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Dr. William Lane Craig
Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig today. The Doctrine of God, Part 14. For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonablefaith.org now, the study
of divine omniscience, as I explained last time, involves two questions, two problems which
are very much discussed and which we
want to now address ourselves.
And. And the first of these is the
famous question of divine foreknowledge and human freedom.
And the objection arises here that if
God knows in advance everything that happens,
every choice that you will ever make, then isn't everything fated to occur? For example, if God knows in advance and predicts that Peter will deny Christ three times, then when the time arrives, isn't Peter fated to deny Christ three times?
Isn't it necessary that Peter deny Christ three times?
How could he do anything else, since God knows and has predicted that he
would do so and God cannot err? It would seem if Peter could do
anything else, that then God could be mistaken, which is impossible. So doesn't it follow from God's complete foreknowledge of the future that fatalism is
true, that everything that happens happens necessarily?
Well, some Christian theologians agree with this.
Martin Luther, for example, believed that in virtue of divine foreknowledge of the future, there is no human free will, that human freedom is illusory. Others in the Reformed theological tradition have
said that God's foreknowledge of the future
is based upon his foreordination of everything, because God foreordains unilaterally everything that will ever happen. Then, of course, by knowing his own
will and his omnipotent ability to bring
about whatever he ordains, God thereby knows that the future.
So on these views, there really is no human freedom to do otherwise.
Everything that happens necessarily,
even the fall
of man into sin, on this view,
since it was foreknown by God, happens necessarily and therefore is part of what
God has foreordained to happen. But.
But this, I think, is a serious theological mistake.
If we say that everything that happens necessarily in virtue of God's foreordination, then that makes God the author of sin. It means that man falls into sin
because this is what God ordains to
happen unilaterally, and man couldn't possibly have done otherwise. And that would make God the author of sin, which would seem to make God himself evil. And so this equation between divine foreknowledge of the future and divine foreordination of the future is one, I think, that we ought not to accept.
So how then could we defend the
Compatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom.
Well, I think in the first place,
we want to break that equation between foreknowing something and foreordaining something.
Those are not the same things. God knows in advance all of the choices that people will freely make.
But that doesn't mean that he determines those choices.
In fact, quite the opposite.
If we want to speak of determination,
it's the choices that determine what God foreknows, not vice versa. It's not that because God foreknows you
will determine do something that you do it.
It's because you will do it that God foreknows it. So if there's any determination going on here, it's the event that determines what God foreknows, not that what God foreknows determines the event. And in understanding this, I think it's very helpful to distinguish between two types of priority. Chronological priority, which would be something being earlier in time.
If something is chronologically prior to something else, it is earlier than it in time.
And then logical priority, where something is explanatorily prior to something else. And these are not the same thing. Something can be logically prior to something
else without being chronologically prior to it.
And I think that's exactly what we
have in the case of divine foreknowledge and the events foreknown by God.
Chronologically, God's foreknowledge comes before the event.
First, God foreknows it, then the event occurs. So the foreknowledge is chronologically prior to the event foreknown.
But logically the event is prior to the foreknowledge. God's foreknowledge is what it is because the event is what it is. It is because you will choose pizza for lunch. That God foreknows is not that you eat pizza for lunch because God foreknows it. That's to confuse chronological with logical priority. So as long as we understand and that the object of God's foreknowledge is
logically prior to what he foreknows, it doesn't really matter that God's foreknowledge is chronologically prior to the event foreknown.
What that means is that if the event were to be different, then God's
foreknowledge would be different. And those of you who have been
with us the last few weeks will recognize there a subjunctive conditional, right? If the event were different, then God's
foreknowledge would have been different.
You will choose pizza for lunch. Let's suppose. But you don't have to.
You're free to choose something else. If you choose Panda Express instead, then God will foreknow that.
So if you were to choose Panda Express, God would have foreknown that instead
of knowing that you will eat pizza for lunch today.
