If God Knows Everything in Advance, How Can We Still Have Free Will?

The basic apologetic syllogism

The objection takes, in its raw version, the following form:

1. God infallibly knows all future events, including my choices.
2. If God infallibly knows that I shall do X tomorrow, then it is impossible for me not to do X.
3. But I am free only if I can do X or refrain from doing X.
4. Therefore, on the hypothesis of divine foreknowledge, I am not free.

The philosopher and apologist Mathieu Lavagna reports the familiar version of the argument in Soyez rationnel, devenez catholique (Be Rational, Become Catholic): "If God knows everything in advance, then the whole course of history is planned by him! Whatever I do, I cannot be free."^[2]

The objection seems devastating. It does not target a peripheral detail: it attacks together divine omniscience and human responsibility. If it succeeded, divine justice would collapse: why punish a sin that God knew, from all eternity, to be unavoidable? Why reward an act of charity that God knew, from all eternity, to be guaranteed?

Three faces of the objection

The objection is not merely a parlour game: it reappears in three very different contexts, each demanding an adapted answer.

(1) Contemporary atheism. The sceptic presents the contradiction as an internal refutation of the Christian God: the very concept of God would be incoherent. This is the version targeted by Lavagna in his chapter on "If God knows everything in advance, no free will?"^[3] Answer: this is not an argument against the existence of God, but against a certain caricatured conception of divine foreknowledge^[4].

(2) Radical Calvinism and Protestant compatibilism. A fraction of Protestantism — stemming from John Calvin and systematised by Jonathan Edwards in the 18th century — accepts the conclusion: God is so sovereign that man is not really free in the libertarian sense. To preserve the word "freedom", Edwards redefines it as psychological spontaneity: we do what we want, but God determines what we want^[5]. This solution sacrifices real freedom; the necessitarianism it presupposes is the one the Church rejected: at Trent, in advance (Session VI, 1547)^[6], then against Quesnellian Jansenism in Unigenitus (1713)^[7] — two texts prior to Edwards (1754), which therefore did not target his work, but the necessitarian doctrine itself.

(3) Ordinary spiritual doubt. "If everything is already written, why pray? Why try to convert? If God knows I shall sin tomorrow, there is nothing I can do about it." This last face is not marginal. It explains why the Catholic answer cannot content itself with an elegant logical pirouette: it must also make prayer, conversion, examination of conscience and the final judgment intelligible.

The strong version: Nelson Pike and accidental necessity

The tightest contemporary version of the objection comes from the American analytic philosopher Nelson Pike. In a foundational 1965 article, "Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action", Pike argues that if yesterday God knew that I shall do X tomorrow, then the fact "God knows that I shall do X" is henceforth a past fact, and no one has any power over the past^[8]. So I can do nothing that would make that past fact false. So I must do X. So I am not free.

This version adds to the classical objection the idea of accidental necessity: what is past is now unchangeable. It is this version that must be defused as a priority, because it relaunched an entire Anglo-Saxon debate over the last fifty years — featuring Alvin Plantinga, William Lane Craig, Eleonore Stump, William Hasker, Linda Zagzebski, and the contemporary resurrection of Molinism. The philosopher Linda Zagzebski even speaks of a genuine dilemma structuring the whole analytic philosophy of religion: either adopt the Boethian eternalist solution, or adopt the Ockhamist soft facts solution, or else abandon either libertarian freedom or exhaustive omniscience^[9].

Before any philosophical analysis, the voice of Revelation must be heard. The Bible affirms with astonishing clarity two inseparable things: God knows everything, including our most intimate thoughts and our most future acts, and man is genuinely free, responsible, capable of choosing.

God knows all our steps

Psalm 138 — "the psalm of divine omniscience" — gives the densest formula:

"O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising; thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether." — Psalm 138 (139), 1-4, liturgical translation^[10]

Isaiah, in the second chapter of his great poem on the one God, goes further still: divine foreknowledge embraces the whole of history, from beginning to end:

"Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure." — Isaiah 46, 9-10^[11]

Jeremiah receives, from his very calling, the avowal of a knowledge that precedes his own existence:

"Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations." — Jeremiah 1, 5^[12]

The Book of Wisdom puts the matter in almost technical terms:

"For she knoweth things past, and judgeth of things to come: she knoweth the subtleties of speeches, and the solutions of arguments: she foreknoweth signs and wonders, and what shall happen in time to come." — Wisdom 8, 8^[13]

And Sirach condenses divine omniscience into a formula that the whole of Scholasticism would take up: "For all things were known to him before they were created, and so also after they were finished." (Sir 23, 20)^[14].

The biblical counterfactual: David at Keilah and the cities of Galilee

More extraordinary still, Scripture affirms that God knows not only what will happen, but what would happen if this or that circumstance were realised. Two classical passages bear witness to this — and they would become, in the 16th century, the scriptural foundation of the Molinist doctrine of middle knowledge.

In the First Book of Samuel, David, fleeing Saul, takes refuge in Keilah. He consults the Lord:

"Will the men of Keilah deliver me into his hand? Will Saul come down, as thy servant hath just heard? O Lord God of Israel, tell thy servant, I beseech thee." And the Lord said: "He will come down." Then said David: "Will the men of Keilah deliver up me and my men into the hand of Saul?" And the Lord said: "They will deliver you up." — 1 Samuel 23, 11-12^[15]

Then David arose with his men — about six hundred — and departed out of Keilah (v. 13).

The passage is fascinating. God reveals what would happen if David stayed: Saul would come down, and Keilah would hand him over. But David leaves, and the event never happens. What God knew was not an effective future fact — it was a counterfactual of freedom: what the men of Keilah would freely do in a hypothetical situation.

