Foreknowledge

Etymology and Basic Definition

Foreknowledge is most generally defined as knowledge of future events or states of affairs. In ordinary language it can range from vague anticipation to specific prediction, but in philosophy and theology it typically refers to precise, often infallible, cognition of what will in fact occur.

The term combines “fore-” (meaning “before”) with “knowledge”, and has close affinities with the Latin praescientia (“knowledge beforehand”), from which the theological term “prescience” is derived. In many historical texts, foreknowledge, prescience, and knowledge of the future are used almost interchangeably, though some authors reserve “prescience” for divine cases.

Basic distinctions include:

• Divine vs. human foreknowledge: whether the knower is a deity or a human agent.
• Infallible vs. fallible foreknowledge: whether the knowledge is guaranteed to be true.
• General vs. particular foreknowledge: knowing that some event of a type will occur vs. knowing that a specific individual action will occur.
• Deterministic vs. indeterministic contexts: whether future states are fixed by prior conditions and laws, or include irreducibly open possibilities.

Philosophically, the central interest in foreknowledge lies in its implications for freedom, responsibility, determinism, and the ontology of time (whether the future is “already real” or not).

Foreknowledge in Theology and Philosophy

Classical theism and divine omniscience

Within classical theism, especially in Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, divine foreknowledge is understood as a component of omniscience: God knows all truths, including all truths about the future. This raises an influential puzzle: if God infallibly knows that a certain action will be performed, can that action truly be free?

Classical authors distinguish between:

• Necessity of the consequence: given that God knows I will do X, it follows that I will do X.
• Necessity of the consequent: that my doing X is itself necessary or unfree.

They typically affirm only the first. God’s foreknowledge is seen as logically correlated to free actions without causing or necessitating them. Aquinas, for example, argues that God’s knowledge is not situated within time; hence it does not “come before” our acts in a temporal sense that could constrain them.

Boethius and the “eternal present”

A key strategy for reconciling divine foreknowledge with human freedom originates with Boethius. In his influential view, God does not strictly “fore-see” the future; rather, God is eternal and views all times—past, present, and future—simultaneously as an “eternal present.” On this model:

• The future is future for us, but not for God.
• God’s knowledge is atemporal; it does not anticipate but directly “sees” events.

This “eternal present” account shaped much of medieval scholastic discussion, offering a way to claim that God’s knowledge is both complete and non-coercive: God’s knowing an event does not make it necessary, any more than our seeing a present event makes it necessary.

Rationalism, possible worlds, and Leibniz

In Leibniz’s rationalist framework, foreknowledge is embedded in a broader doctrine of possible worlds. God comprehends:

• all possible worlds,
• and all the truths about each possible world.

God’s choice of the “best possible world” entails foreknowledge of every event in that world. On Leibniz’s “complete concept” theory, the entire life history of an individual is included in the complete concept of that individual, which God grasps eternally. Critics contend that this view threatens the contingency of human actions, while defenders argue that actions are still free in the sense of being voluntary and non-coerced, even if they are part of a divinely known and chosen plan.

Molinism and middle knowledge

Luis de Molina and later Molinists introduce “middle knowledge” (scientia media) to explain foreknowledge of free contingent acts. They distinguish:

1. Natural knowledge: God’s knowledge of all necessary truths and all possibilities.
2. Middle knowledge: God’s knowledge of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom—what any free creature would do in any possible circumstance.
3. Free knowledge: God’s knowledge of which world is actual, given the divine decree.

On this view, God’s foreknowledge of what free agents will do in the actual world is grounded in middle knowledge. Proponents argue this allows for libertarian free will (the ability to do otherwise) alongside comprehensive divine foreknowledge. Critics question the coherence or grounding of counterfactuals of freedom and whether such knowledge is itself compatible with libertarian freedom.

Contemporary Debates and Modern Usage

Open theism and the “open future”

Open theism represents a contemporary challenge to traditional views of foreknowledge. Open theists maintain that:

• The future contains genuine indeterminacies, especially concerning free choices.
• Therefore, there is no definite fact of the matter yet about many future contingent truths.
• Consequently, even an omniscient God cannot have exhaustive definite foreknowledge of such acts, though God perfectly knows all possibilities, probabilities, and present states.

They often appeal to arguments from temporal ontology (an “open” or “growing” future) and from certain scriptural depictions where God appears to change course or express uncertainty. Critics respond that this revises classical understandings of omniscience and providence, and they defend the intelligibility of complete foreknowledge even with libertarian freedom.

Logical, metaphysical, and epistemic issues

In analytic philosophy, debates over foreknowledge intersect with:

• Fatalism: the argument that if propositions about the future are already true or false, then the future is fixed and human freedom is illusory. Responses include rejecting bivalence for future contingents, reinterpreting necessity, or revising the logic of time.
• The metaphysics of time: eternalists (who hold that past, present, and future are equally real) often find a Boethian, “all-at-once” knowledge model attractive, while presentists and growing block theorists may favor models that distinguish sharply between the determinate past and the indeterminate or partly indeterminate future.
• Epistemology and prophecy: philosophical discussions about prediction, prophecy, and information flow ask whether knowledge of future contingents is possible without a deterministic physical structure, and how such knowledge could be acquired or represented without undermining agency.

Secular and practical uses

Beyond theology, foreknowledge appears in broader philosophical and practical contexts:

• In decision theory and ethics, thought experiments about having foreknowledge of outcomes (for example, in Newcomb’s problem) test intuitions about rational choice and expected utility.
• In legal and moral philosophy, foreknowledge of consequences is closely related to notions of intention, recklessness, and responsibility.
• In philosophy of science, discussions about prediction and retrodiction investigate how scientific theories can support partial or probabilistic foreknowledge, and what distinguishes robust predictive knowledge from mere guesswork.

In contemporary usage, then, foreknowledge functions as a focal term at the intersection of logic, metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and ethics, naming the contested idea that certain future events can be known in advance and serving as a test case for theories of freedom, time, and omniscience.