QuestionsDoes God exist?If God knows everything in advance, am I free?
Does God exist?AtheismCoherence of the divine attributes

If God knows everything in advance, am I free?

Divine foreknowledge and human freedom

Nelson Pike 1930 · 2010If God always knew what I will do, it seems I cannot do otherwise.
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What it claims

There is no God who knows in advance, without possibility of error, everything we will do. Pike puts it this way: the doctrines about God and his knowledge, brought together, "demand the conclusion that if God exists, no human action is voluntary".

Why

God believed long ago what I will do tomorrow and cannot be wrong; the past is fixed, so I cannot do otherwise.

The same idea through history
Cicero44 BCAccording to Augustine (The City of God V, 9), Cicero already saw the dilemma: if the whole future is known in advance, everything happens by fate. To save freedom, he chose to deny that the future can be known, even by a god.
Augustine of Hippo395In the dialogue On Free Choice of the Will (III, 2-4), his friend Evodius raises the question: if God knew that man would sin, it was necessary that he sin; "how is the will free where so inevitable a necessity appears?" Augustine answers that foreknowing is not forcing.
Boèce524In prison, awaiting execution, Boethius takes up the problem in The Consolation of Philosophy (book V, prose 3) with great clarity, then solves it through God's eternity (prose 6).
Nelson Pike1965Pike starts from Boethius and makes the argument rigorous: he names each assumption (God has always existed, he cannot be mistaken, the past is fixed) and shows that together they rule out any free action. His article starts a debate that is still going on.
In short

"If God knows everything in advance, am I free?" is an argument by Nelson Pike ("Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action", Philosophical Review (1965), 1965) on the question "Does God exist?" (answer: atheism). Its claim: There is no God who knows in advance, without possibility of error, everything we will do. Pike puts it this way: the doctrines about God and his knowledge, brought together, "demand the conclusion that if God exists, no human action is voluntary". According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P5). AskPhilosophy presents 5 objections, 4 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

"Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action", Philosophical Review (1965)
Valid with an implicit premise

If God already knows what you will do tomorrow, and cannot be mistaken, can you do anything else? Boethius asked the question in prison around 524. In 1965 the American philosopher Nelson Pike gave it a precise form, discussed ever since by every philosopher of religion. Pike himself does not conclude that God does not exist: he shows that a believer who wants to keep both an omniscient God and human freedom must give up one of the premises. The argument is placed on the atheist side here because, if all its premises are true, the God of tradition, who knows all our acts in advance and cannot be mistaken, does not exist. It does not target every possible God: a God outside time, or one who does not know the future, escapes it.

P1If God exists, he has always existed and he knows everything, including the future. So, eighty years ago, he already believed that Jones would mow his lawn last Saturday.
P2God cannot be mistaken: it is impossible for one of his beliefs to be false.
P3The past is fixed: no one can now act so that the past would have been different, including what God believed eighty years ago.
P4If God already believed that Jones would mow, without being able to be mistaken, and if the past is fixed, then Jones could not have done otherwise on Saturday. To do otherwise, he would have had to make one of God's beliefs false, or change what God believed in the past: both are ruled out.
P5 · implicit premiseActing freely means being able to do otherwise.
P6Yet human beings sometimes act freely. Believers themselves insist on it: without it there would be neither responsibility nor sin.
Therefore there is no God who knows in advance, without possibility of error, everything we will do. Pike puts it this way: the doctrines about God and his knowledge, brought together, "demand the conclusion that if God exists, no human action is voluntary".

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P5, the computer finds a world where God exists, where Jones could not have done otherwise, and where he nonetheless acts freely. This is what compatibilists hold, and, in a way, Augustine: our will is free because it is in our power, even if its outcome is certain.
Valid with P5. Premises P1 to P4 show that, if God exists, Jones could not have done otherwise; P6 says we are free. The two still have to be connected: being free means being able to do otherwise (P5), which Pike does not discuss. The replies divide: Boethius and Swinburne attack P1, Ockham attacks P3, Augustine and Molina attack P4, and compatibilists reject P5.
Analogy. Imagine that a film of your day tomorrow was shot yesterday, and that a film cannot lie. Tomorrow, will you be able to do anything other than what it shows? If so, the film should have shown something else, though it is already shot. The whole discussion is about this "film": does it really exist before you (P1), is it infallible (P2), and is what has already been shot really out of your reach (P3)?