Christ himself uses this kind of counterfactual knowledge, in a famous denunciation of the unrepentant cities of Galilee:

"Woe unto thee, Chorazin! Woe unto thee, Bethsaida! For if the mighty works, which were done in you, had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes... And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to hell: for if the mighty works, which have been done in thee, had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day." — Matthew 11, 21-23^[16]

The passage is decisive. Jesus claims to know what Tyre, Sidon and Sodom would have freely chosen in circumstances that never occurred. This is a knowledge of free counterfactuals: not of what will be, but of what would be if. Such knowledge presupposes both the truth of the counterfactual (and hence the free hypothetical self-determination of the cities), and the divine science that perfectly embraces it^[17].

Freedom affirmed by Scripture

Scripture never sets this omniscience against human freedom. On the contrary, it affirms both together. Sirach gives the most direct formula:

"It was he who created man in the beginning, and he left him in the power of his own inclination. If you will, you can keep the commandments, and to act faithfully is a matter of your own choice." — Sirach 15, 14-15^[18]

This verse would be quoted by the Catechism of the Catholic Church (§ 1730) as a privileged witness to the Catholic doctrine of freedom^[19]. And Deuteronomy seals the covenant with a command in which human freedom is central:

"See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil... Therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live." — Deuteronomy 30, 15.19^[20]

The densest articulation is found in the Acts of the Apostles. The Passion of Christ, the event most laden with divine providence, is presented by Peter as at once willed from all eternity by God and freely carried out by Herod, Pilate, Israel and the nations:

"For of a truth against thy holy child Jesus, whom thou hast anointed, both Herod, and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles, and the people of Israel, were gathered together, for to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel determined before to be done." — Acts 4, 27-28^[21]

And Saint Paul, in the Epistle to the Romans, articulates the eternal divine plan and human responsibility without flattening one onto the other: "For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son..." (Rom 8, 28-30)^[22].

The Bible thus holds, without embarrassment and without apparent tension, both propositions — God knows everything in advance; man is free. It is on this paradox that Catholic philosophy would labour for two thousand years.

The objection did not wait for the 18th century. It was formulated even before Christ — and the Catholic answer is built in dialogue with two thousand years of philosophy.

Aristotle and the sea battle

In chapter 9 of On Interpretation, Aristotle raises the question of future contingents: if the proposition "There will be a sea battle tomorrow" is true today, then the sea battle will happen necessarily; if it is false, it will not happen. In either case, the future seems written, and deliberation becomes absurd^[23].

Aristotle rejects this conclusion. For him, propositions about future contingents do not have, today, an already determined truth value — their truth is fixed only at the moment the event occurs. This solution would be rejected by the dominant Catholic tradition: God cannot be ignorant of the truth of a proposition on the pretext that it concerns the future. But the problem raised by Aristotle — how to articulate the truth of a statement about the future with the freedom of the agent — would remain the framework of the debate for two millennia.

Cicero against the Stoics

Cicero, in On Fate and On Divination, attacks the Stoic doctrine of fatum which seems to chain all things in a necessary causality^[24]. His solution is radical: to save freedom, one must deny divine foreknowledge of future free acts. For Cicero, either God knows everything in advance, or man is free — but not both.

It is precisely this alternative that Saint Augustine would frontally refuse. And it is also this alternative that the contemporary Open Theism of William Hasker and Greg Boyd would reactivate in the 20th century, sacrificing omniscience to save libertarian freedom^[25].

Origen and non-causal foreknowledge

In the 3rd century, Origen, in his great apologetic treatise Against Celsus, formulates for the first time in a Christian setting the distinction that would structure the entire debate. Answering the pagan objection that the messianic prophecies would impose necessity on events, Origen lays down the rule that Saint Thomas Aquinas would take up unchanged a thousand years later:

"We do not believe that he who predicts a thing is the cause of its happening, because he predicted it would happen; but we believe on the contrary that, since the thing was to happen whether predicted or not, it is this which gives the occasion of predicting it to him who knows the future." — Origen, Against Celsus, Book II, chapter 20^[26]

The formula is decisive. In his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Origen systematises it in Latin (via Rufinus's translation) in a form that would pass into the whole of Scholasticism: "Non quia Deus scit aliquid futurum, ideo erit ; sed quia futurum est, ideo a Deo scitur antequam sit" — "It is not because God knows that a thing will be that it will be; but because it will be, it is known by God before it is" ^[27]. Saint Thomas would quote it explicitly in his commentary on the Sentences I, distinction 38^[28].

Saint Augustine against Cicero

In Book V of City of God (completed around 413), Augustine names Cicero explicitly and answers him. He refuses the false alternative:

"It is not a necessary consequence that, if God foreknows what will be in our will, there is nothing in our will. For he who foreknows is not in nothingness; and if he who foreknows what will be in our will knows not nothing but something, then, in the foreknowledge which abides, there is also something in our will." — Saint Augustine, City of God, Book V, chapter 9^[29]

The formula is decisive: divine foreknowledge bears precisely on what depends on the will. If God foresaw a constrained event, he would foresee something other than a free act. But if he foresees a free act, then freedom is in what he knows, not destroyed by him.

"If then we embrace both propositions together — the foreknowledge of God and human freedom — we believe faithfully and we live rightly." — Saint Augustine, City of God, Book V, chapter 10^[30]

Augustine laid down the central axis of the whole Catholic tradition: to join the two together. The rest would be distinction, precision, metaphysical deepening.

Boethius and the eternalist solution

At the beginning of the 6th century, in his death-row cell, Boethius writes the Consolation of Philosophy. The whole of Book V is devoted to the problem of foreknowledge and freedom. His distinctive contribution is to introduce the notion of divine eternity as the key to the problem:

"Eternity is the complete, simultaneous and perfect possession of unbounded life." — Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, Book V, prose 6^[31]

Boethius stresses that God is not in time. He does not advance from moment to moment as we do. All times are simultaneously present to him. What we call future is future only for us: for God, it is eternally present.

"His knowledge, transcending all movement of time, abides in the simplicity of his presence, embracing the infinite spaces of past and future, and considers all things in his simple act of knowledge as though they were already taking place." — Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, Book V, prose 6^[32]

And Boethius adds the formula that the whole tradition would take up: it is better to speak of divine knowledge not as fore-sight (which presupposes the future), but as providence — that is, a gaze from above, seeing all things at once.

