God's Foreknowledge is PERFECTLY COMPATIBLE with Human Free Will

A Q&A about the foreknowledge of God.

DR. WILLIAM LANE CRAIG: Do you think that there's an incompatibility between God’s foreknowing everything and there being free will?

QUESTION: I don't think so, but how can we make other people understand that?

DR. WILLIAM LANE CRAIG: One thing you can do is to show how it's logically fallacious to think that because God foreknows the future therefore everything happens necessarily. What you would do is show them an argument that would go like this:

1. Necessarily, if God foreknows X then X will happen.

2. God foreknows X

Then ask: What follows from those two premises? If they think that what follows from that is that necessarily X will happen then they have committed a logical fallacy. That, in fact, does not follow from those two premises. All that follows from those two premises is that X will happen. But X will not happen necessarily. X could fail to happen, but if it were to fail to happen then God would have foreknown differently. See, there's those subjunctive conditionals again that are so important. From God's foreknowledge of the future you can know what will happen, but it doesn't mean that it will happen necessarily. It could fail to happen, but if it were to fail to happen then God's foreknowledge would have been different. Therefore his knowledge of the future is entirely compatible with contingency and freedom and possibility.

DR. WILLIAM LANE CRAIG: Knowledge isn't a causal factor in this – is it? Whether you knew what the end of the video was or you didn't know what the end of the video was doesn't affect what the people on the video do. They do whatever they want freely, and your just knowing about it doesn't change anything really.

[stoicpandafx]

if he knows the end from the beginning, having different possibilities for billions of choices doesn't give a definite and ultimate end to the beginning