  William takes his claim that God has a two-way power to imply that God could have known or willed otherwise than he did. But, as William realizes, this raises the difficulty that if God had known or willed otherwise, it would seem that he would have been different, and this seems to be impossible given his absolute simplicity. In response, William frequently emphasizes that by the very same act of knowing or will by which God in fact knows or wills one thing, he could have known or willed something else (OO I, 780a; Teske 2007, 105). Thus, when we say “God knows or wills X,” we must distinguish the act of knowing or willing, which is identical with God and utterly the same in every possible situation, from the object X to which it is related.