How does God know the future, and if so, how can we have Free Will, if we cannot do other than he knows? That’s how the supposed conundrum between divine foreknowledge and human free will can be most accurately stated. Here we try and answer that.

Is really God Free, and are We?

In Creating?

I do not accept the validity of the question “could God have created differently?”. A person once asked me if it were possible that God create a Universe without Judas in it, or “was he compelled to do so”. We have already asserted that if God did indeed create freely, this implies that he could then have just not created. Having freely chosen to create this Universe implies that He freely chose to create Judas along with the free will to make the choices that he would make. God’s creation of the “best possible Universe” includes the creation of Judas, with his real choices. When we have said that God was not compelled to create in the first place, it is not then valid to ask whether assuming that free choice to create, was God compelled to create Judas or not. We’ve just said that the choice was free. God knew Judas at the moment of the creation of the Universe. There was no “time” before that, of course. God chose to create a world in which Judas would betray him even though he had given him the greatest vocation in the history of that world. Either that, or God could have also chosen not to create anything at all. We speak a lot more on the topic of God’s creative freedom in the article on Divine Simplicity

What is Free Will?

St. Thomas would describe Free Will as the ability to choose the Good, which is God. This makes sense, because Free Will should only necessarily imply that a human being has the authentic ability to freely choose the best state of affairs for himself. This best state of affairs then can be nothing other than to choose to be with God in Eternity. Free Will requires that man possess such an authentic choice that is not loaded against his interest in anyway. Free Will means that we have authentic freedom to choose the Good, and ultimately to choose Love. A human being can authentically choose to be loved forever. What else could it mean to be truly free?

Objections: I have heard it asked how it could be that we are really “free to choose the Good” if we could equally choose evil. You can already see why the question does not hold water, for the ability to choose evil still does not preclude the possibility of the ability to choose good. Yes “choice” certainly means to “choose one thing over another for temporal creatures. That’s just the definition. The other question that might get asked is as to whether Free Will ends in Heaven. Once again, St Thomas has addressed this admirably well when he points out that once one is in Heaven Free Will is in its fulfilled state. There is no priori reason that free will should be eternally go unfulfilled. It would be absurd if fulfilment were an injustice to the mind, rather it is a state of blessedness.

Further, there is an essential dichotomy involved in the definition of Free Will that can not be avoided: Free Will is the mark of rationality. Free will is rationalist, determinism is lack of it. What does not have free will is a beast of a creation of man like a computer program, which is determined by him. There is no middle position between the two.

Thus Describing “Freedom” in God

Thus we are able to describe that for God and in the context of eternity. Objections to the freedom of a God of unconditional love stem from using temporal definitions of free will, rather than as we defined it from an eternal perspective. There is no a priori reason that God be able to perform ridiculously foolish actions in order to be free, which is what evil is. Evil itself is defined with God’s impeccable behavior as its standard. God’s freedom of will is not related to struggling with moment-to-moment moral decisions, because these are temporal conceptions in the first place, related to the human experience. Rather as we said above, God’s Freedom and Free Will, is resting perfectly fulfilled in his goodness Goodness. God’s Freedom is not restless.

How do we make Free choices?

Our future is determined and impacted upon by our free will decisions made in the past. We do freely choose our future in that sense. Our actions are determined by our past and the conditions in which we find ourselves, but if we are open to God’s Grace, then by it we can overcome those conditions. God’s grace if available to all, we make a free choice whether to accept it or not (in Catholic terminology this is called “Prevenient Grace”). We have Prevenient Grace, which is the Grace available to all human beings to be able to accept belief in God. Once we accept that belief (we would say belief in the true God, of course), then through sanctifying grace (Rom.5:5), our decisions are increasingly moral, leading to the development of the habit of virtue. All this is standard Aquinas. So we do not make “spot decisions based upon the levels of our desires” as I once heard an atheist state. All this is the spiritual journey, purification, sanctification and all that other stuff. However it could certainly describe the decision-making process in certain fallacious creeds- “depending upon the desire levels at the current moment, rather than a free choice”. Truly when truth is abandoned, a person becomes a slave and then and only then does he relinquish free will.

