Concerning Divine Omniscience and Free Will Among Christian theists, many accept that the divine nature is omniscient. One conflict and opposition of divine omniscience is the existence of a free will, for many assert that free will is incompatible with the divine knowledge. Roman philosopher Boethius directly tackles the issues between divine omniscience and free will in his work Consolation of Philosophy. Boethius argues that free will and divine omniscience are in fact compatible, even though it might not seem true at first glance.
First, it is necessary to discuss what Boethius defines as the concept of being “free” or having “freedom”. Freedom is a state of being in which there is no requirement or predetermined outcome of what a …show more content…
Boethius begins by stating how it indeed does seem to be a contradiction that God should know all things and yet there should also exist a free will. This is because it is rather paradoxical to consider that God will know a being will do something, when the being has the choice of simply doing otherwise with no greater difficulty. Such an act would imply that the divine foreknowledge had no knowledge of its occurrence from the beginning. On the other hand, if God were to truly see everything from all times, including the future, it is necessary that God knows something will and must happen. This is because anything that belongs to the divine foreknowledge cannot be an act of free will. Because of this, Boethius attempts to reconcile this conflict between free will and the divine foreknowledge. Through his dialogue partner, Lady Philosophy, Boethius suggests that it is possible for free will and divine foreknowledge to be compatible. This is, in part, due to the character of the divine essence, particularly that God is eternal. By eternal, Boethius means that God transcends the temporal realm and exists outside of …show more content…
Even today, there are arguments against Boethius’s claim of the compatibility between the divine foreknowledge and free will. One such argument one could make would be that if God truly does live in a realm where all eternity is within His present, this would lead to abnormalities. One could consider a chain of caused events, such as the birth of a person, the midpoint of said the person’s life, and the death of the person. Therefore, since God sees all existence in His own respective present time, he would see the birth of the person simultaneously with the person’s death, in which case it would imply that the person never need exist, for he was brought into and out of the world at the same time. This claim, however, is insufficient as far as trying to disprove the central proposition made by Boethius. This is because one who makes such a claim is erroneously mixing up the differences between the divine intellect and human knowledge. God can interpret all existence within the temporal realm simultaneously. Because God is outside of the temporal realm, He is thus able to see its entirety altogether at