The problem of divine foreknowledge and free will has probably been argued since human beings first discovered the realm of a supreme and all perfect creator thousands of years ago. The problem between these two presumably coinciding ideas can be laid out like this. If, at the beginning of time, when God first created the world as we human beings recognize it, God knew everything that would be done at the time he created the world, then nothing can be done presently to prevent or change what has happened in the past; the past cannot be altered. We cannot change the fact that God knows everything that will happen tomorrow and every day afterwards. That fact-that God knows what will happen tomorrow, means that it will happen. If anyone, including God, or you or me, knows that X will happen, then X will happen. Therefore, no one can prevent doing whatever it is that they will do tomorrow; because of the unalterable quality of the past-caused by God's knowledge of all future actions-makes it necessary that these events will happen. So there is no free choice, yet free will is one of the basic tenets of what makes human beings human.

We have been told stories about our free will, and the trouble it has caused us as a species; the story of Adam and Eve, for example, and we have always known that we are free. So how then, can these two ideas that most humans have believed to be true for so long both be possible? It is quite a paradox: if God is omniscient, then humans do not really have free will, but if human beings do have free will then God is not omniscient, and is flawed.

The timeless eternity method of solving the problem of divine foreknowledge and free will is rooted in the belief that God resides in all of eternity. If eternity is the possession of all things all at once, then God is essentially beyond linear time, as human beings know it. God's knowledge lies in the midst of all that has and will happen, and so time is a part of what God knows, in the sense that things will happen before some events and after certain others, but time is not a part of God's actual knowledge. God is outside of time, while his knowledge and deeds are not. God is timeless and so his knowledge knows no before or after, everything is simply embraced at once. God, though omniscient, has no foreknowledge of our actions because he exists outside of time. He simply knows what will happen, because essentially, everything is happening at once in God's eyes.

There are several objections to this proposition. One such argument is that in many religious traditions, God acts in human history. If God exists outside of time, it can be argued that God cannot respond to prayers and other appeals to him within humanity's linear time, as in the story of the Ten Commandments or the Prayer of Hannah we discussed in class. Another argument against the timeless eternity model is that God would have to have an atemporal mind. That would suggest that God's knowledge never changes, and is concurrent with everything that occurs within time. Additionally, all of God's actions would have to be occurring simultaneously as well. Temporally though, they would have ordered themselves linearly within the human concept of time. That means that God would simultaneously be willing, for example, Jesus' birth and death, making Jesus' birth and death

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Approximate Word count = 1488
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)