Month: March 2022

God waits for us. We want to believe that our God is everywhere and everywhen present, and that there is no knowledge or power that He lacks, as assurance that He is the one true God; because if there is some knowledge or power that our God lacks, there might be some other god who has the knowledge and power that our God has but who also has the knowledge and power that our God lacks; and then that other god would be the one true God.

We also believe we have control over some things and no control over other things. 

Is God here at this very moment? Yes. Is God causing me to think these very thoughts? No, or at least not necessarily. He has given me the freedom to think my own thoughts and make my own decisions about certain things that He has given me the power to do or not to do. Now let’s suppose that He knows what I’m going to do long before I do it or even think about it. After all, He is not only here at this moment. He is at every place at this moment, and at every place at every moment and knows everything about everything—past, present, and future. Could He share with me His knowledge about what I shall do in the future if He wanted to? Yes. He can do anything that is logically possible. If He did, would I still be free to do or not to do what He has told me I shall do? A Yes answer to that question implies one or the other of two equally unacceptable alternatives, supposing that I now choose not to do what God has told me I shall do: either 1) I make it so that God was either lying or mistaken, or 2) my choice now, not to do what He told me I would do, retroactively changes what He told me. If I choose now not to do it, then He told me back then that I wouldn’t do it. That is, if I had the power to do anything other than what God has told me I would do, then either I would have the power to reverse time and change what God has said, or I would have the power to show that there is something that God doesn’t know or else that He doesn’t always tell the truth. Since neither of those consequences is acceptable, it follows that I don’t have the power to do anything other than what God has told me I shall do.

But what if God doesn’t tell me? If we suppose that God knows what everyone is going to do long before any of us has decided to do it or even thought about it, then even when He doesn’t tell us, the consequences would be only slightly different and just as unacceptable. If God knows what I am going to do before I do it and before I’ve decided to do it, but doesn’t tell me, and I then fail to do it, I won’t consequently make it to be that He is a liar, because He hasn’t told me; but I will make it to be that He was wrong and so didn’t really know after all. Or, we could say that I make it to be that time is reversed, the past is changed, and what He knew then was that I would fail to do the thing that we were formerly supposing He knew I was going to do.

Something must give way. Either we are wrong in thinking that anything is ever really up to us, or we are wrong in thinking that God knows in advance what we shall decide about something that is up to us. I think it is more likely that we were wrong to think that the true God has infallible knowledge in every detail about what has yet to happen than that we were wrong to think that we have choices about some things and are responsible for those choices. I don’t think it takes away anything from the glory of God to suppose that, although He could know in advance and in every detail what will happen in the future, He has chosen to leave some things up to us, so that He waits to find out what we shall do about those things. It is more glorious to be able to choose whether to exercise a power than to have no choice in the matter. That He has freely chosen to give us a limited version of His own unlimited power doesn’t turn us into rival gods or imply that there is any god greater than Him. He could take back complete control whenever He wants to.

Objection: God is outside of time and He would have to be in time in order to wait for anything. Knowing what someone will do and causing him or her to do it are two different things. God timelessly knows that one freely chooses to do what one freely chooses to do.

Reply: The spatially metaphorical view of all of time from outside of time boils down to conceiving of the future as if it were already past. This is what seemingly justifies the claim that God, or anyone for that matter, could infallibly know what someone will do without causing him or her to do it. One can know without a doubt that in the past someone else made a certain decision without having caused him or her to do it. But one could know infallibly (we are not talking about a reasonable prediction that turns out to be true) that someone else will “choose” a certain course of action in the future only by knowing infallibly that one will have sufficient control over that future situation such that, when the time comes, one will be able to cause the other person to “choose” that course of action by preventing any alternative. Furthermore, to rule out the vagaries of one’s own free choices, one will need to know infallibly that one will have no choice but to control the other person’s behavior in this way.

Finally, there are no decisions to be made in the present that will affect the future if everything just happens timelessly, because there would be no present moment in relation to which anything would be past or future.

The only important sense in which God is represented in Scripture as having foreknowledge is that He makes promises and knows not only that he intends to keep them but also that He will keep them. This is the sense in which the prophets tell us what will happen. It is a philosophical/theological question whether we should also believe that God knows, in advance and in every detail, what is going to happen. If we think of God as the being than which (whom) none greater can be conceived, we can ask whether it is greater to have such foreknowledge or greater not to have it. Is it greater not to be able to be surprised by anything that happens, or greater to be able to be surprised?

It is hard to answer this question even as applied to merely human wisdom. It is plausible to say that someone who has become wise through long experience is less apt to be surprised than someone with less experience. And yet experience also shows that those who are less likely to become wise through experience are precisely those who are adept at ignoring things that do not fit their preconceptions. And this makes it plausible that the wiser person is the one who is more likely to welcome surprises and hence to be surprised.

Someone might object that using the word “surprise” is likely to give us a bias in favor of thinking it is better to be able to be surprised than not, because the word has positive connotations, as when out of the blue something happens to inject a feeling of joy that we didn’t expect. Let’s ask, then, whether it is greater to be able to be disappointed or greater to be unable ever to be disappointed. Surely no one likes to be disappointed. But what could make it so that one would be unable ever to be disappointed? One way would be simply not to have any expectations in the first place. For us humans, with our limited knowledge and reliance on expectations shaped by desires and experience, this is difficult or perhaps impossible. But supposing that God has infallible foreknowledge, it would be not only easy but inevitable. He would never be disappointed because He would always already know what was going to happen. For the same reason, He would never be pleasantly surprised by anything that happens. But since pleasant surprises in our lives add joy, can we believe that the being than which none greater can be conceived never has joy in that way? Would it be greater not to have infallible foreknowledge so that one could have pleasant surprises? A first thought was that the lack of infallible foreknowledge is also what makes one subject to disappointments, and that a being who is not subject to disappointment is greater than one who is. Can we conceive of the being than whom none is greater as lacking infallible foreknowledge in such a way as to make the joy of pleasant surprises possible without also making the pain of disappointment possible? Maybe the greatest being conceivable doesn’t know in advance and in every detail what is going to happen, but does know that at any time He can make happen whatever He wants to happen. It is plausible that this would take the sting out of possible disappointments while still allowing Him the joy of pleasant surprises. And while we humans aren’t relieved of the sting of disappointment by having the power ourselves to make happen whatever we want to happen, still our disappointments can be mollified by considering that the greatest conceivable being does have that power and exercises it, so that we can be sure that despite our disappointments everything comes out all right. And nothing stands in the way of our having the joy of pleasant surprises.