Divine knowledge as direct awareness: a defence of Alston

Abstract

AbstractIn his ‘Does God have beliefs?’, William Alston argues for an intuitive construal of the nature of Divine knowledge according to which God's knowledge consists in His direct awareness without any beliefs. Recently, Travis Dickinson has raised some objections to Alston's view and has developed an alternative account of God's knowledge as His acquaintance with a fact, a corresponding thought or belief, and a correspondence between these two. In this article, I respond to Dickinson's objections and show that there is no reason to favour his acquaintance construal of God's knowledge over Alston's intuitive view of the nature of God's knowledge.