Reconciling God’s Omniscience With Man’s Free Will

By Cyril Anderson

 One of the controversies that comes up between atheists and believers, and also between philosophically minded believers, is the question of reconciling God’s omniscience with man’s free will.  Some see a contradiction between the two, and conclude either that God doesn’t exist or that man has no free will (determinism).  The question raised is, if God knows what we will do “before we do it” is it not true then that in effect we have no real choice in the matter, and that our action is predetermined by God, who foresaw what we would do? 

 The problem with this reasoning is that it confuses two different things: knowledge and causation.  The argument, in essence, comes down to “God knows this will happen before it does, therefore He is the cause of it.”  Unfortunately, this is not an argument, but rather, the conclusion is simply being assumed.  Knowing and causing are two different things.

 For example, suppose someone watches a thrown ball fly through the air. He observes it carefully.  Does this mean he causes the ball to follow the path it does?  No.  The idea is that the relationship of God to the actions we choose is in some ways similar to the relationship of a person watching a ball flying through the air.  God observes our actions, but is not the one causing our actions, or, to be precise, is not the sole cause of our actions.  God foresees our actions, but that does not imply that they are fixed before we do them.  (The medieval philosopher Boethius made a similar argument to this in his Consolation of Philosophy.)

 The key thing to understanding this is to try to think in 4-dimensions.  This is hard for us, who are used to experiencing a three-dimensional world evolving in time.  But this is not a God’s eye view of things.  God “sees” the universe differently from us.  Much as we experience three dimensions in a unified way at once, God experiences the four dimensions of space-time (3 space+1 dimension for time, ignoring, for the moment, the possibility of 10 dimensional spaces and the like talked about in some hypotheses in physics) as a unified whole.  So while we see volumes and space, God “sees” hyper-volumes and hyperspace.

 For God, time is simply another dimension like space.  Indeed, deep treatments of physics such as General Relativity support the idea that time is at heart very similar to the other dimensions.  Because of this, an interval of time is experienced in much the same way as an interval of space is experienced by us – all at once.  Time for God is not a sequential thing, as for us.  God, in essence, does not experience time.  For God, all is one Now.

 The universe is like a complex program written and compiled by God, running by rules He creates acting on materials He creates.  From our standpoint, this program is extremely long, billions of years.  But for God, who does not experience time as a sequence of serial events, the whole thing is less than an instant.  The whole universe, start to finish, simply appears “before him” complete, even as it is contemplated and planned.  As the Qu’ran says, “he simply says ‘Be’ to it, and it Is.” The universe’s unfolding is not a process to Him; it simply becomes.  Time, after all, is a property of the universe, and He is beyond the universe as its creator.  It does not even make sense to speak of God’s experience “before the universe was created,” since this again imposes the language of temporality on the essentially a-temporal creator of time.

 So where does man and his free choice fit in this picture?  As the universe’s creation occurs, the whole life of all humans would appear instantaneously and completed.  Does this mean that our actions are fixed outside of any will or decision-making on our part?  No; this is simply the only possible way an omniscient being outside of time can experience the creation of the universe.

Our actions, given our status as agents with free will, are rather special.  Unlike inanimate objects and unlike the lower animals, we have a consciousness and we have reason.  We are able to reflect and make choices.  The relation of our choices to the unfolding of the universe is this.  God has made a covenant of sorts with all humanity.  God wills to bring what we choose, constrained by the basic limits of the laws of nature by which our physical bodies are bound, into actuality, from imagination to reality.  Whatever we choose to do that is within the capabilities of our body and within the bounds of physical law, God creates.  The price of this is that we are responsible for the consequences of these choices. 

 So in a certain sense, we are co-creators of the world around us.  Now of course this is always subject to the will of God, without which we would not be conscious and would not have reason, and without which our choices could not become reality. (Metaphysically, God is always needed as the intermediary in any interaction between any two created things, which are unable to interact of themselves)  But with this in mind, we are, to an extent partners in the way the world unfolds around us.  As this complex program of the universe, determined by the laws of nature and the choices we make, unfolds, God simultaneously creates and observes.  To God, however, this observation takes no time because He does not experience time.  The whole thing appears instantaneously, complete.  But this does not contradict the fact that human choice plays a part in shaping the final product. 

 Ultimately, the illusion of a perceived contradiction between foreknowledge and free-will comes about from applying temporally bound thinking to a Being unbound by time.  From this perspective, even language such as “God knows what we will do before we do it” is inappropriate, because for God there is no “before” or “after,” or “will do” or “have done.”  There is only “now” and “is.”  God’s observation of our entire lives takes less than an instant. 

 Because God is the one whose power and will acts as intermediary between our choices and the chain of cause and effect that bring them into actuality, God ultimately is the creator of our actions.  But as explained above, this creation is based on our wishes for what we choose to do.  In this sense, He serves us to create the life we choose for ourselves, with the condition that we are responsible for the life we ask Him to bring into Being.  In this light, the relation between our free will and the Divine Omniscience is made clearer.