How does one then choose a true religious belief? We have Prevenient Grace, which is the Grace available to all human beings to be able to accept belief in God. Once we accept that belief, then through sanctifying grace (Rom.5:5), our decisions are increasingly moral, leading to the developement of the habit of virtue. So to apply that to porn, a mature Christian formed in the virtue of chastity has no desire for porn. If he sees porn he switches porn off.

Free Will in choosing Religion

Choice of religion then, is much the same. Prevenient Grace enables one to choose Jesus, basically. We are able to do that freely, because it is a choice made out of love. Remember what I said, Free Will is the freedom to choose the good, and the good is love. Free Will is the ability to choose the Good and refuse the evil. It means that should you incline your heart toward love and goodness, nothing can impede your progress toward obtaining it. This and only this specifically is the “freedom”. It’s not that you are unable to choose evil, rather you are able to refuse it.

Don’t Christians pray “deliver us from evil…?”

I chose love and Goodness in Christ. I’m able, by his Sanctifying Grace to refuse an evil decision like forsaking him. One who rejects Christ takes a decision based on certain evil inclinations of the heart. This proves we are both free (I would say, putting love of sensual satisfaction and pride over love of God as God and the humility of Christ- Matt.11:29). We were both free to choose and the only “determinant” was our own inclinations. We were free to choose those inclinations. The evil in the word is then explained by the choices that are based on evil inclinations. We can choose to follow certain inclinations, that’s the heart of Free Will. We all are faced with good inclinations (love), and evil/ utilitarian inclinations (temptation). Which religion or world -view one follows is dependent upon that choice. As is one’s final outcome. And of course this choice for Love is only made through Grace. In fact that’s the heart of Christian evangelism: awakening the soul’s inner yearning for Love.

That’s just the general principle that we can do nothing good without God’s Grace. That Grace is available to believer and unbeliever alike.

The Problem with Determinism

Determinism takes two routes: the first is the route of single determinism, which is essentially that only the ones that are damned to Hell are pre-determined to Hell. The other is double determinism which states that both are pre-determined. The problem with the former is that it involved pre-meditation on the part of God with respect to the Hellish outcome which would be absurd.  This would only really make sense if Hell was not real that these souls were annihilated, which is contrary to the Christian faith. Significantly, there would be no justice in such a model, for justice hinges on free will. There is no justice in punishing a dumb animal. Were God to literally punish those going to heaven for no fault of their own, it would be not to ascribe justice to him. Only one that is free can be held responsible for their choices and by virtue of that be a moral agent. It would be absurd were God to hold as morally responsible that which was not an agent at all- this would also be to not ascribe wisdom to him.

The second problem is with respect to the ones that are determined for Heaven- it is no obvious just how their choices have been free. A middle road has also been suggested by some “Calvinists”, which is “compatibilism” which is a combination of per-determination and Free will. We have seen from the forgoing that we have no need to resort to such contradictory alliances because we have made a coherent argument for free will already. Incompatibles do not become compatible merely by calling them compatible.

Interplay of Free Will, Divine Universal Causality (DUC) and Dual Causation (DC)

Divine Universal Causation (DUC) holds that God is the underlying cause of every entity, and also its actions and secondary effects. Occasionalism is the belief that every every moment in time is individually and specially brought into existence by God. That is not DUC, rather DUC simply states that without God as upholding creaturely existence at every moment, none of those moments would be possible, or in other words, a creature could not exist without God underlying it’s existence as cause to effect, even for a moment. Since those moments include moments of existence, secondary causation, as well as the effects thereof, all therefore have God as their primary cause. This is not meant to be complicated- all this it is saying is, for example, is that if God ceased to exist at the exact moment I was about to set off mowing my lawn, I could not possibly just keep on mowing as though nothing had happened. The continued flow of events in its entirety is possible because of the continued existence of God.

