Does God's foreknowledge mean determinism?

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Sunfire315

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The way I see it, (Please correct me I’m wrong): if God infallibly knows what I will do in the future, that must be what I will do in the future. If that is the case, then my entire life, everything I have done, has effectively been predetermined; even if I God didn’t make me do what I did, I could have done nothing else.
 
Yes… and no. Eternity is a tricky concept. When we say God is eternal, we do not mean that He has existed for infinite moments of time in the past and will continue to exist for infinite moments in the future. We mean that God experiences no moments or duration. He is what He is, unchanging. What we experiences as progressive time does not come and go for God. All of creation is one act of God. His knowledge is directed to all points at once.

So to speak of God having foreknowledge can be misleading, as there is no before or after in His eternity. He has knowledge of how we experience things, on the order of time, but he doesn’t pass through time Himself. So God doesn’t know “in advance” or “before” in the way a human would know things “in advance” or “before”.
 
Sunfire315 said:
The way I see it, (Please correct me I’m wrong): if God infallibly knows what I will do in the future, that must be what I will do in the future. If that is the case, then my entire life, everything I have done, has effectively been predetermined; even if I God didn’t make me do what I did, I could have done nothing else.
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This thorny issue has been discussed many times before. The way I see it is that G-d knows what we will do but He does NOT make us do it because He created us with free will. Remember too that G-d exists outside the human bounds of time and space and is not bound by the laws of nature, including cause and effect. Our human minds in themselves are often not logical, but even when we do think logically, we are not capable of understanding the mystery of G-d’s mind.
 
Wesrock said:
Yes… and no. Eternity is a tricky concept. When we say God is eternal, we do not mean that He has existed for infinite moments of time in the past and will continue to exist for infinite moments in the future. We mean that God experiences no moments or duration. He is what He is, unchanging. What we experiences as progressive time does not come and go for God. All of creation is one act of God. His knowledge is directed to all points at once.

So to speak of God having foreknowledge can be misleading, as there is no before or after in His eternity. He has knowledge of how we experience things, on the order of time, but he doesn’t pass through time Himself. So God doesn’t know “in advance” or “before” in the way a human would know things “in advance” or “before”.
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Would that still mean what I do is set In stone?
 
Your will is still voluntary. You do things because you choose to.
 
Sunfire315 said:
The way I see it, (Please correct me I’m wrong): if God infallibly knows what I will do in the future, that must be what I will do in the future. If that is the case, then my entire life, everything I have done, has effectively been predetermined; even if I God didn’t make me do what I did, I could have done nothing else.
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Nope.

God is outside of time.

It is not so much that he “forsees” that he has “foreknowedge” – but that he* “sees” *that all of time is before him at once. He is outside of time.

Our “past, present, future” is all before him - in their immediacy.

My birth, my death, my typing on this computer, the fall of Rome, the Moon landing are all present before God who is outside of time.

So talking about God’s “foreknowledge” is leave the gate somewhat in the wrong direction.

Catechism:

“To God, all moments of time are present in their immediacy.” (CCC 600)
 
I once watched a movie I had seen before. Even tho i knew the outcome, I was still cheering for the good guys at the end!

I didn’t make the movie, so my will was uninvolved. I knew the outcome, but I was still rooting for the good characters.

So I see God’s knowledge as being like that, only, of course, sooooo much better 🙂
 
Sunfire315 said:
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he way I see it, (Please correct me I’m wrong): if God infallibly knows what I will do in the future, that must be what I will do in the future. If that is the case, then my entire life, everything I have done, has effectively been predetermined; even if I God didn’t make me do what I did, I could have done nothing else.
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You don’t know what God knows so you cannot do opposite and always do what it is supposed to.
 
STT said:
You don’t know what God knows so you cannot do opposite and always do what it is supposed to.
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More specifically, it is impossible to do the opposite of what God knows you will do, because God only knows you’ll do it because it’s what you do.

OP, as others have said, you can’t think of God’s knowledge in terms of time.
 
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