Chapter 25

Divine Foreknowledge and Time

Simple Foreknowledge Without Determinism

Introduction: The Heart of the Matter

We have now arrived at what I consider to be one of the most important chapters in this entire book. Everything we have built so far — the case for divine temporality, the rejection of strict timelessness, the argument that the Trinity generates a form of divine time, and the biblical evidence that God genuinely acts, responds, and interacts within the flow of history — all of it leads us to a question that every thoughtful Christian eventually asks: If God is in time, how does He know the future?

This is not just an academic puzzle. It cuts to the heart of who God is and how we relate to Him. Can we trust God's promises if He does not know what tomorrow holds? Can we have confidence in biblical prophecy if the future is uncertain — even for God? And on the other side of the coin, if God does know the future with absolute certainty, does that mean our choices are meaningless? Are we just actors reading a script that was written before we were born?

The thesis of this chapter is straightforward, even if defending it requires some careful thinking: God knows every future event with absolute certainty — not because He determines them (as Calvinism teaches), not because He knows what creatures would do in any possible scenario (as Molinism teaches), not because the future is a "block" already laid out in four-dimensional spacetime (as eternalism claims), and not because He sees everything from a timeless vantage point outside of time (as divine timelessness claims). Rather, God knows the future because His unique transcendent access to all of time allows Him to see future events without causing them. I call this position simple foreknowledge with transcendent temporal access.

In what follows, we will first define simple foreknowledge and distinguish it clearly from its four major rivals: Calvinism, Molinism, open theism, and timelessness-based foreknowledge. We will then develop the author's model of how God knows the future. Finally, we will address the most serious objections to this view — including the concern that foreknowledge eliminates free will, the worry that this view smuggles in the B-theory block universe, and the mystery of how God can access events that do not yet exist.

This chapter represents one of the author's most distinctive contributions in this book. The position defended here — dynamic divine temporality combined with exhaustive simple foreknowledge through transcendent access — is, I believe, the most biblically faithful, philosophically coherent, and pastorally satisfying account of how God relates to the future. Let us see why.

What Is Simple Foreknowledge?

Let us begin with a definition. Simple foreknowledge is the view that God knows all future events — including the free choices of His creatures — with absolute certainty, simply because He is omniscient. That is, God's knowledge of the future is a basic, essential attribute of who He is. God does not need to determine events in order to know them. He does not need a special mechanism like middle knowledge. He simply knows all truths — past, present, and future — because knowing all truths is part of what it means to be God.¹

The word "simple" in "simple foreknowledge" does not mean the view is simplistic. It means that God's knowledge of the future is basic or unmediated — it does not come through some intermediate step like a divine decree (Calvinism), counterfactual knowledge (Molinism), or timeless perception (the timelessness view). God just knows. He knows because He is God, and omniscience — knowing all truths — is part of His essential nature.²

Now, the reader may fairly ask: "But how does God know the future? What is the mechanism?" And this is where our distinctive contribution comes in. Traditional defenders of simple foreknowledge have sometimes been content to say, "We don't know how — God just does." William Lane Craig, for instance, advocates what he calls a conceptualist model of divine cognition, in which God's knowledge is self-contained and more like a mind's knowledge of innate ideas than like perception. On this model, God does not "look ahead" and "see" the future (that would be the perceptualist model). Rather, God simply possesses, as part of His essential nature, knowledge of all truths — including truths about future events.³

I find Craig's conceptualist model helpful as far as it goes. But I want to go a step further. The reason I believe God can know all future truths is that God has what I call transcendent temporal access — the unique divine capacity to access, see, and interact with all moments of created time, past, present, and future, without being locked into the creaturely present the way we are. God is genuinely temporal (He experiences real sequence and succession, as we argued in Chapters 7 and 26), but He is not merely temporal in the way creatures are. His temporal experience transcends our clock-time. This gives Him a vantage point from which all of time is accessible — not because time is a frozen block (which I reject), but because God's unique nature allows Him to know temporal realities that are beyond our creaturely reach.⁴

Before developing this model further, we need to understand exactly what it is not. So let us carefully distinguish simple foreknowledge from its four major rivals.

The Four Rival Models of Divine Foreknowledge

1. Calvinism: Foreknowledge Through Deterministic Decrees

The first rival model is the Calvinist or theological determinist view. On this view, God knows the future because He has determined the future. Before the foundation of the world, God issued decrees — sovereign, irrevocable decisions — that fixed every event that would ever occur. God knows what will happen because He decided what would happen. His foreknowledge is, in effect, knowledge of His own decisions.⁵

This view has deep roots in the Reformed tradition, going back to John Calvin and the Westminster Confession of Faith. It has the advantage of providing a clear and straightforward explanation of how God knows the future: He knows it because He planned it. And it certainly preserves the sovereignty and omniscience of God.

But I reject this view for several reasons. First, it eliminates genuine human freedom. If God has determined every event — every thought, every choice, every action — then human beings are not genuinely free in any meaningful sense. We are simply doing what we were programmed to do. The Calvinist will insist that human choices are still "free" in a compatibilist sense (meaning that we do what we want to do, even though what we want was determined by God), but this is a diluted form of freedom that does not match the biblical picture. Scripture presents human beings as genuinely responsible agents who can accept or reject God's grace, obey or disobey His commands, and turn to Him or turn away. This requires what philosophers call libertarian free will — the genuine ability to choose between alternatives.⁶

Second, theological determinism makes God the author of evil. If God has determined every event, then He has determined every sin, every act of cruelty, every atrocity. The Calvinist will say that God "ordains" evil but is not the "author" of it — but this distinction, however well-intentioned, is exceedingly difficult to maintain. If God determined that a man would commit murder, and the man had no genuine ability to do otherwise, then God bears ultimate responsibility for the murder. This is a conclusion I cannot accept, and I do not think Scripture supports it.⁷

Third, on the Calvinist view, prayer becomes largely an exercise in futility. If everything has already been determined, then our prayers do not genuinely influence what happens. God may have determined that we would pray, and He may have determined that certain events would follow our prayers, but the prayers themselves do not genuinely move God to act. This conflicts with the biblical portrait of prayer as real conversation with a God who genuinely listens and responds (see Chapter 35).

