Does God know the future? |
God has a plan and purpose for everything, presumably down to the smallest detail.
Having a master plan that works itself out in time; this implies that God knows the final outcome, the final condition, the endgame which is yet future.
A common theme in science fiction stories is time travel, in which someone goes back or forward in time and monkeys with events, changing what happened. If God resides in the future (because he knows everything), perhaps he "travels back in time" to monkey with events in our present time until he gets it right, until he accomplishes his goal.
So maybe we live our lives over and over, each time somewhat differently as God intervenes in our past, monkeying with our past choices. I don't remember any of these alternate past realities, so perhaps God erases the memories.
. . . . .
Another aspect of God's knowing the future is that he resides simultaneously in the past, present, and future. He is timeless and eternal, seeing all things. But yet he also knows all things; past, present, and future. So an easier way for God to control the outcome is for him to control every event in the present so that it become what he wishes for the future.
There is no need for God to do all this time travelling backwards and forwards to accomplish his will.
So how does God control every tiniest aspect of my life without violating my free will?
Perhaps you might object to the idea that God micromanages every smallest aspect of reality, but this is necessary for him to accomplish his final goal. All things are connected down to the atomic level (and smaller). The motion of an electron has effects which cascade and magnify as future events occur.
For example, maybe an electron appears on one side of the atom instead of the other when the quantum mechanics wave function collapses as it interacts with another particle. Depending on the location of the electron, the electric forces will be greater or smaller, and these forces will affect the motions of all particles in the vicinity based on the masses of these other particles. And the motions of these particles will affect other particles in the vicinity, and on and on it goes, propagating out into the universe.
The tiniest movement in even a single electron propagates into the future, affecting every other particle in the entire universe at the speed of light. God has to take all this into account as he fiddles with matter to accomplish his will.
For God to know the future, he has to know the present.