Foreknowledge and Free Will: Are they Incompatible?

In Critical Reflection #4 Augustine’s contention on free-will and God’s foreknowledge was explored. Here it was established by Augustine that God’s foreknowledge and freewill are in fact compatible, and that to deny the foreknowledge of God and yet embrace his existence is madness (City of God, Book 5). Yet this is only one side of an ongoing debate, in City of God Book 5 another philosopher, Cicero, makes a very different argument. Cicero believes that if God in fact has foreknowledge of all that is to happen, everything is predestined, therefore free-will is nothing but an illusion and our existence as God’s creation is undermined. As such, it is Cicero’s contention that God’s foreknowledge and free will are incompatible and cannot exist

To establish a clearer understanding on the competing ideologies on the compatibility (or lack thereof) of foreknowledge and free-will, we will use Peter Kreeft’s (Boston College) story analogy; According to Mr. Kreeft, every good story has a sense of destiny, as if it were written by God. But every story also leaves its characters free. While lesser writers may jimmy and force their characters into molds, the greater the writer the more likely the characters will have a life and choice of their own. God, of course, is the greatest writer of all. Since human life is his story, it must have both destiny and freedom. This is of course Augustine’s point of view in City of God. Like Kreeft Augustine would contend that God is omniscient and not pre or post anything. This omniscience allows him to be present to everything. As such God does not need to look down into crystal balls, he does not have to wait for anything. Nor does he wonder what will happen. Nothing is uncertain to him, as the future is uncertain to us. Furthermore, God has no need to force our choice because he knows every possible outcome. However this is still problematic, if we are to consider God to be this omniscient author who knows every potential outcome to the story, it still leaves open the question of an unchanging story; does the story change to fit our actions (questionable if God is perfect), or do our actions change to be in line with the story, making free-will an illusion. This is

We can now establish that foreknowledge and free-will are incompatible due to two factors: The first derives from the idea that having free will is a matter of having a choice about the certainty of our actions, and that having a choice depends on the presence of genuine options. This dilemma is present in Peter Kreeft’s analogy of the story, here the presence of an omniscient author (God) does not allow for true choice if our actions are actually determined by the outcome of the story and not by our own choice. The second factor derives from the idea that the truth and presence of predetermination means that we don’t cause our actions in a significant way and our actions are not ultimately controlled by us. In other words, we lack the ability for self-determination. This dilemma is present in Augustine’s later notion of massa damnata, here God because of our tendency to sin has already predetermined who will be sinners and who will be saved, a controversial notion that only further compounds the fact that foreknowledge and free-will are