Objections

5

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

B
Boethius 524 · attacks premise 1

God does not foresee: he sees. He is not in time; he lives in an eternal present from which he sees at a single glance what is, for us, past, present or future. His knowledge is therefore not a forecast of the future but the knowledge of a present that never passes. And seeing a man walk does not force him to walk.

Pike replies
Nelson Pike 1965 · Pike's reply
Pike grants it: this is how Boethius escaped the problem, and his argument assumes a God who exists in time. But this way out has a price. Of a God outside time, one can no longer say that he knew, before it happened, that an event was going to happen. Foreknowledge in the usual sense, the kind prophecy assumes, disappears.
The debate goes on (our summary) Boethius' defenders, like Thomas Aquinas, answer that an eternal God can still reveal the future to prophets, since he sees it whole, like someone who sees the whole road from a height. Their opponents ask how a being outside time can act, answer a prayer or speak at a definite moment. Pike himself, in God and Timelessness (1970), judges that the classical reasons for believing in this timeless eternity do not suffice to justify it. The debate remains open.
A
Augustine 395 · attacks premise 4

Foreknowing is not forcing. Your memory does not force the past to have happened; in the same way God's foreknowledge does not force the future to happen. If you knew a friend was going to sin, it would not be your knowledge that pushed him to sin: he would sin by his own will.

Pike replies
Nelson Pike 1965 · Pike's reply
The argument does not say that God's foreknowledge causes our acts. Even suppose Jones's action had no cause at all: "the argument outlined above remains unaffected". The problem does not come from compulsion, but from the fact that God's belief, already there in the past, cannot be false. So the comparison with a friend who knows in advance fails: a friend can be mistaken, God cannot.
W
William of Ockham 1322 · attacks premise 3

Not all facts about the past are fixed in the same way. "Jones mowed his lawn" is a "hard" past fact. But "God believed eighty years ago that Jones would mow on Saturday" is about the past only in appearance: its truth depends on what Jones will do. Such propositions are not necessary, and Jones keeps the power to act otherwise. Marilyn Adams took up this idea against Pike in 1967: in her view, the existence of an omniscient and everlasting God is not a "hard" fact about the past.

Pike replies
John Martin Fischer 1983
Fischer finds this answer inadequate. It rests entirely on the difference between "hard" and "soft" facts. Yet Adams' definition of it raises serious problems, and Fischer sets a challenge to any version of Ockham's answer: explain clearly why God's past belief would not be a fact about the past like any other.
The debate goes on (our summary) The debate has continued without agreement. Plantinga (1986) defended a version of "Ockham's way out"; others judge that a belief really held by God in the past is the very model of a "hard" fact. It is today one of the most discussed answers.
L
Luis de Molina 1588 · attacks premise 4

Molina ascribes to God a "middle knowledge": God knows what each free will would do in each possible situation, without forcing it. If Jones were to choose otherwise, which he really can do, God would have known it from all eternity. Being able to act otherwise is therefore neither deceiving God nor changing the past: it simply means that God's belief would have been different.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Pike in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) For Pike, this is precisely the problem: having the power to bring it about that God believed something else eighty years ago is having power over the past, which P3 rules out. Molinists answer that this power changes nothing in the past: it only says what would have been true. Their critics also ask what can make true, before any choice, these truths about what a free person "would do" (Robert Adams, 1977).
Richard Swinburne 1977 · attacks premise 1

Being omniscient means knowing everything that can be known. But our future free acts are not yet settled: nothing in the past makes them necessary, and no one, not even God, can know them in advance. God is omniscient if he knows everything except those future states. This path was later developed by "open theism" (William Hasker, 1989): God knows the future as open.

Pike replies
A
Augustine 415 · Augustine's reply in advance, against Cicero, who already denied foreknowledge to save freedom
To confess that God exists and deny that he knows the future is "the most manifest folly". Both must be held at once: God knows everything in advance, and we freely will what we will, for his foreknowledge cannot be mistaken about our will.
The debate goes on (our summary) Supporters of open theism answer that nothing is taken away from God: a perfect being is not blamed for not knowing what does not yet exist. But they have to reread the biblical passages where God foretells the future. And their God is no longer the classical God the argument targets: in a sense, they accept Pike's conclusion.
What today's voices say
Defend it
Matt DillahuntyIf God knew everything and could have made a world where he stayed a believer, God is responsible for the world where he is not.
In the same family · Coherence of the divine attributes
The paradox of omnipotenceJohn Leslie Mackie · 1955 · debate over 4 levels
Does God exist?Atheism 4