Frank Kogan

St. Augustine may have been the one who first had the idea of God being outside time; if I'm remembering right, this was, among other things, Augustine's way of preserving the idea of God as transcendent (so to my mind was one way for Augustine to protect the idea of God from his (Augustine's) own brain).

If you're a Laplace's demon you also can see all of time at once, and you don't need to be God to do so — though this may require a Newtonian rather than a quantum world; I don't know, not knowing enough physics. But the idea is that if you know the momentum and location of everything in the universe, you can know all past and future momentums and locations as well. I read somewhere, though, that to know or calculate all this you'd need a brain bigger than several galaxies. Also, isn't there something unintentionally circular in Laplace's reasoning? To know the momentum, which is mass multiplied by velocity, you have to know every object's location at a minimum of two moments. So you have to already know something — the location at one other time — that you're supposed to be able to derive from the knowledge you already have. (Yeah, I know that Laplace is positing that you do already know the momentum of every atom at one particular time, but I don't think he gets to do this: momentum implies at least two moments, not one. But I may well be misunderstanding something. Laplace was very smart, after all.)