You ask an excellent question about the gift of human free will and what we call the omniscience of God (God’s knowledge of everything).  And you wonder whether “God’s having a plan” for everyone negates the free will of human beings, since God “knows it all already.”  First, I apologize for my extreme tardiness in answering this question; it was posted months ago.  But since it is such a probing question, I felt I had to give it some time and come up with an answer which does it justice.  The following explication may still not do it justice; and, in truth, I am not satisfied with this answer.  I wonder if a satisfying answer exists.  But, with those initial comments made, allow me to continue, going to one of the theological “big guns” of the Church, Thomas Aquinas and his Summa Theologica.

            Thomas makes it abundantly clear that we exercise free will (see question 83).  Here, Thomas notes two things.  First, he notes that the Bible is full of all sorts of “exhortations and commands.”  Do this; don’t do that.  If we did not have a free will, then these commands would be in vain.  Second, he compares human beings to animals and inanimate objects.  Objects, like rocks, simply follow laws of nature (ie, like a stone which is dropped from a tower falls….it neither chooses to do so nor judge it a good thing to do).  Animals, like a sheep, act on instinct.  You never see a sheep saying, “I think I will go talk to that lion and see if he really wants to eat me; he might be a vegetarian lion and want to be my friend.”  Nope, the sheep, out of innate preservation for its life, flees the lion, not of free will, but instinct built into the animal, says Thomas.  Humans, however, act contingently, using their reason and capacity to judge a course of action in a given situation.  And this is free will.

            In answering the questions on free will, Thomas never brings in God’s omniscience.  In fact, when Thomas speaks of God’s knowledge (article 13 of question 14) of contingent things, he presumes that we exercise our free will.  His question is whether God’s knowledge extends to “future contingent things.”  Thomas gives not hint that he sees any conflict with these two ideas (NB: As I did not do a sweeping look at the Summa, Thomas may have addressed this problem later on or in another writing; but he does not ask a question in one of these sections which one might expect, “Does God’s knowledge of future contingent things negate human free will?”)  And, I think, this is where we might find some insight into your probing question.

            “Future contingent things,” I presume, is Thomas’s way of saying formally “one’s choices.”  There are choices we make in the future (presuming we don’t die immediately).  Like, I eventually chose to answer this difficult question; but I also chose to put it off for a while; and then I chose to consult Thomas; and then I got to the point of typing this word…and then this one… and then these…and, well,…you get the point.  These are “contingent.”  They didn’t need to happen; I could have very well deleted this question in a cyberspace waying of saying, “I pass; next!”  That is an example of  a contingent future event which did NOT come to pass (one we call potential, not actual).

            The insight I allude to can be found in how humans and God come to know future contingent events.  We know future events successively.  We see them in sequence as they happen; and we can only know them this way (unlike past events, which we can lump into a whole).  God, in God’s eternity, sees future contingent events simultaneously.  That is, God sees it all at once.  If we think of God as a sort of “fortune teller,” then we have a deficient image of God.  Basically, the mystery we bump up against is how God, as pure act, can know everything in God’s act of being, in eternity.  This is different from our knowledge and reminds us of a famous insight from Thomas: we know about God through analogy, and for every similarity between us and God, there is a greater dissimilarity.

            Now, this may not satisfy your query—for, if God sees all future contingent events simultaneously, does that make us all robots who are bound by that knowledge?  The answer is no, and it comes from our experience.  We know that we freely make choices everyday.  How God “knows” these choices is difficult to say; foreknowledge, knowledge in time of what might happen really doesn’t apply to God since God sees it all in eternity.  What may help more, instead of these reflections on God’s knowledge, is the following discussion of “God’s plan.”

            Again, if we think that God has a plan, minute in every detail, that we are to follow without ever seeing the script, then we have a wrong image of “God’s plan.”  Let’s think of God’s plan more generally and applicable to all: God wants us to love God and accept the gift of eternal life that God offers to us all.  How we all do that, how we all see our giftedness and express our love for God in our specific historical conditions, well, that is up to us.  We can freely accept God’s gift of grace or accept it; and how we live will express our fundamental option for or against God.

            This was (and perhaps still is) a vexing question.  The reality is that we have a free will and that God’s plan for all of us is very simple: Do good, avoid evil.  Accept God’s free gift of grace and live accordingly.  How we discover the graces we are given and the good we are called to do is not found in some hidden plan in the mind of God but is directed through our prayer by the Spirit who loves and guides.  And it is what the adventure of the life of Christian discipleship is all about.

            I do hope this helps.

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Chris

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