Saint Anselm: antecedent necessity and consequent necessity

Six centuries after Boethius, Saint Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) writes his De Concordia Praescientiae et Praedestinationis et Gratiae Dei cum libero arbitrio — "On the Harmony between the Foreknowledge, Predestination and Grace of God and Free Will" (circa 1107-1108). It is one of the finest treatises of Scholasticism on the question.

Anselm's distinctive contribution is a crucial technical distinction: one must distinguish antecedent necessity (necessitas praecedens) from consequent necessity (necessitas sequens). Antecedent necessity is the kind that constrains: if I am chained, I cannot walk. Consequent necessity is purely logical: if I did in fact walk, then "I walked" is necessarily true as a description of what happened. But that kind of "necessity" constrains no one — it merely records what was freely accomplished^[33].

"When I say: 'if it will be, it will be of necessity,' here necessity follows the positing of the thing, it does not precede it. Every future thing is therefore future by necessity; but by a consequent necessity which compels nothing to be." — Saint Anselm, De Concordia, question I, chapter 2^[34]

And Anselm concludes:

"You see then that it is not impossible for God's foreknowledge and free will, by which many things are done without necessity, to exist together." — Saint Anselm, De Concordia, question I, chapter 3^[35]

This distinction would be taken up and systematised by Saint Thomas Aquinas in a slightly different form — conditioned vs absolute necessity — but the idea is the same: divine foreknowledge imposes a necessity of logical coherence, never a necessity of inner constraint.

Saint Thomas Aquinas and divine science

In the 13th century, Saint Thomas Aquinas takes up the Boethian solution and grounds it in a more precise Aristotelian metaphysics. Question 14 of the Summa Theologiae (First Part) is entirely devoted to it. Article 13, "Does God know future contingents?", gives the classical answer:

"Whatever is in time is eternally present to God, not only inasmuch as God has present to his mind the formal principles of all things, as some claim, but because his gaze is eternally fixed on all things, inasmuch as they are present. It is therefore manifest that contingents are infallibly known by God inasmuch as they are present to the divine gaze in their presence, and yet, in relation to their own causes, they remain future contingents." — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q.14, a.13^[36]

Article 13 also contains the analogy that sums it all up:

"It is as with one who walks along a road and does not see those who follow him, whereas the man posted on a height, looking down the whole road, sees at once all who pass along it." — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q.14, a.13, reply to objection 3^[37]

The image is powerful: God is not a traveller in time looking back from a distant future; he stands on the height of eternity, and sees the whole road in a single gaze.

In the Summa contra Gentiles (Book I, chapter 67), Thomas deepens the point by showing that the divine intellect does not turn successively, but in a single act, toward the totality of time:

"The gaze of the divine intellect is directed from all eternity upon each thing accomplished in the course of time as upon what is present to it." — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, Book I, chapter 67^[38]

Duns Scotus, Ockham and the Franciscan way

The Dominican school does not have a monopoly on the question. In the 14th century, two major Franciscans — John Duns Scotus (1266-1308) and William of Ockham (1287-1347) — propose different solutions.

Duns Scotus partly rejects the Boethian solution. For him, God does not know the future only because everything is eternally present to him. He knows it actively through his contingent decreeing will: before the act of the divine will, contingent propositions have no truth value; God determines that truth by freely joining or separating their terms. Scotus distinguishes three logical moments in divine science: (1) the natural science of necessary truths, (2) the free act of the will choosing this world among the possibles, (3) the resulting determinate science of contingents^[39].

William of Ockham invents, in his Tractatus de praedestinatione et de praescientia Dei et de futuris contingentibus (1321-1323), the doctrine that contemporary analytic philosophy would rediscover under the name of soft facts. Ockham grants Aristotle that future contingent propositions have a determinate truth value; but he holds that a past truth bearing on the future is not a necessarily past truth. The fact "yesterday God knew that I would pray tomorrow" has a past component (it existed yesterday) and a future component (it bears on tomorrow). It is not a "hard" fact like "yesterday the sun set", but a "soft" fact whose fixity depends partly on the free future. Ockham thus escapes the lock of fatalism in advance^[40].

This "hard facts / soft facts" distinction would be reactivated by the analytic philosophers Marilyn McCord Adams (1967), Alfred Freddoso (1983) and Alvin Plantinga (1986), as one of the three great solutions to the dilemma analysed by Linda Zagzebski^[41].

Molina, Báñez and the De auxiliis controversy

In the 16th century, the Protestant Reformation relaunched the question of grace, predestination and freedom. Calvin, in the Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), shrinks human freedom under the weight of an absolute predestination. Two Catholic schools organise themselves to answer: the Thomist Dominicans (around Domingo Báñez, 1528-1604) and the Molinist Jesuits (around Luis de Molina, 1535-1600).

• Báñez defends a previous physical premotion (motio physica praevia): God, as first cause, directly and physically moves the human will — without thereby determining it like an automaton.
• Molina proposes middle knowledge (scientia media): God knows, before any decree of his will, what each free creature would do in each possible situation^[42].

The quarrel becomes so violent that it rises all the way to Pope Clement VIII, who opens a special commission, the Congregationes de Auxiliis (1597-1607). After ten years of debates and more than eighty-five sessions, Pope Paul V renders a prudent verdict in 1607: both schools are permitted; each school is forbidden to accuse the other of heresy^[43]. That decision has remained the Roman position to this day.

This history matters: it shows that foreknowledge and freedom are magisterial doctrines held simultaneously, even if the manner of articulating them remains freely debated within Catholic theology.

Why this distinction comes first

Almost all modern formulations of the objection suppose, without saying so, that God would be a spectator situated in time, able to cast his gaze forward as far as tomorrow. That image is inadequate. God does not wait for the future to arrive. Nor has he already-seen the future from the past. He is outside time.

What is divine eternity?

