#763 The Priority of Future Contingents to God’s Foreknowledge
December 26, 2021Hello Dr. Craig. My wife and I have been studying through your Defenders 3 lectures on YouTube. We have been really enjoying the material and having good discussion as a result. In the Doctrine of God, lecture 14, you talked about God's foreknowledge and human free will. You distinguished between three kinds of priority: chronological, logical, and causal. I'm a bit confused with regards to causality. We want to avoid saying that God's knowledge causes our choices because that would undermine free will. But you also said that our choices cannot cause God to know what he knows because that would imply backwards causality. I understand that we want to avoid backwards causality, but then what is the connection between our actions and God's knowing them? Surely they can't be completely independent. Thanks for your work, it has been a great benefit to us.
Lucas
United States
Dr. craig’s response
A
How wonderful that you and your wife are together engaged in the study of Christian doctrine! This is a way of bonding that will strengthen your marriage and your spiritual maturity. You are very wise! I hope that our married readers will learn from your example.
So let’s consider God’s foreknowledge of some future contingent event. God’s foreknowledge is by definition chronologically prior to the event foreknown, that is to say, God’s foreknowledge is earlier in time than the event itself. What about causal priority? Since we are talking about a contingent event, like a free human choice, God’s foreknowledge cannot be the cause of the event. But neither can the event be the cause of God’s foreknowledge. For given the objective reality of temporal becoming, at the time that God has foreknowledge of the future event, the future event itself in no sense exists, for at the time of God’s foreknowledge it has not yet come into being. Therefore, it is impossible that God’s foreknowledge could be caused by the future event, for that would be for something to come into being from nothing.
So that leaves logical priority. This is the sense in which the future event is prior to God’s foreknowledge of it. Another term for this kind of priority is explanatory priority. God foreknows that the event will occur because it will occur; it will not occur because God foreknows it. So God’s foreknowledge is chronologically prior to the event, but the event is logically prior to God’s foreknowledge of it.
So “what is the connection between our actions and God's knowing them?” Think of it this way. Because the event E will occur, certain future contingent propositions about E are true, such as E will happen. Because God is omniscient, He has the property of knowing only and all true propositions. Therefore God knows that E will happen. Neither the relation between an event and a proposition about it nor the relation between a true proposition and God’s knowledge of it is a causal relation. God’s foreknowledge is counterfactually (not causally) dependent upon the future event. That is to say, if the future event were not to occur, then God would not have foreknown it. Thus, they are indeed connected, but not causally.
- William Lane Craig