What is the difference between divine predestination and divine foreknowledge

How much does he know? There are a number of ways this might be done. The last of the four also stands out as not only being a non-comparative account, but as the only analysis which does not state that it is necessary for an omniscient being to have knowledge. Rather it is sufficient to be omniscient if one has a significant degree of power to have knowledge. In spite of an initial feeling of piety that might accompany embracing this definition, it should be rejected.

Recall what knowledge is. It requires at a minimum holding what is true. Since it is false it cannot be known by anyone, especially God who most think could not even believe something that is false let alone know it. According to this clause, God knows a lot—in fact he knows all that could possibly be known. This is a very strong version of omniscience and in all likelihood has been the one most widely held among theists. On this interpretation, God knows all the present truths and all truths of the past and future.

God also knows the propositions that must be true or are merely possibly true. Many have proposed iii [i. But as Edward Wierenga has pointed out, adding this clause in iii is at least redundant and possibly incoherent 39 for it seems to presuppose it is possible that for someone to know all true propositions and yet have a false belief.

Suppose that God could. If God knew all true propositions, he would know that he believed some false proposition. But it may not be coherent to both know p and know that you believe not-p. Yet even if this is coherent, says Wierenga, the additional clause about God not having false beliefs can be shown to be redundant.

Presumably God has deductive cognitive faculties. Now if God both knows p and believes not-p , then God believes a contradiction, and anything whatsoever can be validly deduced from a contradiction. So if God did know p and believed not-p , God would deduce all propositions from this and believe everything.

But this seems impossible. Although holding this definition is consistent with believing that God knows all true propositions, it leaves open the possibility that God does not know everything.

Those that prefer this analysis of omniscience think that there are some propositions that likely God does not know. But there are questions about whether or not God could know haeccities of persons or objects other than God Rosenkrantz, Another set of propositions that God may not know are propositions about causally undetermined, future events.

Examples are random events at the quantum level or free creaturely actions. Whether or not God has knowledge of the future will be discussed below. It should be reiterated that proponents of this limited view of omniscience still want to maintain that omniscience can be characterized quite sufficiently as a comparative notion.

They are not denying that God is omniscient. They simply think that omniscience need not be thought of as necessarily having knowledge of every true proposition. True, it may seem strange that God learns things. Nevertheless, they insist, no one who exists knows as much as God.

God still knows a lot more than anyone else. This definition is also compatible with the second non-comparative definition above having knowledge of all true propositions and proponents of this definition typically think that God does not know all true propositions. But this analysis is stronger than the previous comparative analysis i because it states that God knows everything that any being could possibly know.

But at least since the time of Anselm, God is thought of not only as the greatest actual being, but the greatest possible being. As such it should be the case that God has knowledge which no one could possibly surpass. Note that both i and ii state that no one can know as much as God but they allow for the possibility that there can be more than one omniscient being.

But most theists are uncomfortable with this possibility and iii rules this out. In support of iii a theist could appeal to the doctrine of divine simplicity, the doctrine that God is perfectly simple as mentioned above. But if the doctrine is embraced, it seems to be incompatible with analyses i and ii. For if God is the greatest possible being, and God is the greatest in virtue of having the great-making attributes of omniscience, omnibenevolence, and so forth, which turn out to all be identical with each other and with God , then it is impossible that any other being have omniscience, for to be omniscient is to be identical with God.

The concept of omniscience, it is thought, is only a concept about what God is able to do and not about what he knows.

One virtue of this view for Christian theists is that it may provide resources for making sense of how Jesus was God even though he seemed to grow in knowledge and wisdom during his life on earth. If to be omniscient, it is sufficient to have a superior kind of cognitive power without thereby exercising that power, Jesus could be said to be divine even though he did not fully exercise his power to know many things.

In becoming a man, Jesus relinquished the full exercise of his omnipotence and with it his vast knowledge, nevertheless retaining his power. This position of course leaves one with the curiosity that one can be a human and be omniscient, but perhaps this can be defended.

Furthermore, there is a question about whether omniscience is an attribute of only God considered as a complete substance or an attribute of each person. If God knows that some event E will happen in the future, there is a sense in which E must happen. But if God knows the future exhaustively, then it seems as if the entire future is fixed and humans are not genuinely free See Foreknowledge and Freewill.