So God's foreknowledge tracks your choices like an infallible barometer. The barometer doesn't determine the weather. Even though chronologically the reading of the
barometer may be first.
The barometer infallibly tracks what the weather will be. In the same way, God's foreknowledge infallibly tracks your choices. And if your choices were to be
different, then God's foreknowledge would have been different. Different.
And thus God's foreknowledge doesn't prejudice anything. When the time comes, you are completely
free to do something other than what you will do.
It's just that if you were to
do that other thing, then God's foreknowledge would have been different instead.
But God's knowledge of the future doesn't
fade anything to occur. I mean, let's think about it. Think about some events here on the timeline. Let's imagine this line is time. Let's imagine here some event, E, which
is foreknown by God.
And here is God in time, and he knows in advance that E will take place.
Now, God's knowing that E will take place is not a causal connection between
God and E. Merely knowing something about something doesn't cause E to occur.
The causes of E will be the prior events in the timeline that bring about E. And for all we know, E could be a completely contingent event. It might be the decay of a subatomic particle or a free will decision
of a human being.
And therefore, with respect to the events earlier than E, E may be causally indeterminate. It could happen, or it could not happen. So how does God merely knowing about
the occurrence of a causally indeterminate event
make that event fated to occur? How can that event occur necessarily?
Simply in virtue of God's knowing about it.
I mean, imagine God didn't know about it. Let's erase the dotted line and let's suppose God didn't know that E will occur. What's changed with respect to E? Nothing. There's no causal connection between God and
E that has now been removed.
Everything remains as before. And yet the theological fatalist who thinks foreknowledge implies fatalism would have to Say that now E is not fated to occur. Now E doesn't occur necessarily because it's
not foreknown by God.
But merely adding God's foreknowledge, as I
say, doesn't do anything to affect E.
So how could E be contingent and free in the one case and yet fated and necessary in the other? I think that fatalism posits a constraint upon human freedom which is simply unintelligible
and therefore really makes no sense at all.
If an event is not causally determined
to occur, then that event occurs freely or randomly, and God's merely knowing about it doesn't do anything to make it occur necessarily. Fatalism posits a constraint on human freedom which is simply unintelligible.
So long as our free choices are
logically prior to what God foreknows, then
there is nothing about the chronological priority
of divine foreknowledge that prejudices human freedom and implies that everything that happens happens necessarily. Any discussion of this question?
All right, let's start with Taewon and
get the microphone to her.
Taewon
Because there is such a definite correspondence between human behavior and their spiritual alignment, and so the human behavior happens necessarily according to their spiritual alignment, and God knows all about their spiritual alignment and knows the decision that follows, and also that the behavior will incur what kind of consequence. Therefore, he reads everything clearly.
Dr. William Lane Craig
Yeah.
To me, t', wan, it sounds to me like you're affirming determinism, that you're saying that in virtue of their spiritual character, everything you do is determined. And I don't think that's true. Even if you think that in virtue of total depravity and our fall into sin,
we sin necessarily. Still, I think people have the freedom to choose the array of sins that they might
commit.
So that, for example, to take Peter's denial of Jesus, he could have denied
him two times, or maybe he could have denied him four times, or he
could have done something different. But for Jesus to be able to predict that Peter would deny Christ three times before the cock crows twice, it just seems to me that cannot be
attributed to a person's spiritual disposition, such that God was able to infer from his spiritual disposition exactly what would happen.
Or think about the fall of man
into sin again, there it seems that Adam, not having a sin nature, is free to obey or disobey, and that there's nothing about God's foreknowing the fall and that would make Adam fall into sin.
There was nothing about his spiritual disposition
that would make him sin.
I think so I want to affirm
the view that even though we are fallen and sinful, nevertheless there is still genuine human freedom. All right, let's take Brad's question or comment. Well, I wanted to go to Brad first.
I saw his hand.
Yes.
