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If
God is all knowing and he knows our future,
then how is that free will?
God knows the
future of what the free will creatures choose. Free will does not stop
becoming free because God knows what will happen. For example, I know that
my child will choose to eat chocolate cake over a bowl full of stinking
dead mice. If I were to
set them both before my child, it is safe to say she will not eat the dead
mice. Knowing this is not taking away
the freedom of my child since she is freely choosing one over the other.
Likewise, for God to know what a person will choose does not mean
that the person has no freedom to make the choice. It simply means
that God knows what the person will choose. This is necessarily so
since God knows all things (1 Joh 3:20). Besides, if a person
were to choose A instead of C, then that is what God would have
known would happen.
Furthermore, if God knows all things and knows what we
are going to choose, then by definition, we are still making the
choice; after all, the argument says that God knows what "we are
going to choose." If we are going to choose" something,
then we really are making the choice -- otherwise it
wouldn't be logical to assert that God knows what we are
going to choose. Choice implies the ability to decide between
different options. Again, by definition if God is knowing what
we are going to choose, then He knows what we are going to choose
between options...otherwise we are not choosing anything and the
statement is illogical.
Back to the bowl of dead mice. The father,
however, is not omniscient where God is. But does this
difference negate the analogy? Not at all. Knowing what
a person will do still does not force them or limit them to doing
what is known. The complaint of those who say that if God
knows what we are going to do then we don't have "real" freedom is
logically stating that God's foreknowledge of an event somehow
limits the event and the choice of the individual. The
complaint implies that there is an action by God upon a person that
negates His freedom to choose. It would be up to the
complainer to establish some logical connection between what God
knows what will happen and the mind of the one who makes a choice so
that the mind of the person making the choice no longer is making a
choice. It seems that the critics are saying that the
choice-maker is affected by God's knowledge to such an extent that
his freedom is lost. If that is the case, then can they prove
this logically? If not, then how can they maintain their
position?
God's knowing what we will choose is a function of His
omnipresence since He is in all places all the time. If He
were not, He would not know what choices were were freely going to
make. To deny that God is all knowing, even of the choices we
make, is to deny His omnipresence and reduce God's nature to
something more like ourselves, which would be a mistake.
Nevertheless, some people try and claim that God
does not know what we will freely choose. But, this cannot be since it
would violate the biblical teaching that God knows all things.
Following is taken from an email complaining that
God's foreknowledge means we have no free will. The person wrote six
points. I reproduced them and have inserted comments,
in blue below
the points.
- God knows every decision that I am going to make tomorrow.
- Correct.
- For sake of simplicity, let's assume that I am going to
make only one decision tomorrow. My decision will be whether or
not to go to my aerobics class at the gym.
- A
decision is a choice about something that you want to do or
believe. It is drawing a conclusion while considering the
options. Your statement that you are going to make the
decision means that you admit that you are the one making the
choice. By definition then, you are freely choosing to do
something. Therefore, to later say that you have no choice
in what you are doing is a contradiction of your statement here.
- God knows what decision I will make. He has it written on
his "list."
- There is
no "list" that God has anywhere of the things that
anyone is going to do. The knowledge of God is not a
list. It is simply necessarily complete since He knows all
things. This is because God's nature requires that He know
all things since He is everywhere all the time: the past,
present, and future.
- His "list" can't be wrong.
- This is
not an issue of the list being wrong. It is simply a fact
that God knows all things. Whatever you choose to do is what
God knows will happen. If you chose not to go to the
class, then that is what God would have known would be your
choice. So, whichever choice you freely make is the one
God knows you will make.
- Furthermore, the
"list" will always be right. That is, it is always
right because it is a list of the free will choices you want to
make. Read below...
- If his "list" says I am going to my aerobics
class, I must go.
- The
problem here is that the idea of a list introduces the error that
there is a set list of things that the person must accomplish,
because it is on a list for them to do. This is not the
case. You do not go to the gym because it is on the list
that you must fulfill. It is simply an advance recording of
what you will do based on the choices you will freely make.
- A better
understanding of the "list" idea would be if God wrote a
list of the things you did after you did them. He can
do this since He is in the future and can look back from the
future to see what you chose to do at any time. Time is
relative to God. Because you have already done them freely
(from God's future perspective looking backward), the list can be
made accurately by God. Since He is also in the past and
present, He can even show us this list in advance...only for Him
it happened a long time ago as He watched you freely do what you
wanted to do. So, since God is in all places at all time, He
can look back in time to get the list, and then even reveal it in
advance to you. It would be a list of things you freely
chose to do -- or should I say, that you will freely choose
to do.
- The fact that "I must go" is incompatible with
the statement that I am free to decide whether to go or not to go.
- There is no "must" in
this situation. You will freely choose.
- There
is no incompatibility at all if we see that God simply knows what
our choices are going to be before we make them since it is
necessarily true that He knows all things.
- Furthermore,
this idea of God's knowledge and peoples' freedom is ultimately an
unanswerable issue since it involves us working in time and God is
outside of time. Our question deals with a situation from a
perspective inside of time where God is outside of
time. By default, our questions and answers concerning this
issue cannot be complete. Past, present, and future are
concepts and realities created for us, not God.
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