On the other hand, if creatures are free and act indeterminately then it may be that God cannot know what exactly his creatures will do and this lack of knowledge may limit his providential care for them.

There have been many ways of trying to hold on to all three and sometimes the attempts end up diminishing the extent of one at the expense of another.

After the argument is presented, four types of foreknowledge which are modeled after human cognitive faculties will be explained as responses to the argument. The following argument is about a fictional person, Ryan, who we are to imagine freely refrains from watching TV on his day off from work. A worry is that if God knows what he will do ahead of time, then Ryan is not really free to refrain from watching TV. Even though this is a fictional account, one can see that if this argument is right it would additionally apply to real people and could be generalized to show that either no one is ever free, or God is not omniscient since he does not have foreknowledge.

One way to challenge the conclusion of the IOF argument is to reject the clause in the first premise that God is essentially in time. Boethius is a good representative of this contingent of philosophers and is one of the earliest philosophers to devote much thought to the question of how God knows the future. God is able to know the future because of the way that God exists, eternally. That which grasps and possesses the entire fullness of a life that has no end at one and the same time nothing that is to come being absent to it, nothing of what has passed having flowed away from it is rightly held to be eternal.

God is not like humans who exist wholly at each finite moment in time and endure through time. Thus by being eternal, the future is not off in the distance for God but is subsumed under his eternal presence.

Foreknowledge is a simple awareness of the future, not involving any complex deductive or inductive reasoning. Still, there are other worries besides how to make sense of the way an immaterial being perceives. For one, there are problems about what kinds of propositions God could be justified in believing from his vantage point.

But God could not know this latter kind of tensed proposition. This is because these kinds of statements describe events relative to the time they are spoken, written, or in general, expressed by creatures. All tensed propositions will be reduced to tenseless propositions. Defenders of Boethius argue that tense is a creaturely fiction; tensed statements only express psychological attitudes but nothing about time itself.

As such, there is nothing that God fails to know since time is not really composed of a real past, present, and future. But this debate is yet to be settled. If I am now typing while my wife is writing, and my wife is writing while my daughters are now playing, then I am now typing while my daughters are now playing. For God, I am now typing while he is now seeing me type, and God is now seeing me type while he is seeing Rome burn.

But this means that I am now typing while Rome is burning! This seems absurd. If the perceptual view is right, it would seem that God is taking a very large risk in creating. This is because his creative activity must be in some sense prior to his knowledge of his creation—for he cannot be said to know the happenings in the world if it does not exist!

In other words, God creates the whole world all at once—past, present, and future—then sees the world from his atemporal vantage point. Thus God runs a risk of creating a world in which tremendous evil occurs. If God creates the world logically prior to his knowing about the world, then it appears that God learns about what he creates. But to learn of what he creates is for God to change.

At least two things could be said in response to this charge. First, typically since at least the time of Aristotle , a change has been thought of as the acquisition or loss of a property from one time to another.

But since God is atemporal, there is no time in which he gains or loses a property. His creation is logically prior to his knowledge, but not temporally prior. Of course, this response hinges crucially on the notion of logical priority—if some sense can be made of it and it can be separated from temporal priority then this objection seems to have been met.

A second response is to concede that God has changed, but retort that this kind of change does not affect the doctrine of divine immutability. God does not change with regard to his moral character, but can change in other ways.

This response would weaken the doctrine of immutability as it has traditionally been held. Being free is compatible with being determined. Some DK advocates also reject the idea that God is temporal.

Both the temporal and atemporal versions are discussed below. The basic idea is relatively simple. According to DK, God is completely in control of the unfolding of time including everything that happens in the future.

This is because he predestines the future. Since the future is determined by God, once God initiates his plan for the future, necessarily, his plan unfolds and there is no possibility of any divergence from the plan. Thus, once God knows his plan and initiates it, God can deduce any event which follows from it because he knows either self-evidently or a priori , 1 the plan prior to its unfolding, 2 that he wants it to unfold, and knows 3 that God gets exactly what he wants.

The DK view is consistent with both an atemporal understanding of God as well as a temporal one. On the atemporal view, God is outside of time and determines the world via one eternal act. Since God is outside of time there is no prior time when God formulates and initiates a plan.