Brad
So this seems to deny the existence of randomness. And if I know enough about how something occurs, I can postulate it, I can forecast it, I can use the formulas. If I had all of the inputs, I could figure out what would happen. But it seems to deny the possibility that there is randomness at that point.
Dr. William Lane Craig
Well, I'm surprised to hear you say that, Brad, because I would have thought just the opposite, that what I'm trying
to defend is the view of that there can be genuine freedom or randomness in the world.
Brad
Then how would it be foreknown?
Dr. William Lane Craig
Well now that's a question we haven't addressed.
That's the second question. I said there were two questions we
want to talk about.
The first one is if God does
foreknow your choice or the motion of
the subatomic particle, does it happen necessarily?
Does God's foreknowledge obliterate randomness and freedom from the universe?
And what I'm saying is know that
this event E, remember E again could
be random or a free choice theoretically. And that whether God knows about it
or not doesn't do anything to affect
Brad
E. But doesn't that in quantum physics, the old Schrodinger dead cat thing, that it seems like observing things cause different things to happen, could that not be something that's happening?
Dr. William Lane Craig
Ah, okay, now, all right, that's very interesting, Brad, because on certain. Oh boy, you're really opening up Pandora's box or a Schrodinger's box.
Maybe here on certain interpretations of quantum
mechanics, the so called measurement problem arises.
Namely the.
The quantum description of the physical system isn't completely determined until it's measured by
a classical measuring apparatus, which would be not have a quantum description.
The problem is you could give a quantum description of the classical measuring apparatus and then that would need then to
be measured by another further apparatus.
And this goes on to infinity. And some have suggested, well wait a minute, maybe you can break the chain,
the infinite regress, by saying when an
observer, a conscious observer, sees the result of the measurement, then that stops the
chain, the regress and makes it determinate.
Because you can't give a quantum physical description of a conscious state that's a non physical state. Right. When a conscious observer looks at the
classical measuring apparatus, you can't give a quantum Description of the state of consciousness. So that breaks the regress and makes reality determinate. Then all the way down.
Wouldn't that apply here? That's a very, very interesting question. Then, for theism. Because God is such an observer on a sort of cosmic scale. And maybe he collapses the wave function of the universe. So that he's the ultimate observer.
And makes everything determinant.
What I'm trying to do, Brad, for the sake of argument.
I, in fact, don't believe that quantum indeterminacy is ontic or real.
I think it's just epistemic. But let's.
In fact, having God would make it eliminate indeterminacy.
But what I'm saying is let's assume for the sake of argument.
That quantum indeterminacy is real.
What I'm trying to show here is
that merely knowing about it doesn't eliminate it.
If you don't like the example of E being a quantumly indeterminate event.
Then make it a free choice. Instead, make it be Peter's denying Christ three times. And that will be then unproblematic.
So you're quite right in raising this interesting question. But I'm asking you just for the sake of argument. Let's not go down that route.
Let's assume that these quantum events are random and indeterminate. And ask, would merely having knowledge that it would occur. Means that it's fated to occur and has to happen? And that's an independent question of whether or not, in virtue of being observed by an observer. The event is now determinant.
In fact, I mean, even on this
version of quantum mechanics.
It doesn't mean the event occurs necessarily.
It just means it's determinant. It means that there is a time
and place specifically at which it occurs.
But it doesn't mean that it happens necessarily. So even given that it wouldn't remove the contingency of the event. Simply by being known about it. It would remove its being indeterminate.
Brad
So now I have to have a Newtonian view of God and a quantum view of God.
Dr. William Lane Craig
Yeah, I'm trying to not draw those issues in here. To keep them keep us from, as
I say, opening the Pandora's box.
All right, Eric, let's.
Eric
Okay, so if our actions are the calls. That's then creating the effect of God's foreknowledge.
Dr. William Lane Craig
Now, wait. I didn't say that. Eric, let's be very careful.
Did you hear Eric's question?
Do our choices cause God to foreknow what he does? I didn't say that. That would require backward causation.