I want to be clear: I have great respect for the Calvinist tradition and for the many godly men and women who hold this view. But I believe theological determinism is not the best reading of Scripture, and it creates more problems than it solves when it comes to foreknowledge and free will. Foreknowledge does not require determinism. God can know what we will freely choose without having determined that we would choose it.⁸

2. Molinism: Middle Knowledge

The second rival model is Molinism, named after the sixteenth-century Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina (1535–1600). Molinism is one of the most creative and sophisticated proposals in the history of theology, and it deserves careful attention.⁹

Molinism proposes that God has three kinds of knowledge, arranged in a logical sequence:

Natural knowledge comes first. This is God's knowledge of all necessary truths — all the things that are logically possible. God knows every possible world He could create, every possible creature He could make, every possible scenario that could unfold. This knowledge is part of God's nature and does not depend on His will.

Middle knowledge comes second. This is the distinctive Molinist contribution. Middle knowledge is God's knowledge of what philosophers call counterfactuals of creaturely freedom — propositions about what every possible free creature would freely do in every possible circumstance. For example, God knows: "If Peter were placed in circumstances C, Peter would freely deny Jesus three times." God knows this not because He determined Peter's choice, but because He simply knows what Peter would freely do. This knowledge is also part of God's nature and does not depend on His will.¹⁰

Free knowledge comes third. Armed with His natural knowledge (what is possible) and His middle knowledge (what creatures would freely do in any scenario), God freely chooses which world to create. Once He makes this choice, He knows everything that will happen in the actual world — because He knows which scenarios will obtain and what creatures will freely do in those scenarios.

Molinism is an ingenious system. It appears to preserve both divine sovereignty (God chose the best feasible world) and human freedom (creatures make genuinely free choices within the world God selected). It also provides a clear account of how God knows the future: He knows what will happen because He knows what creatures would do in the circumstances He chose to create.

So why do I reject Molinism? The primary reason is what philosophers call the grounding objection.¹¹ The grounding objection asks: What makes counterfactuals of creaturely freedom true? Consider the proposition: "If Peter were in circumstances C, Peter would freely deny Jesus." What makes this proposition true? It cannot be true because God determined it (that would collapse Molinism into Calvinism). It cannot be true because Peter has already made the choice (the circumstances haven't occurred yet). It cannot be true because of Peter's character or dispositions (because libertarian freedom means Peter could have done otherwise even with the same character and dispositions). So what grounds the truth of this counterfactual?

The Molinist must say that these counterfactuals are just true — they are brute facts about what creatures would freely do, with no further explanation. But this seems deeply unsatisfying. How can there be a definite fact about what a free creature would do in circumstances that have never obtained, when libertarian freedom means the creature could have done otherwise? The grounding objection suggests that counterfactuals of creaturely freedom simply have no truth-value prior to the actual exercise of freedom — and without truth-values, there is nothing for God to know.¹²

There is also a theological concern. Molinism can make God seem like a cosmic chess master who manipulates circumstances to get the outcomes He wants — placing people in precisely the situations where He knows they will make the choices He desires. This is a more subtle form of manipulation than outright determinism, but it raises similar concerns about the genuineness of the relationship between God and His creatures. I prefer a model in which God genuinely interacts with free creatures in real time, responding to their choices rather than orchestrating their circumstances to produce predetermined outcomes.

3. Open Theism: The Denial of Exhaustive Foreknowledge

The third rival model is open theism. Open theists agree with us that God is genuinely temporal and that He interacts with the world in real time. They also agree that Calvinism and its deterministic decrees are wrong. But they draw a conclusion that I believe goes too far: they deny that God has exhaustive knowledge of future free choices.¹³

The open theist reasoning goes something like this: If God is genuinely temporal, then He exists in the present moment. The future has not yet happened. Future free choices have not yet been made. Since there are no future facts about what free creatures will choose (because the choices have not been made yet), there is nothing for God to know. God knows everything that can be known — but future free choices cannot be known because they do not yet exist as determinate realities. God is still omniscient on this view; He knows all that is knowable. It's just that the future free actions of creatures are not yet knowable.¹⁴

I have already addressed open theism at length in Chapters 9 and will critique it more fully in Chapter 32, so I will be brief here. I reject open theism for three main reasons:

First, the biblical evidence for God's exhaustive foreknowledge is simply too strong. When God declares, "I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done" (Isaiah 46:9–10, ESV), He is claiming to know the entire future — including the free choices of human beings. The ability to declare future events is presented as a defining characteristic of the true God, distinguishing Him from false gods who cannot predict the future (as argued in Chapter 20). The specificity of biblical prophecy — from messianic predictions to Jesus's prediction of Peter's three denials — requires exhaustive foreknowledge of free choices, not merely knowledge of what God Himself intends to do.¹⁵

Second, open theism undermines pastoral confidence. If God does not know what tomorrow holds, how can we trust His promises about the future? How can we be confident that His plans will succeed? How can we rest in the assurance that "all things work together for good" (Romans 8:28) if God does not know what "all things" will include? The pastoral cost of open theism is too high.

Third — and this is the key point for our purposes — open theism's denial of foreknowledge is theologically unnecessary. The open theist assumes that if God is temporal, He cannot know the future. But this assumption is false. It assumes that a temporal being can only know the present — that temporal experience limits one to awareness of what is happening now. But why should we accept this assumption? A temporal God whose temporal experience transcends creaturely clock-time can be temporal AND know the future. That is precisely the model I am proposing.¹⁶

4. Timelessness-Based Foreknowledge

The fourth rival model grounds God's knowledge of the future in divine timelessness. On this view, God exists outside of time entirely. He sees all of time — past, present, and future — spread out before Him in a single, unchanging "eternal now." From this timeless vantage point, nothing is past or future for God. Everything simply is. God does not really have foreknowledge at all (since there is no "before" or "after" for a timeless being); He has timeless knowledge of all events.¹⁷

This view has an elegant simplicity. If God is outside of time, the problem of how He knows the future simply dissolves — the future is just as present to Him as the past. Thomas Aquinas compared God's perspective to a person standing on a hilltop watching a procession pass below. The people in the procession can only see those immediately around them, but the person on the hilltop can see the entire procession at once. Similarly, creatures in time can only see the present, but God from His timeless vantage point sees all of time at once.¹⁸

The problem, of course, is that we have spent the first twenty-four chapters of this book arguing that divine timelessness is philosophically untenable and biblically unsupported. If God is not timeless — and I have argued at length that He is not — then this model of foreknowledge collapses. We cannot ground God's knowledge of the future in a mode of existence (timelessness) that God does not actually possess. We need a different account — one that preserves God's genuine temporality while still affirming His exhaustive knowledge of the future.¹⁹

And that is exactly what simple foreknowledge with transcendent temporal access provides.

