As a Christian who believes in an omniscient God, I’ve struggled with the idea of freedom/free will.  How could I be truly free to do anything if God already knows what I’m going to do? If God knows what I’m going to do, then doesn’t that mean I have to do the thing that God knows I’m going to do and if I have to do something, then how could I have any free will if I don’t really have a choice for how I will act?  

Does God’s omniscience entail fatalism or determinism? No.  Why not?  The important thing is to understand how God’s knowledge relates to the world.  I can think of three primary ways that God’s knowledge relates to the world.  In two of those ways, God’s omniscience doesn’t entail fatalism or determinism.  In one of those ways, it would entail fatalism and/or determinism.  Understanding the casual relationship between God’s knowledge and reality is what’s crucial here.  I think in the two ways that God’s knowledge doesn’t entail determinism or fatalism, there is either no or very little causality between God’s knowledge and what events happen in the world.  In the one way where I think God’s knowledge could entail fatalism or determinism, God’s knowledge has causality (at least indirectly) with what events happen in the world.  

Let me use the idea of a movie as a way to get at what I’m thinking for some of this.  When it comes to a movie, there’s a few different ways you can “know” what’s going to happen in the movie.  One way is if you wrote the movie script.  If God’s knowledge of the world is akin to a director’s knowledge of a movie they wrote, then God’s knowledge would be the cause of events that happen in the world, and I think this type of omniscience would equate to determinism or fatalism.  This is because, God’s knowledge of the world would be based on the fact that God has planned out precisely what will happen and so he knows what will happen because he has already decided what will happen.  

There’s two other ways you could “know” everything that’s going to happen in a movie.  You could know what’s going to happen because you’ve already seen the movie.  If this is what God’s omniscience is like, then God knows what we are going to do not because he has decided and determined how we are going to act, but because he has already seen what we are going to do and what events are going to occur in the world.  

If your anything like me, you might ask at this point, how could God have already seen what is going to happen before it has happened?  Well, if God is the creator of all things, then he is also the creator of time.  He thus would be before time or outside of time or transcends time (whatever phrase you prefer).  This gives us reason to think God might not experience time in the linear way that we do.  I’ve heard people say that God experiences all moments in time at the same time.  I don’t quite get what they are saying, but here’s another analogy I’ve heard someone say that I think helps me think about what God’s relationship to time could be like if he is outside of time.  I promise I will bring this back to the movie comparison as well.

Let’s imagine a parade as an analogy for the flow of time.  When you are on the street level with the parade, all you can see is what comes right in front of you.  The higher up you get, the more of the parade you can see.  You see more floats as they approach you and more floats as they pass by you.  If you go high enough into the air, you can see all the floats at once.  Now this can help us think about time.  For us humans, we are on the street level.  All we can see and experience in time is what’s right in front of us, the present.  We can’t look back at the floats after they have passed us and we can’t look forward and see what floats are approaching.  However, maybe God has this bird’s eye view of the parade where he can see the end and the beginning of the parade all at once.  So, maybe God, being beyond time or outside of time or transcending time, can see all the events of history at one time as one might see the entire parade if they were high enough above it.  In this way, God’s knowledge of what’s going to happen in the future isn’t causing the future, because his knowledge isn’t based on the fact that God is causing the future, but that he’s already seen in it.  

So, if we bring this back to our movie analogy, maybe God has already seen the movie of reality, and so his knowledge of what’s going to happen is because he has seen what has happened, not because he is dictating what’s going to happen.  When you know what’s going to happen in a movie because you’ve already seen it, your knowledge of what’s going to happen next in the movie doesn’t cause it to happen, even if your knowledge is complete and perfect.  In this way, God’s omniscience wouldn’t have any causal effects on the world and so even if God knows everything, we are still free in our choices because God’s knowledge is based off him already seeing what are free choices would be, rather than him knowing what we will do because he has already wrote the script and determined what we will do.

Now in this case, it still feels like we aren’t really free.  If God knows what we are going to do because he can see the future and see what we are going to do, then it seems like our decisions have already been made.  If the future has already happened, then all we are doing is playing out the script in the present, even if the script wasn’t written directly by God.  This may leave some space for some sense of free will, but it feels like we don’t have the type of free will we want and it feels like we are in some version of determinism, even if this determinism isn’t based on God’s omniscience (I will refrain from a tangent into what could be the cause of this determinism if it is not God’s knowledge).  This leads me to my last thought.

When we go back to our movie comparison, I think the last common way people “know” what’s going to happen next is when they are able to take the current information they have in the movie and deduce what will come next.  Sometimes, people who watch a lot of movies, they are able to accurately predict what will happen next because they are able to understand characters and understand what would make sense for characters to do next.  Well, what if this is how God knows the future, but that he has perfect knowledge of everything in the present and so He is able to perfectly predict what will happen next.  

In this sense, God’s omniscience doesn’t cause us to do anything.  God just knows us so thoroughly and so deeply, that he just knows what we will do next.  In the same way that you might know how a loved one may act in a particular situation, God knows how we will act in every situation.  Your knowledge of how your loved one will act doesn’t cause them to act that way, even if you predict it perfectly.  Likewise, God’s knowledge of how we will act doesn’t cause us to act that way, even if he always knows perfectly what people will do.  

In this version of omniscience, I think we still maintain a robust sense of free will because God’s knowledge is based on us and who we are and doesn’t require us to act in any particular way.  Also, our future actions haven’t already occurred where God has already seen them.  Rather, our choices are truly our own and truly free, God just knows what we will do because he knows us so well.  In the same way you may know what will happen next in a movie because you understand the plot and the characters so well, God understands us and our current situations so well that he will always infallibly predict what we will do next.  

I’ll just finish with this acknowledgment.  I know that I may not be using the word “knowledge” or “know” in a precise way or in the exact same way every time throughout this post.  I’m mainly just concerned with using it in the more general way that people use it in our everyday life.  So, if I say that God will always infallibly predict what we will do in the future, is that truly the same thing as knowing what we will do? In a technical sense, maybe but also maybe not, but I think for practical purposes and for how we use the word “know” in conventional conversations and everyday life, I would say always infallibly predicting the future is the same thing as knowing the future.