Eric
Yeah, that's what I was thinking.
Dr. William Lane Craig
That you could have an event in the future which would have causal effects in the past. And.
And I think that that's a very, very difficult idea. Problematic. And I don't want to say that
that was why I used the word determine rather than cause.
And I also kind of even then waffled on that.
I said, if there is anything here
about determining, it would be the event that determines the foreknowledge, not the foreknowledge that determines the event.
But I don't think of this as causal, but priority.
We could distinguish another kind of priority
here, Eric, which would be causal priority.
And there.
I don't want to say that God's knowledge is causally prior to the event or that the event is causally prior to God's foreknowledge. We don't cause events, or I mean knowledge or ideas to pop into God's mind. Right.
We don't have any kind of causal connection with God to make those things happen.
Rather, the way it works is like this.
We have the ability to choose A or not A.
And whichever we do, the proposition Eric will choose A is true, or the proposition Eric will choose not A is true. You have the choice to determine which of those propositions is true by making that free choice. God is omniscient and knows only in all true propositions. And so in virtue of that proposition
being true, that's what God foreknows.
But notice, neither the relationship between you and a proposition nor the relationship between a proposition and God is a causal relation. So this is sort of logical priority
or explanatory priority, not causal priority.
Cindy
Okay, Cindy, Looking at this dilemma on a large scale, when God created the universe, foreknew that man would fall, he had a plan of salvation.
Dr. William Lane Craig
Yes.
Cindy
And in my way of thinking, Christ being God, took action that then, knowing in advance, would result in the salvation and a new Jerusalem, a new earth. In that, it seems to me, prior to the fall of man, prior to creation, there was a simple knowledge of the ultimate realization of a heaven and an earth, a new heaven and new earth and a salvation for the human race. So we're working that plan out.
Dr. William Lane Craig
Yes.
Cindy
In my mind, I see that as his salvation of us. Therefore, providing that.
Dr. William Lane Craig
Yes.
Cindy
And knowing that in advance, he had to have a plan. He had to have created a plan which to me caused the salvation to be possible. And in that regard, I'm not saying that we. That that action caused us to take certain Steps. But there seems to be to be more than just a foreknowledge. There was a plan.
Dr. William Lane Craig
Oh, absolutely, Cindy.
I mean, I am not here attempting to give an explanation of divine providence.
When we get to the subject of doctrine of creation, then we will talk about the doctrine of providence and. And God's sovereignty over the world, directing
it, governing it, directing it, acting in it to bring about his plan.
So don't confuse divine providence with this mere knowledge of what is going to
happen in the future.
You're quite right. But the Bible does indicate that Christ
and his death and the plan of salvation were part of the foreknowledge of
God that the Scripture describes Christ as foreknown from before the foundations of the world. So clearly God knew all of this,
and he worked out a plan in
accordance with his perfect knowledge.
But we're not talking about those other aspects here.
We're just asking this question of what's called theological fatalism.
And that is, does God's knowing the future imply that everything that happens, happens necessarily? That there is no free will, no randomness? Now, was there a question over here? I think.
Unnamed Questioner 1
I'm not sure if this is part of the second question or not, but does God's total foreknowledge remove the possibility of God having free will?
Dr. William Lane Craig
Good question. If you say that foreknowledge is incompatible
with freedom, you not only remove human freedom, you remove divine freedom. Because God foreknows His own choices and decisions. And I don't think we want to say that that God is determined to do everything he does or that he is fated to do everything he does, so that when the time arrives, he has no ability to do otherwise.
So the theological implications of this go
beyond exterminating human freedom. It would eliminate divine freedom as well.
Unnamed Questioner 1
So you could modify your definition of God's foreknowledge. He has total foreknowledge of all the ramifications for everything he has so far. Preordained. He still has the ability to preordain other things or react to free will in man.
Dr. William Lane Craig
No, I mean, I want to stick with the original definition of omniscience that I gave, which was that for any proposition P, if P is true, then God knows that P, and He does not believe any false proposition.