The Author's Model: Transcendent Temporal Access

Now that we have surveyed the landscape and explained why each rival model falls short, let me lay out the positive case for the view I am defending. I call this view simple foreknowledge with transcendent temporal access, and it has several key components.

God Is Genuinely Temporal

As argued throughout this book — especially in Chapters 7, 26, and 28 — God is genuinely temporal. He experiences real sequence and succession. He acts, responds, creates, speaks, listens, grieves, and rejoices. These are not metaphors or accommodations. They reflect the genuine reality of God's temporal life. The dynamic, perichoretic life of the Trinity — the mutual indwelling of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — itself generates a form of temporality, a "divine time" that is an attribute of God's own being (see Chapter 26). God has always been temporal; He did not become temporal at creation. Created, physical, measurable time began at creation, but time itself — as a feature of the divine life — did not begin.²⁰

God Is Not Locked Into the Creaturely Present

Here is where our view parts ways with open theism. While God is genuinely temporal, He is not merely temporal in the way creatures are. Creatures are locked into the present moment. We can remember the past (imperfectly) and anticipate the future (uncertainly), but we can only directly experience the present. The past is gone; the future has not arrived. We are, as it were, passengers on a train, seeing only the landscape passing by our window right now.

God is different. His temporal experience transcends creaturely clock-time. He can access, see, and interact with all moments of created time — past, present, and future. He is not limited to experiencing only the present moment and then "waiting" for the future to arrive. I have called this capacity transcendent temporal access.²¹

The Mountain-Top Analogy

An analogy may help here — though, as with all analogies for divine realities, it is imperfect and should not be pressed too far. Imagine a long road winding through a valley. A traveler on the road can only see a short distance ahead and behind. The road bends, hills block the view, trees obscure what lies around the next corner. The traveler knows where he has been (he remembers the road behind him) and he can guess about what lies ahead (based on the direction of the road), but he cannot see what is ahead with certainty. This is like our creaturely experience of time: we are on the road, moving forward moment by moment, unable to see the future.

Now imagine a person standing on a mountaintop overlooking the entire valley. From this elevated vantage point, she can see the whole road — its beginning, its middle, its end, every twist and turn. She can see the traveler on the road and she can see what lies around the corner that the traveler cannot yet see. She does not cause what is on the road to be there; she simply sees it from her elevated position.²²

This analogy — often associated with classical theism and divine timelessness — is actually more appropriate for our view than for the timelessness view. The person on the mountaintop is not outside of the valley. She is in the same world as the traveler. She is a real, spatially located being — not some abstract entity existing in a different dimension. Her advantage is not that she exists in a fundamentally different kind of reality, but that her position gives her access to more of the same reality than the traveler can see.

Similarly, on our view, God is not outside of time. He is in time — He experiences real sequence and succession. But His "position" — His transcendent nature as the omniscient, omnipotent Creator — gives Him access to more of temporal reality than we can experience. He can see the future not because He exists outside of time, but because His unique divine nature gives Him an elevated temporal vantage point that transcends creaturely limitations.²³

How God Knows Without Causing

This brings us to perhaps the most important distinction in this entire discussion: the difference between knowing and causing. This distinction is simple, but it is absolutely critical, and getting it wrong leads to enormous confusion.

Knowledge tracks events. Events do not track knowledge. That is, knowledge follows reality — it corresponds to what is the case. When I know that it is raining outside, my knowledge corresponds to the fact of the rain. My knowledge does not cause the rain. The rain would be falling whether or not I knew about it. My knowledge is a response to reality, not a cause of it.²⁴

The same is true of God's foreknowledge. When God knows that tomorrow you will choose to go for a walk, His knowledge corresponds to the fact of your future free choice. His knowledge does not cause your choice. You would make the same choice whether or not God knew about it in advance. God's foreknowledge is a response to what you will freely do, not a cause of what you will do.

Craig puts this point well. He notes that the argument for theological fatalism — the argument that divine foreknowledge eliminates human freedom — commits a basic logical fallacy. The argument goes like this:

1. Necessarily, if God foreknows x, then x will happen.
2. God foreknows x.
3. Therefore, x will necessarily happen.

But this argument is fallacious. What validly follows from premises (1) and (2) is not (3) but:

3'. Therefore, x will happen.

The fatalist illicitly transfers the necessity of the inference (it necessarily follows from the premises) to the conclusion itself (the event itself is necessary). But the conclusion — that x will happen — is perfectly compatible with x happening freely. From God's knowledge that I will do x, it follows that I will do x. It does not follow that I must do x. The "will" is a statement of what occurs; the "must" would be a statement of necessity. These are very different things.²⁵

Think of it this way. Suppose your best friend knows you so well that she can predict with certainty what you will order at a restaurant. When you order the pasta — exactly as she predicted — did her knowledge cause you to order the pasta? Of course not. You freely chose the pasta because you wanted it. Her knowledge was based on her understanding of you, not on any causal influence over your choice. Now multiply this by infinity. God knows you perfectly — more perfectly than any friend ever could — and He knows what you will freely choose. His knowledge tracks your free choice; it does not determine it.

