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Can we have free will if God is All-Knowing?

The questions we must first ask in relation to our question:

  1. Can an outcome be set if you can freely choose what you do?

  2. What bounds God to be unable to know what we will freely do?

  3. Is freewill a definite fact or could it be an illusion?

The idea that God knows exactly what will happen in the future seems to contradict the idea that we have the ability to choose our actions freely, resulting in either God not being all-knowing or us not being able to act freely.

 

While it could be argued that we are only free to think and act in scenarios based on our personal experience (which would make our actions entirely predictable), if we assume that we are truly free to think and act, then the only limiting factor that would prevent God from knowing the future is time.


God, however, is not limited to a linear progression of time like we are (He is timeless), making it possible to know exactly what we will do whilst still giving us free will. A good analogy of this is a recorded football match:

If you were to record a football match and find out the score of the match before watching it, when you come to watch the match later, the players you watch are still playing freely despite the outcome of the game already being known and set.

Conclusion

Just as our human experience makes it difficult for us to comprehend the idea of timeless observations, it could also be true that our understanding is insufficient to know the mystery of God’s omniscience and how it interacts with free will. Nonetheless, with God being timeless, it is logical to conclude that He knows the future just as we can know the past.

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