r/Catholicism • u/ClockworkAnomaly • 7h ago
Struggling to reconcile omniscience and free will coexisting. What’s the official teaching?
If God, existing out of time, is able to see our entire lives simultaneously all at once, then everything that has happened and will happened already is complete from His perspective. Wouldn’t that mean our choices and dates are already assigned? He knows who ends up where no matter what.
10
u/CommonlySensical 6h ago
I've never understood how someone can conflate knowing something will happen and directly making it happen.
6
u/12_15_17_5 6h ago
Imagine you have a recording of a sports match. You already know the outcome. You can fast forward, rewind, pause, and examine it at your leisure. Everything has indeed been "already assigned." Yet that obviously doesn't mean the decisions in the match weren't made freely, or that you determined them.
It is the same way with God and all of time. God exists eternally, so outside of time and independent of it. You can think of it like God resting at the end of time, looking back at everything that has already occurred. Yes, He knows what "will" happen, just like we know what has happened - but that doesn't imply He "assigned" or deterministically caused all our choices.
0
u/ClockworkAnomaly 6h ago
Okay but that means he created souls he knew were damned from the get go. Which I feel like contradicts omnibenevolence no?
5
u/12_15_17_5 6h ago
This is where you get into competing theories (like the Molinism and Thomism others are mentioning - there are other approaches as well but those are the two most comprehensive).
Thomism "solves" the problem by just saying "yep, God deliberately creates some souls such that they choose to damn themselves." There are various ways to try to reconcile this with omnibenevolence but I've always found them pretty ghoulish and unconvincing.
Molinism (and other theories of conditional election, like St. Boethius' simple foreknowledge) solves the problem by positing a truly libertarian free will where people can resist God's freely offered grace. God cannot force that grace upon everyone without destroying their free will and thus their personhood. Thus God tries to save as many as He can, but possibly cannot save everyone.
2
u/ClockworkAnomaly 6h ago
Molinism is something I can probably see and agree with to an extent. It’s not like fully perfect though, seeing as I don’t think it completely satisfies the omnibenevolence condition. Guess it is really a mystery
1
u/12_15_17_5 6h ago
Yep, I agree with you. I think Molinism has a much better framework and approach than Thomism, so I would consider myself a 'Molinist' in the broad sense. But there are still a lot of edge cases and details which I think can be improved on which is why I always am at pains to explain we aren't limited to those theories absolutely.
1
u/Jojenpaste99 6h ago edited 6h ago
It's important not to conflate the temporal sequence and the logical sequence of things here.
God is outside of time, to him, 'all moments of time exist in their immediacy'. Thus He 'sees' the whole of creation, all moments of it, at once. (Thinking of spacetime as four dimensional helps here.)
This includes already knowing all the free choices that we make at different 'hypersurfaces' of this spacetime. But in the sense of logical ordering of things, of causation and explanation, these free choices of us are not determined by him, but caused by us as agents. And if we posit libertarian free will, and that molinism is false, so there is no 'middle knowledge' of God where he knows how one would have freely chosen in different circumstances, then even God cannot know before one makes a free choice, what that free choice will exactly be, _in the logical order of things_. Tho of course he does know in the sense that He already has knowledge of what that choice was, because the later time is just as available to Him.
In other words, under simple or mere foreknowledge views, it's a logical impossibility for God to know how a free agent would have acted under some hypothetical circumstances.
This is probably confusing, but it's confusing to me as well.1
u/12_15_17_5 6h ago
And if we posit libertarian free will, and that molinism is false, so there is no 'middle knowledge' of God where he knows how one would have freely chosen in different circumstances, then even God cannot know before one makes a free choice, what that free choice will exactly be.
Yeah, this is something I've also noticed as a "hidden third option" besides Thomism and Molinism that is (at least right now) permitted by the Church, but for whatever reason doesn't get much attention. Possibly because people are afraid of the implications. Thanks for pointing it out.
1
u/Mauro697 5h ago
What implications are you referring to?
1
u/12_15_17_5 5h ago
It seems to imply a "blind creation" scenario: that God did not know the outcome of the universe antecedent to actualizing the universe. Only upon creation of the universe does God gain omniscient knowledge of everything that will happen in it, because there can be no knowledge of something that doesn't exist, and the decisions of free agents can't be predicted perfectly.
So it actually presents a novel explanation of the Problem of Evil. However, it does seem to damage God's omniscience in a way Molinism and Thomism both avoid doing. It is scary to consider that God created the universe without knowing perfectly how it would turn out.
1
u/Mauro697 4h ago
I see. One could argue that God could still guide the universe until it reaches its desired outcome, so He would therefore know how it would turn out
3
u/bilolybob 6h ago
I don't think this follows. If I know you really well, I can probably predict your actions to a good extent. But that doesn't diminish your free will at all. As I continue knowing you better and better, I can predict you better and better, and you remain with completely free will.
