Human Free Will and God’s Foreknowledge Theme Analysis

In Book V of his Consolation, Boethius raises a classic philosophical problem: how can people freely choose their actions if God knows everything that will happen beforehand? If there is no free will, then everything Boethius believes in crumbles: God’s rewards and punishments are meaningless, because people do not choose the behaviors that merit them; God is responsible for the evil in the world; and “hope and prayer” lose their power. Philosophy solves this problem by explaining that there is no contradiction between God having perfect foreknowledge of the world and humans having free will. Technically, her argument is that God’s foreknowledge relies on what she calls conditional necessity, and human free will is violated only if human actions are determined by what she calls simple necessity. In practice, what she means is that, because God exists on a higher plane of the cosmos, with a greater capacity for knowledge and a different relationship to time, human distinctions among past, present, and future don’t exist for God—everything is part of the present. Therefore, He can know things that humans consider to not have happened yet, and He can do so without causing those things to happen.

Because God is a superior being, Philosophy argues, He has a greater capacity for knowledge than human beings, which means He can know about human action in a way that would not be knowable to people. First, Philosophy argues that knowledge depends on the knowing agent, not the thing that is to be known. She separates out four kinds of knowledge: sense-perception, imagination, reason, and intelligence. Sense-perception (knowledge through senses like sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing) tells the knower about the material form of the thing they are investigating. Imagination can tell them about the “shape [of a thing] alone without [reference to physical] matter,” and reason looks at the universal characteristics of a type of thing. Intelligence, which only God has completely, is “pure vision of the mind,” which gives Him complete insight into everything. Since only God has intelligence and humans do not, He can know things—including things about the future—that humans cannot know through their reason, imagination, or sense-perception. The apparent problem with foreknowledge is that, if God already knows what someone will do, then that person is not truly free to do it, because they could not choose the opposite. However, this problem only exists if knowledge is rational—meaning that one can only know things that are certainly true (since anything else would be opinion). Since God’s knowledge is through intelligence, he can know things that “ha[ve] no certain occurrence.”

God also has a different relationship to time, which allows Him to see things that have not yet happened according to the human perception of time. By definition, Philosophy explains, God created the universe, which means he “is eternal”—something Philosophy defines as “the complete, simultaneous and perfect possession of everlasting life.” He is not just old, but lives outside the dimension of time entirely. This contrasts with temporal things like humans and the physical world, which experience time in terms of the past, present, and future. Following Plato, Philosophy suggests that God is “eternal,” while the world—which extends infinitely into the future—is “perpetual.” Because of God’s “eternal presence,” He can see “all the infinite recesses of past and future […] as though they are happening in the present.” So what looks like the future to humans is already visible to God, and what looks like foreknowledge to humans is really just God looking at (what is to him) the present. Therefore, because God exists outside of time, he can know what humans have freely decided to do, but not infringe on humans’ free will by having this knowledge.

In technical terms, Philosophy concludes, God’s foreknowledge does not infringe on human free will because this knowledge is about conditional necessity, not simple necessity. Simple necessity refers to something that must be true because of the very nature of what something is. For instance, it is simply necessary that any human body is mortal, and will not exist forever. Nobody can ever choose to deny simple necessity through free will (i.e., a human cannot simply decide to be immortal, because this would go against their nature). On the other hand, conditional necessity refers to something that is necessarily true, but only because of “a condition which is added.” For instance, “if you know someone is walking, it is necessary that [they are] walking.” But the person could freely choose to stop walking, which means conditional necessity can be changed through free will. The kind of free human actions that God knows about are instances of conditional necessity. It is not necessary that they will happen, but once they have happened, it is necessary that they did happen. God does not force people to choose, but rather sees all the choices people have made and will ever make. This is how He knows what humans see as the future. His foreknowledge is like “an eye that is present to watch” from outside the bounds of time, which is capable of knowing in ways not accessible to human beings.

The history of philosophy after Boethius has seen a wide variety of often-conflicting answers to this common problem of free will, but Lady Philosophy’s argument clearly explains how this free will is compatible with God’s foreknowledge of human events. Most importantly, it follows directly from the picture Boethius paints of the cosmos: the universe has been created by God, who directs everything from a stance outside of time through Providence, and then watches as Fate runs its course. Although it might be difficult for contemporary readers to accept notions of God existing outside of time or knowing things in unfathomable ways as a result, at the very least, this argument should challenge readers’ preconceptions about the apparent contradiction between determinism and human free will.