I've always been puzzled by the notion held by some people that if God knows what we are going to choose in the future, then we really don't have free will. We are little more than pre-programed robots.
They say that if God knows we are going to make a certain "free will" choice, then when it is time for us to make that choice, God already knows what we are going to choose. Therefore we are not really free to make a different choice, change our minds, and God's foreknowledge of events big and small, means we really don’t have freedom of choice at all.
Quite honestly, I do not see this as being a legitimate theological issue. Let me explain. Let's work with the basis that we are “free-will creatures” and that God knows all things, even our future choices. Furthermore, let's define free will as the ability to make choices, reverse direction, change our minds, regardless of a person's sinful nature. Given these conditions, is God's omniscience and our free will incompatible, as those who claim God does not know all things before they happen?
By analogy, knowing what will happen does not mean that we are preventing or causing that thing to happen. The sun will rise tomorrow. I am not causing it to rise, nor am I preventing it from rising by knowing that it will happen. Maybe a more human illustration... if I put a bowl of ice-cream and a bowl of cauliflower in front of a child, [they sort of alike] you know without much debate which one is chosen – the ice cream. Knowing an expected outcome ahead of time does not restrict a child from making a free choice when the time comes.
Logically, God knowing what we are going to do does not mean that we can't do something else. It means that God simply knows what we have chosen to do ahead of time. Our freedom is not restricted by God's foreknowledge. Our freedom of choice is simply realized by God ahead of our action. In this, our natural ability to make another choice has not been removed any more than my choice of what to write and how to write this article is controlled by God, word for word. Before typing any part of this text, I pondered which words to write. My pondering was my doing, and the choice of words was mine. How then was I somehow restricted in freedom when choosing what to write if God knew what I was going to do? No matter what choice we freely make, it can be known by God, and His knowing it doesn't mean we aren't making a free choice.
Part of the issue here is the nature of time. If the future exists for God even as the present does, then God is consistently in all places at all times and is not restricted by time. This would mean that time (as we know and understand time) was not a part of His nature, to which God is subject and that God is not a linear entity, that is, it would mean that God is not restricted to operating in our time realm and is not restricted to the present only.
If God is not restricted to existence in the present, our present, then the future is known by God because God indwells the future as well as the present (and the past). This would mean that our future choices, as free as they are, are simply known by God, not pre-programmed choices and outcomes. Again, our ability to choose is not altered or lessened by God existing in the future and knowing what we freely choose. It just means that God can see what we will freely choose, and therefore knows what our choice will be.
Scripturally, God inhabits eternity. Psalm 90:2 says, "Before the mountains were born or You gave birth to the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God. But this verse, and others, do not declare that God lives inside or outside of time.
Rather, the Bible tells us that God is eternal. The Bible teaches that God has no beginning or end. Nevertheless, the Scriptures are not definitive on this issue, and we can only conclude what they do say, namely, that God is eternal, without beginning, without end and that He can accurately and precisely predict what will happen. "As for you, O king, while on your bed your thoughts turned to what would take place in the future; and He who reveals mysteries has made known to you what will take place," (Dan. 2:29).
We can reasonably conclude from our limited understanding of God’s nature that time, as we know it, is not applicable to God's nature. In other words, God has no beginning, and since "beginning" deals with a logical event in time, God is outside of time. Essentially, time has no relevance to God, while time is man’s enemy, up to the return of Christ when eternal life becomes a reality for the faithful. So, in relation to our free will and God's predictive ability, there is no Biblical reason to assert that God's foreknowledge negates our freedom of choice.
Furthermore, there is no logical reason to claim that if God knows what choices we are going to make, that it means we are not free. It just means that the free choices we will make are made independent of any cosmic manipulation or coercion... they are just known ahead of time by God.
If we choose something different, then that choice will have been eternally known by God. Furthermore, this knowledge by God does not alter our nature in that it does not change what we are--free to make choices. God's knowledge is necessarily complete and exhaustive because that is His nature... to know all things.
Why? Because God always knows all things: " . . . God is greater than our heart, and knows all things," (1 John 3:20).
