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.