So God deduces, logically prior to his one eternal act, everything that will occur given his plan and his intent to create the future. The temporal view is basically the same. God knows his plan, that he wants it, and that he will get it if he wants it. The only difference is that God has always known this in his infinite temporal existence. God is everlasting and his knowledge of the future is not only logically prior to the future but is temporally prior to the future as well.

God deduces what will happen both logically and temporally prior to the future occurrences. Since God causes the future by bringing about his perfect plan, there are no surprises like there seem to be if God knows the future via perception.

The model also has a clear way of explaining how God knows, namely by deduction—an infallible guide to a conclusion. So the most substantive objections to this model of knowledge are not epistemological, rather they are metaphysical. One fairly obvious worry is that this view relies on a very tenuous view of freedom, namely that freedom is compatible with determinism. But for many this sounds crazy. What could be any less free than being wholly determined? Another problem is that it seems that God is the author of not only the good and redemptive acts in the world, but also pain, suffering, and in general, all the evil.

Although this problem of evil is something that all theists must deal with, it is particularly difficult for the determinist. A defender of DK will either want to argue that this is the best world God could create, or that even if we cannot show that it is, there may be reasons of which we are unaware for why God permits so much evil. Middle knowledge or as it is often called, Molinism, after the 16th century Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina, is also a deductive model See Middle Knowledge.

Like the previous two models, Molinism is not committed to the idea that God is essentially in time. However, Molinists want to maintain a strong view of human freedom and reject the idea that human freedom is compatible with determinism. Their response to the IOF argument is to show that it is invalid because God can know the future, whether in time or not, and humans can still be significantly free.

More will be said below to flesh out precisely how they would respond. God also has free knowledge. But the Molinist account of how some of this free knowledge is arrived at is different than the account given by some DK advocates who allow that the future is contingent. It is contingently true and not necessarily true that Adam eats the fruit only because it is possible that God determine Adam not to eat the fruit. But middle knowledge is like free knowledge in that the truths of middle knowledge are contingent and not necessary.

Natural Knowledge: It is possible that Eve and a snake are created in a garden and possible that Eve will freely choose to eat the fruit. Middle knowledge: If Eve were in the garden in the circumstances in which a serpent tempts her to eat fruit, then Eve would freely choose to eat the fruit after being placed in these circumstances. Free knowledge: God creates Eve in the garden in the circumstances in which a serpent tempts her to eat the fruit.

She said she was so worried why you just suddenly disappear without informing her. She said she would want you to go back home for a dinner. You would love to go home and tell your mum how beautiful this has turned out to be. You cannot wait for that. But as it turns out, you cannot open the door.

Now Locke is asking us. The first condition of human freedom is satisfied. That means you love to stay in the room because of Jun Vu. But, are you really free? There is something that is missing. And this something is, according to Locke, for a human to be genuinely free, he has to have an ability to do otherwise. This is with this idea of freedom that we will be working on when we consider the problem of divine foreknowledge.

When you say X is compatible with Y, you are effectively saying X and Y can co-exist. When you say X is incompatible with Y, you are effectively saying X and Y cannot co-exist. So when you ask whether divine foreknowledge is compatible with human freedom, you are effectively asking whether the two of them are able to co-exist.

Some may say no. Because when you say God is omniscient, that means he knows everything even before we were born. You move on to ask how can he know everything even before we were born.

Some may say it is because he has ordained everything to be in a certain way, that is why he can know everything even before we were born. The idea is this you will reduce the idea of divine foreknowledge to the idea of divine predestination.

And when you do that, the idea of human free, as I have explained earlier, will be a delusion. However, there is a better way to account for the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom.

When you have a telescope, it helps you to see star in the distant galaxy. You just know how the star is going to move, but the movement of the star is not caused by you. So, does it mean that the problem of incompatibility between divine foreknowledge and human freedom has been solved?

If the problem is so easy to be solved, I will not be writing a lengthy post like this. So please bear with me, you will find this argument is really interesting. That means, if God has foreknowledge, it is not in our power to do otherwise Lockean concept of human freedom.

Premise 1 God is omniscient, he knows before we were born everything we will do Premise 2 If God knows before we were born everything we will do, it is not in our power to do otherwise Premise 3 If it is not in our power to do otherwise, there is no human freedom Premise 4 Therefore, there is no human freedom.

