Abstract
AbstractSometimes theists wonder how God's beliefs track particular portions of reality, e.g. contingent states of affairs, or facts regarding future free actions. In this article I sketch a general model for how God's beliefs track reality. God's beliefs track reality in much the same way that propositions track reality, namely via grounding. Just as the truth values of true propositions are generally or always grounded in their truthmakers, so too God's true beliefs are grounded in the subject matters of those beliefs (i.e. God believes that p in virtue of the fact that p). This is not idle speculation, since my proposal allows the theist to account for God's true beliefs regarding causally inert portions of reality.
Highlights
Theists generally think that God is omniscient
Some theists maintain that God knows contingent states of affairs by God’s act of creation (Mann ( ) defends something like this view)
Molinists maintain that God knows future free actions by knowing counterfactuals of free action (Flint ( ) )
Summary
Theists generally think that God is omniscient. It is difficult to spell out exactly what omniscience amounts to.For my purposes it is enough to note that, given God’s omniscience, God has many true beliefs about the world, and no false beliefs. In this case it seems plausible to me that we can give a non-causal explanation of God’s correct beliefs regarding mathematical, normative, and similar facts, underwritten by grounding relations between those facts and God’s beliefs about those facts.
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