Divine eternity, in Catholic theology, does not mean infinite time. It means a mode of being beyond time. God does not endure: he is. This is what Boethius condenses in his classical formula:

"Aeternitas igitur est interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio." — Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, Book V, prose 6^[44]

Three words carry the weight of the definition: interminabilis (without limit), tota simul (whole all at once), perfecta (perfect). It is the patristic translation of a point already central in Saint Augustine:

"Thy years are as one day, and Thy day is not daily but today, for Thy today yields not to tomorrow, nor does it follow yesterday. Thy today is eternity." — Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book XI, chapter 13^[45]

Saint Thomas, in the Summa Theologiae I, q. 10, a. 1, takes up Boethius's definition and clarifies it: eternity is not time stretched to infinity; it is the pure absence of succession. The eternal present embraces, without before or after, everything we perceive as past, present and future^[46].

All times present to the divine gaze

Thomas Aquinas reformulates the point in the language of metaphysics:

"Although contingents come to pass successively, God does not know them successively in themselves as we do, but simultaneously. For his knowledge, no less than his being, is measured by eternity; and eternity, which is wholly all at once, encompasses the totality of time." — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q.14, a.13^[47]

The point is metaphysical, but its logical scope is immense. If God knows my acts as present, then his knowledge has no need to project itself into an empty future. The future is empty for me who am in time; it is full for God who is eternal.

This is what the Catechism expresses with lapidary concision:

"To God, all moments of time are present in their immediacy." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 600^[48]

The mountain-top analogy

The best-known analogy is that of the summit. A traveller on a winding path sees only the stretch before him; he does not know who walks downstream, upstream, nor when each will reach the crossroads. The observer posted on the mountain, by contrast, sees the whole path in a single gaze.

"It is as with one who walks along a road and does not see those who follow him, whereas the man posted on a height, looking down the whole road, sees at once all who pass along it." — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q.14, a.13, reply to objection 3^[49]

The analogy is limited — all analogies are — but it gives the right intuition: simultaneity of vision does not entail constraint of the walkers. God sees the whole path; that does not make him walk my steps in my place.

Limits of the analogy

Three clarifications are indispensable if we are not to go astray:

1. The mountain observer remains in time — he looks at the same instant at every segment. God is not even in that instant: he is in eternity.
2. The analogy might suggest that God sees a future already fixed. But what God sees are acts in the course of being freely posited — including the free act itself.
3. God's vision is not mere passive observation: it is also the first cause maintaining all reality in being. God does not merely see: he makes exist.

An unexpected convergence with modern physics

A quick detour through 20th-century physics is illuminating. When Hermann Minkowski, in his Cologne lecture of 21 September 1908, proposes four-dimensional space-time as the natural framework of Einstein's relativity, he introduces into physics the idea that past, present and future have equivalent ontological status: all events of the "block universe" exist in the same way, and only our perception introduces succession^[50].

This "block universe view" remains philosophically contested — physical eternalism has its presentist opponents — but it offers a suggestive analogy to the Boethian solution: what the theologian says of divine eternity, the physicist says of the four-dimensional structure of reality. The populariser Brian Greene details this convergence in The Fabric of the Cosmos (2004)^[51].

Three qualifications are indispensable. (1) The analogy is heuristic, not demonstrative: theology has no need of physics to uphold divine eternity, which is grounded on Revelation and metaphysics. (2) Divine eternity is not an "infinite duration" nor a "fourth dimension": it is a pure absence of succession, qualitatively different from an additional dimension of the space-time continuum. (3) But the fact that the most advanced physics has recognised an equivalent status for the future and the present defuses the naive image of an ontologically empty future that divine foreknowledge would have to fill miraculously. The future is not nothingness waiting — it is, in its own way, already there, and God sees it in his "tota simul".

The hidden sophism in the objection

The popular objection ("God knows, so I cannot choose otherwise") conceals a logical slide. Knowing that an event will take place is not making it take place. My knowledge that the sun will rise tomorrow does not make the sun rise. My certainty that a friend will accept an invitation did not force his decision.

Origen said it first in Against Celsus:

"It is not because God knows that a thing will be that it will be; but because it will be, it is known by God before it is." — Origen, quoted by Saint Thomas, Sentences I, dist. 38^[52]

Mathieu Lavagna illustrates the point in his chapter 5:

"The fact that God knows in advance what I am going to do does not imply that I am not free to do it. God can know in advance whether I shall have toast or cereal tomorrow morning, while leaving me free to make the choice. The fact that God knows in advance how I shall use my free will does not imply that he influences my free will." — Mathieu Lavagna, Soyez rationnel, devenez catholique, p. 128^[53]

The general rule is as simple as it is effective: knowledge conforms to its object. If the object is free, knowledge grasps it as free. If the object is necessary, knowledge grasps it as necessary. Knowledge never makes its object free or necessary.

Necessity of the consequence vs necessity of the consequent

Thomas Aquinas forged for this difficulty a technical but luminous distinction, already prepared by Anselm: one must distinguish the necessity of the consequence (the logical link between the propositions) from the necessity of the consequent (the intrinsic necessity of the event itself).

Thomas formulates the canonical solution thus:

"When I say: 'If God knew something, it will be,' the consequent must be understood of being according as the thing is present. So understood, it is necessary just as the antecedent is, for what is, when it is, it is necessary that it be, according to Aristotle." — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q.14, a.13, reply to objection 2^[54]

In other words: God knows my act as it is in the course of being posited. At that moment, like every present act, it is what it is. But in itself, it remains an act that could have been otherwise — a free act.

Sensu composito and sensu diviso

Thomas further refines the distinction with a logical analysis inherited from the medieval treatises: one must distinguish sensu composito (in the composite sense) from sensu diviso (in the divided sense).

• Sensu composito: the proposition "Peter, who is known by God as going to pray, can refrain from praying" is false. One cannot, at the same time, be known as praying and not pray — that is a logical contradiction.
• Sensu diviso: the proposition "Peter can refrain from praying", taken in itself, is true. Peter's capacity to refrain from praying remains real, independently of the divine science that sees the effective act.

