Board index ‹ Specific Bible verses, texts, and passages ‹ Genesis

[August]

If G-d is omniscient (knows past/present/future), why did he put the Tree of Knowledge and serpent in Eden, knowing Eve would be convinced to eat from it?

[jimwalton]

Free will necessitates choice. You can't have free will that isn't free. If God protects them from the possibilities of negative choices, they don't really have free will.

Knowledge of what his creatures would do implies his ability to see, not his interference to force or determine them to do it. No matter how much I know, my knowledge doesn't make anybody do anything. If I were able to travel forward in time to see what you were going to write back to me, or to not even respond, my seeing that would not force you to write what you of your own free will choose to write, or even not to write at all. Knowledge is not causative, and even all-knowledge (omniscience) is not causative. Knowledge only sees or comprehends, it cannot coerce.

God knows all things because He can see all along the timeline. But His ability to see doesn't mean that He forced them to disobey, that He created them to disobey, that the system was rigged against them, that they were tricked, or that they had no free will. Knowledge is not causative. Only power is causative. God's ability to move forward in time to see what they would do doesn't mean God made them disobey. They had every option in front of them, and the power to obey or disobey. Their disobedience was theirs and theirs alone.

The Bible says that because God knew they would disobey, He had already designed a way to win them back in relationship to Himself, since He could not interfere with their free will. He knew they would disobey and so instituted a plan of restoration, redemption, and reconciliation. And even though He knew we would sin, He knew His power of redemption was stronger than our sin. As the old hymn says, "Grace that is greater than all our sin."

The only way people learn and can live their lives is by having choices and learning from the consequences of those choices. If God were to protect them from all harm (as is no different for us), we'd all be dumb as rocks and lazy as sloths.