Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

The first one is fairly obvious: interfering with choices of free will leads to problems. If you are working on a project, and God says to you that you will succeed, does it mean that you indeed will continue with the project and succeed or that you must continue with the project and succeed? Can you, for example, abandon the project? Maybe you can but won’t; but maybe you can’t. Can you frustrate God’s own prophesy? (Will you be punished if you do?) Such thoughts are unhealthy for a human being. Hence God can’t inform us about many future events.

Second, it has to do with the possibility of self-defeating prophesies. Assume that God cannot lie. Yet He cannot always tell the truth, either, especially about future events, because the very action of revealing the future can alter it in such a way as to cause God to have lied. Suppose that if God tells person P that X will occur, then Y will occur instead; and suppose that if God tells P that Y will occur, then X will occur instead. Finally, if God makes a claim that some other event Z will occur, then either X or Y and not Z will actually occur. Clearly, whatever God says to P will be a lie. Hence He cannot truthfully let him know what will happen. He is required by the demands of logic to hide this information from P for fear of uttering a lie. So, this example demonstrates that God must hide from men for a particular reason.

The foregoing scenario can result in a sort of a game between God and P in God’s mind. Suppose that P actively wants to upset God’s prophesy. God knows that if He tells P that X, then P will try to bring about Y and succeed. So, He changes his prophesy and thinks of saying to P: “X would happen, unless you tried to cause Y, which you will, so Y will happen.” In response P, now cognizant of the new future, would try instead to cause X. God again, foreseeing that, imagines telling P: “X would happen, unless you tried to cause Y, but if you tried to (thwart my prophesy that you would cause Y) by trying to cause X, which you will, so X will happen.” And so on ad infinitum. This is now unhealthy for God.

The third problem is self-fulfilling prophesies. Suppose God tells P that he will die tomorrow. P takes this to mind and tries to avoid death, for example, by staying at home tomorrow. Yet there occurs a fire at his house tomorrow, in which he dies. And if God had not told P of his impending doom, then P would have been outside when the fire occurred and would have kept his life. So, whether God can tell P that he would die tomorrow depends on whether God has designs for him to die. So, we see that if God wants P to live, then he can’t perform the act of telling him the truth, because doing so would be contrary to God’s purposes.

At the very least, then, God has to, in some situations, hide from humans his foreknowledge of the future.