Introduction
Adherents of the Abrahamic religions usually believe that God not only does possess the attribute of knowledge but also is all-knowing. Accordingly, God's knowledge has been always considered by philosophers and theologians as one of the most significant attributes of God. However, surprisingly the nature of Divine knowledge has not been addressed properly in contemporary philosophy of religion. Instead, contemporary philosophers of religion usually take a familiar account of Divine knowledge for granted and then deal with problems such as the scope of God's knowledge and its relation to issues such as human freedom.Footnote 1 According to this familiar account, apparently inspired by the dominant view in the contemporary epistemology, Divine knowledge is not essentially different from human knowledge, but is quite similarly constituted by true justified belief. As a result, most contemporary philosophers of religion hold that God does have beliefs. But there are a few exceptions. Most famously, in his article ‘Does God Have Beliefs?’, William Alston rejects this view and argues that God's knowledge is not composed of beliefs but is constituted by direct awareness (intuition) of facts.
Alston's proposal, however, did not receive proper attention in the literature. Nonetheless, in a recent article Travis Dickinson examines Alston's position. In his article, he first makes some objections against Alston's view in order to show its insufficiency in giving a plausible and comprehensive account of God's knowledge. Then, he develops an alternative account according to which God's knowledge consists in His being acquainted with facts.
The aim of my article is to defend Alston's account against Dickinson's objections. In what follows, I first provide a brief description of Alston's account of God's knowledge in his ‘Does God Have Beliefs?’. Then I examine Dickinson's discussion of Alston's view. Relying on the description that I have provided for Alston's account, I show that Dickinson misrepresents some crucial aspects of Alston's view. After clarifying the misrepresentations, I reply to Dickinson's objections and argue that his interpretation of God's knowledge as ‘acquaintance with facts’ is not an acceptable alternative or complement to Alston's intuitive construal of Divine knowledge.
Alston on God's intuitive knowledge
Alston distinguishes between two positions about God's knowledge. According to the first position, Divine knowledge is propositional ‘in the sense that it is made up of cases of knowledge that p, where what replaces p in each case is some declarative sentence that expresses a proposition’. According to the second view, ‘God's knowledge is not broken up into proposition-sized bits . . . but rather constitutes a seamless whole, an undifferentiated intuition of all there is.’ Alston does not intend to decide between these two positions. Instead, he argues that no matter which of these positions one adopts, the answer to the question ‘Does God have beliefs?’ is ‘No.’Footnote 2
First, he considers the second position, i.e. the non-propositional view of Divine knowledge.Footnote 3 Aquinas, a prominent representative of this position, grounded it on the principle of Divine simplicity. Since God is absolutely simple, He (His essence) is identical with his knowledge. Therefore, God's knowledge is totally simple and hence it is beyond any kind of complexity, including the complexity due to having a propositional structure.
Since Alston finds the principle of Divine simplicity quite problematic, he seeks another basis for the non-propositional position. He argues that as human beings, our propositional knowledge stems from two of our limitations: first we ‘cannot grasp any concrete whole in its full concreteness’, and second ‘we need to isolate separate propositions in order to relate them logically’ and then ‘extend our knowledge inferentially’. But since God is obviously beyond these limitations, His knowledge is not required to be propositional.Footnote 4 Taking for granted the rather common view that beliefs are propositional attitudes, Alston concludes that if God's knowledge is non-propositional, it obviously does not involve any belief.
Alston then considers the first position according to which God's knowledge is propositional. He argues that even in this case, His knowledge does not involve beliefs. For ‘there is another construal of divine knowledge that is superior to any belief+ . . . construal’. This superior construal is nothing but the ‘ “intuitive” conception of knowledge’ which consists in being immediately aware of facts.Footnote 5 On this construal, the nature of knowledge is totally different from that of belief and consequently is infallible, because ‘its inherent nature guarantees the reality of the object’ of knowledge. Alston holds that in some cases, human beings do have intuitive knowledge of some facts too, but these items of human intuitive knowledge cannot be free of any belief (or judgmental element). This, however, should be considered as a limitation just for human intuitive knowledge and not for God's. For Alston, God's necessary infallibility in being immediately aware that x is p makes Him needless of any judgment or belief that x is p.Footnote 6 Moreover, the intuitive concept of knowledge fails to present an adequate account of human knowledge, because it cannot cover numerous instances of human knowledge whose objects (facts) are not actually present to our consciousness, such as our knowledge of a historical fact or a fact about a contemporary character of a distant land.Footnote 7 But again, Alston maintains that God's knowledge is beyond any such restriction; there is nothing to prevent God from having immediate awareness of any conceivable facts.
