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Written in the attempt to reconcile free will and divine Omniscience
in everyday language. |
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Have you ever
wondered how you can be responsible for your decisions if God knows what you’re going
to decide beforehand? If God already knows
whether or not I’m going to lose my temper tomorrow, what choice do I have in it? How can I be guilty for any of my sin if I never
had any say-so in it? In the Bible, it’s
very clear that we are responsible for our own
actions, so there must be some way out of this dilemma.
One possible solution
is the idea that God doesn’t see time like we do.
We think of time as having three different parts. There’s the Past: That’s every moment—today, yesterday, or
years and years ago--that has ever existed before this very instant. The choices and decisions that lie in the past have
already been made, we may or may not know about them, and there’s no way for us to
change them. Then there’s the Present: The Present is right now, the moment that divides
the Future from the Past. When one of our
decisions lies in the Present, we’re in the act of making that decision. It doesn’t seem that we’ve already
decided the matter; instead, every possible option lies open before us, and we can go down
whatever path we choose. We don’t already
know what the outcome of our decisions in the Present will be, not until we finish
deciding. Lastly, there’s the Future: The Future is what has not yet come to pass. We don’t know much about what will happen in
the Future because none of it has happened yet. We
don’t know the outcome of our decisions in the Future because we haven’t yet
made those decisions.
But maybe God
doesn’t have a Past, Present, and Future. Maybe,
for God, all of time is just one big Now. What
I mean is that God might see all history—Past, Present, and Future—like we can
see all the different scenes on a movie film when it’s unwound from the video-tape
and stretched out before us. If our field of
vision was wide enough, then we could see the very first frame of an unwound movie film at
the same time as the very last, and we’d also see all the hundreds of frames in the
middle. Would it be possible to say which one
particular frame was in the Present? Or would
it make sense to choose any one particular scene of the movie as the one that was
happening right “now”? No, of course
not, because every single frame on the movie
reel would be before our eyes at the exact same time!
Maybe God sees time like that. There’s
not a yesterday, a today, and a tomorrow. He
sees all three days together, and He actually watches us making all of our “tomorrow”
decisions at the same time he watches our “yesterday.” That would explain how He knows all about the
Future when we can only know about the Present and the Past.
This would mean that God doesn’t actually make our decisions in the Future for us; instead,
he watches us make them. So we’re the ones responsible for our actions,
not God.
The question we’ve
been talking about has bothered a lot of people for hundreds of years of history (even
though the idea discussed here had already been put forth back then), so it’s nice to
have a workable answer without just saying, “We’ll find out in the afterlife.” This may not be the right answer, of course; but,
then again, it might be. At the least, it
gives us the possibility of an answer, so that nobody can say he’s sure that he’s
not responsible for his actions just because God already knows about them. And at least nobody can use God’s knowledge of
the Future to prove that God Himself has already decided what we’re going to do in
every one of our choices. |
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