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Dear catholic.com visitors: This Catholic Answers website, with all its free resources, is the world’s largest source of explanations for Catholic beliefs and practices. We receive no funding from the institutional Church and rely entirely on your generosity to sustain this website with trustworthy, accessible content. If every visitor this month donated $1, catholic.com would be fully funded for an entire year. If you’ve never made a gift, now is the time. Your donation will be matched dollar for dollar this week only. Thanks and God bless.
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Q&A

How can we reconcile free will with God’s omniscience?

Fr. Vincent Serpa O.P.

Question:

In his book God’s Debris, Scott Adams says that if God knows the future, then we don’t have free will because our free choices would change how the future unfolds. If we do really have free will, then God cannot know the future. How does Church teaching reconcile this?

Answer:

There is nothing to reconcile. Because you know that the sun will be in the sky tomorrow doesn’t mean that you will have caused it to be there! Even though God already knows what our free choices will be in the future, our choices are still ours and are still free. If our free choices change how the future will be, God already knows that and has known it for all eternity.

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