Not only is it possible for God to have intuitive knowledge of facts, but also it is necessary for His knowledge to be intuitive. For
the intuitive conception of knowledge represents the fullest and most perfect realization of the cognitive ideal . . . because it is a direct and foolproof way of mirroring the reality to be known. There is no potentially distorting medium in the way, no possibly unreliable witnesses, no fallible signs or indications.Footnote 8
Although he sees the above argument as sufficient, Alston examines the issue from another perspective too. He considers three accounts about the nature of beliefs and argues that they are unable to provide a plausible construal of God's knowledge. According to the occurrence account of belief, it is a kind of mental occurrence or mental act, namely assenting to a proposition. But it would be meaningless for God, who knows all facts immediately, to assent to propositions. The dispositional account of belief considers ‘a belief that p as, at least in part, a complex of dispositions to act, in appropriate situations, in ways that are appropriate to its being the case that p, given the subject's aims, desires, standards, and so on’.Footnote 9 Alston argues that for a being to have dispositions is to be temporal while God's existence is timeless. And even if we admit that God has dispositions, since He has unlimited and perfect intuitive knowledge, He does not need beliefs to guide His behaviour. Finally, according to the representational account of belief, it involves some inner mental representation of its object. Again, Alston argues that God lacks beliefs, for ‘He has no need for inner representations that He can “carry around with Him” for use when the facts are absent’.Footnote 10
Of course, one may wonder how God's knowledge can be propositional, in its strict sense, and at the same time, intuitive and free of beliefs. Alston is apparently aware of the implausibility of this prima facie contradictory view. He admits that rejecting Divine beliefs in a propositional construal of God's knowledge ‘will require more extensive consideration than the exclusion of divine beliefs by the non-propositional conception of divine knowledge’.Footnote 11 This unclarity in Alston's position actually puzzles William Hasker and made him wonder ‘[H]ow and in what way is the view we have before us a propositional account of divine knowledge, as Alston says it is?’Footnote 12 And it would be interesting to note that Alston, in order to clear up this obscurity, adds a footnote to the reprinted copy of his article saying ‘that the fact itself has a propositional structure. Facts, in fact, just are what true propositions correspond to, and that correspondence involves an isomorphism of structure.’Footnote 13
It is obvious that Alston's account of facts as possessing propositional structure can properly meet questions like that raised by Hasker. For Alston, the propositional structure of facts is sufficient for making his account of God's intuitive knowledge of facts propositional. In contrast, if for example someone claims that God's knowledge consists in His direct awareness of entities and not of facts, then s/he cannot plausibly call this knowledge ‘propositional’ since entities clearly lack any propositional structures.
Therefore, Alston's argument for the claim that God's knowledge does not have beliefs can be summarized as follows: either we consider God's knowledge as non-propositional or propositional knowledge. In either case, however, His knowledge would be free of beliefs. If His knowledge is non-propositional, then since belief is assumedly a kind of propositional attitude, it will be obvious that His knowledge per se cannot involve beliefs. And if we maintain that He has propositional knowledge, we still can propose an intuitive construal of it as a direct awareness of facts which is superior to the common ‘belief + . . .’ construal. And since God's perfection requires the highest kind of knowledge, His knowledge must be intuitive. Finally, none of the major accounts about the nature of belief can provide a plausible construal of God's knowledge; whether we see the nature of belief as a kind of mental occurrence (act) or a specific disposition or representation, it would be either impossible or superfluous (meaningless) for God to have beliefs.Footnote 14
A misrepresentation
Dickinson holds that Alston offers two arguments on behalf of the thesis ‘that immediate awareness with facts, by itself, sufficiently captures all that is needed in an account [of] God's knowledge’. The first, the argument from perfection, is that God would be the greatest (knower) for having this kind of knowledge and the second, the argument from superfluity thesis, says that propositional attitudes are superfluous for God.Footnote 15
I do not think that this is an accurate description of Alston's position. For, if by ‘the thesis’ Dickinson means what Alston pursues in his article in general, as I have shown in my brief description, Alston provides several arguments and sub-arguments for his position. But if what Dickinson has in mind is Alston's claim that God's knowledge is ‘better construed as intuitive’ than as ‘true + variety’,Footnote 16 then what Alston offers as the argument for this specific claim is just what Dickinson calls the argument from perfection and there is not a trace of the argument from superfluity thesis here.
