in the first world are much better than the creatures in the second world, it somehow
logically follows that God must love the creatures in the first world more than he loves
the creatures in the second. But there is nothing in his presentation of the view that God's
love for creatures is independent of their merit that yields this result. It is doubtful,
therefore, that the Judeo-Christian concept of grace rules out the view of Leibniz and
Clarke that God must create the best world if there is a best world to create.
end p.27
Knowledge
As we've seen, a being worthy of unconditional praise and devotion will possess certain
perfections in the highest possible degree, for otherwise, one could conceive of a being
more worthy of our praise and devotion. In addition to maximal power and goodness, the
long tradition of classical theism has maintained that God possesses the perfection of
maximal knowledge. For a being who is immensely powerful and good but somewhat
lacking in knowledge would not be as deserving of our respect, reverence, and awe as a
being who, in addition to being all-powerful and perfectly good, possessed complete
knowledge of all that is possible to be known. But, as with God's possession of total
power and perfect goodness, there are difficulties in understanding what it would be for a
being to be omniscient, knowing all there is to be known. In addition, there is the
question of whether God's knowledge of all the truths there are is compatible with other
features of the theistic worldview, such as the strong emphasis on human freedom and
responsibility.
What is possible to be known? The most obvious answer is propositions that are true. If a
certain claim is true—whether about the past, the present, or the future—then unless it's
like “No one knows anything,” it seems possible that someone should know that
proposition to be true. Accordingly, if God is all-knowing, we should expect God to
know all the propositions that are true. So, if God exists, he now knows that two World
Wars occurred in the twentieth century. And he knows that it is now the twenty-first
century. Moreover, if it is true that no World Wars will occur in the twenty-second
century, then God now knows that no World Wars will occur in the twenty-second
century. If he did not know all these truths he would be lacking in knowledge of what is
possible to be known and, therefore, would not be omniscient. Moreover, God's
knowledge is generally held to be immediate or direct, not inferred from evidence that he
has gathered.
In suggesting that God now knows truths about the future we inevitably suggest that, like
us, God is a temporal being, existing in time. Of course, he is not a temporal being in the
sense of having a beginning or an end in time. He is temporal in the sense of being
everlasting, existing at every moment from a beginningless past to an unending future.
While this is the dominant view of God in the modern period, it must be noted that from
the time of Augustine up through the medieval period a number of important religious
thinkers viewed God as outside of time and having a knowledge of events in time (past,
present, and future) akin to the knowledge we have of what happens in the present. They
took the view that temporal existence imposes limitations not appropriate with respect to