In the first of several scheduled public debates, Tom Flint and Bill Hasker stood on different sides answering “Does God Know the Future?”  

The main difference is whether or not the future can be known. To Flint, the answer is yes, but that doesn’t mean that humans don’t have free will. To Hasker, if God knows all that will happen in the future, then human choices aren’t really a choice. (Because God can’t be wrong, and he knows what’s going to happen, then humans have to do what God knows.) There was lots of talk about a fictional man named Cuthbert and iguanas, but this is the gist. 

There are many implications that come from their different beliefs, such as the power of prayer. For open theists, if God knows what is going to happen, how can he answer prayers for the future to make it otherwise? For Flint and other classical theists, if God doesn’t know what is going to happen, then he can answer prayers with what might be best but who knows if it will work, so he’s not all-powerful. 

A frequent metaphor was that of God having a script of the universe. It lists everything that’s going to happen, and that script is completely fixed. No ad-libbing allowed. (Which was also brought up in Flint’s lecture this morning. See here for recap.) How is that free? Flint argues that he isn’t “changing the script,” there is no “script” in that sense. He’s just doing what he wants, and God just knows what is going to happen.