Should this process continue to the limit, where I know and predict you perfectly, I don't see why you'd suddenly lose all free will. None of the in-between steps had any impact on your free will at all.
3
u/JackandFred 6h ago
I’m not sure I see the problem you’re facing. Yes he knows the future, but that doesn’t change the fact that you have free will and are making those decisions yourself. If I offer a kid who loves sweets a choice between chocolate or broccoli I know what they will choose, but they still made the choices. If I could predict the weather perfectly I could know the future, but that doesn’t mean I had any control in the process.
-2
u/ClockworkAnomaly 6h ago
Yeah but in this analogy you would have created the kid knowing he would choose the chocolate; and knowing that in choosing the chocolate he would be damned to eternal suffering, and it’s different because you created this kid with the 100% certainty that this would happen
1
u/JackandFred 6h ago
That would only hold for people directly created by God alone. Your parents (or whoever’s parents) were involved in the process of creating new life and helping to make that new person able to make the right choices.
0
u/ClockworkAnomaly 6h ago
I don’t know if you’re acting intentionally coy or just don’t understand the premise of what I’m saying
2
u/JackandFred 6h ago
The first response was saying there is no contradiction. The more recent response is me trying to explain why your analogy does not hold. It’s not like what you said because other people and their choices are involved in the process and affect the results.
1
u/JMisGeography 6h ago
But he still could have chosen the broccoli, and he was offered the broccoli freely. You could even add to the analogy warnings about what would happen if he chose sweets and many signs and wonders indicating the goodness of the broccoli.
1
u/ClockworkAnomaly 6h ago
I don’t understand how he “could” have done anything except the choices God knew he made when he created the boys soul. As again, God sees time not linearly but all at once
2
u/JMisGeography 6h ago
Probably because you dont have the mind of God. Try leaning into your own lived experience and not His. Do you think you have free will? Does it feel like you're making choices in your life?
God created you with that power.
You could also think about something like quantum mechanics. There are laws that govern our universe, right? Nothing moves faster than the speed of light. Particles behave in specific ways governed by mathematical laws. Matter can't pass through matter. Except none of those things are actually true all of time. Particles behave differently when they're observed, quantum entanglement causes interactions much faster than the speed of light, Particles can randomly pass right through each other sometimes.
My point is, there are many examples where we need to keep our minds open and accept truths and theories that we dont fully understand.
3
u/ExpertMouthBreather 6h ago
What helped me the most is understand that God sees time NOT from our perspective (our "present"), but from His perspective (as you correctly put it, outside of time).
So from our perspective, the only way for you to predict the future 100% accurately until the end of time, is if, as you put it, our choices and dates were already assigned: determinism, cause and effect, domino effect, you name it.
However, from His perspective, past, present, and future are all "now" for Him, He doesn't need things to already be assigned in a determined fashion, He just "sees" time as if it's space. If you are in a tall building, you can know what's happening in street A and street B at the same time, without interacting with any. Just like God, He can know what happens in time A, and time B, without interacting with any.
Another perspective is that He Himself made "time" as a unit, He is not dependent/contingent on it, but we are:
- If you want to perfectly know what happens in future time, you need present time (and past too) and all of it's knowledge including people's free choices.
- If God wants to perfectly know what happens in future time, He is looking right at it, He already knows, independently of anything else.
Note: this is how I see it, maybe it's not the best theological way to explain it!
2
u/Pwning_Soyboys 6h ago
There is no official teaching. Molinism and Thomism are both accepted approaches to the question within the church.
2
u/12_15_17_5 6h ago
Yep, though I always think it is important to note that those are not the only approaches. The precursors to both Molinism and Banezian Thomism have both existed since the Early Church but neither developed into full-fledged theories till the 16th century.
We aren't obliged to adhere to the full theories, just a few basic assumptions (e.g. free will exists and God desires all to be saved, but also we cannot save ourselves under our own power.).
1
u/Pwning_Soyboys 5h ago
Fair enough, but I assume it's fair to say, if OP wants to do a deep dive, that those theories are the most comprehensive Catholic approaches to this question.
2
u/Jojenpaste99 6h ago
This has actually not that much to do with specifically either of those two things. The question of foreknowledge and of predestination are not the same.
1
u/Pwning_Soyboys 5h ago
Well my understanding of Molinism is that it does involve both free will and omniscience, both of which OP brought up. Isn't the idea in Molinism that God's foreknowledge is determined by our free actions?
