If God knows exactly what you will choose, in what sense are your choices truly free?

 Have you ever finished a sentence for someone, or predicted what will be said or happen next in a film or TV show? Have you ever said, “I knew you would say that,” or “I knew you would do that”?

If you have, you can appreciate the simple distinction: knowledge of an action is not the cause of the action. Prediction does not equal coercion.

We constantly predict things, and often we are right. It could be blind luck, but more often it comes from being familiar with what follows from what. We recognize patterns and behavioral traits. The more familiar we are with the patterns of a particular type of film, or with someone's personality, habits and past responses, the more accurate our predictions become.

All of this shows that knowing what someone will do does not, by itself, take away their freedom to do it.

If we can sometimes make remarkably accurate predictions at our very limited level of knowledge, then at God's level of complete knowledge, He can know exactly what we will choose without that knowledge being what causes us to choose it.

God's knowing our choice does not mean that He made the choice for us.

Undoubtedly, there are other factors that do affect our free will. Our circumstances, conditioning, desires, ignorance and the influence of the material modes can all affect the choices available to us.

But God's knowledge of what we will choose is not one of them.

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