Do we need to consider the substance of created objects as well as their operations/actions as separate with separate proofs of each as falling under DUC? I would say this is not the case, as substance includes operation. There would be no point stating that God sustained a created entity were its life-operations not part of what was being sustained.

The problems of “Occasionalism”

The correct perspective of causation is actually the other way round- events can flow in time because of the existence of God in eternity. There is nothing in all of this that requires that God intervene into that flow of events in the manner of determining outcomes, or creating individual outcomes at every moment in time, that is occasionalism. Occasionalism is the belief that God creates every moment in time at every moment in time thereby determining what it will be. This is the strongest possible view of determinism, and it is easy to see why it is not DUC when viewed in this manner.

This, along which Humeian (no causation, just successive causally unrelated unrelated events) world-views struggle to maintain relevance in a post Relativity world in which there is no concept of a specific “moment of time” or a “slice” of the present, rather every observer carries their own personal “clock”. There is no “slice” for an occasionalist deity to create, this is an illusion. What’s more such views of creative activity temporalize God, and interested reader can delve into the work in recent times of the likes of William Lane Craig as one who accepts such a situational theistic view. DUC on the other hand, is merely creating the possibility of any outcomes at all and the conditions under which those might occur, which is the continued existence of the created order. God makes the existence of free will a possibility. He can enable actions without determining them.

Analogies of Dual Causation

Dual Causation (DC) is the manner of causation that we propose in the matter of maintaining libertarian free will (LFW), which is the possibility of divine and creaturely causes co-existing as a “co-operation” analogous to the manner of human beings co-operating in a particular enterprise, for example common household chores, for example, wherein each performs a different task as part of the same overall project.

We can give analogies of undetermined causation: I can enable my child to ride a bike by giving them one, but whether he rides it or not is still up to him. My younger son was very reluctant to get on the bike and needed quite a bit of coaxing, for example. At the same time, had I not bought him the bike he would have no way of riding one, so I am the determinate cause of his ability to ride, not of his decision to do so. God’s causing one’s acts precludes their being free in the libertarian sense if and only if God’s causing them rules out their being performed voluntarily and intentionally.

A recent real-world example of such “Dual Causation” (DC, which again is a term Matthews Grant uses) is from research on “cellular automata”, famously as in John Conway’s “Game of Life”. In these, the researcher sets up the prior conditions that make it possible for a system to evolve. The manner that the system evolves is truly undetermined, and impossible to predict, except through running it- in a sense the running of it is the calculation itself. The “Game of Life” set-up is simply a set of black and white contiguous squares on a board, that change color according to a set of rules, the rules merely pertaining to the colors of the surrounding squares and nothing else.

In recent times Stephen Wolfram has done pioneering work on these systems. These programmes might run for days and weeks or months until they settle on a “stable” pattern in the form of a repeating loop. These stable patterns can have surprising configurations where some have an entity that seems to generate new entities, or even self-replicate, and do so on loop. The Game of Life is undecidable, which means that given an initial pattern and a later pattern, no algorithm exists that can tell whether the later pattern is ever going to appear. There is much more to the topic that is beyond our present scope, but the “Game of Life” is said to be “Turing complete”. Turing-complete” is used to denote that any real-world general-purpose computer or computer language can approximately simulate the computational aspects of any other real-world general-purpose computer or computer language.  Theoretically, the Game of Life has the power of a universal Turing machine: anything that can be computed algorithmically can be computed within the Game of Life (from Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays (Academic Press, 1982) by Elwyn R. Berlekamp, John H. Conway, and Richard K. Guy is a compendium of information on mathematical games.) Of course in real life there is no shortage of analogies for dual causation where the same job is performed by two different persons co-operating.