God is omniscient and he knows before we were born everything we will do. There is nothing to quarrel over here. Premise 3 If it is not in our power to do otherwise, there is no human freedom.

This is the implication of Lockean account of human freedom that we have already discussed above. The true, more philosophically loaded concept of freedom is our ability to do otherwise. If it is not in our power to do otherwise, clearly, we are not free in a philosophically significant sense. Foreknowledge can be thought to be compatible with our foreedom to do otherwise because God is not causing anything to happen.

In order to derive at the conclusion, we need to defend premise 2. Now, this is when the argument gets tricky. Why should we believe in premise 2.

What reason can be given in supporting the truth of premise 2. As a philosophically oriented person as you are, you value knowledge above romantic relationship. You think for a while. As a matter of fact, you go for the class on philosophy. Now at 2. You have already regretted your decision. You miss your bae so much. About the best we can do in English is to create the following unidiomatic, extremely clumsy sentence:.

English prose is a poor tool for expressing fine logical distinctions just as it is an unsuitable tool for expressing fine mathematical distinctions [ 3 ]. But, as it turns out, the situation is worse than just having to make do with awkward sentences. For it is a curious fact about most natural languages — English, French, Hebrew, etc.

Just see how natural it is to try to formulate the preceding point [namely proposition 1 ] in this fashion:.

In ordinary speech, the latter sentence, 2 , is natural and idiomatic; the former sentence 1b is unnatural and unidiomatic. But — and this is the crucial point — the propositions expressed by 1 - 1b are not equivalent to the propositions expressed by sentences 2 - 2a.

The former set, that is 1 - 1b , are all true. The latter, 2 - 2a are false and commit the modal fallacy. Ordinary grammar beguiles us and misleads us. Recall the principle of the fixity of modal status.

See 1b above. Some persons have been deceived by the following fallacious argument to the effect that there are no contingent propositions:. That is, there are no contingent propositions. Every proposition is either necessarily true or necessarily false. Contingency is simply an artifact of ignorance. Contingency disappears with complete knowledge. The fallacy arises in the ambiguity of the first premise. If we interpret it close to the English, we get:.

However, if we regard the English as misleading, as assigning a necessity to what is simply nothing more than a necessary condition, then we get instead as our premises:. In short, the argument to the effect that there are no contingent propositions is unsound. Its very first premise commits the modal fallacy. The identical error occurs in the argument for logical determinism. If A is true, then A cannot be false.

If A is true, then B cannot be true. If B is true, then B cannot be false. If B is true, then A cannot be true. In this argument, by hypothesis, either A is true or B is true, and since they cannot both be true, the second premise may be accepted as true. But none of the conclusions is true. A is contingent, and B is contingent. Yet the conclusions state that from the assumed truth of either of the two contingencies A or B, it follows that A and B are each either necessarily true or necessarily false.

Each of these eight conclusions violates the principle of the fixity of modal status. What, then, are the conclusions one may draw validly from the premises? But the profound difference between these two assertions is that the former preserves the principle of the fixity of modal status, the latter violates that principle. Indeed this is a trivial logical truth:. The argument for logical determinism illicitly treats this logical truth as if it were equivalent to the false proposition.

The truth of a proposition concerning your future behavior does not make that future behavior necessary. What you choose to do in the future was, is, and will remain contingent, even if a proposition describing that choice is timelessly true. There seems to be at least one missing premise. So the argument becomes:. But even with this repair, the argument remains invalid. The conclusion does not follow from the two premises. To derive the conclusion, a third premise is needed, and it is easy to see what it is.

But this third premise, we have seen above, is false; it commits the modal fallacy. Either way, the argument is a logical botch. Once the logical error is detected, and removed, the argument for epistemic determinism simply collapses. Inasmuch as its description was, is, and will remain forever contingent , both it and its negation remain possible. Of course only one of the two was, is, and will remain true; while the other was, is, and will remain false. Whether true or false, each of these propositions was, is, and will remain possible.

Knowing — whether by God or a human being — some future event no more forces that event to occur than our learning that dinosaurs lived in what is now South Dakota forced those reptiles to take up residence there.

It will sometimes happen that persons will painstakingly follow each of the steps of the preceding arguments that expose the modal fallacy in logical and epistemic determinism and still harbor lingering worries that the truth or knowledge of future contingents precludes the very possibility of free will.

