I’ve heard it: “Free will means we have the option between receiving God’s grace wholeheartedly and rejecting it. A loving God wants true love from His people, which necessitates the gift of free will.” I also know that God is omniscient and can therefore tell which of His people will follow Him and which will reject Him before they they are even conceived in the womb. In His omnipotence, then, why does He allow such souls with an eternally hateful heart to enter the world? If free will means love, then why does God love us?
This is a great theological question and much has been written on it. There is obviously much mystery involved in it but as Frank Sheed said mysteries are things we can not know everything about, but they are not things that we can know nothing about. It requires contemplation on what we know about the nature of God. Unlike us finite beings God is infinite, eternal, omniscient, immutable and omnipotent. He is not bound by anything including time or space as we are. He is pure existence and eternally present we on the other hand see things on a linear plain, past, present and future.
“As we examine the Mysteries of religion, we discover that the practical result of this effort of the finite to know the Infinite—which is also a determination of the Infinite to be known by the finite—is that any given Mystery resolves itself (for our minds, of course, not in its own reality) into two truths which we cannot see how to reconcile. Sometimes by the revelation of God, sometimes by the hard effort of man’s own mind, we see that each of two things must be so, yet we cannot see why one does not exclude the other. Thus in the Mystery of the Blessed Trinity, we cannot see how God can be Three if He is infinitely One; in the Doctrine of the Incarnation, we cannot see how Christ can be wholly God and at the same time wholly man; in the mystery of our own will, we do not see how its freedom can be reconciled with God’s omniscience; and so with all the other Mysteries of religion. Left to ourselves, we should almost certainly say that there is a conflict, and therefore that both cannot be true; and even if under pressure we reluctantly admit that we cannot absolutely prove that there is contradiction, or exclude the possibility that there might be reconciliation at some point beyond our gaze, yet the point of reconciliation is beyond our gaze; and what lies within our gaze seems for ever irreconcilable.” SHEED
The first thing to say is that this age-old dilemma ultimately remains a mystery, and will continue to do so due to the difference in perspective between the Creator and His creatures. Perhaps we will understand a little more in the next life; perhaps not. What is certain is that we will never understand completely – to do so would be to see things from God’s perspective, and this is simply not possible. The second thing to say is that we cannot deny either our free-will or God’s omnipotence without sliding into further absurdity. Without our freedom, we become mere automatons, incapable of choice and therefore incapable of true love or virtue. Without omnipotence, God is no longer God.
