscient,
God's mind must be characterized by a host of accidental properties? Only if we accept
the inference from “God knows the contingent fact that p” to “God exemplifies the
accidental property of knowing that p.” The inference is easy enough to resist. At the
same time, it is easy to see the attractiveness of the related inference from “Jones knows
that p” to “Jones exemplifies the accidental property of knowing that p.” As the
etymology suggests, an accidental property is a property that a thing acquires per
accidens, a modification of the thing brought about by the workings of some other thing.
Jones knows that it rained last night because he saw it raining, or saw that the streets were
wet this morning, or read about it in the newspaper. In each case Jones's knowledge is
caused, directly or indirectly, by the fact. Given this account of accidental propertihood in
terms of causal dependency, we have seen reason to think that God has no accidental
properties. To put it in other terms, the doctrine of God's simplicity, together with a
causal conception of an accidental property, entails that God has no such properties.
Simplicity and Eternality
Now to take up the case of memory. Never lacking in persistence, our critic bids us
consider the following dilemma. “Even the supercharged sort of self-awareness that God
is supposed to enjoy—no self-deception, complete transparency of self to self—is,
strictly speaking, a second-order monitoring capacity of God's present mental states. That
is, by means of self-awareness God can perceive only what is occurring in his mind now.
Surely a being could have self-awareness and yet lack memory. Memory is not so much a
monitoring capacity as a storage-and-retrieval capacity. Thus, if God has memory in
addition to self-awareness, then the thesis that God's mind is nonmodular is false. But if
God lacks memory, then the only knowledge God can have of the past is by way of
retrodictive inference from present states of the world, or of God's mind, to past states.
You may suppose, if you like, that God has time-indexed representations of all past
events presently open to his omnicompetent gaze, much as a person might have an album
of dated photographs open on a coffee table. To suppose this, however, is to concede that
a memoryless God's knowledge of the past is inferential, from the representations to the
past events as the best explanation for the existence and content of the representations.
Retrodiction, however, is a kind of discursive reasoning that is incompatible with God's
alleged simplicity. Thus, if God lacks memory, then either God is not omniscient or God
is not simple.”
Let us approach this issue by first recalling the motivation behind the ascription of
simplicity to God. God must be noncomplex, having no components or parts, because if
God had parts then God would be dependent on those parts.