If agency is completely real, what does that mean for God’s knowledge? Scripture insists that God knows all things.Moses 1:6: “all things are present with me, for I know them all.” See also Doctrine and Covenants 130:7. This model agrees, but asks us to understand that knowledge carefully.
Complete Knowledge of Possibility
God knows every possible future completely: every possible sequence of choices, events, consequences, and outcomes, all the way to their completion. Not merely the next few steps, and not a rough forecast.
Picture the whole of history not as a single road but as an unimaginably vast tree of possibilities. Every time a free agent chooses, the road forks. Every fork leads to further forks. God sees the entire tree, every path through it, and exactly what lies at the end of each one.
It helps to be precise about what this knowledge contains. For every complete set of choices that free agents could make, God knows exactly what would follow: every consequence, every downstream effect, every interaction with natural law and with other people’s choices, to the end of history. What the model does not say is that God knows, ahead of the choosing, which set of choices will in fact be made. The knowledge is complete over the whole tree; it is the actual path through the tree that is still being settled.
What Is Not Fixed
What is not necessarily fixed is which of those possible futures becomes the actual history. That happens as agents make real choices.
So God does not guess about the future. His knowledge of possibility is complete. He knows exactly what would happen under every possible set of choices. There is nothing anyone could do that would surprise Him, because there is no path through the tree that He has not already seen to its end.
Knowing Is Not Making
Knowing a future is possible is different from making that future actual. A person can know every route between two cities without choosing which one a traveler will take. God can know every possible destiny a person could choose while leaving that person completely free to determine which one becomes theirs.
In that sense, God’s knowledge of possibility is eternally complete, while actuality unfolds through agency.
This is a different picture from the one many people carry. In the common picture, God simply looks ahead and sees the one future that will happen, which makes it hard to see how anything could have happened differently. In this picture, God sees all the futures that could happen, and nothing about His seeing them closes any of them off. The closing off is done by choice.
Where This Sits Among the Classic Views
Against simple foreknowledge. The traditional view says God knows the one actual future. The worry, raised by Origen’s opponents and pressed ever since, is that if God infallibly knows I will do X tomorrow, I cannot do otherwise. Origen answered that knowledge does not cause.Origen, Philocalia 23.8. See the companion chapter for the full passage. This model goes further and removes the premise: there is no single known actual future yet to constrain anyone.
Against Molinism. The sixteenth-century Jesuit Luis de Molina proposed that God has “middle knowledge”: He knows what every possible free creature would freely do in every possible circumstance. That gives God enormous providential control, since He can choose which circumstances to actualize. The model in this book is close in spirit but different in substance. It gives God complete knowledge of what would follow from any set of choices, not knowledge of which choice a free person would make. That avoids a well-known objection to Molinism, the “grounding objection,” which asks what could make it true, before anyone exists, that a particular person would freely choose one way rather than another.
Against open theism. Open theists, such as Clark Pinnock and Gregory Boyd, also hold that the free future is not settled, and they conclude that God’s knowledge of it is partly a matter of likelihoods. This model shares the openness but rejects the guessing. God’s knowledge of the space of possibilities is total; nothing that happens is unanticipated.
An objection. If God does not know which future will become actual, does He fail to know something, namely, the truth about tomorrow? The model’s answer is that before a free choice is made there is no fact yet about which way it will go, and so nothing is missing from God’s knowledge. Knowing all truths is compatible with there not yet being a truth about what a free person will choose. Whether that answer fully satisfies the scriptural language of foreknowledge is one of the questions this book keeps open.