In fact exactly the same situation is created in machine learning. The programme for machine learning is merely a manner of digitized “tool-set” which is then fed with data which allows that “neural network” (being the “tool-set” itself) to evolve leading to the development of the eventual algorithm of machine learning for that particular task. The algorithm itself is completely undetermined at the start, and unsearchable at its conclusion. For example did the programmers of the computer which defeated the world champion at “Go” understand the algorithm it was using to do so (which would be necessary in order to determine it, were it the case that it were determined), then they could perform against that world champion themselves. As it is they might not even qualify for the tournament. On the contrary in those tournaments we saw even the expert commentators in the game admit that they could not have predicted the computer’s moves nor comprehend the reasoning for them beforehand.

The point is this: the “determination” at the start says nothing with regards to “go and develop a self-replicator”, or “proceed to develop a Turing machine” and so on. Rather the instructions are on the lines of “surrounded by two black squares= death; by three= come back to life; by one= no action…” and so on. The “mind” of system is not consciously determined by the designer.

Neither logically prior nor sufficient divine causation

“what’s needed is an account of divine agency on which God’s causing a creaturely act introduces no factor that is both prior to and logically sufficient for the act.” (Matthews Grant)

In order that a thing be determined, there must exist that which were both logically prior to it, as well as sufficient for it. As we have seen, it is not necessary that every creaturely decision require a divine action that were its sufficient explanation, without requiring an additional act that were ascribed to the creature alone and that it is possible for the divine agent to create the conditions for this to be the case.

“Sufficient”, as Grant explains is meant for the purposes of determinism to denote logically sufficient, while “prior” while meaning temporally prior, might also denote an asymmetrical dependence relationship (this might be what is meant by non-counterfactual). As Grant states. “Indeed, what really matters for determinism is arguably not priority of time but priority in the order of dependence or explanation.”

Further as Grant describes in his book, divine interaction by which human existence and action are made possible are not necessarily “prior” to those acts. God being eternal, the notion of “prior” cannot be applied to his actions and they can from our perspective be taken as simply simultaneous to our actions. As an example, there is no act that God “performs” 5 minutes before I act, so as to enable the possibility of my action, nor is there one a second before nor a fraction of a second before and so on. God as a cause is simultaneous with his effects and so his acts “presuppose” their effects. This does not mean that the effects are prior to their cause either, of course, rather that unlike ins the case of humans, for God intended effects never fail to arise. God’s intending of an effect is the same as that effect being accomplished. In this sense both of the conditions for non-deterministic nature of effects are satisfied.

IN summary, we conclude from this discussion that this objection to the possibility of creaturely free will arise from the wrong semantic usage of “causation” when it is ascribed to the divine agent, which it is to simply extrapolate from human or creaturely usage. Creatures seem to cause their effects necessarily and in a manner that is both logically prior and sufficient to those effects. But God in his transcendence is not bound to doing so, as we have seen since he bears no temporal relation to those effects and because the mode of causation involved is ontological rather than anything to do with the laws of thermodynamics, the energy flow in physical systems. We must be careful not to equivocate on “cause” when we assert something like “God causes the universe to be”, or to totally avoid the terminology and assert instead “God enables the Universe to be what it is- free”. Especially when human analogies for this abound, like the setting free of a bird from its cage and so on and so forth.

Matthews Grant quotes Dionysius (Div. Nom. iv): “it belongs to Divine providence, not to destroy but to preserve the nature of things. Wherefore it moves all things in accordance with their conditions; so that from necessary causes through the Divine motion, effects follow of necessity; but from contingent causes, effects follow contingently. Since, therefore, the will is an active principle, not determinate to one thing, but having an indifferent relation to many things, God so moves it, that He does not determine it of necessity to one thing, but its movement remains contingent and not necessary, except in those things to which it is moved naturally. (see also Aquinas ST 1–2.10.4.)

Discussing God’s Mode of Knowing

God knows all things in their Simultaneity

God is not in time, he is not a temporal being. As a result it is incorrect to state “God knows things before they happen”, rather He simply knows them independently of their progression in time. God has a simple knowledge of all time. There is a sense in which when God created time, he created it in its entirety, both the beginning and the end of time simultaneously. This corresponds also to the quantum sense, in which all of time is present, both past and future (the so called “block-universe” model which we take a look at in the next section). The entirely of the time of the Universe is as a soap bubble floating in Eternity. (Note not all philosophers hold to this theory of the block universe, however it is scientifically sound, and I find it to have excellent explanatory value). It is incorrect to assert something along the lines of “were God to know that such and such person would be damned before he had created him…” and so on, since there is no “before” that is applicable in any real sense to God.