Were I do something else instead, in effect not do Z on Tuesday, then I would change, from true to false, the truth-value that a proposition had on Monday. But that is impossible. Thus, tomorrow, my considering the alternatives — my deliberating over my course of action, my trying to make up my mind what I will choose, my trying to exercise free will — is really just an illusion. Changing the past, present, or future : The past is fixed. One cannot undo what has happened although one can, of course, try to mitigate the consequences of wrongful acts — by apologizing, making amends, etc.

Epstein, , pp. Such prayers were regarded as blasphemous since they were taken to be supplications to God that He change the past from the way it was. But not even an omnipotent God can violate the logical principle of the law of non-contradiction. And yet, God-fearing persons frequently do utter such prayers. How natural it is, for example, for Believers, when knowing that their child was on board a particular ship, and learning that the ship has met a terrible calamity and sunk — with some passengers being lost and some others being rescued — to pray to God that their child is among the survivors.

Is there any way to rationalize such behavior and render it non-blasphemous? Modern modal logic again comes to the rescue. Remember, on traditional accounts, God is along with being all-good omniscient and omnipotent. God, being omniscient, will have known, since the beginning of time, that the parents would pray at such and such a time for the survival of their child.

On this view, God is not changing the past at all; God is making the past one particular way among the infinite number of different ways it could have been. One must attend to the modalities. It is, quite the contrary: it is the parents praying of their own free will that God have saved their child from death that moves God to do have done as he did. Similar freedoms and constraints apply to the present.

On pain of inconsistency, one cannot change what is happening at this very moment. In some circumstances, and in a certain sense, one can change what is about to happen next that is, in the immediate future. But one cannot change what is happening now that is, at this very moment.

What about the future? Most of us believe that we can, to a certain extent, change or affect the future. If the future will be what it is going to be, how can we change it? But I can change the future from what it might have been. I may carefully consider the appearance of my garden, and after a bit of thought, mulling over a few alternatives, I decide to cut down the apple tree. By so doing, I change the future from what it might have been.

But I do not change it from what it will be. Indeed, by my doing what I do, I contribute — in a small measure — to making the future the very way it will be. I can only change the present from the way it might have been, from the way it would have been were I not doing what I am doing right now. And finally, I cannot change the past from the way it was.

In the past, I changed it from what it might have been, from what it would have been had I not done what I did. We cannot — on pain of logical contradiction — change the world from the way it was, is, or will be.

Suppose that tomorrow, by the exercise of my free will, I wash the family car. In doing so, I make the future just what it was to be. But it was to be that way rather than some other just because I will exercise my free will tomorrow.

In exercising my free will tomorrow to wash the family car have I retroactively changed the past? Have I changed the truth-value of some proposition from true to false and of some other proposition from false to true? Semantic relations are not causal relations : Again, the English language confuses us.

Causal relations occur between two events or occurrences, or states. The event of my washing the car brings about the state or the event that lasts several days of my car being clean. The proposition that I wash the car tomorrow that is, on such-and-such a date simply describes what happens tomorrow.

If I do wash the car tomorrow, then that proposition was, is, and forever will be, true. If I do not wash the car tomorrow, then that same proposition was, is, and always will be false.

Consider the proposition which is still being debated by scientists that the dinosaurs on earth perished as a result of an impact of a huge meteor at Chicxulub, on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, about 65 million years ago. If there was such an impact, and if it caused the demise of the dinosaurs, then the proposition is true or, more specifically, always was, is, and always will be true.

Every actual event has a timelessly true description. About Clarke Morledge. My buddy, Mike Scott, snapped this photo of me on the summit. View all posts by Clarke Morledge. This entry was posted on Monday, February 3rd, at pm and tagged with election , foreknowledge , golden chain of redemption , predestination and posted in Topics.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2. Tenacity: John C. Whitcomb ». Claude Mariottini February 3rd, at pm Clarke, Good videos. Claude Mariottini Like Like. Clarke Morledge February 3rd, at pm Thank you, Dr. Calvinism cannot answer these questions, so there must be a better answer.

Clarke Morledge February 5th, at pm Great question, Jerry. Jerry Like Like. Clarke Morledge February 6th, at am These are very helpful reflections, Jerry. Thank you. Jerry Dearmon February 6th, at pm Clarke, Thanks for the clarification.

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