The distinction settles the tightest version of the objection in one stroke: the opponent demands a "possibility of doing otherwise" in the sensu composito, which is logically absurd even for human knowledge; but freedom only needs possibility in the sensu diviso, which is intact^[55].

Time travel: Lavagna's thought experiment

Mathieu Lavagna proposes a thought experiment that makes the point intuitive:

"Imagine you could travel through time and see some future action of your brother — for example, the fact that he will choose to eat pasta next Monday. After seeing this, you return from your time travel. You now know how your brother will act later. Will anyone say that your brother will not be free when he eats pasta next Monday? No, of course not. The fact that you know in advance how he will act in a given situation does not imply that he is not free." — Mathieu Lavagna, Soyez rationnel, devenez catholique, p. 128-129^[56]

The analogy has a limit — God is not a time traveller, as we have seen — but it suffices to show the essential point: certain knowledge of an act does not remove the freedom of that act. If this were true even for a human time traveller, a fortiori for God who sees the act in itself in eternity.

The trap of logical fatalism

One variant of the objection runs: "If the proposition 'I shall do X tomorrow' is true today, then X is already fixed." This is logical fatalism, already denounced by Aristotle in On Interpretation^[57].

The Catholic answer is to say that the truth of a proposition does not precede its object: it follows it. A proposition is true because the event will occur (and will occur freely), not the other way round. The eternal truth of the proposition "Peter will choose to pray tomorrow at 8" is nothing other than God's eternal taking into account of the free act Peter will posit at 8.

This is exactly what Origen formulated in the 3rd century, and what the whole of Scholasticism took up: "Non quia Deus scit aliquid futurum, ideo erit ; sed quia futurum est, ideo a Deo scitur antequam sit."

Divine science conforms to its object

The decisive formula of the whole tradition is this: God knows each thing according to its own mode. Necessary things, he knows as necessary. Contingent things, he knows as contingent. Free acts, he knows as free.

"The contingent causes that God knows are contingent by reason of their proximate causes, although the science of God, which is their first cause, is a necessary cause." — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q.14, a.13, reply to objection 1^[58]

Divine science does not reduce its object to itself. It is infinite, but its perfection includes precisely respect for the proper modalities: a free act is not known as a disguised mechanism; it is known in its very freedom.

First cause and second cause

This doctrine is articulated with the Thomist metaphysics of the two causalities:

• First cause: God, who maintains all things in being and communicates to them the power to act.
• Second cause: the creature (here man), who acts genuinely, but from the being and power received.

"Man is free, because he is endowed with reason." — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q.83, a.1^[59]

God is not in competition with the second cause, as two people pulling on the same rope. He is the cause of the cause: he makes human freedom exist as freedom. The free act is wholly of God (as gift) and wholly of man (as act). The contemporary Dominican theologian Thomas Joseph White sums up the doctrine in a lapidary formula: "Deus movet voluntatem ad modum voluntatis" — "God moves the will in the manner of the will", that is, freely^[60].

Why can we not choose otherwise?

The ambiguous phrase "I cannot choose otherwise than what God knows" must be defused. Two possible meanings:

1. "It is impossible for God to be mistaken about what I shall choose": true. Divine science is infallible.
2. "I am inwardly constrained to make this choice": false. Constraint has not been established; only the certainty of divine science has been.

The summary table helps fix the points:

Molina's project

Luis de Molina (1535-1600), a Spanish Jesuit, publishes in 1588 a technical work with a programmatic title: Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis, divina praescientia, providentia, praedestinatione et reprobatione — "Harmony of Free Will with the Gifts of Grace, Divine Foreknowledge, Providence, Predestination and Reprobation" ^[61].

His project: to show that all these doctrines hold together, sacrificing neither divine sovereignty, nor human freedom, nor responsibility in salvation. To do so, he proposes a new distinction within divine science.

Three moments in divine science

Molina distinguishes logically (not temporally) three moments in God's knowledge of all things:

Middle science is the innovation. It stands "between" the science of possibles and the science of actuals: it bears on conditional futures or counterfactuals of freedom ("if he were in such a context, he would choose such a thing").

Counterfactuals of freedom

The central idea: before deciding which situation to actualise, God knows, through his middle knowledge, how each created freedom would act in each possible situation. Then, by a decree of his free will, he chooses to actualise a given possible world — and it is in this actualisation that providence unfolds.

The advantage of the Molinist solution is twofold:

• it preserves divine omniscience (God knows everything, including counterfactuals),
• it preserves creaturely freedom (counterfactuals bear on what the creature would freely do).

Mathieu Lavagna explicitly mentions the "magnificent" illustration of this compatibility by Molina in the final note of his chapter 5: "This compatibility between free will and divine omniscience is magnificently illustrated in the works of the Jesuit theologian Molina."^[62]

The biblical foundation: Matthew 11 and 1 Samuel 23

Middle knowledge is not a mere philosophical construction: it rests on precise biblical passages. As we have seen, two decisive texts are mobilised by contemporary Molinists^[63].

First text — the denunciation of the cities of Galilee (Mt 11, 21-23): Jesus affirms that if the miracles had taken place in Tyre and Sidon, those cities would have done penance. A counterfactual affirmation about what pagan cities would have freely chosen in a hypothetical situation. For such an affirmation to be true, there must be a fact (the counterfactual) making it true. And God knows that truth.

Second text — the episode of David at Keilah (1 Sam 23, 7-13): God reveals to David that if he stayed in Keilah, its inhabitants would hand him over to Saul. David leaves, and the event does not take place. But the counterfactual remains true and known by God.

These two passages, says William Lane Craig, "strongly suggest that God knows, not only what will be, but also what would be under different conditions" ^[64].

Plantinga and Craig: the contemporary defence

In the 20th century, the Protestant philosopher Alvin Plantinga relaunched Molinism in the Anglo-Saxon world. In God, Freedom, and Evil (1974) and The Nature of Necessity (1974), he uses it to answer the problem of evil — middle knowledge makes it possible to conceive a God who creates a free world while knowing the risk of the Fall^[65].

