The Eternal Now

source: iep

One way to challenge the conclusion of the incompatibility of free will and God’s knowledge of the future argument is to reject the clause in the first premise that God is essentially in time. A number of philosophers have argues that God is not in time but “sees” all of time from his eternal perspective. Boethius is a good representative of this view and is one of the earliest philosophers to devote much thought to the question of how God knows the future. God is able to know the future because of the way that God exists, eternally. Boethius describes God’s eternal existence as follows:

“Eternity is a possession of life, a possession simultaneously entire and perfect, which has no end. . . That which grasps and possesses the entire fullness of a life that has no end at one and the same time (nothing that is to come being absent to it, nothing of what has passed having flowed away from it) is rightly held to be eternal.” (Consolation CV 6.4, 144).

God is not like humans who exist wholly at each finite moment in time and endure through time. A human possesses her life only in a small finite window which we call “now”—the past life is no longer possessed but gone, the future is not yet realized. Since our human life is lived in a finite “now”, it is never full and complete but is fragmented. God, however, is perfect and God’s life is not fragmented like the life of a temporally enduring human. He lives in the eternal “now.” His “now” stretches over our past, present, and future. Our finite present is representative of God’s eternal present, but our finite present is only a faint and imperfect model.

Thus by being eternal, the future is not off in the distance for God but is subsumed under his eternal presence. Since God wholly exists at all times in his eternal “now” he can know what happens at every time. Boethius says that God’s foreknowledge “looks at such things as are present to it just as they will eventually come to pass in time as future things.” (Consolation CV 6.21, 147). Boethius’ explanation for how God knows the future is a kind of perceptual model. Foreknowledge is a simple awareness of the future, not involving any complex deductive or inductive reasoning. If having knowledge of something before it happens is like looking far off in the distance, having knowledge in the “eternal now” is like perceiving something immediately before one’s eyes. God “sees” with the divine mind all of existence immediately in one eternal moment. [See Marenbon (2003)].