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The Problem of the Absolute Foreknowledge of God
I think there are problems with how we tend to formulate the "foreknowledge" of God, especially when we define that foreknowledge in absolute categories and tie it to ultimate reality. Let’s use the four principles that Albert Outler distilled from John Wesley’s theological method to examine this issue, realizing that the first three were already well established aspects of doing theology in the Western Church.
1) From the perspective of Tradition: Throughout most of the history of the church, the "standard" position has been that God knew the future, that it was simply an unfolding of the divine plan. However, that view was rooted deeply in a certain world view built on certain philosophical assumptions about the nature of reality. The kinds of questions asked in the early church, especially following Augustine in the 4th and 5th centuries, were metaphysical ontological questions about ultimate reality. And those questions were rooted in the Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophies that saw God and human existence in absolute or idealistic terms. God was defined by asking logical questions, and reaching logical answers. Basically, a view of God was developed whereby God was defined in terms of what a god ought to be to be God. While the results may not be totally invalid, they are obviously limited, and a departure from Scripture and God’s own revelation about himself in human history.
I think this became a circular argument, because then it was assumed that God was exactly like we had logically described Him to be, and then that "nature" or "essence" of God was used to construct ideas about His work in the world. The "omni-" doctrines that arose from this were all logically consistent, and reinforced one another (omni mean all, so that God is all knowing, all powerful, etc.). Since the questions that were being asked were about ultimates (what is the all?), the definition of God was given in terms of those ultimates. He was omni-everything, that is, the absolute and ultimate of any category about which one could think or speak.
I simply do not think these formulations are at all adequate, simply because they are our definition of what we want in a God or what a god by our definition should be, which does not necessarily define God very adequately. They are far too limiting, at the very point that they claim to be all encompassing! In other words, God does not have to be what we say he is, no matter how "big" or "omni-" we try to make what we say.
The same thing can be said for other categories, like "perfect" or "infinite" or "immutable" that we impose on God as if we really knew that they were adequate, or even accurate. It is just that those are the "biggest" terms we can come up with in order to answer the questions about ultimate reality and absolute existence.
The idea of the "perfection" of God is one of those Platonic philosophical categories that we have tended to accept as absolutely necessary. It is our definition of what God must be. That very idea, when played out logically, has created some very difficult problems of its own, primarily in relating a "perfect" being to the existence of evil in creation (see The English Term Perfect and The Problem of Natural "Evil"). Plato’s idea of perfection was the idea of perfection (thus, idealism), because nothing in physical existence could conform to the idea. Thus, all of physical existence was imperfect and corrupt, which, of course, led to the development of a radical metaphysical dualism. While on one level, that may be satisfying intellectually to our sense of order, it does not necessarily tell us anything about God.
God may or may not be "perfect" or "infinite" in whatever way we want to define that. We do not know. How would we, being less than the ideal or the perfection or, as Plato called it, "the beingness" or pure existence, understand the ideal, the perfect? How can we define perfection unless we are ourselves perfect? How can we who are finite define the infinite, except to say that it is beyond us? Do we just define it as what we are not? Interesting, that this is exactly how the Bible talks about God; He is other than humanity! However, the biblical term for this is "Holy" (cf. Hos 11:9), not "perfect" or "infinite." 2) From the perspective of reason: One way that we have tried to maintain the logical coherence of the omni-doctrines is by retreating to paradox. This simply asserts that the apparently contradictory logical conclusions that we have reached about God, that he is perfect yet the creator of an obviously evil world, or that He is all powerful and good yet horrible things happen, or that He knows everything that will happen yet does not cause events to occur, are really somehow consistent on a level beyond what we can understand logically. But, if it is a valid observation that while truths about God may not be totally logical, they will not be illogical, we have problems at this point.
Paradox may well be an option here. But if we do not resort to paradox, the logic of the omni-doctrines will not stand. The biggest problem for the foreknowledge of God is the relation of foreknowledge to human freedom. If God knows that something will happen, then it will happen. That is, if God knows the event to be a historical reality, then that event must occur; it is predestined. If it does not occur than God did not know.