The Conceptualist Foundation

Craig makes an important contribution here with his distinction between the perceptualist model and the conceptualist model of divine cognition. The perceptualist model imagines God "looking" at the future and "seeing" what is there — like a person peering through a telescope at distant events. This model runs into problems because, on the A-theory of time that I hold, future events do not yet exist. If they do not exist, there is nothing for God to "see."²⁶

The conceptualist model avoids this problem. On this model, God does not acquire His knowledge by perceiving external objects. His knowledge is self-contained — more like a mind's awareness of innate ideas than like a person looking at something. God knows all truths not because He "looks" at them, but because knowing all truths is an essential part of His nature. As Craig writes, God "simply possesses essentially knowledge of all truth, including truths about future contingents."²⁷

I accept the conceptualist model as far as it goes. But I want to integrate it with transcendent temporal access. God's knowledge of the future is not merely a brute fact about His nature with no further explanation. It is grounded in His unique capacity, as a temporal being who transcends creaturely time, to access temporal realities that are beyond our reach. The conceptualist model tells us what God's knowledge is like (self-contained, essential, not dependent on perceiving external objects). Transcendent temporal access tells us how this is possible (God's temporal experience is not limited to the creaturely present).

The Role of the A-Theory

As argued in Chapter 24, I hold the A-theory of time — the dynamic, tensed view in which the present is objectively real, time genuinely "flows," and temporal becoming is a real feature of reality. The past is fixed, the present is the locus of agency and experience, and the future (from the creaturely perspective) has not yet occurred. I reject the B-theory (the static, tenseless view in which all moments are equally real and temporal passage is illusory) and its associated eternalism (the view that past, present, and future events all exist in the same way).²⁸

This commitment to the A-theory creates a complication for our view that must be honestly addressed. If the future has not yet occurred — if future events do not yet exist as concrete realities — then how can God know them? Even with transcendent temporal access, what is there for God to access?

This is a genuine mystery, and I do not pretend to have a complete answer. But I want to make two important points.

First, the mystery is not unique to our view. Every account of divine foreknowledge faces a version of this mystery. The Calvinist must explain how a timeless decree can cause temporal events. The Molinist must explain what grounds counterfactuals of creaturely freedom. The open theist must explain how a God who does not know the future can guarantee the fulfillment of specific prophecies. The atemporalist must explain how a timeless being can interact with temporal reality at all. Every position has its mysteries. The question is which position best fits the biblical data and creates the fewest problems — and I believe simple foreknowledge with transcendent temporal access is that position.²⁹

Second, when I say that God "accesses" future events, I am not making a claim about the ontological status of those events. I am not saying that future events already exist in some B-theory block. I am saying that God's unique nature gives Him epistemic access — genuine knowledge — of realities that transcend our creaturely reach. This is a unique divine capacity. Just as God's omnipresence means He is present everywhere without being a physical object extended through space, God's omniscience (via transcendent temporal access) means He knows all temporal truths without those truths having to "exist" in a B-theory sense. God's knowledge of the future is sui generis — one of a kind. It does not fit neatly into any creaturely category, and we should not expect it to.³⁰

Biblical Support for Simple Foreknowledge

The biblical case for God's exhaustive foreknowledge has been developed at length in Chapter 20, so I will not reproduce that full argument here. But a brief summary is important for grounding the philosophical model we are building.

The prophetic literature is our strongest witness. In the great trial speeches of Isaiah 40–48, God challenges the false gods to prove their deity by predicting the future — and when they cannot, He does it Himself. "I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done" (Isaiah 46:9–10, ESV). The ability to declare the future is presented as a unique mark of the true God. It is not merely knowledge of what God Himself intends to do (though it includes that); it is knowledge of the entire sweep of history, including the free choices of human agents.³¹

Consider also God's detailed foreknowledge of specific human choices. God told Abraham that his descendants would be enslaved in a foreign land for four hundred years and would then come out with great possessions (Genesis 15:13–14) — a prediction that involved countless free human decisions over centuries. Jesus predicted that Peter would deny Him three times before the rooster crowed (Matthew 26:34) — a prediction involving Peter's free, spontaneous responses under pressure. God told Jeremiah the specific name of the Persian king (Cyrus) who would authorize the return from exile (Isaiah 44:28; 45:1) — a prediction made over a century in advance, involving the free decisions of a man who had not yet been born.³²

These are not vague predictions that could be fulfilled in many ways. They are specific, detailed foreknowledge of particular free human choices. They make far better sense on the view that God has exhaustive foreknowledge of all future events — including free choices — than on any view that limits God's knowledge of the future.

The apostolic witness confirms this. Paul writes that God "foreknew" His people (Romans 8:29), chose them "before the foundation of the world" (Ephesians 1:4), and has a "plan for the fullness of time" (Ephesians 1:10). Peter speaks of Christ as "foreknown before the foundation of the world" (1 Peter 1:20). Acts 2:23 describes Jesus being "delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God." These texts assume that God has comprehensive knowledge of the future — not merely knowledge of His own intentions, but knowledge of the entire course of history including the free choices of human beings who would crucify the Messiah.³³

The crucial observation is this: the Bible everywhere assumes that God knows the future exhaustively, and it never suggests that this foreknowledge is based on determinism. The biblical writers affirm both God's foreknowledge and genuine human responsibility without any sense of contradiction. They do not appear to think that foreknowledge requires determinism. They hold both truths together naturally and without tension. This is exactly what simple foreknowledge proposes: God knows the future completely, and human beings are genuinely free. The two are compatible because knowledge is not causation.

Addressing the Major Objections

No philosophical position worth holding is free from objections. Simple foreknowledge with transcendent temporal access faces several serious challenges, and intellectual honesty requires that we address them directly. Let me take the three most important objections in turn.

Objection 1: "If God Sees the Future, Isn't Free Will Illusory?"

This is the most common objection, and we have already touched on it above. But let me develop the response more fully, because this objection is the one that troubles people the most.

The objection goes like this: If God knows right now that tomorrow I will choose to have coffee for breakfast, then it is certain that tomorrow I will choose coffee. And if it is certain, then I could not have chosen otherwise. And if I could not have chosen otherwise, then my choice is not free. So divine foreknowledge eliminates free will.

