Reading Reaction to Recent Work in Divine Foreknowledge and Free Will by L.T. Zagzebski

It seems to me that the argument for friction between belief in Free Will and belief in God’s omniscience ability to perfect foreknowledge hinges on our understanding of the concept of time. Zagsebski here mentions a couple of solutions that deal with time and that particularly interest me. The first is an idea that although he cannot do what is counter to what God’s knows will happen, we are still free. This argument sounds much like Steven Hawking’s argument on the existence of wormholes. The idea of wormholes is wrought with problems, especially the concept of a man being able to go backwards in time, for if a man goes backwards in time, could not he kill his own ancestor and then never exist? But then if he never existed who killed his ancestor? Hawking wrote out some mathematical proof using pool balls that reputedly proved that this sort of thing would not happen – that you could not do anything in the past that would disrupt the future. This does not seem to make any sense at all, and I have not actually checked his math, but this argument would seemingly apply to our problem with God and Free Will. Of course, there is a marked difference between a pool ball and a human being that Stephen Hawking seems to have overlooked. The second idea of interest is backward causation. It almost completely depends on some knowledge of time that allows for wormholes to the past, for it almost seems to argue as if every unexpected action sends a wormhole back in time, changing God’s belief in that present.