Time does not outrun Eternity nor is it in any sense “external” to it, or this would violate eternality. All of time lies within Eternity, and this is the only way, impossible as it may seem, that the two might co-exist. When viewed in this sense it would be incorrect to hold that the “future” of time lay outside the grasp of eternity.

So the notion that God creates simply the first “slice“ of time is erroneous, it seems safe to assert. There is no such thing as a slice of the present, even in Science, so it seems unreasonable to assume that God would suffer any such restriction. He simply creates all of temporality, he does not need to set in in motion and wait for it to unfold. One of the problems of holding this view is that it would tie in God’s attribute of observation (which is his knowledge) to the succession of the moments of time, and tie God himself into the succession of spacetime.

What this means firstly is that “fore-knowledge” is a misnomer with reference to God, and so is pre-destination. God simply creates and knows simultaneously. In order to “pre-destine”, God requires to determine something before hand. However this only arises in an erroneous tensed view of God. If God is outside time it is erroneous to suppose that God chooses between a number of options before creating. For God to be deciding in this manner before creating he would require to have the option before him. This would either have to be given to him externally which is absurd, or he would have to give them to himself, which is also absurd. He would know the best option already.

The “Bread-loaf” theory of Space-time is Scientific

There is no science of the present, the uncertainty principle took away any likelihood of that we may have yet fostered such a possibility. If we accurately pinpoint the position of a thing, we do not know how fast it is moving, and vice versa is essentially a denial of the present- you cannot say that a thing is “here”, because in that time it has moved through space-time, and you cannot say how fast a thing is moving at a given moment because that moment, the “present” is already a past moment. The future simply flows into the past, it does not “stop” at a thing called the “present”. We can see how languages like Hebrew function without any notion of “present”.

We struggle to really describe the present even in English “I run” does not state the time of running, it is just a general statement of an activity you are capable of, while “I am running” denotes a duration of time- you cannot run a single step, that would only be a lunge. “I am running” begins in the past an continues into the future, and if we state “at this moment I am running”, the moment is already past by the time you reach the end of the word “moment”.

All of time must be present in its entirety. Such a creation certainly can be shown theoretically and therefore logically to preserve freedom, since Quantum is bursting with possibilities completely un-deterministic.

Why did God Create Evil?

In the eyes of God that creation in freedom is good. He does not hold back from creating, because the goodness in creation outweighs all else. Further were He not to create the souls that are to be dammed, the whole creation and freedom would fall apart, because freedom is itself predicated on the being able to make the right choices in the light of the availability of the wrong choices. Such a spectrum of choices is only available in the milieu of all souls co-existing and the interactions among them.

One might persist in asserting that it might be the case God sees a “current slice” of time which is the only reality, which then drops out of reality from one moment to the next. Firstly such a “slice” would be impossible to define because whatever it were defined as, it would be possible to question whether it should not be sliced further.

“the will’s being directed towards goodness, the ultimate end for all things, is naturally necessitated; but that natural necessity, far from threatening freedom, is a precondition of the will’s making choices. Aquinas, following Aristotle, takes the will’s activity of choice to depend on its inclination towards the ultimate end as the intellect’s activity of reasoning depends on its grasp of the first principles. Choice, as distinct from whim or chance, is motivated, and some motives are subsidiary to others, happiness being the supreme motive or highest good for human beings. So the ultimate end, recognized as a precondition of choice” (Stump, Aquinas p.104)

The Bible, on Predestination

I’ve tackled this question in the article Violence in the Old Testament- Does God Hate, Regret or Pre-Determine? in the section about predestination, metaphor, because that’s where the argument is most pertinent- if God predestines, it raises question as to morality and his relation to us,

nice interview: