Open Theism: What If God Doesn't Know What You'll Do Tomorrow?

If God knew everything, He'd know how to prevent all bad things from happening, right? That seems obvious—practically baked into the definition of omniscience. But what if it's not true? What if God really does know everything there is to know, and yet there's still a category of future events He genuinely doesn't know? Does that even make sense? This is one of the strangest and most controversial moves in the whole problem of evil conversation, and I want to walk through it carefully.

Where We Left Off

Remember the logical problem of evil from last time:

1. If God exists, God could prevent evil.
2. If God exists, God would prevent evil.
3. So, if God exists, evil doesn't exist.
4. Evil exists.
5. So, God doesn't exist.

This argument falls apart if premise 1, 2, or 4 turns out to be shaky. Premise 1 actually rests on a smaller supporting argument:

6. God exists (assumed).
7. God is all-knowing.
8. Evil is something to know how to prevent.
9. Therefore, God knows how to prevent evil.
10. God is all-powerful.
11. Evil is something to have the power to prevent.
12. Therefore, God has the power to prevent evil.
13. An agent can prevent something if she knows how and has the power to do it.
14. Therefore, if God exists, God could prevent evil.

Focus on steps 7, 8, and 9. Premise 9 follows logically from 7 and 8. Premise 8 seems obvious—evil is surely something you could, in principle, know how to prevent. So if you wanted to reject this sub-argument, premise 7 looks like the natural target: maybe God isn't all-knowing.

Here's what's interesting: Open Theism doesn't reject premise 7. It rejects premise 8. That's the whole trick, and it's stranger than it first appears.

What Open Theism Actually Claims

I want to be upfront: I am not an Open Theist, and most of my disagreements with the view won't get a full hearing here—that's a project for when I get to divine foreknowledge properly. What I want to do is present the view honestly, because it deserves a fair hearing even from people who ultimately reject it.

Open Theism has been developed by a handful of contemporary theologians and philosophers—Clark Pinnock, Gregory Boyd, and William Hasker are the names you'll run into most. Pinnock's edited volume The Openness of God (1994) is usually treated as the movement's founding document, and Hasker's God, Time, and Knowledge (1989) gives it a rigorous philosophical backbone.

The case rests on a few building blocks. First, God's knowledge works the way ours does, just on a vastly bigger scale—omniscience means knowing everything there is to know. Second, and this is the load-bearing claim, the future does not yet exist. This is a view in the philosophy of time called presentism: only the present is real. The past was real and left traces, but it's gone now. The future hasn't happened yet, so there's nothing there for anyone—including God—to know. Not every philosopher of time agrees (there's a rival view called eternalism, where past, present, and future are all equally real, like a four-dimensional block universe), but Open Theists need presentism for their case to work.

Given presentism, would God still know almost everything that's going to happen? Mostly, yes. If God knows the complete state of the universe right now, knows all the laws of nature perfectly, and can compute with infinite precision, He could predict practically the entire future the way Pierre-Simon Laplace's famous hypothetical "demon" could in classical physics—a being who, knowing the position and momentum of every particle in the universe, could calculate all of history from Newton's laws alone. (Quantum indeterminacy complicates this at the subatomic level, but that's not what's at stake here.)

There's one category of future event this kind of prediction can't touch: our free choices.

Libertarian Free Will and the Killer Robots

Imagine a mad scientist builds killer robots, and they destroy the world. Who's responsible? Not the robots—their mechanical design and programming determined every move they made. They never had a real choice. The blame lands on the scientist.

Now imagine the same scientist builds people instead, whose physical makeup and psychology predetermine every decision they'll ever make, just like the robots' circuitry. Would you blame those people? It's hard to see how, any more than you'd blame the robots.

If God simply "wired us" so all our choices were fully determined by our nature and circumstances, God would be exactly like that mad scientist. So if we're genuinely praiseworthy or blameworthy for anything, our choices can't be fully determined by our design—even a design God gave us. This is libertarian free will: the view that free choices are not causally determined, full stop. (A term of art from metaphysics, not the political philosophy.) Open Theists build their whole case on libertarian free will being both possible and necessary for moral responsibility.