The response turns on a crucial distinction between certainty and necessity. These two concepts are often confused, but they are fundamentally different. Certainty is a property of knowledge — it describes how confident we are about something. Necessity is a property of events — it describes whether an event could have been otherwise. An event can be certain (known with complete confidence) without being necessary (unable to have been otherwise).³⁴

Consider an analogy from everyday life. Suppose I watch a recording of yesterday's football game. I already know the outcome: the home team wins 24–17. My knowledge of the outcome is completely certain. But does my knowledge cause the outcome? Obviously not. The players made their free choices during the game, and my watching the recording afterward does not retroactively eliminate their freedom. The game was played freely; I simply know how it turned out.

Now, you might object: "But that's knowledge of the past, not the future. God's foreknowledge is different because it comes before the event." But is it really different in any relevant way? The key question is whether knowledge — regardless of when it occurs — causally determines what it knows. And the answer is clearly no. Knowledge corresponds to reality; it does not create reality. Whether God knows an event before it happens, while it happens, or after it happens, His knowledge is still a response to the event, not a cause of it.

Craig makes this point effectively. The argument for theological fatalism — that God's foreknowledge makes everything necessary — commits the basic logical fallacy of confusing the necessity of the inference with the necessity of the conclusion. It is necessarily true that if God foreknows x, then x will happen. But it does not follow that x must happen. The conditional is necessary; the consequent is not.³⁵

The philosopher Linda Zagzebski has developed a more sophisticated version of this objection, arguing that the necessity of the past creates a special problem for foreknowledge. If God believed yesterday that I would choose coffee tomorrow, then His belief is now part of the fixed, unalterable past. Since I cannot change the past, I cannot change God's past belief. And since God's belief entails that I will choose coffee, I cannot do otherwise. This is the "accidental necessity" argument — the claim that past events (including God's past beliefs about the future) are "accidentally necessary," meaning they cannot now be otherwise.³⁶

The standard response to this argument — and I think it is correct — involves the distinction between "hard facts" and "soft facts" about the past. A "hard fact" about the past is a fact that is wholly and entirely about the past — like "Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC." A "soft fact" about the past is a fact that is partly about the future — like "Yesterday, God believed that I would choose coffee tomorrow." The soft fact depends for its truth on what I will do tomorrow. It is not entirely about the past; it is partly about the future. And soft facts about the past do not have the same kind of accidental necessity as hard facts. They can be "changed" in the sense that, if I were to choose tea instead of coffee, then God's past belief would have been different — He would have believed that I would choose tea.³⁷

This may seem strange at first. Are we saying that my future choices affect God's past beliefs? Not exactly. We are saying that God's past beliefs about my future choices are logically dependent on those choices. They track the choices. If the choices had been different, the beliefs would have been different. There is no backward causation here — my future choice does not reach back in time and change God's past belief. Rather, God's past belief was always what it was because of what I would freely choose. Knowledge tracks events; events do not track knowledge.³⁸

I find this response philosophically satisfying, but I want to add a dimension that is unique to our position. On our view, God's knowledge of the future is not merely a "past belief" that is now fixed. God has transcendent temporal access — He can access all of time, including the future. His knowledge of my future choice is grounded not in a past belief that is accidentally necessary, but in His ongoing, direct cognitive access to all temporal realities. The "soft fact" response works, but our model provides an even deeper explanation: God knows the future because He has a unique divine capacity to access temporal reality that transcends the creaturely present.

Objection 2: "Isn't This Just the B-Theory Block Universe in Disguise?"

The second major objection asks whether our view — God accessing future events — is really just a disguised version of the B-theory of time or eternalism. If God can "see" the future, doesn't that mean the future already exists? And if the future already exists, isn't that just the block universe — the view that past, present, and future are all equally real?

This is a fair and important question, and the answer is no. Our view is not the block universe for several reasons.

First, the block universe is a claim about the ontology of time — it says that future events exist in the same way that present events exist. Our view makes no such claim. We affirm the A-theory: the present is objectively real, the past is fixed, and the future (from the creaturely perspective) has not yet occurred. God's ability to access the future does not change the ontological status of the future. The future is not a pre-existing block that God simply observes. Rather, God has a unique epistemic capacity that transcends the ontological limitations of creaturely existence.³⁹

Second, the block universe eliminates genuine temporal becoming. If all moments are equally real, then there is no real "flow" of time, no genuine transition from present to future, no real becoming. But on our view, temporal becoming is real. Time genuinely flows. Events genuinely come into being. The future genuinely becomes the present, and the present genuinely becomes the past. God's knowledge of the future does not change this. He knows what will become actual, but that does not make it actual before it becomes so.

Third, the block universe is typically associated with the denial of libertarian free will. If the future already exists as a fixed block, then our future actions are already "there," and it is hard to see how we could do otherwise. But on our view, the future is genuinely open from the creaturely perspective — we have real choices, real alternatives, real freedom. God knows what we will freely choose, but we could have chosen otherwise. If we had chosen otherwise, God would have known that instead.

An analogy may help. Consider a person with a crystal ball that shows the future. The crystal ball does not create the future; it merely reveals it. The events shown in the crystal ball will happen freely and naturally. The crystal ball is an epistemic tool — it gives the person knowledge — not a metaphysical entity that fixes reality. Similarly, God's transcendent temporal access is an epistemic capacity — it gives God knowledge of temporal realities — not a metaphysical claim that the future already exists as a block.⁴⁰

Now, I want to be forthright about the tension here. There is an undeniable tension between affirming the A-theory (the future has not yet occurred) and affirming that God knows the future with certainty. If the future has not yet occurred, what is it that God knows? This tension is real, and I do not wish to minimize it. But I note that every view of divine foreknowledge faces an analogous tension. The A-theory atemporalist must explain how a timeless being relates to an A-theory temporal world at all. The open theist must explain how an A-theory God can guarantee specific future events. The Molinist must explain how counterfactuals about non-existent creatures can be true in an A-theory framework. Our tension — how a temporal A-theory God can know a future that has not yet occurred — is no worse than the tensions faced by our rivals.

