Omniscience & Free Will
Last Sunday's homily touched on God's omniscience and how nothing that happens surprises God. The priest spoke about how for everything that happens, God works that thing toward His own ultimate design. Either He wills a thing that happens (if it is good) or permits it to happen (if it is evil). In either case, all that happens, God uses toward good.
This homily immediately got me thinking about the seeming tension between God's omniscience and free will. Remembering a recent discussion that I'd read on National Review Online about the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics, I concluded that the apparent conflict between omniscience and free will arises from a limitation on our part, not God's.
Imagine that there are an infinite number of possible universes, and that each decision we make throughout our lives, for good or ill, is represented by one of those universes. Whether those universes actually exist or not (I tend to think they don't, but that's irrelevant for the thought experiment), God has full knowledge of each of these infinite possible universes: their histories, how each of our choices affects those histories, etc.
In such a scenario, it's easy to see that nothing we choose to do would surprise God. Nevertheless, our free will is maintained. History is not predestined, yet God still knows what will happen and how events will work toward His ends. Our inability to reconcile these seeming contradictions is rooted in our view of a single, linear history - because that is all that we can see. When we "step outside the box," it makes more sense. Because of our human limitations, we can't grasp such a reality fully, as God does. But I think we can see the outlines of it, dimly.