Martin Luther is credited with arguing that, because God always knows what we are going to do, we can never act freely. On this view, human freedom exists in name only. If God knows exactly what we are going to do, then we don’t have much choice about it. This approach was unacceptable to Catholics, and it hasn’t pleased many Lutherans either. But it’s no surprise that we can wonder how our future acts can be free, if God already knows them.
We human beings definitely don’t know the future. The future doesn’t exist yet, so it isn’t something we can know for certain. We can predict the future, and derive some kind of knowledge of what will come to pass from our knowledge of the present. Doctors and weather forecasters do this, and so do we all. From what we know about the present, we can make conjectures about the future.
However, there is plenty we don’t know, and our conjectural knowledge is limited. Working out what people will choose to do is especially tricky, because being free means they can act or not act, do this or that thing, of their own free will. When a prophet has certain knowledge of the future, that is only because God has shared his knowledge with the prophet. By our natural resources, we don’t know the future.
It’s not so different with angels either. We might think that, with their powerful intellects, these spiritual beings have certain knowledge of what we are going to do. But St Thomas Aquinas, who thought a lot about angels, concluded that their situation was not too different from ours. As with the prophets, an angel can only be certain about what we will choose to do, if God shares his knowledge of our future with the angel. But by nature, an angel does not know our future free acts and choices. We must be careful not to confuse the angels with God.
Nor, however, must we confuse God with an angel. If we did so, we might think that God does not know the future, including our free acts to come; God’s knowledge would be more like ours or an angel’s. We might even end up holding that God’s knowledge doesn’t cover our free acts at all; how then would he be omni-scient? But that’s exactly what the Bible says he is: “No creature is unseen by him, but is laid bare and open to his eyes” (Hebrews 4:13).
God, however, is not another item in the world, like angels and us. Instead, God is the Creator of the world, of all things visible and invisible, and of space and time. We shall get confused if we think that God is just like us, or just like the angels, and that he experiences time like creatures do. His knowledge of time is not the same as ours or an angel’s.
We humans are creatures in time and we experience one thing after another. Some things lie in the past for us, we experience the present now, and the future lies open for us. An angel can make a succession of acts, and so experiences time too. St Thomas thought that an angel’s time was not the same as the time of the physical world. However, these times are all related. We know this from how angels interact with human beings in the Bible. An angel’s time intersects with our world’s time.
God, however, is not in time. As human Jesus is in time, but as God he is not. God doesn’t have his life stretched out over a period of time, not even an infinite period. God has his life all at once, in a single eternity. He doesn’t improve himself over time. His being is too rich, too perfect, for that. This means his knowledge is different from his creatures’ knowledge. Unlike us, he knows everything all at once in one great grasp of knowledge. He doesn’t get to know things over time, but he knows everything all at once in one great act of knowing himself, everything he can do, and everything he does.
What this means is that we must not think of God knowing things yet to come in the fu-ture, as though God were in time and these events were future for God. What lies in the future for us does not lie in any future for God. God’s knowing them is more like knowing something present to him than knowing something future to him. So if we want to think about whether God’s knowledge of our future free actions takes away their freedom, we need to think of these free acts as present to God rather than as future to him. They may be in the future for us creatures of time, but they are present to God in his eternity.
If I look outside my window, I can see people in the park opposite sitting, walking or running there. Every one of them is present to my knowledge precisely in the present moment. And yet we don’t suppose that my present knowledge of them running, walking or sitting means that none of that can be free. I see them now running freely, walking freely and sitting freely, all in the present moment. The fact that I know for certain that they are running, walking or sitting does not take away from the fact that they are doing all these things of their own free will.
The example of our knowing the present gives us a better insight into God’s knowledge than thinking of God as someone in time looking towards the future. But, unlike my limited vision of the park outside in the present moment of time, God knows all places as present to him all at once. And just as he knows all places all at once, so he knows all times all at once. It’s just as though all creation, past, present and future, is stretched out before his sight, just as the space of the park is currently stretched out before mine. And his eternal knowing doesn’t mean he is confused about past, present, and future in the world. In one great act of knowledge, he sees all happenings ordered to each other throughout time, just like I see things spatially ordered to one another in the park.
What is future to us, then, is always present to God. And just as my present knowledge doesn’t take away freedom from the free acts I now see, so God’s present knowledge doesn’t take away freedom from the free acts he knows across all created space and time. Any free acts that are still future to us are always present to God. His certain knowledge of what we are going to do in our future does not remove our freedom. All things, whether free or not, are present to his sight.
You may object that there is an important difference between my present knowledge of people walking in the park and God’s eternal knowledge of the world. While I am not the cause of the people walking freely in the park, God is the cause of all creation, including our free acts. Here, however, we are beginning to ask not just about God’s knowledge but about his will. And that is a different theological story, which will have to wait for another day.
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