The Protestant apologist William Lane Craig made it one of the central arguments of his apologetics of divine foreknowledge, with a dedicated book, The Only Wise God (1987)^[66]. Craig develops four arguments in favour of middle knowledge:

1. The scriptural argument (Mt 11, 1 Sam 23, Jr 38, Wis 8).
2. The philosophical argument (free counterfactuals have a truth value).
3. The apologetic argument (middle knowledge resolves the foreknowledge/freedom enigma).
4. The soteriological argument (God can predestine without constraining).

The grounding problem

Molinism is not without critics, including Catholic ones. The best known is the grounding problem: on what is the truth of a counterfactual of freedom grounded before the creature exists? If I have not yet been created, how can the proposition "if Peter were in situation S, he would choose X" be true?

This objection lies at the heart of the modern Thomist critique of Molinism. Molinists reply that the truth of a counterfactual need not be "grounded" in an actual fact — it is made true by what the creature would do, full stop. The debate remains lively and structures much of the analytic philosophy of religion of the last forty years^[67].

Báñez and previous physical premotion

The Dominican school, around Domingo Báñez, rejects the idea of a middle knowledge. For strict Thomists, divine science is either natural (of possibles) or free (of actuals) — there is no "in-between". God does not know counterfactuals through a science prior to his decree; he knows them in his very decree.

The key concept is previous physical premotion (motio physica praevia): God, as first cause, directly and physically moves the human will — without thereby determining it into an act that would no longer be free. The divine motion is precisely what produces, in the creature, both the being of the act and its freedom.

First cause and second causality

The idea behind the Thomist solution is metaphysical: if God were not the first cause of the free act itself, then the creature would, on this point, be independent of God — which is metaphysically untenable. God must therefore cause the free act as free. This requires a notion of causality that is not mechanical: God causes freedom precisely as freedom.

"Man is endowed with free will; otherwise counsels, exhortations, precepts, prohibitions, rewards and punishments would be in vain." — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q.83, a.1^[68]

For Báñez and the Thomist tradition, the mystery is embraced: first cause and second cause are held together, without claiming to exhaust what articulates them.

The De auxiliis controversy (1597-1607)

Between 1597 and 1607, the quarrel between Thomist Dominicans and Molinist Jesuits grows so fierce that it rises to Rome. Pope Clement VIII convenes the Congregationes de Auxiliis: more than 85 sessions, more than 250 documents exchanged, with the participation of the greatest theologians of the age^[69].

The final verdict of Paul V (1607) is prudent: no one condemned, no dogmatic definition in favour of either school. Both opinions remain permitted, on condition that neither accuses the other of heresy. That decision has kept two rigorous Catholic schools in balance, on this question, down to the present day.

The two permitted schools

The Catholic Church does not define as dogma the precise way of articulating foreknowledge and freedom^[70]. It does define the boundaries:

1. God knows everything, including future free acts (the constant doctrine of divine omniscience).
2. Man is free: he acts of himself, and he is morally responsible.
3. Grace is necessary to do supernatural good (anti-Pelagianism).
4. Grace does not destroy freedom (anti-Jansenism, anti-determinism).

The Council of Trent (Session VI, 1547) explicitly condemns anyone who would say that human free will was destroyed after the Fall:

"If anyone says that, since Adam's sin, the free will of man is lost and extinct, or that it is a thing merely titular, yea a name without a reality, a figment, in fine, introduced into the Church by Satan: let him be anathema." — Council of Trent, Session VI, canon 5 on justification, 13 January 1547^[71]

The rejection of Jansenist determinism

In the 17th century, the Augustinus of Cornelius Jansen (published in 1640) takes up Augustine in a determinist sense. Grace is there an irresistible force, which in fact removes freedom. This doctrine is condemned by Popes Innocent X (1653) and Alexander VII (1656), then explicitly by Clement XI in the bull Unigenitus Dei Filius of 8 September 1713^[72]. The constant Catholic position: grace does not constrain the will.

The rejection of semi-Pelagianism

At the other extreme, semi-Pelagianism (already condemned at the Council of Orange in 529) claimed that man could, by his own powers, take the first step toward God, grace coming only to complete the work^[73]. This position is also rejected. Human freedom is real, but it needs grace for supernatural good.

Catechism and freedom

The current Catechism takes up this synthesis in a page of great density:

_"God created man a rational being, conferring on him the dignity of a person who can initiate and control his own actions. 'God willed that man should be left in the hand of his own counsel (Sir 15:14), so that he might of his own accord seek his Creator and freely attain his full and blessed perfection by cleaving to him.'" — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 1730^[74]

"Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one's own responsibility. By free will one shapes one's own life. Human freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 1731^[75]

"Freedom makes man responsible for his acts to the extent that they are voluntary." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 1734^[76]

On the Passion of Christ, the Catechism forcefully states the compatibility between the eternal plan and human responsibility:

"To the eternal plan, God included the free response of men. (...) 'For truly in this city there were gathered together against thy holy servant Jesus, whom thou didst anoint, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever thy hand and thy plan had predestined to take place' (Acts 4:27-28)." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 600^[77]

The passage is central: God eternally includes men's free response in his plan. He does not replace it. He includes it.

"If God knows that I shall sin, I cannot refrain from sinning"

This is the most painful pastoral version of the objection. It supposes that foreknowledge is a lock: if God knows that I shall sin tomorrow, I am already condemned to sin. The tradition's answer is firm:

• God knows your free sin, not a constrained sin.
• Divine knowledge does not cause sin; your will freely causes it.
• You can, now, choose not to sin — and then it is that non-sin that God eternally knows.

The pastoral psychology of the spiritual life confirms the point: awareness of a foretold sin is never, in lived experience, a chain. It is a call — precisely a call to choose otherwise, in the present act where I am free.

"Why did God create me, knowing that I would reject him?"