So he has complete knowledge of everything that's going to happen, every future tense, truth. Okay, let's go to another person.
I'm sorry, I forget your name.
Katharine.
Of course.
Unnamed Questioner 2
What I always get caught up on is if he created you and Put you in this specific time and place with these parents and these circumstances. Lucky me. Wouldn't he therefore have created me and put me in a place where I would make specific decisions and choices? And therefore, because he created me and put me here, he made me make those decisions.
Dr. William Lane Craig
Well, obviously there's a kind of soft
determinism in virtue of where you're born and of whom you are born. You're not free to suddenly start speaking Vietnamese right now.
Right.
Because you don't have that background on the other end. Probably Taiwan could start talking Chinese at
the drop of a hat because she
has a different background. But that doesn't mean that you're totally determined. That you're having your hand on your
chin is determined causally because of where
you were born or by whom. I mean, or the husband that you marry.
Certainly our lives are shaped by these
things, but there's still plenty of room for libertarian free choices within those parameters.
Okay, let's go over to George here.
George
George, Bill, for the sake of completeness, could you say a few words about open theism? I know, I think that's the view that God does not foreknow free choices. And that's not a deficiency because it's logically impossible. Like he can't make a square circle. It's not a deficiency. I know a number of people who consider themselves in the camp of orthodox Christianity hold that, including I think, one of your teachers, Clark Pennock, before he died. And one of the dividends of that would be, it would seem to solve at least a large part of the problem of evil. You can't blame God if he didn't know at the creation of the world that Hitler was going to kill, you know, commit the Holocaust.
Dr. William Lane Craig
Yeah.
George is right in drawing attention to a significant current within contemporary theology and in evangelical theology, frankly, on behalf of those who actually think that foreknowledge implies fatalism, they agree with Luther and certain
other thinkers that if God has complete
foreknowledge of the future, then everything that happens happens necessarily. But unlike Luther and these other theologians, they therefore choose to deny divine foreknowledge rather than freedom.
So it's sort of like two ends of the same teeter totter. Both of these theologians agree that foreknowledge
and freedom are incompatible. This leads the Lutheran or Reformed theologian to deny human freedom.
It leads the open theist to deny divine foreknowledge. Now, I think in virtue of the scriptural data that we've already reviewed, that
open theism is just unbiblical it isn't even an option for a biblically orthodox Christian.
The scripture not only gives multitudinous examples of God's foreknowledge of the future that couldn't be inferred from present causes, like Peter's denying Jesus three times before the cock crows twice, but the scripture actually says that God has foreknowledge. As I say, it uses words like
foreknowledge with respect to Christ being foreknown before the foundations of the world and God's entire salvific plan being foreknown.
And there's a whole family of words
in the New Testament that have this
prefix pra, which means for including pro gnosis, which is foreknowledge. It says God has foreknowledge pro gnosis, but also verbs like pra martirello, to
tell in advance, or pra cantangello and
pro matureo to bear witness to in advance, pro ganosco to know in advance. So it seems to me that it's just biblically unorthodox to deny that God
has complete foreknowledge of the future.
Therefore, I want to get off the teeter totter and say that neither of these folks is right, that there is
no incompatibility between foreknowledge and freedom as
long as we keep these crucial distinctions
of chronological and logical priority clear in our thinking.
Now, as for the problem of evil, George, it certainly is true that on open theism, since God doesn't know what's
going to happen in the future, that he didn't know in advance or very far in advance horrible things like the
Holocaust say and what Hitler would do
in World War II, that these things
catch God off guard, so to speak,
on open theism because he's just a sort of super intelligent but finite counselor
who doesn't really know what's going to happen. But I don't think this gets him
off the hook for the problem of evil.
Once the Holocaust starts to occur, once the Nazis begin to round up the Jews, why doesn't the God of open theism do anything to stop it? You don't need to be a genius
to see what's going on in Nazi Germany.