My suggestion is that God's transcendent temporal access is a sui generis divine capacity — one of a kind, not fully comparable to any creaturely ability. We should not expect it to fit neatly into our A-theory framework, any more than we expect God's omnipresence to fit neatly into our spatial framework or His eternity to fit neatly into our temporal framework. God transcends creaturely categories while remaining genuinely engaged with creaturely reality. His knowledge of the future is one expression of this transcendence.

Objection 3: "How Can God Access Events That Don't Yet Exist?"

The third major objection presses the point further: if the future does not yet exist (as the A-theory holds), then what is God accessing? You cannot have knowledge of nothing. Knowledge requires a truth-maker — something that makes the known proposition true. If the future does not exist, there are no future facts, and without future facts, there is nothing for God to know.

This is perhaps the deepest philosophical challenge to simple foreknowledge, and it has been pressed effectively by open theists like William Hasker and by some defenders of Molinism who argue that simple foreknowledge is not "providentially useful" — that it cannot do the work that a robust doctrine of divine providence requires.⁴¹

Let me offer several responses.

First, the existence objection assumes that knowledge requires the prior existence of the known object. But this assumption is questionable. Craig notes that even on a perceptualist model, one can argue that God perceives present truths — including presently existing future-tense propositions — rather than perceiving future events directly. "The question is, how does God know true future-tense propositions about causally undetermined events?" Craig asks. And his answer is: God knows them because knowing all truths is part of His essential nature. The truth of the proposition does not require the existence of the event it describes — it only requires the determinate truth-value of the proposition itself.⁴²

Second, on the conceptualist model, God's knowledge is not based on perceiving external objects at all. It is based on God's essential, self-contained cognitive nature. God does not need future events to "exist" in order to know truths about them, any more than a mathematician needs a physical triangle to exist in order to know that the interior angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees. God's knowledge is grounded in His own nature, not in the existence of the objects of His knowledge.

Third, I would argue that future-tense propositions do have determinate truth-values, even on the A-theory. This is a controversial claim, but I believe it is correct. Consider the proposition: "Tomorrow it will rain in London." I believe this proposition is either true or false right now, even though "tomorrow" has not yet arrived. The principle of bivalence — the principle that every meaningful proposition is either true or false — applies to future-tense propositions just as it applies to past-tense and present-tense propositions. Craig makes this argument powerfully: to deny bivalence for future-tense propositions leads to absurd consequences. We could not say that "Tomorrow it will rain and it will not rain in London" is false — because each conjunct would supposedly be neither true nor false, making the conjunction also neither true nor false. But surely a self-contradiction is false, regardless of when it is stated.⁴³

If future-tense propositions have determinate truth-values, then God, as an omniscient being who knows all truths, must know these truths. And knowing all true future-tense propositions just is having foreknowledge. The existence of the future events is not required; what is required is the truth of the propositions about them.

Fourth — and this is where our distinctive contribution comes in — transcendent temporal access provides a more robust grounding for God's knowledge of the future than the bare conceptualist model does. On our view, God does not merely know future truths as abstract propositions. He has genuine cognitive access to temporal realities — including future ones — through His unique divine capacity. How this works in detail is something I honestly cannot fully explain. But I can point to an analogy that may be suggestive.

Near-death experiences, as we will discuss in Chapter 33, frequently involve temporal anomalies that illustrate how temporal experience can be radically different from ordinary clock-time. NDEers report experiencing their entire life in a matter of moments during the "life review" — with full detail, full emotional content, and full comprehension. They report events occurring simultaneously that in ordinary time would be sequential. They report time slowing down, speeding up, or stopping altogether. Some report a sense of being "outside" of time while still experiencing genuine sequence. These experiences suggest that temporal experience need not be limited to the creaturely model of moment-by-moment succession. If human beings can have temporal experiences that transcend clock-time, how much more might God — the infinite, omniscient Creator — have temporal experiences that transcend creaturely limitations?⁴⁴

I want to be clear: I am not claiming that NDEs prove our theory of divine foreknowledge. The argument is analogical, not demonstrative. NDEs suggest that temporal experience is more flexible and varied than our ordinary experience leads us to believe. If even creatures can experience time in ways that transcend clock-time, then it is not unreasonable to think that God — who is infinitely greater than any creature — can access temporal realities that are entirely beyond our creaturely reach.

The Providential Usefulness Objection

There is one further objection that deserves attention, even though it presses more directly against simple foreknowledge than against transcendent temporal access. Some philosophers — most notably William Hasker — have argued that simple foreknowledge is "providentially useless." The argument goes like this: if God's foreknowledge is simply a result of His knowing what will happen, then by the time God "has" the foreknowledge, the events are already determined to occur. God cannot use His foreknowledge to change anything, because the foreknowledge already reflects what will happen — including whatever God Himself will do. So foreknowledge gives God no advantage in guiding history. It is, as Hasker puts it, "too late" for God to use it.⁴⁵

This objection has generated significant debate. I think Hasker's argument is less devastating than it initially appears, for several reasons.

First, the objection assumes a temporal model of divine cognition in which God first "acquires" foreknowledge and then "uses" it — as though there were a moment before God had the knowledge and a moment after. But on our view, God has always had foreknowledge. There is no moment at which God "learns" the future and then decides what to do about it. God's knowledge of the future and His providential action are not sequential steps; they are aspects of a single, unified divine act of knowing and willing. God's plan already incorporates His foreknowledge because His plan and His foreknowledge are co-eternal.⁴⁶

Second, the objection assumes that providence requires God to change the future based on foreknowledge. But this is not the only model of providence. On our view, God's providential plan already takes into account everything that will happen — including the free choices of creatures. God does not need to "intervene" to change a future that He foreknows; He has already woven His providential purposes into the fabric of history in light of His comprehensive knowledge of what will occur. His foreknowledge is not a tool He uses to manipulate events; it is a comprehensive vision of reality that His providential plan already reflects.

