How Can God Know the Future?

[1ke]

You can’t know what I’ll do in the future, God apparently DOES know everything I’ll do

No, he knows what you did. You are thinking linearly. God is not linear. He possesses his knowledge in one act of knowing, not sequentially as we

If everything is already set in stone, as in He knows it will happen 100%, then I can’t have any free will.

Nope. It’s not set in stone. You choose. He knows what you chose. You have 100% free will when you choose.

 

[phil19034]

If we have free will, how can God tell the future? For that to be the case, it would have to be predestined. Even if God exists outside of time, it would mean our choices to be obsolete. This would mean no matter what I do I’ll have the same fate. How can that be free will?

I highly recommend you look into St Thomas Aquinas’s 8 Attributes of God. They will help you understand this, which is rooted in Philosophy.

Pints With Aquinas: 20: What are the 8 attributes of God?

St Thomas Aquinas, in the first part of his Summa Theologica, after having enumerated five proofs for the existence of God, proceeds to outline and explicate his attributes, of which Thomas says He has eight: 1) Simplicity, 2) perfection, 3) goodness, 4) infinity, 5) ubiquity, 6) immutability...

pintswithaquinas.libsyn.com

You should read the above link and listen to the audio it has.

But essentially, God is outside time.

Have you even seen any movie with time travel? Well, when time traveling, the person goes outside of time and then re-enters time at different moment.

Or better yet, have you ever seen a show or movie where the time travelers can sit outside time for a while? Legends of Tomorrow (note: I don’t recommend the show, it’s pretty bad) does this a lot, where they sit outside time to hide or reset the changes they made.

Now when time travelers time travel, they are biased. They want their time line to continue and sometimes, they want to travel back in time to make changes to their timeline or restore their timeline. Therefore, human time travelers would have the temptation to predestined or modify things and take away free will to insure the future they want.

However, God doesn’t do this. Why? Because God is outside time to begin with. He doesn’t have a bias and He is happy with the way it ends. So there is no reason for God to tinker with things which will alter the perfection of Creation and the way the world ends.

Btw - going back to the time travelers - just because someone travels to the future doesn’t mean they are automatically predestinating that future.

Finally, in regards to predestination: God DOES predestine some people to Heaven, like Mary. But he’s doesn’t take their free will away. St Thomas Aquinas has some very complex teachings regarding this, but that a different topic.

Any way free will is what we have. And God knows what we would do with any extra graces we might be given. For example, someone like Gov Andrew Cuomo has been given many Graces that have obviously been wasted. But others, like the Blessed Mother, The Apostles, and the Saints have used their Graces well. Therefore, sometimes God gives some extra Graces to those who ask for them. And God grants them if it fits into his design.

But God didn’t prompt us to ask for those extra Graces. He just knew we would ask.

(Continued)

 

[phil19034]

(part 2)

Final thought, it’s no different for parents. Sometimes we parents decide we are going to do something for our kids, but only if they ask for it (Christmas gifts are a good example). And sometimes, because we know our kids so well, we buy it before they ask. Then, they ask and we give it to them. It was already part of our plan. But if kid said before Christmas, “mom/dad, you know that toy We saw in the store… well Jonny has it and I really don’t like it,” then we return the toy because we don’t want to push it on them.

It’s similar with God. He’s not going to give us a gift we don’t want. Therefore, we have free will and are not predestined (in the Protestant way) because God respects our choices.

I pray this helps a little.

God Bless

 

[Thrstypirate]

Not to internet weirdos, though. It’s a dangerous place, the net.

 

[phil19034]

If God knows I will do something with complete certainty, and I cannot avoid that outcome, then I have no free will. Simple dots to connect.

I am not coming to the conclusion that God should do something about my choices, quite the opposite. I’m questioning how free will can exist if God knows everything in the future.

Ok, you seem to be implying that God designed the Universe so that you would make the choices you make in order to reach the final outcome.

But that’s not how God Designed the universe. He designed it knowing how it would end, and then was eager to see how His Creation lives out their lives.

Think of it as a computer simulation for a moment. The programer knows how and when the simulation will end. And the programmer know what he did to create the simulation.

But he has NO IDEA what is going to happen during the simulation until he runs it.

It’s the same way with God. He didn’t program in our choices. It’s just that since God is outside the “simulation” He’s already seen the end.

Here’s another way to think of it. If you play Sim City, you can set the time so that a few hundred years in the simulation take only a few minutes for the player. But for the Sims, it still took hundreds of years, while for us it only took a few minutes because we are outside the game. We’re finished playing… we know know what happens… but the characters still “experience” hundred of years.

Remember: time is relative.

