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Is divine omniscience compatible with human freewill?
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Is Divine Omniscience compatible with human freewill? The two most basic parts of the definition of God is that he is all powerful and all knowing, or omnipotent and omniscient. This essay will focus on the classical definition of God’s omniscience and the problems that this definition creates for human free-will theory. I will outline both definitions and the problems they mutually create for each other, some alternative views of God’s omniscience and also alternative views of human free-will, I will then suggest solutions to the problems from both sides of the argument and then conclude if they are compatible The most basic definition of divine omniscience is that God knows everything, and that everything he knows is a true fact, that god has a complete and ultimate knowledge of everything. This means that God’s knowledge is based on the true reality of the universe. Many theists hold that the reason God knows everything in the universe is because he created it, while others say that God’s creation or non-creation of the universe is moot as the very definition of God entails that he knows everything that is true. Most theorists imply that God cannot know absolutely everything, his knowledge is constrained by logic. He cannot know for example that 2+2=5 as this would be a logical impossibility. Logic is held to be a universally accessible and unilaterally applicable truth to all entities, and as such is a necessary limit on God’s knowledge. This means that God cannot know something that is false, as his knowledge is only of the truth. Because God seems to have limits on his omniscience, a basically limitless concept, it begs the question as to what other limits he has and one of the most personally pertinent is what limits his omniscience has with respect to human freewill. In order to examine this relationship I must first examine human free-will theory. The theory of origination holds that human beings are capable of creating new causal chains by utilising their free will to make choices. The traditional doctrine of free-will or libertarianism holds that these are genuine causal chains that have the same sort of effect as any other chain. This means that unlike random events or inanimate, soulless objects that are merely links in a determined chain, human beings are capable of making their own legitimate choices. The problem that traditional free will creates for divine omniscience and vice versa is that one cannot exist as stated if the other is true. This is because part of the theistic definition of omniscience is that God knows the events of the future, and because God only knows truth that these events have truth-value. This means that God’s knowledge of the future determines and fixes these events as true and hence that humans have no ability to change these events, as humanity is merely part of God’s causal chain. For example if God knows that I will not go to my philosophy of religion lecture tomorrow, and will instead go drinking, this is a true fact and I have no ability to change this pre-determined future, as this truth will have already existed in the past and I am unable to change the past.
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