God's Knowledge of the Future
How should we understand God's knowledge of and relationship to future events? Chris Fisher of @realityisnotoptional joins Idol Killer to discuss various models of God's relationship and knowledge of the future - specifically a recent Idol Killer community post:
Question:
Does God know what horse will you ride three days before Thanksgiving 2028? Solution 1. God from all eternity determined you to ride the Palomino, so He will effectually bring it to pass. Thus, He knows what you will do, because He will ensure you do it.
Solution 2. God created all time and actions such that sequence is an illusion; past, present and future are all equal existing realities. As such a temporal counterpart of yourself has always ridden the Appaloosa. God knows this, because He created it this way. The you reading this right now, will never ride the Appaloosa, but your temporal counterpart is forever.
Solution 3. God looked at all possible worlds and for some reason really wanted to actualize the world where you will certainly ride a Thoroughbred. In another world you could've ridden any other horse, or chosen not to ride a horse, but in this world you will always choose to ride the Thoroughbred because God determined you to when He created this world.
Solution 4. Yes, God knows what horse you will ride or won't. We don't know how or why, and we don't like to consider all the problems this claim creates, like seemingly entailing all things obtain necessarily due to God's perfect knowledge of settled future events. We appeal to mystery.
Solution 5. The matter of if you will or won't ride a horse is as of yet indeterminate. Why must you ride a horse 3 days before Thanksgiving 2028? God hasn't created it as an existing reality equal to past and present, nor has He effectually decreed it to obtain and committed Himself to bringing it to pass, nor have you determined to ride a horse, nor is the future so linear that it is inevitable you will ride a horse. Neither the past nor the future exist. When the matter is settled, God will know this perfectly because His knowledge of reality is perfect... until then He knows this as indeterminate, because again His knowledge of reality is perfect.
