Tahafut_al-Tahafut-transl-Engl-van-den-Bergh

the person who takes up different positions, and God’s
knowledge must be understood in this way, for indeed we
admit that God comprehends things in one single knowledge
in everlasting eternity, and that His condition does not
change; with their intention, the denial of His change, we do
agree, but their assertion that it is necessary to regard the
knowledge of an actual becoming and its cessation as a
change, we refuse to accept. For how do you know this?
Indeed, suppose God had created in us a knowledge that
Zaid will arrive tomorrow at daybreak, and had made this
knowledge permanent without creating for us another
knowledge or the forgetfulness of this knowledge; then, by
the mere previous knowledge, we should know at daybreak
that at present Zaid is arriving and afterwards that he had
arrived, and this one permanent knowledge would suffice to
comprehend these three moments.
There still remains their assertion that the relation to a
definite object known enters into the essence of the
knowledge of this object, and that whenever the relation
becomes different the thing which has this essential relation
becomes different, and that whenever this differentiation and
this sequence arise there is a change. ‘
We say: If this is true, then rather follow the path of your
fellow-philosophers when they say that God knows only
Himself and that knowing Himself is identical with His
essence, for if He knew man and animal and the inorganic in
general (and these are undoubtedly different things), His
relation to them would undoubtedly be different too; and one
single knowledge cannot be a knowledge of different things,
since the object related is differentiated, and the relation is
differentiated, and the relation to the object known is
essential to the knowledge, and this implies a multiplicity and
a differentiation-not a mere multiplicity with a similarity, for
similar things are things which can be substituted for each
other, but the knowledge of an animal cannot be substituted
for the knowledge of the inorganic, nor the knowledge of
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