At any rate, interpreting Alston in the above way, Dickinson makes objections against both of what he sees as Alston's arguments. In what follows, I will examine these objections.
Argument from perfection
According to Dickinson, Alston's first argument proceeds as follows: ‘since the intuitive conception of knowledge is the highest form of knowledge . . ., God, as the maximally perfect being, must have this sort of knowledge’.Footnote 17 Briefly, Dickinson's objection to this argument, as far as I understand, is this: the intuitive conception of God's knowledge cannot make any sense of God's infallibility. For, infallibility, according to its typical definition, is a property of a believer. The intuitive account of God's knowledge, however, requires that He lacks beliefs and hence is not a believer. Therefore, He could not be considered infallible. Yet, it is quite obvious, and even Alston agrees, that God is infallible. Therefore, Alston's intuitive conception of God's knowledge is implausible.Footnote 18
Understood in this way, Dickinson's objection is easy to defuse. ‘Fallibility’ and ‘infallibility’ are among those epistemological terms that can be plausibly predicated of different notions. As we can meaningfully talk about an infallible believer, we may also meaningfully talk about an infallible justification or an infallible proposition or statement. For instance, one might define (though roughly) ‘infallible proposition’ as one whose justification entails its truth.Footnote 19 So, Dickinson's claim that infallibility must be used exclusively as an attribute of a believer is not plausible. And if we adopt a general conception of ‘knowledge’ which does not embrace truth as its component, then it seems meaningful to speak even of ‘fallible knowledge’ versus ‘infallible knowledge’. Accordingly, it seems totally reasonable to consider God's intuitive knowledge as an example of infallible knowledge. Alston explicitly admits that ‘knowledge, on this construal [i.e. intuitive knowledge] is infallible in a strong sense; its inherent nature guarantees the reality of the object’.Footnote 20
Even if one insists that ‘infallible’ can be properly used just as an adjective of a subject and thus the phrase ‘infallible knowledge’ is senseless, there is no reason to think that it must be restricted to a believer as such. (Here I assume that the concept of ‘subject’, in its epistemological usage, is broader than of ‘believer’. I use ‘subject’ as almost synonymous to ‘knower’. If God, according to Alston's view, knows facts without believing propositions, then He is a knower or subject but not a believer.) Alston himself spells out this broad application of ‘infallible’ when he writes: ‘In epistemology, this term is most appropriately used for the epistemic position of a subject vis-à-vis a given subject-matter, more specifically for the impossibility of the subject's being mistaken about that subject matter.’Footnote 21 If the above-mentioned points are accepted, it will be very obvious that according to his own account of God's intuitive knowledge, Alston can quite meaningfully talk about God's being ‘infallible’ in the sense that He is an infallible knower. Consequently, Dickinson's claim that Alston's account of God's knowledge as intuitive cannot make sense of God's infallibility is ill-grounded. It seems that Dickinson, though implicitly, admits that his objection is not very powerful. For, as if on behalf of Alston, he replies that by God's infallibility, one might mean that ‘God can't possibly fail to be directly aware of the facts themselves.’Footnote 22
The superfluity thesis
Now we can move on to examine Dickinson's objections against Alston's second argument, which is based on the claim that ‘God's beliefs would be superfluous when there is direct awareness of facts.’ Dickinson takes this argument to be based upon what he calls ‘the superfluity thesis ST’:
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(ST) If one is directly aware of a fact x, then a propositional attitude about x is unnecessary for knowing x.Footnote 23
Dickinson's first objection against ST is that ‘we can imagine cases in which one enjoys direct awareness of a fact and yet one does not have knowledge of that fact’. Two examples are one's awareness of a patch of colour in the periphery of one's visual field and a new-born baby's awareness of certain features of the world for which s/he has no concepts. According to Dickinson, since the direct awareness involved in these cases is not accompanied by any thought or conceptualization, it is not knowledge.Footnote 24
I suggest two responses to this objection. First and foremost, it seems that Alston (at least in the context of his discussion in ‘Does God Have Beliefs?’) is not ready to accept ST as a general principle which embraces every subject with every kind and level of direct awareness. Instead, as far as his discussion shows, Alston's own version of the superfluity thesis would be a modified one:
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(ST*) If one is directly aware of a fact x in the highest and the richest conceivable level of cognitive state, then a propositional attitude about x is unnecessary for knowing x.Footnote 25
My point here is that by calling the plausibility of ST into question, Dickinson's counterexamples become irrelevant to God's knowledge. For they are constituted of cases of human awareness usually gained through physical procedures involving bodily sensory organs, while God's direct awareness of facts is, ex hypothesi, beyond any such constraints. To sum up, since ST* is restricted to the highest and the richest conceivable level of cognitive state, Dickinson's counterexamples cannot defeat it.
