Wierenga no a-theorist either

Abstract

The defender of the coherence of divine timelessness, divine omniscience, and a tensed theory of time may either argue that no incoherence has been shown in the notion of a timeless being's knowing tensed facts or else provide an account of divine omniscience according to which a deity who is ignorant of tensed facts may still count as omniscient. With respect to the first strategy, I took Wierenga to be arguing that in grasping present-time propositions involving a time's haecceity God is able to know the tensed propositional content or facts expressed by tensed sentences, even though such grasping does not in God's case issue in beliefs de praesenti. In his reply, Wierenga makes it clear that in his first proposal he is not offering a defense of God's knowledge of tensed facts at all, so that this proposed account does not even pretend to offer an account of God's knowledge of tensed facts. With respect to the second strategy, Wierenga characterizes as misleading my description of his view as allowing that there is a ''multitude of objectively true propositions which remain unknown to God" and that temporal persons "know not merely that p is true at t; they know p simpliciter, an objectively true proposition of which God is ignorant." But if Wierenga's re-definition of omniscience is intended to preclude propositions expressed by tensed sentences' being simply true, then he will have preserved divine omniscience only at the expense of denying the tensed theory of time. In that case, the second strategy proves no more successful in defending the coherence of divine timelessness, divine omniscience, and a tensed theory of time than the first strategy.