6. What Does God Know?

Watch this lesson on YouTube, or listen to it here.

Access the slide deck here. 

Introduction

1) Summary of our last class:

A)   God’s primary desire is the highest moral good: Our freewill choice to love him.

B) Free will demands an option to not love God.

C) This conversation fits within this class on the problem of evil because we are asking why God even created the option for evil and suffering within his creation. The answer is because it would be impossible to have love without the option to not love, which logically demands at least the option for evil and suffering.

What does God know?

The following are (extreme) options for what God knows, especially about the future.

1) Hard Determinism

A)   The future is fixed. Fatalism.

B) Every event, including human thoughts, decisions, and actions, is causally inevitable.

C) There are no genuine alternatives.

D)   There is no libertarian (genuine) free will.

2) Open Theism

A)   The future is not set in stone.

1) The future is branching, or open, depending upon time, chance, and free will.

2) There are multiple real possibilities for how events unfold.

B) God chooses to enter into a dynamic “give-and-take” relationship with creation rather than controlling every outcome.

1) Divine responsiveness – God is a personal, emotional being who genuinely reacts to human actions and prayers. God changes his mind about things and outcomes are not pre-settled.

2) Divine risk – God is a “risk-taker” who allows for the possibility of his will to be thwarted by human choice to achieve a higher goal: a relationship based on love rather than coercion.

C) KEY: God knows all knowable truths, which includes all past and present facts and all future possibilities, but he does NOT know which choice a free agent will make until it’s made.

D)   Libertarian free will cannot coexist with a predetermined future.

What does the Bible say?

1) There are clear deterministic ideas in the Scripture.

A)   The most important is God’s plan of salvation through Jesus.

1) Acts 2:22-28

(a)   v. 23 – “according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God”

(b)   v. 24 – God raised him up according to what God spoke through David in Ps. 16:8-11. This was going to happen no matter what.

2) Acts 4:27-28

3) Acts 13:27

4) Lk. 22:22

5) Matt. 26:20-25

(a)   Jesus’ betrayal by Judas for foreknown.

(b)   v. 24 – “as it is written of him”

B) The whole concept of predictive prophecy implies that things are set.

1) “It is written…”

2) Gen. 15:13-16 – God’s promise to Abraham (even to the extent of the number of years) and the sinful decline and punishment of the Amorites.

3) Gen. 41:29-32 – The seven years of plenty and famine in Pharoah’s dreams were fixed by God.

4) Dan. 2:27-28 – The rise and fall of entire empires.

C) This is where Calvinism and an extreme view of God’s sovereignty are going to camp: God is entirely sovereign and nothing happens that is outside of his will or control.

2) There are other concepts in Scripture that are not compatible with hard determinism.

A)   cf. The free will passages from our last class.

1) Ezek. 18 is one short example.

B) God is responsive to human actions.

1) Gen. 6:6 – “The Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.”

2) Gen. 22:12 – “Now I know that you fear God.”

3) Ex. 32:14 – Moses interceded for Israel, “And the Lord relented from the disaster that he haed spoken of bringing on this people.”

C) God wants all people to choose him and be saved.

1) Jn. 3:16

2) 1 Tim. 2:4

3) 2 Pet. 3:9

4) Rev. 22:17

What is the solution? How can God’s foreknowledge, libertarian free will, and God’s responsiveness all be true at the same time?

1)     Compatibilism

A)   Freedom is compatible with determinism (i.e. they can both be true at the same time).

B) The way this works is by redefining “freedom.”

1) Freedom is NOT the ability to have genuinely chosen otherwise.

(a)   Even if your choice was 100% predetermined, you can still be free according to the new definition of freedom.

2) Freedom IS the ability to act according to one’s own desires and wishes – without external force or coercion stopping you.

(a)   In other words, you are free when you do what you WANT to do even if what you want was itself determined by external factors (God’s design, genes, upbringing, brain chemistry).

C) Sandwich illustration:

1) If you get hungry and eat a sandwich you are free because you did what you desired even though those desires were 100% determined by biology and experience.

2) If someone holds a gun to your head and says, “Eat this sandwich or die,” then you’re not free. That is coercion against your desire.

D)   Compatibilism and the problem of evil:

1) God could have created moral agents who only ever desired and wished for good; and since they would still be acting on their own desires and wishes, then they would be considered free in the compatibilists sense. They have no desire to sin, and no attraction to evil of any kind.

2) This is opposite of the freewill defense (i.e. That God allowed an option of evil because true freedom requires the real possibility of choosing it).

3) The bottom line:

(a)   Evil exists because God created people to want to do evil. Since they are doing what they were created to do, they are freely choosing evil.

(b)   In Calvinism, God created some people (or puts within some people) the desire to come to Jesus for salvation. Since they are doing what they were made to do, they are free.

E) Problem: The Bible describes libertarian free will, and this is not that. This is still pre-programmed people going through the motions of what God created them to do.

2)     Molinism / Middle Knowledge

A)   Luis de Molina (1535-1600) – Spanish Jesuit priest.

B) God has 3 kinds of knowledge:

1) Natural knowledge – Everything that could possibly (i.e. no logical impossibilities) happen.

2) Free knowledge – God’s knowledge of what actually will happen.

3) Middle knowledge (between those two)

(a)   Knowledge of what morally free creatures would freely do in any hypothetical situation or set of circumstances (even ones that never actually occur). God knows “all possible worlds.”

(b)   This answers the question: What would any specific free creature do if placed under any set of possible circumstances?

(c)   Example: If Judas were in circumstance X with temptation Y, he would freely betray Jesus.

(d)   It’s middle because God has this knowledge after natural knowledge, but before free knowledge.

(e)   God used his middle knowledge to decide which world to create.

(i) This is the ultimate intellectual chess move.

(ii)  Imagine God, who is outside of time, standing over his creation (a yard stick). He can see the beginning and the end, and we are somewhere on the stick. God has arranged history in such a way so that the free choices that people make fit into his ultimate plan.

C)   Middle knowledge and the Bible

1) God is absolutely working a plan.

(a)   Is. 46:9-10

(b)   Ps. 139:16

2) But we are still responsible for our choices. This may be one of the biggest distinguishing factors between Molinism and Compatibilism: Human responsibility.

(a)   Gen. 50:20 – “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.”

(b)   Acts 2:23; 4:27-28 – Jesus’ crucifixion was planned, but those who did it were responsible for making the sinful choice.

(c)   Ex. 13:17 – If God would have led Israel by the way of the Philistines, then they would have been afraid and returned to Egypt.

D)   Major takeaways from middle knowledge:

1) God’s omniscience is way bigger than I can even imagine.

2) I have a role to play in God’s big-picture plan; and it is my choice about whether that role is for God’s glory or against God’s will.

E) Middle knowledge and the problem of evil.

1) Molinism helps understand the presence of God and evil in that God is logically constrained by feasibility, or possible worlds.

(a)   A common way to talk about Molinism is the “hand of cards” that God has been dealt. He must work within the libertarian free will choices of his creation.

(b)   God cannot MAKE someone freely choose moral good.

2) It is especially important for our next class when we talk about the evidential / probabilistic problem of evil and gratuitous evil.