Issues with Omniscience

The most serious issue arising from omniscience is the apparent incompatibility between divine foreknowledge and genuine human free will, and while Boethius' eternal now response is philosophically elegant, it faces a devastating objection from Anthony Kenny.

If God is omniscient and knows at time T1 that person P will choose action A at time T2, then it appears to be necessarily true at T1 that P will choose A at T2. If it is necessarily true, P cannot choose otherwise — and if P cannot choose otherwise, P's choice is not genuinely free. This threatens both moral responsibility (how can P be praised or blamed for what they could not have done otherwise?) and the free will theodicy (how can evil be blamed on human free will if God created beings whose choices were foreknown and therefore fixed?). Boethius, in The Consolation of Philosophy, responds by arguing that God exists outside time in an eternal present: all moments of history are simultaneously present to God, as if God were watching from a mountain top while events unfold in the valley below. On this account, God does not foreknow our choices — he simply knows them from a timeless vantage point, as we might know what someone freely does by watching them, without causing it.

Boethius' solution is elegant, but Anthony Kenny raises a decisive objection: the idea that all time is simultaneously present to God is incoherent. If God simultaneously perceives the Battle of Hastings (1066) and the Battle of Waterloo (1815), then these two events are simultaneous with each other — but they are not simultaneous with each other; they are separated by 750 years. Kenny's argument is a reductio ad absurdum: Boethius' eternal now collapses temporal sequence, making events simultaneous that are plainly not. Furthermore, if God is timeless and completely outside time, it is difficult to see how God can respond to prayer, perform miracles in history, or genuinely interact with temporal beings — a timeless God seems more like an abstract principle than the personal, responsive God of theism.

A defender of Boethius might argue that Kenny's objection conflates two different senses of simultaneity: events are simultaneous relative to God's eternal perspective without being simultaneous relative to each other in time. God's eternal knowing is a different mode of existence from temporal being, and we should not expect the logic of temporal succession to govern it. On the interaction problem, the defender might argue that God's eternal act of creation encompasses all temporal interactions — miracles and answers to prayer are part of one eternal creative act, not reactive interventions.

The Boethian response to Kenny remains contested: the claim that two events can be simultaneous for God without being simultaneous for each other still seems logically strained, and Kenny's objection has not been fully rebutted in the literature. The interaction problem is also serious: a God who cannot genuinely respond to temporal events struggles to fit the description of a personal, loving, providential God. Boethius' solution preserves the logical form of omniscience but at the cost of a God who is remote from human experience in a way that most religious believers find unsatisfying. The eternal now therefore addresses the free will problem only partially and generates new problems about God's personal engagement with creation.

So the foreknowledge-free will problem is not fully resolved by Boethius: his eternal now is philosophically elegant but faces a serious logical challenge from Kenny and creates difficulties about divine interaction with the temporal world.

Swinburne's alternative — that God is everlasting rather than timeless and voluntarily limits foreknowledge of free choices — resolves the Kenny problem and preserves divine interaction, but at the significant cost of revising classical omniscience and raising questions about God's relationship with moral evil.

Swinburne argues that God exists within time (everlasting, not timeless), experiencing a genuine temporal sequence of past, present and future. He further proposes that God voluntarily limits his foreknowledge of free human choices: since free choices are not yet determined, there is nothing yet to know — and God's omniscience is best defined as knowing everything it is logically possible to know. On this account, "God does not know what I will freely choose tomorrow" is not a failure of omniscience but a reflection of the fact that there is no fact yet to be known. This preserves genuine human freedom without positing a paradoxical timeless eternity, and allows God to be genuinely personal, responsive, and interactive with temporal human beings.

However, Swinburne's solution is costly. First, it revises classical omniscience significantly: a God who does not know future free choices is not omniscient in the traditional sense, which raises the question of whether he is truly God as classical theism understands him. Second, an everlasting God who is in time faces the problem of immutability: if God genuinely responds to human prayers and actions, God's mental states change, which seems incompatible with the classical claim that God is perfect and therefore unchanging. Third, if God does not know what free creatures will choose, he cannot guarantee his providential purposes — the eschatological hope that God will ultimately redeem creation becomes uncertain rather than assured.

Swinburne can respond that the classical attributes of timelessness and strict omniscience are philosophical additions to the core theistic claim rather than essential to it, and that a God who genuinely loves and interacts with creation is more theologically coherent and religiously adequate than the remote timeless absolute of Boethius. He could argue that immutability in the sense of perfect character (not changing in goodness, love, or purpose) is compatible with changing in knowledge as history unfolds — just as a perfectly faithful human friend changes in knowledge without changing in character.

Swinburne's response is persuasive in showing that the choice between omniscience and free will does not have to be resolved by the contorted logic of timeless eternity. His God is more relationally intelligible and avoids Kenny's objection entirely. However, as Divinityphilosophy.net notes, the result is that "if God is omnipotent and omniscience entails omniscience, it is difficult to maintain any meaningful degree of human freedom; without freedom there is no convincing way of defending God against charges of creating gratuitous suffering" — illustrating that omniscience is tied to virtually every other central problem in the philosophy of religion. Swinburne's solution trades one set of problems (foreknowledge vs free will) for another (a less-than-classically-omniscient God), and the question of which trade-off is more acceptable ultimately depends on prior commitments about what God must be like.

So Swinburne's open-future omniscience resolves the free will problem more convincingly than Boethius, but at the cost of departing from classical theism and introducing new difficulties about immutability and providential certainty.