[Mempho]

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God Can See the Future

Now, the determinism people will point out very quickly (and quite correctly) that God can see the future. They think this presents a conundrum for the concept of free will. It does not.

Suppose that God is on his throne, peers through time into the future, and one day and sees Susie being born. Susie is a wonderful child and grows into a beautiful, young woman. She is beautiful, smart, giving, and caring. She donates time to feed the poor and is an avid churchgoer. She gets engaged to a young man who loves her very much named David. Her life is a blessing to all around her. One night she comes home from feeding the poor and finds Tom in her house. Tom has made a dark choice and proceeds to rape and kill her.

Would God not think of this as a terrible tragedy? Of course he would. After all, it was not Susie’s fault and she was a blessing to all around her. It was Tom’s fault because he made the wrong choice. God could’ve intervened but he did not. If God intervened every time that something bad happened, he would eventually end up removing Susie’s capacity to love all of those around her because all of the opportunities for everyone who ever lived to make a wrong choice would be extinguished. Love is a choice. Without that choice, humans are nothing more than biological material. With that choice, however, the door for evil is always open.


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This doesnt address the supposed conflict between free will and omniscience, it addresses the problem of evil.

In your scenario, the argument would be that Tom had no choice to rape Susie as God already knew he was going to. If he got to that moment and then chose not to, God would have been wrong (which is impossible). Therefore, at the moment he made his choice, he was choosing between only the one option that God had already seen. (Furthermore, God could have made Tom such that he wouldnt have chosen rape at that moment. When someone is shot, it's not the gun's fault.)

It also avoids the problem of why didnt God make us able to choose between a whole lot of good choices? It doesnt have to be rape vs not rape. Tom could have been exercising his free will on a much more benevolent scale - God could make a world where we went around choosing "Do I give Susie one birthday present or two?" Why allow us the ability to do such awful things that some of us do? He could make the dark just a little gloomy rather than pitch black.

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Well, if he makes the worst case a little gloomy, then he eliminates the choice for total darkness.