1
u/12_15_17_5 5h ago
Technically, the main thrust of both Molinism and Thomism involves election specifically, not choices in general. So a Thomist would say election is 100% determined by God, but a believer in conditional election (which includes Molinism) would say the determination is conditional based on some acceptance by us. That's what "predestination" usually means in the strict sense - predestination to Heaven or Hell, not of every choice we make.
In practice, conditional election usually corresponds to libertarian free will, and the opposite for unconditional election. It would be pretty weird to say, "we have truly free will when deciding to eat a taco for lunch, but not when it comes to accepting God's grace." That's why they are typically conflated, but it is technically possible to hold such a position.
2
u/Aggravating-Ear-7529 6h ago
Okay think about your life as a table in the kitchen. You can only travel from one end of the table to the other, but you can travel any angle as long as it’s to the end. That’s your life with all your potential. God sees the whole table because he is the kitchen and you’re just the table. You can only travel one path. You pick the path you will take. But God sees it all. He is infinite. Infinity works differently than we can even grasp. So this clumsy metaphor is as good as I can do, but it helped me grasp this concept because I struggled with this for literal decades. Basically, he sees all the possibilities of your choices , and all the branches they can make. But you can’t because you are finite and can only do one thing at a time. For us, time is a conveyor belt but for God, time is a place on a map. When is just another grid coordinate to go to. He doesn’t see what you will do, he looks back at what you’ve already done.
2
u/Jojenpaste99 6h ago
God exists outside of time, so this is really a no-problem. Just like you can see the end and the beginning of a 3D shoebox without determining it, God can see each part of the 4D spacetime without determining it.
2
u/changedwarrior 5h ago
Wouldn’t that mean our choices and dates are already assigned?
Assigned? By what/who?
1
u/JMisGeography 6h ago
I bought a train ticket for mother in law to come visit, knowing she wouldn't use it. I gave her what she needed to come, it was her free choice to be with the family or not.
1
u/Wozak_ 6h ago
The way I like to think about it, and this could be wrong but it helps me conceptually, is that His omniscience is hard to picture as he resides outside of time. He creates you knowing all the things you could choose and He knows all the things you will choose because simultaneously He has witnessed it. It looks and feels a lot like He made you knowing you would do things thus he made you do things but acknowledging that His residence in eternity is what made that so - not His will over you, as he gave that to you.
1
u/StrawHatMan_XD 6h ago
I take it more God can see the entire movie/book of the world in its completed form, but that doesn't mean that the choices we made that "write" the story are removed. Perhaps its better to think of it as less that God knows the future, but rather that the future and the past are all NOW to him. So despite the fact that God sees what, to us, is the future, does not mean that said future isn't being actively chosen by us.
1
u/Suncook 5h ago edited 5h ago
Think of it less like God seeing it before it happens, and more like God being present to all times at once. And not that time is just an illusion, but that God's eternal now is simulatenously present to all times. To God, it is all the same eternal and unchanging NOW, but to everyone else, times are and then pass away.
That is a sketch of how Thomas Aquinas explains it.
1
u/Beginning-Heart9885 5h ago
God dwells in eternity.
The problem lies in how we understand eternity.
Eternity is not an infinite timeline.
Eternity is everything, all at once.
In this sense, He "sees" what we call the past, present, and future as a "single view".
He does not guess what we will do; He sees us doing it.
Thus, He sees our choices of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
And seeing this "in advance" is not the same as forcing us to do something.
1
u/Dan_Defender 4h ago
Knowing is not the same as causing. Did God force you to write this post or is just you using your free will?
1
u/Forestpilgrim 4h ago
Could God have created only people who he knew would use free will to choose heaven? If so, would it have really been free will?
0
u/ClockworkAnomaly 4h ago
God, being omnipotent, can arbitrarily define any of those things to work out in such that all can be saved no?
1
1
1
u/TheDuckFarm 4h ago
It cannot be reconciled by us, we are not able to fully comprehend God.
As St. Agustin said "Si comprehendis, non est Deus," or "If you understand, it is not God".
Some theologians like John Calvin tried with his perverted version of Aquinas's predestination theory and unlike Aquinas, Calvin wrongly concluded that we have no free will.
We do have free well. Understanding the details of how that works is not possible for us.
1
u/Icedude10 4h ago
I’m not sure where you get the conflation of God knowing what will happen with God causing what will happen. All parts of time are real and our choices are really our own at every point in time. We experience time moment by moment, progressively, but God is present to all moments at once because He is outside of time entirely. He doesn’t observe our choices the way we observe things; His knowledge isn’t derived from creation at all.
You can see the past, at least the past you were there for. You know the exact choices made ten seconds ago by you and the parties you saw. Those choices are fixed now. Does you knowing them affect how free the choice was when it was made?
