In this chapter, Maimonides argues that most of the objections to God’s omniscience arise because we use our understanding of human knowledge to evaluate God’s knowledge. But according to him, “the knowledge attributed to [God’s] essence has nothing in common with our knowledge, just as that essence is in no way like our essence.”

For example, our knowledge of things changes with time; in order for us to know different things at different times, a change has to come into our knowledge. But for God,

various events are known to Him before they take place; He constantly knows them, and therefore no fresh knowledge is acquired by Him. e.g., He knows that a certain person is non-existent at present, will come to existence at a certain time, will continue to exist for sometime, and will then cease to exist. When this person, in accordance with God’s foreknowledge concerning him, comes into existence, God’s knowledge is not increased; it contains nothing that it did not contain before, but something has taken place that was known previously exactly as it has taken place.

This is very different from how human knowledge works; therefore, Maimonides would have us think that the usual objections to God’s omniscience are misplaced. For example, some philosophers think that God can only know constants and not transients, or universals and not particulars, or species but not individuals. Maimonides does not admit any of these impediments to God’s knowledge: God truly is omniscient. The catch is that his knowledge is a mysterious thing that we cannot understand, and any analogy with our own knowledge is inadequate and deficient.