Aristotle maintained that there is no certain knowledge of contingent future events. Socinus, in like manner, while he admitted that God knows all things that are knowable, abridged the objects of the divine knowledge by withdrawing from the number those objects whose future existence he considered as uncertain, such as the determinations of free agents. These, he held, cannot be certainly foreknown, because there is nothing in the present condition of things from which they will necessarily follow by natural law. The man who makes a clock can tell when it will strike. But free-will, not being subject to mechanical laws, cannot have its acts predicted or foreknown. God knows things only in their causes—future events only in their antecedents. John Milton seems also to deny God's foreknowledge of free acts: “So, without least impulse or shadow of fate, Or aught by me immutably foreseen, They trespass.”
With this Socinian doctrine some Arminians agree, as McCabe, in his Foreknowledge of God, and in his Divine Nescience of Future Contingencies a Necessity. McCabe, however, sacrifices the principle of free will, in defence of which he makes this surrender of God's foreknowledge, by saying that in cases of fulfilled prophecy, like Peter's denial and Judas's betrayal, God brought special influences to bear to secure the result,—so that Peter's and Judas's wills acted irresponsibly under the law of cause and effect. He quotes Dr. Daniel Curry as declaring that “the denial of absolute divine foreknowledge is the essential complement of the Methodist theology, without which its philosophical incompleteness is defenceless against the logical consistency of Calvinism.”See also article by McCabe in Methodist Review, Sept. 1892:760-773. Also Simon, Reconciliation, 287—“God has constituted a creature, the actions of which he can only know as such when they are performed. In presence of man, to a certain extent, even the great God condescends to wait; nay more, has himself so ordained things that he must wait, inquiring, ‘What will he do?’ ”
So Dugald Stewart: “Shall we venture to affirm that it exceeds the power of God to permit such a train of contingent events to take place as his own foreknowledge shall not extend to?” Martensen holds this view, and Rothe, Theologische Ethik, 1:212-234, who declares that the free choices of men are continually increasing the knowledge of God. So also Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:279—“The belief in the divine foreknowledge of our future has no basis in philosophy. We no longer deem it true that even God knows the moment of my moral life that is coming next. Even he does not know whether I shall yield to the secret temptation at midday. To him life is a drama of which he knows not the conclusion.” Then, says Dr. A. J. Gordon, there is nothing so dreary and dreadful as to be living under the direction of such a God. The universe is rushing on like an express-train in the darkness without headlight or engineer; at any moment we may be plunged into the abyss. Lotze does not deny God's foreknowledge of free human actions, but he regards as insoluble by the intellect the problem of the relation of time to God, and such foreknowledge as “one of those postulates as to which we know not how they can be fulfilled.” Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 159—“Foreknowledge of a free act is a knowledge without assignable grounds of knowing. On the assumption of a real time, it is hard to find a way out of this difficulty.... The doctrine of the ideality of time helps us by suggesting the possibility of an all-embracing present, or an eternal now, for God. In that case the problem vanishes with time, its condition.”
Against the doctrine of the divine nescience we urge not only our fundamental conviction of God's perfection, but the constant testimony of Scripture. In Is. 41:21, 22, God makes his foreknowledge the test of his Godhead in the controversy with idols. If God cannot foreknow free human acts, then “the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8) was only a sacrifice to be offered in case Adam should fall, God not knowing whether he would or not, and in case Judas should betray Christ, God not knowing whether he would or not. Indeed, since the course of nature is changed by man's will when he burns towns and fells forests, God cannot on this theory predict even the course of nature. All prophecy is therefore a protest against this view.
How God foreknows free human decisions we may not be able to say, but then the method of God's knowledge in many other respects is unknown to us. The following explanations have been proposed. God may foreknow free acts:—
1. Mediately, by foreknowing the motives of these acts, and this either because these motives induce the acts, (1) necessarily, or (2) certainly. This last “certainly” is to be accepted, if either; since motives are never causes, but are only occasions, of action. The cause is the will, or the man himself. But it may be said that foreknowing acts through their motives is not foreknowing at all, but is reasoning or inference rather. Moreover, although intelligent beings commonly act according to motives previously dominant, they also at critical epochs, as at the fall of Satan and of Adam, choose between motives, and in such cases knowledge of the motives which have hitherto actuated them gives no clue to their next decisions. Another statement is therefore proposed to meet these difficulties, namely, that God may foreknow free acts:—
2. Immediately, by pure intuition, inexplicable to us. Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:203, 225—“If God can know a future event as certain only by a calculation of causes, it must be allowed that he cannot with certainty foreknow any free act of man; for his foreknowledge would then be proof that the act in question was the necessary consequence of certain causes, and was not in itself free. If, on the contrary, the divine knowledge be regarded as intuitive, we see that it stands in the same immediate relation to the act itself as to its antecedents, and thus the difficulty is removed.” Even [pg 286]upon this view there still remains the difficulty of perceiving how there can be in God's mind a subjective certitude with regard to acts in respect to which there is no assignable objective ground of certainty. Yet, in spite of this difficulty, we feel bound both by Scripture and by our fundamental idea of God's perfection to maintain God's perfect knowledge of the future free acts of his creatures. With President Pepper we say: “Knowledge of contingency is not necessarily contingent knowledge.” With Whedon: “It is not calculation, but pure knowledge.” See Dorner, System of Doct., 1:332-337; 2:58-62; Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1858:601-605; Charnock, Attributes, 1:429-446; Solly, The Will, 240-254. For a valuable article on the whole subject, though advocating the view that God foreknows acts by foreknowing motives, see Bib. Sac., Oct. 1883:655-694. See also Hill, Divinity, 517.
(e) Prescience is not itself causative. It is not to be confounded with the predetermining will of God. Free actions do not take place because they are foreseen, but they are foreseen because they are to take place.
Seeing a thing in the future does not cause it to be, more than seeing a thing in the past causes it to be. As to future events, we may say with Whedon: “Knowledge takes them, not makes them.” Foreknowledge may, and does, presuppose predetermination, but it is not itself predetermination. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa, 1:38:1:1, says that “the knowledge of God is the cause of things”; but he is obliged to add: “God is not the cause of all things that are known by God, since evil things that are known by God are not from him.” John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 3—“Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault, Which had no less proved certain unforeknown.”
(f) Omniscience embraces the actual and the possible, but it does not embrace the self-contradictory and the impossible, because these are not objects of knowledge.