The Sea Battle Problem

This puzzle about foreknowledge and freedom traces back to Aristotle, who raised something like it in De Interpretatione(chapter 9), written in the 4th century BC, using the example of a sea battle.

Consider: "There will be a sea battle tomorrow." If that's true today, can the battle somehow fail to happen? Seems like no—if it's true now, it has to happen, or the statement would never have been true.

Now consider: "The admiral will freely begin a sea battle tomorrow." Suppose the admiral has genuine libertarian free will. Can this be true right now? If it's true, the admiral can't help but start the battle—his choice was already fixed. If false, he can't help but not start it. Either way, his choice looks locked in before he ever makes it. But if he's genuinely free, neither the statement nor its negation should be settled in advance.

Open Theists run with this: if God knows today that you will freely choose X tomorrow, in what sense is your choice actually free? It looks locked in the whole time. So: divine foreknowledge of a free choice is incompatible with that choice being genuinely free.

The Payoff

Put the pieces together. Future free choices don't currently exist (presentism). They're also not determined in advance (or that would destroy libertarian freedom). So there's nothing there yet for God to know. And this doesn't count against omniscience, because omniscience only requires knowing everything that exists and is there to be known. Failing to know a non-existent future choice is no more a defect than failing to know the color of a square circle.

Which means: God doesn't know, in advance, exactly which evils our free choices will produce. Premise 8—"evil is something to know how to prevent"—turns out false, at least for this whole category of evil. God can't know how to prevent something He genuinely doesn't know is coming.

How This Relates to the Free Will Defense

This will sound familiar if you already know the classic Free Will Defense (a few weeks out), and the two views share a lot of DNA. The standard Free Will Defense says free will is valuable enough that it was better for God to allow the evil that comes with it than to skip free will altogether. Give people genuine freedom, and yes, some will rob, pillage, and (worst of all) make dubstep music—but that's a price worth paying for free creatures instead of programmed ones.

Here's where Open Theism goes further: the standard Free Will Defense assumes God knows the bad things free creatures will do and decides the tradeoff is worth it anyway. Open Theism denies God has that knowledge at all. On this view, God takes a genuine risk on creating free creatures—He knows it's likely some will choose evil, but not exactly what, by whom, or when. Freedom is worth the gamble, and as a bonus, we get an independent argument for the view from the logic of foreknowledge and freedom, not just a patch for the problem of evil.

Objections

"God shouldn't have taken the risk in the first place." I don't buy this, even though I'm not an Open Theist. It seems clearly worth the risk of suffering for someone to exist at all. If it weren't, every set of parents having a child—knowing that child will almost certainly suffer at some point—would be doing something evil by having kids. That's too strong a conclusion.

"What about hell?" This one bites harder, but only for Open Theists who also hold a traditional doctrine of eternal punishment. If God is gambling on each person's eternal fate, and some fraction of humanity suffers forever as a result, that's a much bigger risk to defend than earthly suffering. Some Open Theists soften the doctrine of hell to relieve the pressure; others bite the bullet and try to explain why the risk was worth it. That's really a separate problem for another series.

Where I Land

There are assumptions buried here I'd want to poke at in a longer format—presentism itself, whether libertarian free will is really necessary for culpability, whether foreknowledge really is incompatible with freedom (plenty of philosophers think it isn't). I'll save the deep dive for when I get to divine foreknowledge properly.

But a broader worry applies to Open Theism as a response to the problem of evil: it shares the same basic vulnerability as the standard Free Will Defense. Not all evil is obviously tied to free choices. The evils that upset us most—rape, genocide—sure, those trace to free will. But there's a huge category of what philosophers call natural evil: cancer, earthquakes, animal suffering. None of it obviously traces to anyone's free choice. If Open Theism can't connect natural evil to free will somehow, it's only solving part of the puzzle—we'll look at an attempt to bridge that gap in the Free Will Defense post.

There's also a subtler worry: is giving up total foreknowledge worth what you gain over the standard Free Will Defense? If God still knows evil is probably coming, even without the details, is that different enough to matter? And if God doesn't know exactly what free creatures will do, how can He be confident the whole gamble of creation is worth it? What if everyone had chosen badly? The uncertainty itself might make the risk harder to justify, not easier.