Third, I want to argue that transcendent temporal access changes the calculus. On bare simple foreknowledge without transcendent access, Hasker's objection has some force. But on our view, God does not merely have propositional foreknowledge (knowing true future-tense propositions). He has direct cognitive access to all of temporal reality. This means He can interact with events at any point in the timeline — not by changing the past or retroactively altering what has happened, but by acting at the right moments to bring about His purposes. God's transcendent temporal access gives Him a comprehensive vantage point from which to act providentially — and His actions are already reflected in the foreknowledge He has. There is no "before" and "after" in God's cognitive life regarding foreknowledge and providence; both are aspects of His unified temporal experience of all of reality.

The fuller treatment of how God acts providentially using simple foreknowledge is developed in Chapter 29, so I will not reproduce that argument here. The key point for our purposes is that the providential usefulness objection does not succeed against our model, because our model does not treat foreknowledge and providence as sequential steps.

Simple Foreknowledge and the Companions in Guilt

One effective argumentative strategy is what philosophers call the "companions in guilt" approach. When an objection is raised against your view, you show that the same objection — or an equally serious one — applies to every rival view as well. If every position faces the same problem, then the objection loses its force as a reason to prefer one view over another.

This strategy works powerfully for simple foreknowledge. Consider:

Against Calvinism: How can God determine every event and still hold creatures morally responsible for their choices? If God causally determines that a person sins, how is the person truly guilty? The Calvinist faces a mystery of the relationship between divine sovereignty and human responsibility that is at least as deep as the mystery of how foreknowledge is compatible with freedom.

Against Molinism: What grounds the truth of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom? If the truth of "Peter would deny Jesus in circumstances C" is not grounded in God's decree (that would be Calvinism) or in Peter's actual choice (he has not yet been placed in those circumstances), then what makes it true? The Molinist faces a grounding mystery that is at least as deep as the mystery of how God accesses future events on our view.

Against open theism: How can God guarantee the fulfillment of specific prophecies about free human choices if He does not know what those choices will be? How did God know that Peter would deny Jesus three times? The open theist must either deny the specificity of biblical prophecy (which conflicts with the text) or appeal to God's extraordinary ability to predict free choices (which is foreknowledge by another name). The pastoral mystery of an uncertain divine knowledge is at least as troubling as the philosophical mystery of how transcendent temporal access works.

Against divine timelessness: How can a timeless being interact with a temporal world? How can a being with no temporal experience create, speak, respond, and act in time? The atemporalist faces what R.T. Mullins calls the "interaction problem" — the mystery of how timeless eternity and temporal history can intersect at all. This mystery is at least as deep as anything simple foreknowledge faces.⁴⁷

The upshot is clear: every view of divine foreknowledge has its mysteries. The question is not which view is free from mystery (none are), but which view best fits the biblical data, preserves the most important theological commitments, and creates the fewest problems overall. I believe that simple foreknowledge with transcendent temporal access meets these criteria better than any rival.

How Our View Differs from Craig's

Since our position shares significant common ground with William Lane Craig's, it is important to note where we differ. Craig and I agree on several crucial points: God has exhaustive foreknowledge, foreknowledge is compatible with libertarian free will, the A-theory of time is correct, and the argument for theological fatalism is fallacious. Craig's conceptualist model of divine cognition is, I believe, substantially correct. And Craig's defense of foreknowledge in the appendix to Time and Eternity remains one of the best treatments available.⁴⁸

However, there are important differences. Craig holds a hybrid view of God's relationship to time: God was timeless "sans creation" (without creation) and became temporal at the moment of creation (see Chapter 8 for a full treatment). I reject this hybrid view. As argued in Chapters 7 and 26, I hold that God has always been temporal — time is an attribute of God's own being, generated by the perichoretic life of the Trinity, and God did not transition from timelessness to temporality at creation. I also reject Craig's Molinism. Craig uses middle knowledge as his primary mechanism for explaining how a temporal God can have foreknowledge and exercise providence. I reject Molinism on the grounds of the grounding objection and its potential for making God a cosmic manipulator rather than a genuinely relational partner.⁴⁹

Additionally, I introduce the concept of transcendent temporal access as a more robust grounding for simple foreknowledge than the bare conceptualist model. Craig's conceptualist model says God "just knows" all truths essentially. I agree with this but want to say more about how this is possible. God's unique capacity to access all of temporal reality — His temporal experience that transcends creaturely clock-time — provides the experiential and metaphysical basis for His exhaustive knowledge of future truths.

Finally, I place greater emphasis on the NDE analogy as a suggestive illustration of how temporal experience can transcend ordinary clock-time. Craig does not develop this line of argument. I find the NDE literature — with its reports of time compression, time expansion, simultaneous experience, and qualitatively different temporal experience — to be a rich source of analogies for understanding the difference between creaturely clock-time and the kind of temporal experience that God may enjoy (see Chapter 33).

How Our View Differs from Mullins's

R.T. Mullins — whose two books are among the most important sources for this entire study — is a powerful advocate of divine temporality. His critique of divine timelessness in The End of the Timeless God and his constructive case for divine temporality in From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker are, in my judgment, the most sustained and rigorous treatments of the topic in the literature. I agree with Mullins on most of the fundamental issues: God is genuinely temporal, divine timelessness is untenable, the Trinity generates divine temporality, and Craig's hybrid view is problematic.⁵⁰

On the specific question of foreknowledge, however, Mullins's approach is somewhat different from mine. In From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, Mullins surveys the foreknowledge landscape — determinism, Molinism, open theism — and explores how each can be combined with divine temporality. He is careful not to commit definitively to one model, preferring to show that divine temporality is compatible with multiple accounts of foreknowledge. The temporalist, Mullins argues, has options: she can be a determinist, a Molinist, an open theist, or a defender of simple foreknowledge. The choice between these models is a separate question from the question of whether God is temporal.⁵¹

I appreciate Mullins's careful, exploratory approach. But I want to be more definitive. I argue that simple foreknowledge — specifically, simple foreknowledge grounded in transcendent temporal access — is the best option for the divine temporalist. It avoids the problems of determinism (God is not the author of evil), Molinism (no grounding objection), and open theism (no loss of exhaustive foreknowledge), while fitting naturally with the model of dynamic divine temporality that this book defends.