If God knows that when I leave the house for Wednesday evening Bible study, that at exactly 5:58 PM CDT (running late, as usual!), at the intersection of NW 42nd and MacArthur, a car will run the red light, strike my car as I turn onto MacArthur, and I will be killed, then it will occur. I have no choice in the matter. No matter what I do, it will happen. It may appear that I chose, but that event is determined to occur regardless of what I decide. I will only choose the courses of action that will allow that event to happen. It doesn’t matter that I never drive to church through that intersection, or that I usually go an hour later, or that I actually decided to get around on time for a change. My freedom is dissolved into God’s foreknowledge. Human freedom is only the illusion of freedom.
Some want to respond at this point that simply because God knows something does not mean either that it must occur or that he caused it to happen. Usually the example is given from human experience in which knowledge is not related to causality. However neither of these perspectives will stand.
There is a great deal of difference between a human being "knowing" and God "knowing." Our knowing is influenced and conditioned by a myriad of factors, not all of which we are even aware or understand if we are aware of them. So our perceptions, even of ourselves, let alone others, or the world, or God are always limited and flawed. That’s why Paul can say that we see through a glass darkly. However, God’s "knowing" about Himself, and about His creation is not hindered by those things, so that what he knows is an accurate and complete knowledge of whatever is the object of that knowledge (which I’m not sure we can totally define).
Relating this to causality is not the answer. Yet it doesn’t really matter whether we introduce the idea of causality into the equation or not. The point is that because of God’s complete (but not necessarily absolute) knowledge, if indeed He "knows" something, then that’s the way it is, whether or not He directly caused it to be that way. If God "knows" a future event, that event must occur, whether or not He directly caused it. It is still predestined, even though we might think from our perspective we were exercising our freedom to choose (a classical argument from determinists and predestinationists). Our freedom is still only an illusion of freedom. And if that event must occur, and not just be a possibility, then either God was indeed the cause of the event, which results in theistic predestination, or God is not the cause of the event, which results in a form of naturalism (historical positivism) or at best deism, which is a theistic naturalism.
That is part of the difficulty with the whole idea of foreknowledge; God is locked into a system over which He does not have the freedom to act. My understanding of the sovereignty of God says that He does have that freedom. And perhaps an exercise of that sovereignty is that he has chosen to give up absolute sovereignty for the sake of human freedom and soteriological sovereignty (relating to salvation and relationship with humanity) .
While the doctrine of predestination is not a necessary outgrowth of the absolute foreknowledge of God, it must have it in place to work. That is, there cannot be eternal and absolute decrees of God unless he has absolute foreknowledge. So, the classical articulation of "foreknowledge," especially as it is related to the concepts of the decrees and predestination, interferes with and indeed precludes the concept of authentic human freedom. Unless, of course, we resort to paradox and try to maintain logically incompatible ideas by this method.
One irony here that is interesting. While these doctrines have their origin in logical formulation, today when there is a difficulty in getting the omni-doctrines to fit with modern ways of thinking or with Scripture, we usually resort to paradox to explain how they can work. That is, we say that we cannot really understand how God can know the future and human beings still have any genuine freedom. The doctrines that came into existence as logical descriptions of God are thereby touted as non-logical assertions, which is inherently illogical.
One assertion at this point is often that, since God is infinite, he exists outside of our time and space. Because of that, he can see the past and the future all at once; in other words, there is no time for God since he exists in the eternal "now" apart from any restrictions of time and space. This begins moving into areas that range far beyond what we can really discuss here. But this objection continues to illustrate how thoroughly the metaphysical categories have permeated our thinking about God. All of this assertion is built on logical inferences about the nature of ultimate reality based on the assumption that the Greek philosophical models represent ontological reality (the way things really are). Just some reflections here for further thought.
The past and the future are not the same thing, unless we invoke a theory of time in which space and time are the same thing (this gets complex very quickly). There are such theories, which are the basis for many of the older science fiction stories about time travel. But they are also rooted in older philosophical ideas about the fixed and immutable nature of reality, ideas which are currently being challenged not only by new philosophical paradigms (existential and process philosophy), but also from new perspectives in science (quantum mechanics, genetic indeterminism, and the idea of random event).