 

[stpurl]

Poor logic, attempting to make God the author of your choice and then complaining you don’t have a choice.

If God knows that you are going to commit a crime in 5 minutes, and you go ahead and commit it, how do you NOT have free will? God’s knowledge of your action didn’t make you DO the action; had God somehow ‘not known’ it would not have kept you from doing that very same action. It is not God’s knowledge that causes your action, but your action which is a part of God’s knowledge because of your action.

 

[pnewton]

The best I can do is an analogy to explain what it would mean for God to be outside of time, where he can both know what will happen, because to him it has, and there still be free will.

Betelgeuse. Big star, long way out there. Let us say we noticed it growing unstable, but because of quantum uncertainties it might go supernova in a year, or in a thousand. For us, the future remains unknown. Then let us say that in fact it had already gone supernova. If we could teleport to that location, we could know the exact second the event began. But from Earth, all that would still seem to be in the future.

Now replace that with a kid at the same distance who had shoplifted. From our perspective, the act remained in the future, and the kid has free will. From the perspective on one being able to see that future, the act has occurred.

I know this is an inexact analogy, as all are, but it is the best I could think of. I will not steal Peter Kreeft’s analogies, but this is his talk on the subject.

http://www.peterkreeft.com/audio/29_lotr_fated-free.htm

 

[curious_cath]

If I can’t escape my fate, if everything’s going to happen the same no matter what I do, then I have no free will, no matter how He experiences it.

Foreknowledge and freedom are not exclusive. All knowledge has a storage from where it can be pulled out. It is called a configuration, because representing the thing the information is about, it maps down the internal relations of that knowledge into its storage place. Our storage are our brains. A neuron configuration in the brain maps down the knowledge you want to recall. Even library systems and computers work similarly.

But God is different. His configuration is His whole creation. He is present in everything in the world. Therefore He leaves our freedom, in particular our freedom of choice between good and evil, intact.

 

[Latin]

Poor logic, attempting to make God the author of your choice and then complaining you don’t have a choice.

If God knows that you are going to commit a crime in 5 minutes, and you go ahead and commit it, how do you NOT have free will? God’s knowledge of your action didn’t make you DO the action; had God somehow ‘not known’ it would not have kept you from doing that very same action. It is not God’s knowledge that causes your action, but your action which is a part of God’s knowledge because of your action.

According to Catholic Soteriology, God is the author/ cause of every our good choices and every our good acts by His provision of His gifts of efficacious graces.

We have a power to reject efficacious graces but we never reject them because God with efficacious graces enlightens our minds and we every time FREELY and INFALLIBLY choose the good willed by God.

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God knows when we will to commit an act of sin, if God wills to permit us the act of sin for the reason to convert our act of sin into a greater good God provides us a sufficient grace to resist sin and we every time INFALLIBLY and FREELY reject His sufficient grace and we every time FREELY commit the act of sin and God converts our sin into a greater good.
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If God wills not to permit us the act of sin, God provides us an efficacious grace to resist sin and we every time INFALLIBLY and FREELY reject the temptation of sin.

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As we see above, God’s graces DOES NOT hinders our FREE WILLS, when we do an act of good by the aides of God’s efficacious graces we do it by the choices of our FREE WILLS.
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When we do an act of sin by freely reject God’s sufficient grace we also FREELY choose to commit an act of sin.

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THE MYSTERY OF PREDESTINATION by John Salza:

Page 121; Fr. Most identifies the metaphysical issue as follows:

Sufficient grace gives man the potency to do good, but do not give the application.

For the application efficacious grace is required to move him from potency to act.

Therefore, sufficient grace is insufficient to move him to act. End quote.
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God bless

 

[otjm]

God is completely outside of time, so there is no such thing as “future” with God’ all is present all at once.

To say God “knows the future” is to put God in time.

We know time, and as that is our experiential knowledge, we project it on God, because we cannot understand “no time” or “all is present at once”.

To say “God knows” implies underneath the statement that God didn’t know before… which is false.

This is a poor analogy: it is like watching a movie, except that instead of a star, middle and end, it all comes at once. We experience time, and choice, as that is the reality God created for us, and we do/think/see/feel/hear in time.

To say that all is present to God at once is not to say that God knows because that is a human construct - knowing, which we do in time.

Your issue of no free will is to make God a puppet master by your term of “knowing”.We are here to seek God and give him praise. There would be no praise if there was no free will, and thus we would have no purpose whatsoever.

The Church teaches we have free will, we make choices and act on them, and the good is praise. If there was no free will, why would we exist - unless you want to make God the puppet master, controlling and directing our very breath.

 

[otjm]

Fate is not a Catholic construct.