Why did he let the bomb plot against Hitler fail by having the bomb be placed behind a heavy table leg? Why didn't he just strike Hitler dead or have the bomb plot succeed? The fact is that the God of open theism sits idly by, twiddling his thumbs while allowing these evils to go
on and he doesn't intervene to stop
them, at least on the view that
we'll defend later on when we get to God's sovereignty and full foreknowledge and middle knowledge of everything that will occur.
You can say that though God knows about these evils and permits them to occur, he never does so without having
an overriding justification for doing so.
Unlike the God of open theism, he's not caught off guard. He's not surprised. He has morally justifying reasons for allowing
the Holocaust to occur. And I find that to be a better solution to the problem of evil
than to say that God is caught
off guard by these things and didn't see them coming and therefore isn't to blame for the evils in the world.
But certainly George has pointed out here
one of the key issues in the debate over divine foreknowledge and human freedom today. And that would be the problem of evil.
Well, I think we have time for just Kurt's question.
Go ahead.
Kurt
You seem to object to fatalism, and you're using it as a negative. But what then do you do with Ecclesiastes 3:1 where it says, to everything there is a season, and to everything under the heaven there is a purpose? That if God is saying that for the person who's writing that is saying that on behalf of God, why is fatalism as it's used negatively, not something where God, as the Lady Catherine over here said, he has a purpose and a plan, and he's working that plan.
Dr. William Lane Craig
Okay, that would be a good verse to quote against the open theist who says God doesn't have a purpose for
allowing everything to occur.
They catch him by surprise.
He didn't know that was going to happen.
On my view, God does have a
purpose for everything that happens. And with respect to human freedom, he
allows you to make choices. But if these are evil choices, which he doesn't positively will, he permits them to occur because he has overriding reasons
for allowing that to happen again.
This will fit into our discussion of
divine providence later on.
But don't equate fatalism with God's having
providence or sovereignty over the world. Those are two different questions.
Fatalism is the view that everything that
happens happens necessarily, not that things happen for a purpose. You see, it's not that things happen for a purpose, it's that they happen necessarily. There's no freedom, there's no randomness.
That's fatalism.
And I'm suggesting that divine foreknowledge doesn't imply that kind of fatalism.
All right, let's close with a benediction from the book of second Thessalonians. If we may bow our heads now. May our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace. Comfort your hearts and establish them in
every good work and word. Amen.
The copyright for the content of this recording is held by Dr. William Lane Craig. For more go to reasonablefaith.org.
Episode Theme: Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom
Host: Dr. William Lane Craig
Date: February 16, 2022
In this session of Dr. Craig’s Defenders class, the focus is on the interplay between God’s perfect foreknowledge and human freedom. Dr. Craig addresses the classic theological question: If God knows everything that will happen, including all human choices, does this mean humans lack genuine freedom and that all events are predetermined (fatalism)? Through lecture and Q&A, Dr. Craig explores distinctions between foreknowledge, foreordination, determinism, and the logical/chronological relationships between God’s knowledge and events.
Articulation of the Problem
Historical Views
Craig’s Objection to Fatalism
On the central misconception:
“It’s not that what God foreknows determines the event. It’s the event that determines what God foreknows.” (04:13–04:44)
Barometer Analogy:
“God’s foreknowledge tracks your choices like an infallible barometer. The barometer doesn’t determine the weather … In the same way, God’s foreknowledge infallibly tracks your choices.” (06:55–07:20)
On fatalism's incoherence:
“Fatalism posits a constraint upon human freedom which is simply unintelligible and therefore really makes no sense at all.” (10:12)
On Open Theism:
“Open theism is just unbiblical—it isn’t even an option for a biblically orthodox Christian.” (29:02)
This episode provides a thorough, logical, and scripturally grounded exploration of a core philosophical-theological issue, offering conceptual tools and clear distinctions that are vital in contemporary dialogue about God’s knowledge and human agency.