It is interesting that most science fiction now focuses on travel to parallel or alternate realities (e.g. the television programs Sliders or Seven Days) more than it does on time travel (e.g. H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine). That’s because the older theories about the unity of space and time are no longer acceptable in light of newer scientific theories and thinking. The newer perspectives all emphasize the contingency of the future based on various variables. Theologically, one of those variables is human decision, as well as God’s interaction with that decision.
As far as we know from our viewpoint, the past no longer exists, but it is "real" because it has existed in a way that the future is not real simply because it does not yet exist. We cannot affect the past, but we can affect the future; the past is a closed book, while the future is still contingent upon the present.
Stephen’s King’s story The Langoliers is a modern expression of this perspective. It is based on a theory of time in which neither the past nor the future actually exist. The past exists only in memory and the future exists only in possibility. This has interesting implications for how we talk about what God knows. Why do we need to affirm that God knows that which does not yet exist? From this perspective, we could say that God knows the possibilities of the future, but that human beings create the future by their decisions. That is part of human freedom that God has granted to us. That suggests a much more incarnational model for God than earlier models built on metaphysical ontology have allowed. In all of this, we must recall that the only way that we know anything about God is what He has revealed to us within the constraints of finite time and space (unless, of course, one is a proponent of natural theology, which I am not). All of God’s relation to humanity has been incarnational. One of our major difficulties that lies behind all of our "omni-" doctrines is that we have mistakenly assumed that the Incarnation was a single act of God in history, rather than understanding the Incarnation to be revelatory of God Himself. That is, Incarnation is not just something God did in Christ, but is how he has chosen to relate to His creation, of which the Incarnation is the best example. In fact, creation itself is an incarnational act, in that God by creating chose to enter into finite time and space. The fundamental faith affirmation of the OT is that God reveals Himself in human history, in finite time and space. That is why we cannot know God beyond that incarnational dimension, except by speculation.
If we could ever come to conceptualize God as incarnational, and history as the arena in which an incarnational God reveals Himself to us, it would help us address a lot of the logical problems we have created for ourselves. We have tried to distance God from His own creation by placing Him in some abstracted way outside and apart from that creation. Yet, if we conceptualize an incarnational God, then we can go one step further and conceptualize an incarnational model for history. We would find, I think, that the Bible makes a lot more sense, and far more readily, than it does when we try to impose other philosophical models upon it, as we have tended to do through most of Christian history. 3) From the perspective of Scripture: Invariably, of course, this is going to lead to a discussion of the nature of prophecy. And here is where people tend to get passionate when we start "messing with the Bible." The fact is, this whole scenario is also tied up with circular reasoning related to Scripture. The omni-doctrines were not developed from Scripture, but from logic. Yet, they have become near absolute statements of fact in approaching the interpretation of Scripture. The logical positions are assumed to be true, then assumed to be in Scripture, and then Scripture is interpreted through the lens of these doctrines. This is especially true in talking about Old Testament prophecy, which we commonly assume to be prediction of the future governed by the omni-doctrines, especially God’s foreknowledge usually reduced to a subcategory of omniscience (all-knowing).
I just scanned this quickly, and my first impression was that this guy is arguing for God as Abraxas, the god who is both good and evil. That concept has bothered me ever since I first learned of it, oddly enough, before I was saved. Abraxas was the title of Santana's 2nd album. I was a fan of Santana until I learned what Abraxas meant. (Must have been my upbringing in the EUB church, before they abandoned the Gospel and merged with the methodists in the United Methodist Church.) Ever since, I find it hard to listen to Santana's music, even Carlos as a solo artist.
It seems to me that the Middle Knowledge position fails to take into account a basic rule of logic: The law of non-contradiction. Simply put, If God foresees an action taking place, it cannot follow then that the action does not take place. How can God Foresee something that does not happen? An action cannot both take place and not take place. A thing cannot both be and not be.