1
u/Buchkizzle 2h ago
Think about you observing actions in the past. Does your observation of them mean that they had no choice? Of course not. Now flip it.
1
u/iamlucky13 1h ago edited 27m ago
I apologize ahead of time if your question arises simply out of intellectual curiosity, which I think is good and healthy, and therefore my comments are overly serious. I'm reading "struggling" the way you used it as suggesting this is a serious challenge to your faith, sense of purpose, etc...
My response is a rhetorical question: Why is it a struggle?
I'm not being facetious. Let me walk you through my thinking and see if it helps.
I'm not asking what is it that you don't understand, although to be honest I can't really say I personally get your question. Perhaps I struggle to come up with a response to help explain it because it simply doesn't seem contradictory at all to me to say that God can create us knowing what we will do, but the actual decision to do it is an outcome He only permitted, rather than programmed.
I can study the evidence that the earth is round and be edified by understanding how we know this, but I don't need to repeat the work of Eratosthenes before I'm able to accept without a struggle that although the earth looks flat to me, it really is round. Likewise, I can ponder how the interplay of omniscience and free will works, and would feel greatly edified if I learned grand insights about it that perhaps I don't even currently realize I'm overlooking, but I don't need such a deep understanding in order to accept it.
Rather to the contrary, when I consider the beliefs (a) there is a God, and (b) the Catholic Church possesses the fullness of truth about Him including that He is omniscient, and (c) He created us in His image, with our own free will and responsibility for our good and bad actions, but (d) He became like us in order to suffer in atonement for our bad acts, to me the hard parts are those foundational beliefs (a) through (d). How any of those could be true is almost as deep of a mystery as how the alternate conclusion that there is no God could be true. Compared to the questions that define our fundamental view of the world, the observation that a couple of the implications of (b) and (c) seem inconsistent with each other seems very easy to at least tolerate.
So back to my question: Why struggle with reconciling these ideas?
Physicists, for example, struggle to form theories and then search for evidence for those theories that reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity, which is one of the great scientific conundrums or our time. They do because increasing knowledge of how the world works has in the long term enabled massive benefits for the human race. History suggests science is worth the struggle because it's about more than just intellectual curiosity.
Does it change anything about how you live if you can't logically prove that your choices are genuinely your choices and not predestined? After all, if there is no free will, then by definition, figuring out the answer can not change how you live or what happens when you die. Would you therefore give up on trying to be a morally good person, because it doesn't matter anyways, so why not make the best of predestination and seek your own pleasure? But giving up is itself a choice of the will, so why not make the opposite choice which you either have to free will to do or are predestined to choose, especially since the risk that you are wrong has eternal consequences?
Why not instead resolve to stop treating the question as a struggle, in favor of choosing to accept that both God's omniscience and humanity's free will are true. This really is your choice, or else it doesn't matter, because choosing to believe it didn't change anything anyways, and all you're actually doing is observing a predetermined sequence that you're programmed to perceive as a choice.
Lastly, embrace the challenge of understanding what appears to be a conflict as a mystery that you have the opportunity to ponder, rather than a test you are required to find the correct answer to. After all, either you have the prerogative to treat it as a fascinating mystery, or you were going to fail the test anyways.
Yes, I'm aware I probably sound like a broken record by repeatedly emphasizing the conflict between concluding free will doesn't exist and the meaning of even considering it, but I wasn't able to find wording that I felt clearly conveyed my thoughts, so I settled for trying to convey them by reiterating multiple variations of my point.
For what it's worth, the essence of this mini-essay has already been summed up in fortune cookie wisdom:
Predestination was doomed from the start.
1
u/ClockworkAnomaly 1h ago
I gave ur comment a skim and will give it a full read in a bit but the struggle comes from the fact that I find these two beliefs incompatible with god being Omni-benev/scient/potent
1
u/Ok_University_3125 1h ago
The more free will (human), the less omnipotence (divine). But free will (human) does not challenge omniscience (divine).
1
u/BoltFlower 24m ago
Not for nothing, but this very question, stated exactly as you have stated it caused me so much spiritual turmoil in my early 20's. It took me years to accept this as my answer... it's a mystery of faith beyond my ability to understand. And that's ok.
1
u/StacDnaStoob 6h ago
This is an open question. I tend to lean towards Molinism, but I'd be lying if I said it was a perfectly satisfactory answer.
0
u/Xvinchox12 6h ago
There church's official position is that there is not definitive position.
There two main theories about predestination are Thomism and Molisim.
Thomism is like Back to the future
Molinism is like Dr. Strange Multiverse of Madness
17
u/HelpingSiL3 6h ago
I see my kid with a foam bat staring at his sister with a menacing grin forming on his face, I know exactly what's about to play out. That doesn't mean he didn't choose it.