This is the objection of the damned. It is serious, and receives in the tradition three elements of answer, which add up without opposing one another:

1. The good of existing freely, even at the risk of choosing badly, is in itself a good — superior to non-existence for a being created in the image of God.
2. God offers every soul graces sufficient for its salvation (constant doctrine, against Jansenism). Final rejection is a free act, not an imposed fatality.
3. The mystery remains real: we do not see from outside our own history; the final judgment includes a mercy whose extent escapes our foresight.

The subject is treated in more detail in the articles The problem of evil and suffering and God's love, evil and hell.

Nelson Pike's theological fatalism

As we have seen, Pike holds that if God knew yesterday that I shall do X tomorrow, then that past fact is unchangeable, so I can do nothing that would make it false, so I must do X. The classical Catholic answer — already prepared in Boethius — is threefold:

1. God did not know yesterday: he knows eternally. The Pikean premise supposes a temporal God who is not the Catholic God.
2. Even granting God a "past" knowledge, its truth depends on the future act, not the other way round: what I shall freely do is what makes his science true. This is the Ockhamist soft facts strategy: the fact "yesterday God knew that I would pray tomorrow" is not a "hard" past fact; it is partly constituted by the future on which it depends^[78].
3. Counterfactual power ("I could have done otherwise") suffices for freedom: no one is asked to be able to change the past; one is asked to be able to choose otherwise in the present.

The analytic philosopher Eleonore Stump, in a foundational article co-signed with Norman Kretzmann in 1981, reactualised the Boethian solution against Pike. Her point: if God is timeless, Pike's premise — "yesterday God knew" — is simply false. There is no knowledge-yesterday in God. There is an eternal knowledge that has no date^[79].

Open Theism: sacrificing omniscience to save freedom?

An inverse strategy developed at the end of the 20th century in certain Protestant evangelical circles: Open Theism. Rather than saving freedom by redefining foreknowledge, one restricts omniscience to preserve freedom.

The philosopher William Hasker, in God, Time, and Knowledge (Cornell University Press, 1989), states the thesis directly: "All attempts to reconcile divine foreknowledge of future contingents with libertarianism fail; and if one is a libertarian, one must abandon God's exhaustive foreknowledge." ^[80] Greg Boyd, in God of the Possible (Baker, 2000), affirms that "God knows everything that is knowable" — but future free acts are not yet present to be known; they are possibilities^[81]. John Sanders, in The God Who Risks (IVP, 1998), speaks of a "relational God who takes real risks" ^[82].

This position is explicitly rejected by Catholic doctrine. Three fundamental reasons:

1. Scripture affirms exhaustive foreknowledge (Ps 138; Is 46, 10; Jr 1, 5; Mt 11, 21-23; Acts 2, 23; Rom 8, 29). Open Theism must recast these texts at the cost of major exegetical contortions — as William Lane Craig showed in his debates with Hasker and Boyd.
2. The unanimous tradition holds both propositions together since Origen. Sacrificing omniscience is an unprecedented break in classical Christianity.
3. The philosophical analysis is defective. As Linda Zagzebski showed in The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge (Oxford UP, 1991), the Boethian solution (God outside time) and the Ockhamist solution (soft facts) suffice to untie the dilemma without sacrificing omniscience^[83]. The Catholic philosopher Norman Geisler called Open Theism a "neotheism" and an "anthropomorphic drift" in Creating God in the Image of Man? The New "Open" View of God (Bethany, 1997)^[84].

For the Dominican theologian Thomas Joseph White, Open Theism confuses foreknowledge with projective knowledge and loses the essential metaphysical dimension: God is not a superhuman prophet; he is the Ipsum esse subsistens embracing all duration^[85].

Jonathan Edwards' compatibilism: saving the word "freedom" while losing the thing

At the exact opposite of Open Theism, Jonathan Edwards, the American Calvinist theologian (1703-1758), proposed in Freedom of the Will (1754) a radically determinist strategy. Human freedom is not a power to choose otherwise: it is simple psychological spontaneity — doing what one wants, it being understood that God determines what one wants.

Edwards distinguishes natural ability from moral ability: we are naturally capable of doing good (nothing physically prevents us), but we are morally incapable (our sinful will refuses the good). This moral inability, he says, is compatible with "freedom" in the sense that it remains internal to the will^[86].

This solution is not Catholic. It reduces freedom to the spontaneity of a will wholly determined by God. It ends in a compatibilism close to modern philosophical determinism. The Council of Trent refused it in advance (canon 5 on justification); and the Catechism rejects it by affirming that "freedom is the power [...] to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one's own responsibility" (CCC § 1731). Catholic freedom is libertarian in the technical sense: it includes a genuine power to choose otherwise.

Foreknowledge and predestination: not to be confused

One last confusion must be cleared up. Foreknowledge is not predestination. God predestines to salvation those he has called (Rom 8, 29-30), but he also knows the free choices of those who will reject him. The whole Catholic tradition refuses to turn foreknowledge into the cause of damnation: God does not decree anyone's damnation; he knows, without causing, the free refusal of grace.

The Council of Trent (Session VI, canons 17 and 23) explicitly condemns the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination, according to which God would positively predestine some to damnation^[87]. God's foreknowledge includes the free refusal of salvation; it does not produce it.

No fatalism: acting remains decisive

The most immediate consequence of Catholic doctrine is negative: there is no room for spiritual fatalism. "If I am to be saved, I shall be; if I am to be damned, I shall be too" — that sentence, sometimes attributed to a misuse of predestination, is anti-Catholic. God knows what I shall freely choose. My present choice to love, to pray, to convert is not useless: it is precisely what God eternally knows as my part in his plan.

