Every Thursday night, I get together with a group of friends from my church for “Theology on Tap,” which is essentially just drinking beer and catching up on our lives, but we do also talk about God and theology from time to time. We’ve been doing this for years now, and so over the years we’ve had many a theological debate around our table. But none have been as passionate, or returned to as often, as the debate over free will and predestination.
Of course, almost everyone around the table usually chooses the free will side of the debate. How could you not? I’m not sure many people these days really want to believe that they have no control over their actions, that their lives are fully scripted in advance. Instinctively, we all know that we have free will, we can feel it deep in our bones; the idea that we don’t is so counterintuitive as to be laughable. Yet, that in and of itself is not an argument against predestination. And every time this debate comes up at Theology on Tap, there is always one sticking point: Divine Foreknowledge, the belief that God is omniscient and therefore knows not only all that has been and all that is, but also all that will be.
In the classic conception of God’s omniscience, there is nothing that God does not know. God knows all truths and cannot be fooled or lied to, God knows the plan for the future, God knows what you are going to have for lunch today (even if God doesn’t particularly care about your lunch). Yet if God knows it, then how can it be a free action? If God already knows what you’re going to do, doesn’t that mean your life is predetermined? Some try to argue that it’s like watching a movie - you exist outside the timeline of the movie, so you know how it ends, but you’re not controlling the actions of the characters. Yet this analogy breaks down when talking about God, who is meant to be the author and creator of the world! So it would be like arguing that the writer and director of a movie didn’t influence the story they see playing out on the screen, which is patently false and absurd.
So it seems that something will have to give: either God is not entirely omniscient, or we do not have free will. Perhaps you reading this will not struggle with that debate in your own mind. Maybe you are ready to believe in a God who doesn’t know the future, or are ready to give up your philosophical free will. But if you are a Christian reader who at least generally believes in an omniscient God, and believes you have free will, then we have a problem on our hands that must be resolved.
Thankfully, as you might guess, theologians have not left us without thoughts on this subject over the last 2,000 years. And when you try to dive in to those thoughts, things can get rather… technical, to say the least. There is a whole body of theology that tries to work out different ideas of God’s foreknowledge by turning to the rigorous philosophical school of logic, with its emphasis on the order of events and commands and which things are logically prior or posterior to another. But in short, there are a few main strands of thought on the subject, and I will try to summarize them here.
We can deal pretty quickly with the first one, which is that found in the hardcore Calvinists and others like them. This is the view that predestination is real (and getting into what that means is a whole other technical can of worms) and therefore it is simple to acknowledge that God knows what’s going to happen before it happens, end of story. In my opinion, there are all sorts of problems with this view, some of the biggest being: Does God therefore choose to condemn some of God’s own creatures to eternal damnation? If everything is truly predestined and foreknown, then why is there so much evil in the world? What is the point of human existence if everything is pre-written? Questions like these strike a fatal blow to the idea of full predestination and simple foreknowledge, in my view, but there are plenty of Reformed theo-bros who will point out all the flaws in my logic, I’m sure.
On the extreme other end, some have taken the view that God simply does not have foreknowledge, and therefore our free will is entirely intact. Of course, this presents problems all its own for those who believe in God: If God doesn’t know anything about the future, then how could we trust God’s promises? Would we be saying that the prophecies found in the Bible are complete lies, fabricated after the fact? Many who do not believe in God would make those exact claims, I’m well aware. But for those of us who do believe in God, the idea of a God without foreknowledge of any kind is difficult to square with the revelation we have received about God.
Therefore, we need to look at one of several middle options as the way to proceed. Now, there is a whole other side conversation that could be added here about the nature of God’s existence - does God exist eternally outside of time, or is God an everlasting being within time? And while I let you ponder that question, I will say honestly that I’m not sure any of the following proposals demand an answer to it. If God is eternal, then God also somehow interacts with time and can therefore perceive it, if we believe that God does in fact act in the world; and if God is everlasting, then as we’ve seen before God must have some level of foresight or foreknowledge anyway since it seems impossible to square our understanding of God from revelation with a complete lack of foreknowledge.
Having said all that, then, we turn to the other ways of understanding God’s foreknowledge. In each of these cases, the question is not whether God is omniscient or whether our actions are already settled, but the meaning and extent of those terms and ideas. These are the arguments that can get really in the weeds of logic, trying to determine whether God’s decree of a certain event or action is logically prior to God’s knowledge of the other possible outcomes, and so on. But they all have a few things in common: That God does, in fact, know at least some parts of the future for certain; that God chooses to limit God’s own knowledge in some way or form; and that it is possible for God to “know” multiple possible outcomes as a kind of foreknowledge.
To make this a little clearer, we might take the example of rolling a dice. We all know that there are 6 possible outcomes, and as far as we know, any of the 6 are possible. Now there are some theologians who would say that God has decreed which number the dice will land on, but God has knowledge of what would have happened if God had decided on any of the other numbers instead. Others suggest that this limits human freedom too much, and say that God first knows all the potential outcomes, and then after the dice has landed, God knows all the new sets of outcomes for what happens after the dice landed on 4 instead of 5.
This second position most closely resembles “open theism,” a strand of theology that embraces the idea that God knows all possibilities as possibilities, rather than as settled fact. In this view, God as omnipotent decides which aspects of the future to settle decisively - for example, that Jesus Christ would die and resurrect to save all of humanity from sin - and leaves everything else as unsettled. So God knows the settled parts of the future perfectly, and knows all of the possibilities of everything else as possibilities. Once humans act in the world, those possibilities are restricted and create new possibilities, all of which God knows as possibilities. It is a bit unsettling at first for those who are used to a more concrete idea of foreknowledge, but in my opinion it provides the clearest, and most Biblical, presentation of foreknowledge as compatible with human freedom.
In open theism, we can still trust that God knows the end, that the restoration of creation is not in doubt, since this is a settled matter. Yet we can also believe that our actions matter, since we do not know whether anything else is settled or not. It is entirely likely that God only knows as possibilities all of my options for lunch, instead of already knowing for a settled fact what I’m going to eat. And it is also likely that God has settled, and always known, about certain giant facts of history that move forward the plan of God in the world.
Of course, open theism has the ability to make us very uncomfortable. Without knowing what is or isn’t settled, we will always wonder how much of our lives has been mapped out and how much is left to chance. We can never be sure whether something is part of God’s plan or simply part of the world as it works. But this is already how we live, embracing the uncertainty that comes with any kind of faith in something beyond our comprehension. And it also comes with the added benefit of helping us to understand and explain some of the more challenging questions posed by those who do not believe. How could God allow suffering in the world? God has given us real freedom, and if God violated our freedom we would no longer be free. Does God send people to hell? Setting aside for another time the question of whether hell is even real or not, God does not send people there, since humans have the free capacity to choose God or reject God of their own volition.
Is open theism the perfect answer to the free will conundrum? Of course not. No such thing exists, when we must deal with subjects we can’t possibly understand. But I do find it a compelling view of God’s foreknowledge, and I think it holds many advantages. But who knows, maybe that’s just what God has predetermined I would think?
Thanks for wrestling with this question. I guess the open theism is where I kinda land but also that only God knows! interesting to think about.
Susan