Oracle: I'd ask you to sit down, but, you're not going to anyway. And don't worry about the vase.
Neo: What vase?
[Neo turns to look for a vase, and as he does, he knocks over a vase of flowers, which shatters on the floor.]
Oracle: That vase.
Neo: I'm sorry--
Oracle: I said don't worry about it. I'll get one of my kids to fix it.
Neo: How did you know?
Oracle: Ohh, what's really going to bake your noodle later on is, would you still have broken it if I hadn't said anything?
Does God's divine knowledge, particularly of the future, mean you have no free will? Thinking about stuff like that can really bake your noodle.
Greg Koukl takes on that challenge in this essay called What Determines the Future?
Koukl says, "The real question isn't whether the future is set or not, but what it is that sets the events of the future." Our knowledge of past events is similar to God's knowledge of future events. When looking backwards, the past is set. We call this history. History was determined by free choices. We know what the past was. We cannot change the past. Yet the past was created by free choices. Knowledge and free choices are intact. God's knowledge of the future is analagous to that.
Since we live on a time line, and we are always headed in one direction and our view of fixed events in time can only be in one direction ... looking backwards. God, however, is not bound by time. He created it. He invented it.
There is an intramural debate among Christian philosophers of God's relationship to time. William Lane Craig argues the position that God is timeless. This has been the classic view through the ages, I believe. Hugh Ross, the science-philosopher-evangelist argues that God is timeful. In other words, God is extra-dimensional ... which includes time. We don't really know how many dimensions of time God exists in. From a three dimensional perspective of time, for example, God sees past, present and future simultaneously. Picture God sitting at the North pole looking down at the equator. The equator is a line (which is time for us). We march forward in one direction, yet God sees all points on the equator at the same time. Finally, C.S. Lewis, if I recall correctly, had an interesting view of time. His perspective was that time in "eternity" was an eternal now. Everything was the present - no past tense, no future tense. God sees it all in the same way we see and experience the present.
Is your noodle baked yet?
Regardless of how you cache out God's eternality and omniscience, it seems to me that knowing events and fixing events are two different things. This is the point Koukl is trying to make. Don't confuse the setting part with the knowing part.
Does this mean Koukl is not Calvinistic in his soteriology? No. He distinguishes between God's involvement when it comes to salvation from God's involvement when it comes to the minutae of daily events. In Greg's words: "separate issue."
Does this sound like Open Theism? No. That is the position that God does not know the future. Definitely a separate issue there.
Bottom line: keep the issue of knowledge of all events separate from the issue of setting of all events, and you will be okay.
Now, here is my question to you. Do you think a discussion of the relationship of God to time would make for a rousing dinner conversation?