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GOD Aquinas’ solution to this diYculty depends on the thesis that God is outside time: his life is measured not by time, but by eternity Eternity, which has no parts, overlaps the whole of time; consequently, the things that happen at diVerent times are all present together to God An event is known as future only when there is a relation of future to past between the knowledge of the knower and the happening of the event But the relation between God’s knowledge and any event in time is always one of simultaneity A contingent event, as it comes to God’s knowledge, is not future but present; and as present it is necessary; for what is the case is the case and is beyond anyone’s power to alter (ST 1a 14 13) Aquinas’ solution is essentially the same as Boethius’, and he uses the same illustration to explain how God’s knowledge is above time ‘A man who is walking along a road cannot see those who are coming after him; but a man who looks down from a hill upon the whole length of the road can see at the same time all those who are travelling along it.’ Aquinas’ solution is open to the same objection as Boethius’: the notion of eternity as simultaneous with every point in time collapses temporal distinctions, on earth as well as in heaven, and makes time unreal Aquinas cannot be said to have succeeded in reconciling contingency, and human freedom in particular, with divine omniscience Aquinas was more successful in defending the coherence of the notion of a diVerent divine attribute, omnipotence His Wrst attempt at a deWnition is to say that God is omnipotent because he can everything that is logically possible This will not do, because there are many counterexamples that Aquinas himself would have accepted It is logically possible that Troy did not fall, but Aquinas (unlike Grosseteste) did not think that there was any sense in which God could change the past In fact, Aquinas preferred the formulation ‘God’s power is inWnite’ to the formulation ‘God is omnipotent’ ‘God possesses every logically possible power’ is more coherent than the earlier formulation, but it is still only an approximation to a correct deWnition, because some logically possible powers— such as the power to weaken, sicken, and die—clash with other divine attributes Can God evil? Can God better than he does? Aquinas answers that God can only what is Wtting and just to do; but because of the condemnation of Abelard, he has to accept that God can other than he does He explains how the two propositions are to be reconciled 301
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