Second, it seems that Dickinson is committing a petitio principii when he argues that cases in question are not knowledge because they are not accompanied by any thought or conceptualization, for Alston would not agree that every type of knowledge, including God's knowledge, must involve belief or thought or the like.Footnote 26
In summary, it seems that appealing to cases like our peripheral vision, a new-born baby's awareness, or in fact any cases of awareness that falls short of the richest and the highest level of cognitive state cannot threaten the plausibility of the superfluity thesis for God's knowledge.
Dickinson's second objection against ST is based on an assumption made at the beginning of his article: ‘God's knowledge and human knowledge are not fundamentally different in nature.’Footnote 27 This assumption requires ST to be a general thesis that covers God's and human beings’ direct awareness alike. But, as his counterexamples show, ST is not true about human beings’ direct awareness. Thus ST must be rejected.
Dickinson thinks not only that his assumption of the fundamental similarity between God's and human knowledge requires the generality of (ST), but also Alston sees (ST) as a general thesis covering human knowledge too. He writes: ‘[W]e should notice that Alston construes his point as a general one. He seems to think that ST holds for any genuine instance of immediate and direct awareness.’Footnote 28
Yet, I believe that this is a quite distorted interpretation of Alston's view. As I mentioned briefly in my response to the first objection, contrary to Dickinson's claim, Alston does not endorse ST in its general, i.e. unmodified, form. Rather, ST* reflects his view accurately. There is nothing in Alston's article suggesting that he accepts ST. Contrariwise, there are several pieces of textual evidence suggesting that his idea of the so-called superfluity thesis must exclusively be applied to God's direct awareness. For example, in the second section of his article, Alston reports an argument articulated by other philosophers to show that an immediate awareness of a fact cannot be free of belief or judgment. He finds this argument sound. Nevertheless, he restricts it to human direct awareness: ‘My contention will be that what the argument infers from this for the human case fails to follow for the divine case. Even if it is true for us that to apply the concept of P to x is, or necessarily involves, believing that x is p, . . . no such conclusion can be drawn for the divine case.’Footnote 29 Now, since on the one hand, Alston concedes that human direct awareness necessarily involves belief and, on the other hand, he argues that God's direct awareness is free of belief, it is quite clear that he never endorses ST as a general thesis which includes human direct awareness.
Another piece of evidence for my claim that Alston would accept ST* instead of ST is that in his discussion of the non-propositional view of Divine knowledge, he comes to consider cases like the ‘early stages of individual psychological development’ and the ‘relatively unorganized psychological conditions of adult subjects (just falling off to sleep or just waking up, for example)’ as ones which can work as a model of God's ‘purely non-propositional knowledge’. But he immediately rejects the sufficiency of this model, because he believes that ‘it is a poorer, not a richer cognitive state than the propositional knowledge into which it develops’,Footnote 30 whereas God's knowledge is to be the cognitive ideal.
What about Dickinson's assumption that ‘God's knowledge and human knowledge are not fundamentally different in nature’? This assumption, which is the ground for the alleged generality of ST, seems too ambiguous. What is meant by ‘fundamental difference’? What is the ‘nature’ of knowledge and what are its components? Are the limitations of a kind of knowledge constituents of its nature? If the answer is ‘yes’, then one may reject Dickinson's assumption, since it is widely accepted by theists that God's knowledge is beyond all limitations of human knowledge. For example, as far as we know, in the present moment, no human being has direct awareness of historical facts or those related to the future. Thus, Dickinson's assumption requires us to accept this odd implication that God's direct awareness couldn't embrace past and future facts since otherwise God's and human knowledge would be different in nature. But this implication openly contradicts the classical interpretation of Divine omniscience. Therefore, the fact that some cases of human direct awareness, in order to be knowledge, require a propositional attitude merely stems from the limitations of this awareness and has nothing to do with the nature of awareness. And if the answer is ‘no’ – that is, if the limitations of a certain kind of knowledge are not constituents of its nature – then Dickinson's claim that in some cases human direct awareness does not entail knowledge tells us nothing about God's awareness, even if we accept his assumption.