Saint Augustine said it in a lapidary formula that must guide the whole Christian life:

"He who made you without you will not save you without you." — Saint Augustine, Sermon 169, chapter 11^[88]

Prayer within divine foreknowledge

The objection: "How can you pray for something in the future, when God already knows what is going to happen?" Lavagna answers it directly:

"When we pray, we are not asking God to 'give up his omniscience'. God knew from all eternity whether we were going to pray at instant t and, accordingly, he foresaw, from all eternity, answering the prayer we make to him today. This does not contradict our free will, since God knew from all eternity that we were going freely to ask him for X, and he ordered future events in light of that eternal knowledge of our prayer." — Mathieu Lavagna, Soyez rationnel, devenez catholique, p. 129-130^[89]

Prayer therefore has neither the function of informing God, nor of making him change his mind. It enters the eternal plan as one of its springs: God ordered the world including our free prayers. Saint Thomas Aquinas explains it thus:

"We do not pray in order to change the divine disposition, but to obtain what God decided to accomplish through the prayers of the saints." — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, IIa-IIae, q.83, a.2, ad 2^[90]

The Catechism synthesises the point in § 2738: "Christian prayer is cooperation with his Providence, with his loving plan for men"^[91]. Christ's prayer at Gethsemane is the supreme example: fully free, fully included in the Father's eternal plan, fully effective for the salvation of the world.

Trust in Providence

Divine foreknowledge, rightly understood, does not crush: it liberates. No event, no decision, no suffering escapes God's gaze — and God includes all of it in a plan of salvation that surpasses our sight.

"We know that to them that love God, all things work together unto good, to such as, according to his purpose, are called to be saints." — Saint Paul, Letter to the Romans 8, 28^[92]

This trust is not fatalism, because it includes our free cooperation. But it is trust, because my freedom, however imperfect, is eternally embraced by an intelligence that loves it.

The language of the saints

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux lived this truth with particular intensity. On 5 June 1897, during Matins, speaking with Mother Agnes about the possibility of dying without having received the sacraments, she confided to her:

"If you were to find me dead one morning, do not grieve: it would mean that Papa, the good God, had simply come to fetch me. No doubt it is a great grace to receive the sacraments; but when the good God does not permit it, it is still good, everything is grace." — Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus, Derniers entretiens, Carnet jaune of Mother Agnes, entry of 5 June 1897^[93]

She does not say "everything is fate", but "everything is grace": everything, including my free choices, is included in a gift. And Saint Augustine, at the other end of the tradition:

"Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in Thee." — Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book I, chapter 1^[94]

The for Thee marks the goal — God's eternity where our freedoms are fulfilled; the restless marks the free journey — our real history, embraced by an eternal science that knows it, but does not replace it.

God knows everything, including our future acts, because he sees all times present to his eternity. That knowledge is infallible, but it does not constrain the will. God knows our free choices as free: he knows what we shall do, not because he forces us to do it, but because his intelligence perfectly embraces all reality, including our freedom.

The apparent contradiction comes from a faulty image of God: a temporal God, a distant observer, whose knowledge would be a chain around our decisions. The Christian God is not in time. He is the eternity that sees all in a single gaze. His science does not precede our freedom: it embraces it.

The right conclusion is therefore not: "God knows, so I am not free". It is: "God perfectly knows what I freely choose" — and it is in that eternal gaze that my freedom finds its place, its dignity and its eternity.

• The free-will argument
• God's love, freedom, evil and hell
• The problem of evil and suffering
• Can God lift a stone too heavy to lift?
• Proofs of God's existence
• The moral argument
• The argument from conscience

Principal sources

• Aristotle, On Interpretation, chapter 9 (the sea-battle problem).
• Cicero, On Fate and On Divination, 1st century BC.
• Origen, Against Celsus, Book II, chapter 20; Commentary on Romans, Book VII.
• Saint Augustine, City of God, Book V, chapters 9-11 (against Cicero, on foreknowledge and freedom).
• Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book XI (on time and eternity).
• Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, Book V, proses 3-6 (divine eternity and foreknowledge).
• Saint Anselm, De Concordia Praescientiae et Praedestinationis et Gratiae Dei cum libero arbitrio, circa 1107-1108.
• Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, First Part, q. 14 (God's science), q. 22 (providence), q. 23 (predestination), q. 83 (free will).
• Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, Book I, chapters 66-67.
• Saint Thomas Aquinas, De veritate, q. 2, a. 12 (divine science of futures).
• Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, IIa-IIae, q. 83 (prayer).
• John Duns Scotus, Ordinatio I, dist. 38-39 (on future contingents).
• William of Ockham, Tractatus de praedestinatione et de praescientia Dei et de futuris contingentibus, 1321-1323.
• Luis de Molina, Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis, divina praescientia, providentia, praedestinatione et reprobatione, Lisbon, 1588.
• Domingo Báñez, Scholastica commentaria in primam partem Summae theologicae S. Thomae Aquinatis, Salamanca, 1584-1588.
• Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§ 302-314 (Providence), §§ 599-601 (Passion), §§ 1730-1742 (freedom), § 2738 (prayer and Providence).
• Council of Orange II, canons on grace, July 529.
• Council of Trent, Session VI (decree and canons on justification, 13 January 1547).
• Clement XI, bull Unigenitus Dei Filius, 8 September 1713 (against Jansenism).
• Nelson Pike, "Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action", Philosophical Review 74 (1965), p. 27-46.
• Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil, Eerdmans, 1974; The Nature of Necessity, Oxford University Press, 1974.
• Jonathan Edwards, A Careful and Strict Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of that Freedom of Will, Boston, 1754.
• William Lane Craig, The Only Wise God: The Compatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom, Baker, 1987.
• Eleonore Stump & Norman Kretzmann, "Eternity", Journal of Philosophy 78 (1981), p. 429-458.
• William Hasker, God, Time, and Knowledge, Cornell University Press, 1989.
• Linda Zagzebski, The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge, Oxford University Press, 1991.
• Norman Geisler, Creating God in the Image of Man? The New "Open" View of God, Bethany House, 1997.
• John Sanders, The God Who Risks, InterVarsity Press, 1998.
• Greg Boyd, God of the Possible, Baker Books, 2000.
• Thomas Joseph White, O.P., The Incarnate Lord: A Thomistic Study in Christology, CUA Press, 2015.
• Mathieu Lavagna, Soyez rationnel, devenez catholique !, MDN Productions, Paris, 2023.