Omniscience, Foreknowledge, and Freedom

Omniscience — knowing all truths — generates the deepest and most famous tension among the divine attributes: if God knows now, infallibly, everything I will freely do tomorrow, then it seems my doing it is already fixed, and so not free after all. The problem of theological fatalism is the religious twin of the free-will problem: where the secular version pits freedom against causal determinism, this one pits it against infallible foreknowledge. It is the single richest point of contact between the philosophy of religion and the free will section, and it has produced a remarkable repertoire of solutions — Boethian eternity, Ockhamist hard/soft facts, Molinist middle knowledge, and open theism.

This page formalises the foreknowledge argument, then surveys the five classic responses, keeping the focus on the coherence of the attribute (the agency side is developed under free will).

The foreknowledge dilemma

Nelson Pike's sharpened version (1965) of a problem going back to Boethius and Augustine. Suppose God is essentially omniscient and that he believed eighty years ago that you would do $A$ today. Then:

1. God believed at $t_1$ (eighty years ago) that you would do $A$ at $t_2$ (today). (omniscient foreknowledge)
2. God is essentially infallible — if God believes $p$, then $p$. So God's past belief cannot have been mistaken.
3. It is now too late to do anything about what God believed at $t_1$ — the past is fixed, beyond anyone's power to change. (fixity of the past)
4. If you were able to refrain from $A$ at $t_2$, you would be able either to make God's past belief false, or to make it the case that God did not hold it, or that God was not infallible — but (2) and (3) rule all three out.
5. Therefore you are not able to refrain from $A$: you cannot do otherwise.
6. So you do not do $A$ freely.

The structure exactly mirrors the Consequence Argument: a transfer of the fixity of the past across an entailment to the fixity of the present action. Here the role of "the past plus the laws" is played by "God's past infallible belief." Crucially the threat is epistemic/logical, not causal — God's foreknowledge need not cause your act; the mere existence of an infallible prior belief seems enough to remove the ability to do otherwise. (For the same reason, the argument is a species of logical/theological fatalism, distinct from causal determinism.)

The responses

1. Deny the past belief is a "hard fact" — Ockhamism

William of Ockham's strategy attacks premise 3's application. Distinguish:

• Hard facts about a time — facts wholly about that time, genuinely over and done with (e.g. "the sun rose at dawn"). These are accidentally necessary, beyond anyone's power.
• Soft facts — facts about a past time that are partly about the future, whose truth depends on what happens later (e.g. "eighty years ago, it was true that you would do $A$ today").

Ockham argues God's past belief about your future free act is a soft fact: its obtaining depends on what you will freely do, so it is not "over and done with" in the way a hard fact is. Hence you can do otherwise — not by changing the past, but because, had you been going to do otherwise, God would always have believed that instead. Your present freedom has a kind of "counterfactual power" over God's past belief (a backtracking dependence, not backward causation). The challenge (Plantinga, Fischer's "Ockhamism" debate) is to give a principled hard/soft fact distinction that classifies God's belief as soft without trivialising — a notoriously difficult task.

2. Take God out of time — Boethian eternity

Boethius (and Aquinas) deny premise 1's tensed framing. God is timeless: God does not foreknow anything, because God is not in time at all. From his eternal "now," God sees all of history — past, present, and future to us — in a single timeless present, as a watcher on a hill sees the whole road at once while travellers on it pass point by point. God's knowledge of your act is therefore not earlier than the act; there is no past belief to be fixed, so premise 3 has nothing to grip. Boethius: God's knowledge is of things "present to him," and "if you will weigh the foreknowledge by which God discerns all things, you will more rightly deem it to be knowledge of a never-failing present than foreknowledge of the future."

Objections: (a) it relocates rather than removes the problem — if God timelessly knows you do $A$, your doing $A$ is still fixed relative to that infallible knowledge (the "eternity" version of the dilemma); (b) it requires the contested doctrine of divine timelessness, with its own difficulties about how a timeless being acts and knows the changing present.

3. Middle knowledge — Molinism

Luis de Molina's ingenious account posits, between God's natural knowledge (of necessary truths) and free knowledge (of what he decrees), a middle knowledge (scientia media): God's pre-volitional knowledge of all true counterfactuals of freedom — propositions of the form "if creature $S$ were in circumstances $C$, $S$ would freely do $A$." Knowing all such conditionals and which circumstances he will actualise, God knows infallibly what every free creature will do, without causing it and without the act being unfree: the truth-maker of God's knowledge is the creature's own (libertarian-free) counterfactual disposition. Molinism is powerful — it also underwrites accounts of providence and grace — and is defended today by Flint and Craig.

Its central difficulty is the grounding objection (Adams, Hasker): what makes the counterfactuals of freedom true, prior to the creature's existing or choosing? If a libertarian-free choice is genuinely undetermined, there seems to be no fact — not the agent, not the circumstances — to ground a determinate truth about what the agent would freely do in a merely possible situation. If there is no such truth-maker, there is no middle knowledge to have.

4. Deny there are truths to know — open theism

Open theism (Hasker, Swinburne, Pinker, Boyd) bites a different bullet: it limits omniscience by redefining it. God knows all truths, but — if the future is genuinely open — there are no truths yet about what free creatures will undetermined-ly do (future contingents lack a truth-value, or are all false). So God's not knowing them is no imperfection: omniscience is knowing everything knowable, and unsettled futures are not there to be known. God knows all possibilities and probabilities and is supremely intelligent in responding, but takes genuine risks. This dissolves the dilemma (no infallible foreknowledge of the free act exists) at the cost of classical omniscience and exhaustive providence — and it presupposes libertarian free will plus an open-future (non-bivalent) metaphysics. Critics charge it gives up too much of the God of classical theism and struggles with prophecy.

5. Accept the conclusion — theological compatibilism

Finally, one may grant that infallible foreknowledge is incompatible with the ability to do otherwise but deny that such ability is required for freedom — the move of compatibilism and especially semicompatibilism. If freedom is acting on one's own reasons-responsive mechanism (guidance control) rather than having genuine alternatives, then God's foreknowledge — which removes alternatives but not self-governance — leaves freedom and responsibility intact. This is the natural home for theists who are already compatibilists about determinism, and it connects the foreknowledge debate directly to the Frankfurt-case attack on the alternative-possibilities condition.

A map of the options

The five responses can be sorted by which premise of Pike's argument they reject:

Where omniscience sits

The foreknowledge problem shows that omniscience cannot be assessed apart from the theory of free will: the argument is structurally the Consequence Argument with "God's prior infallible belief" in place of "the past plus the laws," and the menu of escapes maps onto the broader free-will menu. A theist's choice here is largely forced by commitments elsewhere — a libertarian who wants exhaustive providence is pushed toward Molinism or eternity; one willing to limit providence takes open theism; a compatibilist simply denies that foreknowledge threatens the freedom worth having. None of the options is cost-free, which is why this remains the liveliest of the attribute debates. It also feeds the problem of evil (a God who foreknew every horror and created anyway faces the sharpest form of the question) and the coherence-of-theism capstone. The companion tensions — whether a timeless God can know "what time it is now," and whether omniscience conflicts with immutability — are taken up next.