What Foreknowledge Is Not

Knowing an event and causing that event are objectively distinct.  The two are nonetheless usually conflated by Calvinists and even some atheists, who argue that divine foreknowledge would render human free will a logical impossibility.  Even if Calvinistic ideas about foreknowledge might produce existential dread in Christians who encounter them, it is not difficult at all to prove that foreknowledge and free will are fully compatible.

The reason is simple.  Seeing into the future or into other minds is not the same as affecting the future or dictating the thoughts and behaviors of other minds.  If neither of these things alters what will happen or determines the actions of free creatures, the combination of the two likewise has no effect on the future events that are seen.  Even having absolute certainty about every future event has no causal impact on any of those events.

Foreknowledge is nothing other than the epistemological state of partially or fully knowing the contents of the future.  God having foreknowledge, therefore, cannot make God guilty of whatever evil has yet to be committed by humans, just as God having foreknowledge cannot mean that humans have no free will.  There is absolutely nothing logically exclusive about foreknowledge and free will.  Whatever the reason, those who claim otherwise perhaps never regard foreknowledge about strictly natural events as being responsible for causing them, resulting in a strange inconsistency.

For example, suppose that a person knew with absolute certainty that scientific phenomena like gravity or electricity would continue to behave in the future as they do in the present.  Has anyone who confuses foreknowledge for predestination ever claimed that knowing scientific phenomena in advance would mean one is causing them?  No one that I have heard of or talked to ever made such a claim!  When the example is switched from physics to human behaviors, though, divine foreknowledge might very well be thought to entail a cause and effect relationship.

Divine foreknowledge is a clear part of Biblical theology, but no Christian (or non-Christian) needs to worry that the existence of a deity who can see the future erases their capacity to make their own voluntary choices.  By nature of what foreknowledge is, it cannot impact the future; it can only perceive it before the events therein have occurred.  Calvinists, fatalists, and compatibilists might conflate foreknowledge and predestination, but the two are completely separate.