Does God know actual future being?

A friend of mine once got to talking about the power of prayer. He was a bit skeptical, and speculated that intercessory prayer was really a bit of a cop out. His argument was that since God already knows everything, and we don’t, our prayer is really about making ourselves feel better, but doesn’t have any real effects since God already knows everything anyway.

What difference did that prayer make? It is not a stupid question. Many brilliant (and not so brilliant) people have tried to penetrate the mystery of intercessory prayer over the centuries, with greater and lesser degrees of success. As for myself, I see this problem as just another dimension of the theological “problem of evil” and “mystery of suffering” questions.

On an intellectual level, the issue is the following: does God know actual future events, or only all possible potential future events? Most traditional theology would argue the former, but the question deserves greater exploration.

Traditional doctrine on God holds that while God is omnipotent He cannot create logically contradictory things (he cannot make 2+2=5, for example). Why not? Because God is Truth, and logical contradiction implies some sort of falsehood. Is there not a parallel also for omniscience? By definition, future being is potential, because the passage of time is the passage from potential to actual. To speak of “actual future being” when all future being is, by definition, potential, seems to be a logical violation. To deny that God knows “actual future being” is no more destructive to God’s omniscience, then, than the previous example is to God’s omnipotence.

I know that there are Biblical passages that seem to indicate otherwise, but having read them I do not see that they *necessarily* need to be interpreted as meaning that God knows “actual future being”. For there to be “potential future being” that is inevitable does not mean that we know it as “actual future being”, but simply that at some point it is inevitable that it will be “actual being”.

If God in fact does not know “actual future being” (in the strict sense) this solves a lot of problems, most notably the predestination problem (i.e. if God knows the future are we really free?). It gives a lot more room for human free will, and raises interesting speculations regarding the exercise of the divine free will in time. In other words, maybe certain exercises of God’s will do depend on the choices we (and the angels & demons) make. And if that is the case, maybe intercessory prayer does make a difference after all.

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