Essays on Religious Topics

number 2: God’s Knowledge and Free Will

An important idea in most western religions is the notion of free will.  It is widely believed that humans have free will, and, thereby, the ability to choose between good or evil, that is following God’s laws or disobeying them.  Disobedience results in sin, and the presence of sin might result in condemnation to hell.  The entire structure of morality, goodness, sin, reaching heaven, or being condemned to hell is based on the idea that each person has free will.

Another important idea is that God is omniscient that is He knows everything about the universe as well as our past, present, and future behavior.  This knowledge of our behavior will be used by God to determine whether or not we will ascend into heaven or descend into hell.

Argument number 1       If God is omniscient, there is no free will.
If God knows the future, and that knowledge is true, then there is no free will.  What God knows must happen and no other choice is possible.  The only reason that future behavior appears to be free is that we do not know what will happen so we think that we are free.  God, then, controls the future through His knowledge, and that knowledge, being true, must occur.  A common response to this argument is that while God knows the future He does not force us to behave in any particular way.  This response offers no solution.  If God’s knowledge is true, then any “choice” we might make is already known to Him and that choice has been known for countless millennia.

Argument 2        If God is omniscient, there is no sin.
The idea of sin is based on free will because people choose between good and sin.  However, if God is omniscient, then there is no free will and, therefore, no sin.

Argument number 3       If free will exists, God cannot be omniscient.
In order for free will to exist, God’s knowledge must be contingent that is God must wait until a person does something in order to know what was done.  If this condition exists, then God does not know the future, and our idea of God’s omniscience is, at best, only partially correct.

Argument number 4       If God knows the future, then we are all predestined and predetermined.
Knowledge of the future means that all future behavior is predestined and predetermined because no other possibility exists.  God’s knowledge cannot be both true and contingent; it must be one or the other.  If God’s knowledge of the future is true, then that knowledge must happen.  God’s knowledge is not a prediction of what might happen, it is a statement of what will happen, and that statement is certainly true.

The argument that divine foreknowledge is not compatible with free will is known as theological fatalism. If man is truly free to choose between different alternatives, it is very difficult to understand how God could know in advance which way he will choose. Several attempts to resolve this difficulty have been proposed.  The following summary is a review with my comments.

• Proposition 1     God can know in advance what I will do, because free will is to be understood only as freedom from coercion.

I answer that this proposition offers no solution because freedom from coercion is inherent in the idea of free will.

• Proposition 2     God can know in advance what I will do, even though free will in the fullest sense of the phrase does exist. God somehow has a "middle knowledge" - that is, knowledge of how free agents will act in any given circumstances.

I answer that the key word in this proposition is “somehow”, and that idea obscures rather than explains this issue.  In essence, this proposition argues for an incessant miracle.

• Proposition 3     God can know all possibilities. The same way a master chess player is able to anticipate not only one scenario but several and prepare the moves in response to each scenario, God is able to figure all consequences from what I will do next moment, since my options are multiple but still limited.

I answer that knowing all of the possibilities still does not solve the issue, because God knows which possibility a person will select, and because God’s knowledge is true, that possibility must happen.

• Proposition 4     The autonomy of God provides strong inner compulsions toward a course of action, and the power of choice.  The behavior of a human is determined by acting on those urges (from God and the environment around them) and the power to choose.

I answer that while this idea might explain the forces acting on a decision, it does not explain the problem.  God still knows what we will do.

• Proposition 5     God chooses to foreknow and foreordain some things, but not others. This allows a free moral choice on the part of man for those things that God chooses not to foreordain. It accomplishes this by attributing to God the ability for Him to be a free moral agent with the ability to choose what He will foreknow.
• I answer that while this idea, that God chooses to ignore what can be known, is an interesting one, there is no way to know if God behaves in this way.  Furthermore, the decision on God’s part to ignore certain behavior includes the knowledge of that behavior, so we are back to the beginning.

• Proposition 6     It is not possible for God to know the result of a free human choice.

I answer that there is no basis for this conjecture.  Furthermore, if this argument is true then it limits the extent of divine knowledge in an undefined way.  Thus, this idea offers no solution.

• Proposition 7     Since He is an eternal being, God stands outside time. The change that we associate with time does not apply to an eternal being for which all time is present time.  Thus, God simply knows what we do.
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•  This idea was the solution offered by Thomas Aquinas based on arguments advanced by Boethius.  By redefining the concept of time as it might apply to an eternal being, Aquinas provided a solution to theological fatalism.  The notion of only present time without a past or future is contradictory to our ordinary experience, but this definition provides an answer to a very difficult problem in theology.  Aquinas understood that this idea created a different set of problems, namely that divine intervention was impossible, and that prayer cannot influence the divine will.  Those ideas will be subjects for other essays.

To the main argument, I answer that God cannot know the future.  That which has not happened is merely potency, thus there is nothing to know.  God must wait for an action in order to know an event has occurred.  It can be argued that God knows all of the possibilities, but until one of those possibilities is activated, no choice exists, and there is still nothing for God to know.

This answer solves several issues at once.  It preserves free will, permits the possibility of divine intervention, retains our knowledge of time, and allows the potential influence of prayer.

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