Why we know that God knows all

Faith & Science Peter Hodgson
With the publication of Professor Stephen Hawking's latest book, The Universe in a Nutshell, we may expect to read more fascinating speculations about the origin of the universe, coupled with accounts of his views on God, morality and politics and indeed almost anything else that comes into the minds of the journalists who interview him. It is a sign of the times that the views of distinguished scientists on subjects not only remote from their particular field of expertise, but from science itself, are listened to with great respect. We seldom hear theologians giving their views on the latest cosmological speculations and, if they were so unwise as to do so, they would rightly be treated with scorn.
Newman kept well clear of the meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, because he found that scientists used these meetings, as indeed they still do, to air their views on theological matters. In a letter written in 1874 to the Rev David Brown he remarked: "Doubtless theologians have meddled with science, but now scientific men are paying them off by meddling with theology. With you, I see nothing in the theory of evolution inconsistent with an Almighty Creator and Protector: but these men assume, assume with an abundant scorn of us and superciliousness, that religion and science are on this point contradictory. and on this audacious assumption they proceed dogmatically to conclude that there is no truth in religion. It is dreadful to think of the number of the souls that will suffer while the epidemic lasts; but the truth is too powerful not in the end to get the upper hand."
In his previous book, Prof Hawking looked forward to the time when we have a "theory of everything", and added that we would then know the mind of God. By "theory of everything": scientists mean the final theory that explains and enables us to calculate all physical phenomena. The difficulty with this is that we can never be sure that a new experiment will not give results disagreeing with the theory, and then we would have to start all over again. Furthermore, the theory must be mathematical, and as such is subject to Gliders theorem which implies a fundamental flaw.
Theologically, even if we were to know everything about God's creation, this does not mean that we will know everything about God. There is a radical difference between knowing about a thing that is made and knowing about its maker.
A similar logical jump is present in one of Prof Hawking's answers to an interviewer. He is reported as saying that "because of the uncertainty principle even God won't have omniscience". The uncertainty principle is commonly understood to say that there are pairs of observable quantities, such as the position and the speed of an atomic particle, such that the more accurate we measure one, the less we know about the other. This is sometimes taken to mean that the atomic world is somehow fuzzy. However, our inability to measure a quantity exactly does not mean that it does not have an exact value. Still less does it mean that God does not know the exact value: He created the universe and keeps it in being, so He knows all about it. He is not bound by His own laws, and can alter or suspend them at will.
It is essential for the advance of science to make bold speculations about the structure and evolution of the universe, and Prof Hawking is rightly renowned for his work. As he of course recognises, these new ideas must be rigorously tested by comparing their consequences with observations and measurements. This is a complex and delicate task, and often it is a long time before firm conclusions can be drawn. We may then know more about the world that God has made, but this tells us nothing new about God Himself.