The dilemma of God’s omniscience and men’s free will is a perennial question. What I didn’t expect is to find an explanation from the Kalam worldview (Islamic medieval scholasticism).

This classic dilemma goes like this: as God is the creator of time, God cannot be constrained by it. As such, God should be able to access the past, present and future all the same, granting him omniscience — knowledge of everything (or specifically, prescience — knowledge of the future). The problem lies in the seemingly contradictory relationship between God’s timeless existence (hence knowledge of the future) and men’s free will. When I first encountered this problem, frankly I was not ready; this problem put me in a metaphorical paralysis for a few weeks. As I look for answers from many sources, I surprisingly find that for the handful who rise to the challenge of attempting to answer this perennial issue, they do so in a rather simplistic manner, not addressing the implications of their argument. The rest of the sources would treat it as a mystery: “it is something we grasp by faith”.

The gist of the answers that most people give would be along the lines of: just because God knows the future does not mean God interferes in our lives. For example, I might look at the sky and know that it is going to rain, but it does not mean I am the one who makes the rain pour. Therefore, God’s omniscience and men’s free will do not contradict each other. However, I find there are a number of problematic implications from this explanation.

Firstly, by its definition, prescience means a full certainty of the future. If God knows everything with full certainty, A will lead to B, this knowledge should be able to be infinitely regressed, i.e. A will lead to B, which will lead to C, … which will lead to Z; therefore A will lead to Z. This should mean that God knows with full certainty up to the most distant future possible. With this, when God creates us, God knows with certainty every single detail that is going to happen up to our death, even though it has not happened. Wouldn’t this make God responsible for the outcome of our lives, given that He decided to create us in certain specific circumstances knowing full well of what we are to do given the circumstances? It would brush the notion of predestination, which Catholics do not espouse, and undermine the teaching that God wishes all to be saved (Balthasarian argument is outside the scope).

Secondly, God’s prescience would undermine the principal emphasis on prayer (specifically prayer for petitions, including intercessions), and this is another aspect that most sources ignore. If the future has been written (by our future selves, because of free will, even though we do not know it) and therefore it cannot change (because if it can change, it would not be known with full certainty, hence not prescience), there would be no point in praying for something. Obviously, Mother Teresa’s quote comes to mind: “prayer changes us, and we change things”. Unfortunately, I believe that the saying is an exhortation for our better disposition, not so much a teaching. But even if it is a teaching, it still proves my point because if the future has been set in stone, prayer cannot change anything, not even ourselves (because our future selves are part of the future). Then Aquinas’ teaching comes to mind: God is the Unmoved Mover that cannot be changed (or manipulated, swayed, or moved), which is consistent with the stated implication that prayer will not change anything. However, it does not sit well with me. I am trying to be careful here because I do not mean to say that Aquinas is wrong — anyone with a modicum of self-awareness will not dare to dispute Aquinas that easily — but that perhaps there is a possibility this teaching is true only in a certain limited sense. For one, the Bible is teeming with encouragements to bring our petitions in prayer: “Ask and it will be given”, “whatever you ask in prayer, believe you have received it and it will be yours”, etc. If prayer truly can’t change anything, such encouragements would just be a cruel false promise. For another, it is peculiar that in our liturgies, e.g. the prayer of the faithful at Mass, we remain stating our petitions fervently. Wouldn’t it be more fitting if we paraphrase all our prayers into “help us accept that…”?

As mentioned, there are also a great many people who take this problem as a mystery. Allegedly, mystery keeps our faith alive. As the saying goes: if we know something for certain, we have knowledge and no need for faith. Among the sources who take this problem as a mystery, I particularly love the depiction G. K. Chesterton wrote:

“As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic … He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them … Thus he has always believed that there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also … The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything — Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility — Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; … But that transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We are conscious of it as a kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name” [G.K. Chesterton — Orthodoxy: The Maniac]

Honestly, in my view there is nothing wrong with treating this problem as a mystery. Perhaps it can even be healthy too, maintaining a reasonable amount of wonder and humility, and keeping us reasonably away from the entitlement to answers. However, isn’t it just a lot more comforting to have at least a plausible explanation at hand?

Finally after years of putting this problem on the back burner, I finally chanced upon an explanation that could, in my opinion, reconcile this problem satisfactorily. However, I feel it is important to underline that as much as I pledge obedience to the Church, I am a lay person seeking for answers. While I find the following argument to be not in contradiction to the Catholic faith, I am prone to neglect and ignorance.

The argument at issue surprisingly comes from the Kalam cosmological argument (medieval Islamic scholasticism), initially proposed by Al-Ghazali and now endorsed by William Lane Craig. This argument postulates that as the creator of time, God indeed exists unbounded by time, giving him accessibility to the past, present, and future all at the same time. This condition indeed grants Him prescience. However, when God created the universe as well as time, God willingly entered into time. As such, God now lives within time, just like the rest of us.

“But one way to think about it is to envision God existing alone without the universe as changeless and timeless. His free act of creation is a temporal event simultaneous with the universe’s coming into being. Therefore, God enters into time when He creates the universe. God is thus timeless without the universe and in time with the universe.” [William Lane Craig]

In this regard, this point can be supported by the view of Charles Hartshorne, who argues that omniscience does not imply prescience.

“Omniscience is only possible as itself temporal — as knowing new facts as there are new facts to know, but always knowing all the facts as there are at the time.” [Donald Wayne Viney — Does Omniscience Imply Foreknowledge? Craig on Hartshorne: Hartshorne on Omniscience and Foreknowledge]

With this view, all the aforementioned problematic implications are resolved. Firstly, God is not responsible for the decisions people make; and secondly, the emphasis on prayer makes sense, because the future is indeterminate. Most importantly, God’s lack of prescience does not discount the notion that God is the First Mover, the creator of everything including time. With this view at hand, I can finally let this classic problem rest in peace, at least for the time being until this view is proven to have problematic implications (or contradictions to the teachings of the Church).

P.S. Obviously, there may be other follow up questions, e.g. how can there be an act of creation if time does not exist at that point? Doesn’t creation imply two chronological stages: before creation and after creation? Apparently not so according to Craig. Even the phrase “before creation” is semantically wrong, because time only exists at the point of creation (“before” is unwarranted). If you are interested in his further explanations, you may look him up.