Predestination - Predestination and Omniscience

Predestination and Omniscience

Discussion of predestination usually involves consideration of whether God is omniscient, or eternal or atemporal (free from limitations of time or even causality). In terms of these ideas, God may see the past, present, and future, so that God effectively knows the future. If God in some sense knows ahead of time what will happen, then events in the universe are effectively predetermined from God's point of view. This is a form of determinism but not predestination since the latter term implies that God has actually determined (rather than simply seen) in advance the destiny of creatures.

Within Christendom, there is considerable disagreement about God's role in setting ultimate destinies (that is, eternal life or eternal damnation). Christians who follow teachers such as John Calvin generally accept that God alone decides the eternal destinations of each person without regard to man's choices, so that their future actions or beliefs follow according to God's choice (Romans 9:14-16). A contrasting Christian view maintains that God is completely sovereign over all things but that he chose to give each individual self-determining free will through prevenient grace. Classically, this view is called Arminianism, which holds that each person is able to accept or reject God's offer of salvation and hence God allows man's choice to determine salvation (John 3:16-18).

Judaism may accept the possibility that God is atemporal; some forms of Jewish theology teach this virtually as a principle of faith, while other forms of Judaism do not. Jews may use the term omniscience, or preordination as a corollary of omniscience, but normally reject the idea of predestination as being incompatible with the free will and responsibility of moral agents, and it therefore has no place in their religion.

Islam traditionally has strong views of predestination similar to some found in Christianity. In Islam, Allah knows what choices humans are going to make and allows the actualization of the consequences of those choices based on his attributes of justice and mercy. Muslims believe that Allah is literally atemporal, eternal and omniscient.

In philosophy, the relation between foreknowledge and predestination is a central part of Newcomb's paradox.