In the diner, for perhaps the millionth time, Phil Connors (Bill Murray) in the movie Groundhog Day says, “Well maybe the real God uses tricks, or maybe he’s not omnipotent, he’s just been around so long he knows everything.” This assertion leads to an intriguing question. Are God’s thoughts not our thoughts only because God knows more than us? Imagine a simple blade of grass. We can know certain things about that blade of grass; God knows everything about that blade of grass. But does that sum up the difference between God’s thought and ours?

Let us consider the human activity of learning. Man learns. Man is a learner. Man habitually relies on what he knows while working to know more. For man, it is impossible to learn apart from thinking, considering, reflecting, concentrating, evaluating, comparing, categorizing, qualifying, analogizing, and summarizing. Man’s activity as learner is unique to man. Man can learn because man is made in God’s image, but man is limited by learning because man is not God. God cannot learn; He is unchangeable, eternal, infinite, and omniscient. God knows all and always has known all. From all and to all eternity God has known everything about everything, and he never had to learn any of it. This is incomprehensible to man. God’s thought is qualitatively and quantitatively different from man’s thought because God never learned a thing and yet he knows it all!