If my arguments are sound, it can be concluded that Dickinson's objections fall short of showing that Alston's intuitive construal of God's knowledge cannot provide the cognitive ideal.
Acquaintance
By posing the above-mentioned objections, Dickinson does not intend to show that Alston's account of Divine knowledge is substantially wrong, but just to disclose its insufficiency. Therefore, his own proposal should be seen as a complement to Alston's. Dickinson seeks to develop what ‘needs to be added to Alston's account to achieve the epistemic ideal’.Footnote 31 First, he provides a brief survey of some of the characteristics of acquaintance. According to this survey, acquaintance (i) is similar to, if not extensionally equivalent with, direct awareness, (ii) is not a propositional attitude, and (iii) is a relation which needs two real relata (one's mind and a fact).Footnote 32 It seems that it is the first feature, namely, the similarity between acquaintance and direct awareness or intuition, that permits Dickinson to consider his account of God's knowledge as a complement of Alston's view. He then tries to give an allegedly comprehensive account of God's knowledge as His being in acquaintance with facts.Footnote 33 He apparently finds his previous objections against the adequacy of Alston's position sufficient to show that God's knowledge involves, beside His direct awareness (or ‘acquaintance’, in Dickinson's terminology), some kind of propositional attitude. Then he raises this question: ‘is acquaintance with (all) facts and the representation of those facts in thought sufficient as an account of the nature of divine knowledge?' and answers it negatively. He then argues that God must also be acquainted with the relations which hold between His thoughts and the facts.
In order to illustrate this, he compares two hypothetical cases. In the first case, one looks at a side of a building filled with 1,242 discrete spots randomly placed and of various sizes.Footnote 34 One becomes acquainted with the fact that there are 1,242 spots on the facing side and, moreover, believes (truly) that there are 1,242 spots on it. In a second similar case, one sees just three large spots in clear view on a facing side of a building, becomes acquainted with the fact that there are three spots on it, and comes to believe (truly) that there are three spots. Dickinson's claim is that only in the second case does one possess knowledge. The reason for this difference, according to him, is that in the former case, contrary to the latter, the subject lacks the acquaintance with the relation between the involved fact and the corresponding belief. He then makes a second claim: what causes this difference is that the relevant fact is ‘so very complex’ in the former case and ‘simple and straightforward’ in the latter.Footnote 35
Before going further to examine Dickinson's final formulation of God's knowledge, let me contemplate briefly Dickinson's two above-mentioned claims.
His first claim is that a typical subject's awareness of the fact that there are 1,242 spots on the building even when it is accompanied with the corresponding belief is not sufficient for possessing knowledge of this fact unless the subject has acquaintance with the correspondence between the fact and the corresponding belief. On its face, this claim seems controversial. Why is the supposed direct awareness of this fact together with a corresponding true belief not sufficient for possessing knowledge? Dickinson's reply is that ‘one would not typically be aware of what the belief has going for it or whether a slightly different belief (e.g. that there are 1,243 spots) is true despite being acquainted with the corresponding fact’.Footnote 36 Dickinson's explanation, however, seems quite irrelevant, for in this issue we are actually concerned with one's direct awareness of the fact that there are exactly (not approximately) 1,242 spots on the wall and I cannot imagine how a subject who is acquainted with (directly aware of) this specific fact could yet be unaware of ‘whether a slightly different belief (e.g. that there are 1,243 spots) is true’. If I, perhaps in an unusual way, become directly aware of the fact that there are exactly 124,356 hairs on my head and believe that there are exactly 124,356 hairs on my head, then I will be certain that all alternative beliefs, including a very slightly different belief (e.g. that there are 124,355 hairs on my head), are false. Indeed, we should not confuse (i) being directly aware of the fact that there are (exactly) 1,242 spots with (ii) being directly aware of the fact that there are a lot of spots (of which there happen to be 1,242). My contention is that the former is sufficient for possessing knowledge of the fact that there are (exactly) 1,242 spots while the latter is not sufficient for knowing this specific fact even if coupled with the corresponding belief and the acquaintance with the correspondence between them.
