Foreknowledge and choice: does God know what I will choose tomorrow?

Two kinds of future

Maimonides’ tenth principle says that God “knows the deeds of human beings and has not abandoned them.” It is reasonable to accept this belief as a tradition: it has sources in the Bible, and logic supports it too: if God created us for a purpose, it is reasonable that he follows us. The question is about the future.

There are two kinds of future events. Natural events, like a solar eclipse in ten years: there is no problem with God knowing them. They follow from the laws of nature and the present state, and an omniscient being can “calculate” them, as an astronomer calculates an eclipse. And events that are the result of the free choice of human beings. If the choice is really free, it is not yet fixed anywhere. The person who chooses creates it, in a certain sense, out of nothing. And so it cannot be calculated in advance, neither from the state of the world nor from anything else.

The contradiction

Here comes the contradiction the Sages wrestled with for generations. If God knows today, with certainty, that tomorrow I will choose a certain thing, I cannot choose otherwise. If I choose otherwise, his knowledge will turn out to be wrong, and that is impossible. So knowing a choice in advance and freedom of choice logically contradict each other. Not “hard to reconcile.” Contradictory.

Maimonides (Laws of Repentance, chapter 5) presents the question, and answers that God’s knowledge is different from ours, and we have no ability to understand it. But that is not an answer. It is an admission that there is no answer. The Ra’avad, in his gloss there, wrote that Maimonides did not act as a wise man, because “he began with words and questions and left the matter as a difficulty.” Some say God is “above time”: he does not know “in advance,” but sees everything at once. But that does not solve it either: if the knowledge exists “before” the choice, in any sense, the choice is already fixed. And the Ra’avad himself proposed that God knows like “the astrologers,” that is, the tendencies and not the choice, and admitted himself that this is not enough.

It is important to understand what kind of contradiction this is. It is not a “physical” contradiction, like a stone flying upward, which whoever created the laws of nature can change. It is a logical contradiction, like a “round triangle.” Certain knowledge of a choice not yet made, and free choice, are two things that cannot both be true. So there is no “difficulty” here that God could solve with his infinite power. As we saw, a logical contradiction is not something that can be done, and so even the omnipotent does not “do” it.

The conclusion, and the sources

The conclusion is that God does not know our free choices in advance. And this is no flaw in him. As we saw, he too “cannot” do what contradicts logic. “Slaughtering a sacred cow”? When a logical analysis shows something, it is a necessary conclusion, not an opinion. Whoever says otherwise has simply become confused.

Nor is this conclusion new. The Shelah, Rabbi Yeshaya Horowitz, in the introduction to his book “Toldot Adam,” wrote things very close to this, and even explained that God “contracts” his knowledge to make room for choice. Rashi (Sotah 2a) and the “Or HaChaim” (Genesis 6:5) wrote similar things.

And why did God do this? Because without choice, none of our actions would have meaning, religious, moral or otherwise. If we did not decide, it has no value. And choice is also what makes us resemble the Creator: whoever chooses, even if he chose evil, resembles his Creator in something, and there is a merit in this that one who keeps commandments without choosing does not have. If our deeds are the purpose of creation, it is reasonable that God gave us the freedom to choose them, and gave up, for this purpose, part of his knowledge. This, by the way, is the deep meaning of the tzimtzum: God withdrew from the places where we choose. The choices are made by us, not by him, and he does not even know them in advance. Free choice is a kind of “bubble” within nature, which God removed from the domain of his knowledge.