God's Knowledge, Who Can Know it? - part 7

My God is bigger than your God

“The Ultimate end which God decreed he regarded as great enough and glorious enough that it justified to himself both the divine plan itself and he ordained incidental "evil arising along the foreordained path to his plan’s great and glorious end.[i]”

There is a segment of Christian theologians who propose that God appears more sovereign, that His sovereignty is better proclaimed in a system of providence that supports real contingencies. I call this the: my God is bigger than your God syndrome. They critique the Reformed view of God’s knowledge of future events by saying that it minimizes His sovereignty to suggest that He had to “stack the deck in His favor”. Referring of course to the Reformed doctrine of God’s decree and that He knows the future because He has decreed all events to come to pass. They submit that God appears more sovereign if He has to work around the libertarian free will choices of man in order to accomplish His purposes.

Besides there being no biblical evidence to support such a view of God’s providence, the biblical and logical evidence is mounted firmly against such an absurd assertion. If a person refuses to see in the biblical testimony that one event in history can simultaneously be meant for evil by the creature and meant for ultimate good by the Creator, then a conclusion like the one above will likely be made. Let us consider what is actually being said here: God is sovereign therefore He knows what will happen if Joseph’s brothers sell him into slavery and if Joseph’s brothers do not sell him into slavery. In contrast, the Reformed position says that God is sovereign therefore He decreed that Joseph’s brothers would sell him into slavery so He could eventually raise Joseph up in Egypt to “keep many people alive”. Middle Knowledge protests that Compatibilism destroys the genuine freedom of man, and thus also destroys his culpability. It also asserts that the later system makes God the author of evil.  Compatibilism accuses Middle Knowledge of absurdity: that God cannot both, know the future choices of men perfectly, and consent to the existence of contingencies.

In order to build an argument against Middle Knowledge let’s concede the point momentarily and say that God knows all things that might possibly happen, but He also knows what will certainly happen. In the system there are many different potential events but only certain events will actually occur. God knows both the events that will actually occur and all those that only have the potential to exist but will never actually occur. Assuming the pendant for Middle Knowledge doesn’t fall into Open Theism and deny the orthodox and biblical doctrine of God’s omniscience, then they would have to admit that the events which God knows will certainly happen will never actually—not happen, and that which He knows will possibly but not certainly happen will always—not happen.  So what does this mean for the potential events? Well, the advocate of middle knowledge says that libertarian free will is preserved therein and that God is also protected from being the author of evil. Yet the same theologian would promote God’s perfect knowledge of the future events, which renders those “possible” events inert. At best they are only alternate plans that God did not choose. In the end the advocate of the system of middle knowledge essentially has the same problem that he thinks he is solving by adopting a system contrary to the compatibilistic one, namely—that God knew beforehand that sin would exist yet He created anyway thus the same charge (the one that says that God is the author of evil) could be leveled at them. The reason being, that God didn’t ordain or decree even sinful events in their system, He carelessly created a world wherein sin would exist and it would exist ultimately without a purpose, except (I guess) to have some force against which God could display His power to overcome it.   It makes one ask why God chose the strand of reality that included sin. One would think that in a system of an infinite number of real contingencies that there existed a strand of reality without sin. Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that they would probably say that God does not determine the strand which He will choose—it is chosen by Him as a result of the future choices men would make.  That makes a transition into the second problem that middle knowledge fails to solve.  The same type of problem remains for them even regarding the libertarian free will of man (that which is defined as the ability to have done so or to have done otherwise, without any external or internal determinants). If God knows the future without error, then man cannot make a choice different than that which God knows he will make. To suggest otherwise is to engage in the futile exercise of attempting to justify a logically and biblically inconceivable doctrine of God’s providence.

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[i] Reymond, Robert. A New Systematic Theology of The Christian Faith. (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1998). Page 377