What about the second claim? Dickinson apparently thinks that the fact that ‘there are 1,242 spots’ is more complex than the fact that ‘there are three spots’ and because of this complexity, a typical human subject hardly becomes acquainted with the relation between the former fact and his or her relevant belief. It seems obvious to me that in order to make any assessment of this judgment, we may need to answer a rather substantial question about the criteria of simplicity and complexity of facts. And this question raises a more fundamental question about the very nature of facts. There is not any consensus, however, among the contemporary metaphysicians about what a fact is like and it seems quite natural that the criterion of the complexity of facts may differ according to the diverse relevant views. For example, if someone sees facts as true propositions, it would be hard to justify the view that the fact or the proposition that ‘there are 1,242 spots’ is more complex than the fact or the proposition that ‘there are three spots’. These are two existential propositions which, as propositions, have the same structure.Footnote 37
Dickinson points out that ‘we should understand “fact” in a broadly construed sense and basically synonymous with states of affair [sic]’.Footnote 38 There is a view about the metaphysics of facts which sees a fact as an obtaining state of affairs.Footnote 39 According to this view, a fact can be considered as containing some objects and properties or relations and hence having a kind of internal complexity. Dickinson might be ready to interpret the complexity of facts in this way. It might seem plausible that, given this perspective of complexity, the fact that ‘John is sad and disappointed’ is more complex than the fact that ‘John is sad’, for the former involves one object and two properties while the latter involves one object and only one property. However, as it has been discussed in the literature, this picture of the complexity of facts faces several problems.Footnote 40 So, Dickinson's claim that the fact about 1,242 spots is more complex than the fact about three spots is not as uncontroversial as it might seem at first glance.Footnote 41
Let's get back to our main topic. Concluding that the acquaintance with the relation between the fact and its corresponding belief is a necessary requirement for human beings to possess knowledge of that fact, Dickinson provides the following account of God's knowledge as the ‘genuine cognitive ideal’:
God knows that p if and only if (1) God is acquainted with his thought that p, (2) God is acquainted with a fact's being p, and (3) God is acquainted with the correspondence that holds between the thought that p and the fact p.Footnote 42
As I argued, Dickinson's objections against Alston's intuitive construal of God's knowledge are not successful and this means that appealing to Alston's arguments, one can still reasonably maintain that God's knowledge is entirely free of beliefs. Thus, one would be justified in rejecting the plausibility of adding (1) to the above account and consequently (3) must be abandoned too, since correspondence as a real relation needs two real relata. Hence, what would remain from Dickinson's suggestion is just (2), which, assuming that there is no crucial difference between intuition and acquaintance in this context, is nothing but Alston's own view.Footnote 43
My conclusion is that Dickinson fails to offer any plausible argument to show that his ‘acquaintance construal’ of Divine knowledge is more acceptable than Alston's intuitive account and ‘achieves an ideal way of knowing, worthy of the divine being’.Footnote 44
It is worth noting that Dickinson's construal of God's knowledge is an application of Fumerton's account of the human noninferential justified belief which is based on acquaintance with facts: ‘a belief that p is noninferential[ly] justified if and only if the subject is acquainted with the thought that p, acquainted with a corresponding fact, and acquainted with the correspondence between the thought that p and that corresponding fact’.Footnote 45
A detailed analysis of Fumerton's account of knowledge by acquaintance and Dickinson's application of it is beyond the purpose this article.Footnote 46 Here, I would like just to highlight an essential point. After all, Fumerton's theory of acquaintance, so far as I could understand it, lies within the classical epistemology which accepts the well-known tripartite definition of knowledge. In such a framework, he offers the above definition for a noninferentially justified belief.
In contrast, a main part of Alston's project is to argue that God's knowledge cannot be an instance of the tripartite conception of knowledge. Instead, God possesses the ideal cognitive state, namely the direct awareness or intuition of facts which is free of any beliefs. Alston draws a very sharp distinction between intuitive knowledge and knowledge as ‘true justified belief’ and states that ‘[i]ntuitive theorists . . . are united in affirming that knowledge [i.e. intuitive knowledge] is a different kind of psychological state from belief (judgment); it is not a belief that meets certain further conditions’.Footnote 47 He adds: ‘Despite the curious conviction of many contemporary Anglo-American epistemologists that the true-justified-belief conception of knowledge is “the traditional conception”, the intuitive conception has been much more prominent historically.’Footnote 48 Thus, I would contend that any endeavour to complete or reconstruct Footnote 49 Alston's account of God's knowledge via appealing to one of the current theories of the ‘contemporary Anglo-American epistemology’ contradicts the very spirit of Alston's own project and accordingly has no chance of success.