Where Mullins and I may also differ is on the question of how far divine temporal transcendence extends. Mullins emphasizes that God is genuinely temporal in a robust sense — He experiences real sequence, real before-and-after, real temporal becoming. I agree entirely. But I add a dimension that Mullins does not develop in detail: God's temporal experience is not limited to the creaturely present. He can access all of time. This "transcendent temporal access" is my distinctive contribution, and it provides the basis for simple foreknowledge on a fully temporalist framework.

A Word About Foreknowledge and Prayer

Before we conclude, I want to briefly address a pastoral concern that often arises in discussions of foreknowledge: if God already knows the future, does prayer make any difference? If the future is already known, isn't prayer pointless?

This concern is understandable but misguided. It rests on a confusion between foreknowledge and determinism. If the future were determined, then prayer might indeed be pointless — the outcome would be fixed regardless of whether we pray. But on our view, the future is not determined. It is known by God, but it is not caused or fixed by His knowledge. And what God knows about the future includes our prayers and His responses to them.

Think of it this way: God's foreknowledge of the future is not a foreknowledge of "what would have happened without our prayers." It is a foreknowledge of "what will actually happen, including our prayers and God's genuine responses to them." When God knows the future, He knows a future in which we pray and He responds. Our prayers are genuinely part of the causal fabric of history, and God's responses to our prayers are genuinely caused (in part) by our praying. The fact that God knew all of this in advance does not make any of it less real or less free.⁵²

This is developed more fully in Chapters 29 and 35, but the key point is simple: foreknowledge does not undermine prayer. It enriches it. We pray to a God who already knows our needs, already knows what we will ask, and has already woven our prayers into His providential plan. This is not a reason to stop praying — it is a reason to pray with confidence, knowing that our prayers genuinely matter in the economy of God's purposes.

The Coherence of the Author's Full Position

Let me now step back and show how all the pieces fit together. The position I am defending in this book can be summarized as follows:

God is genuinely temporal. He experiences real sequence and succession. His temporality is not a limitation or an imperfection; it is an expression of His living, dynamic, personal nature. The perichoretic life of the Trinity — the mutual indwelling of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — generates a form of divine time that is an essential attribute of God's being (Chapter 26).

God is not bound by creaturely clock-time. While He is genuinely temporal, He is not locked into the creaturely present the way we are. He has transcendent access to all moments of created time — past, present, and future. This is a unique divine capacity rooted in His transcendent nature.

God has exhaustive definite foreknowledge. He knows every event, every thought, every choice that will ever occur — with absolute certainty. This foreknowledge is not based on determinism, Molinism, or timelessness. It is based on His omniscience, understood as essential knowledge of all truths, grounded in His transcendent temporal access.

Foreknowledge does not eliminate free will. Knowledge tracks events; events do not track knowledge. God knows what we will freely choose, but His knowledge does not cause our choices. We have genuine libertarian free will — the real ability to choose between alternatives.

God genuinely interacts with creatures in the present. He is not a distant observer watching a timeline from outside. He is personally, relationally, and emotionally present in each moment of His creatures' lives. He hears prayers in real time, responds to suffering with genuine emotion, acts providentially in history, and engages in real give-and-take relationship with human beings (Chapter 28).

God has never changed a past event. While God has access to all of time, there is no biblical indication that God has ever altered a past event after it occurred. God's temporal transcendence allows Him to see and know the past perfectly, but His interactions and interventions occur in the present and the future. This is consistent with the A-theory affirmation that the past is fixed.

This full position — what I have called "dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access" or "dynamic omnitemporality" — is, I believe, the most biblically faithful, philosophically coherent, and pastorally satisfying understanding of God's relationship to time and His knowledge of the future. It preserves the biblical portrait of a God who acts, responds, and genuinely interacts with His creatures. It preserves exhaustive foreknowledge and the reliability of biblical prophecy. It preserves genuine human freedom and moral responsibility. And it provides a robust foundation for prayer, providence, and trust in God's sovereign purposes.⁵³

Conclusion

Let me draw the threads together. In this chapter, we have defined simple foreknowledge and distinguished it from four rival models: Calvinism (rejected because it eliminates genuine freedom and makes God the author of evil), Molinism (rejected because of the grounding objection), open theism (rejected because it denies the exhaustive foreknowledge that Scripture clearly teaches), and timelessness-based foreknowledge (rejected along with the doctrine of divine timelessness itself).

We have developed the author's distinctive model: simple foreknowledge with transcendent temporal access. On this view, God knows the future with absolute certainty because His unique divine nature gives Him cognitive access to all of temporal reality — not because He is outside of time, but because His temporal experience transcends the creaturely limitation of being locked into the present.

We have addressed the three most serious objections to this view. First, foreknowledge does not eliminate free will, because knowledge tracks events rather than causing them, and certainty is not the same as necessity. Second, our view is not the B-theory block universe, because transcendent temporal access is an epistemic capacity, not an ontological claim about the existence of the future. Third, the mystery of how God accesses events that have not yet occurred is no greater than the mysteries faced by every rival account of foreknowledge.

We have also addressed the providential usefulness objection, the companions-in-guilt argument, the differences between our view and Craig's and Mullins's positions, and the relationship between foreknowledge and prayer.

I believe that the position defended in this chapter — and in this book as a whole — represents the most satisfying way to hold together everything that Scripture and sound theology teach about God's knowledge of the future. God knows everything. He determines nothing (in the Calvinist sense). He needs no middleman knowledge (Molinism). He is not ignorant of the future (open theism). And He is not frozen in a timeless eternity (divine timelessness). He is the living God — temporal, transcendent, omniscient, and free — who knows the end from the beginning and yet walks with us through every moment of our lives.

As Isaiah declares: "I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, 'My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose'" (Isaiah 46:9–10, ESV).

This God — the God who declares the end from the beginning — is not a timeless abstraction. He is a temporal, personal, living God who knows all things, causes none of the evil He foreknows, and weaves His sovereign purposes through history with a wisdom and power that transcend our understanding. He is the God beyond the clock — and He knows your tomorrow as surely as He knows your today.⁵⁴