Omniscience, Free Will, and the Limited Knowledge of God Movement

I reject the “limited knowledge of God” movement. While I do not hold the standard evangelical view of omniscience, I also do not believe that God has voluntarily limited His knowledge in the way this movement claims. It is important to distinguish my position from both the traditional view and from the limited-knowledge view.

subsection*My Understanding of Omniscience and Time

In my systematic theology, I argue that God truly grants humans genuine free will and that this has implications for the way we understand His knowledge of the future.

subsubsection*God’s Knowledge of the Future

The commonly held view in conservative theology is that God knows everything past, present, and future in the same way. On that view, every specific choice you will ever make is eternally and unalterably known by God in advance as a settled fact.

I take a different approach:

• God knows everything that can be known.
• God knows all possibilities that could unfold from any point in time.
• God has perfect knowledge of the past and present.
• The future, insofar as it depends on genuinely free creaturely decisions, is not a set of fixed facts already “there” to be known.

In this view, when I am confronted with a decision that could go in more than one direction, God perfectly knows every possible outcome and all their implications. But if my will is truly free, then the specific decision is not a knowable reality until I make it. God has not decreed that I must go right rather than left; therefore, “Randy will go right” is not a fixed truth until I choose it. Before that, what exists is a range of real possibilities that God comprehensively knows and fully controls in terms of His overall plan.

subsubsection*God and Time

This also ties to how I understand God’s relationship to time. I deny the idea that God “lives in the future” as if He were experiencing all points of time simultaneously. Instead, I argue that God works in time:

• He can decree future events and bring them infallibly to pass.
• He can promise certain outcomes and guarantee them.
• But He is not “already” standing in our future watching us from ahead, as if time were an observed film rather than a real sequence.

This is not a limitation of God’s power or greatness; it is simply a description of how He has chosen to structure reality, including human freedom.

subsection*Why This Is Not the Limited Knowledge Movement

The “limited knowledge of God” movement (sometimes described along lines of God choosing to be ignorant of some things) claims that God has decided to restrict His knowledge of events, especially future ones, so that He can be surprised or can learn from us, and that we pray in order to “inform” Him of what He otherwise would not know.

I disagree with this on several counts:

• God has not “chosen to limit” His knowledge. He knows everything that is logically knowable.
• The future choices of genuinely free creatures are not yet settled realities; they are possibilities. It is not that God refuses to know a fixed fact; it is that, in many instances, no such fixed fact yet exists.
• Therefore, the difference is not that God is voluntarily ignorant of something that could be known, but that some things are not yet there to be known as settled.

So my view is distinct both from the classical view (“God knows all future choices as fixed facts”) and from the limited-knowledge view (“God could know those facts but chooses not to know them”).

subsection*Free Will and Sovereignty

A major motivation behind both my view and, in a different way, the limited-knowledge movement, is a desire to preserve genuine human free will.

If the only choices I can ever make are those that God has eternally decreed in every detail, and if my actions cannot possibly be otherwise, then language about free will becomes hollow. If God has predetermined that I will go right, and I cannot meaningfully choose left, then I am not exercising actual freedom but functioning like a programmed instrument.

subsubsection*My View of Human Freedom

I hold that:

God has created humans with genuine capacity to choose differently between real options. When I face a decision, I could truly decide A or B. God has not predetermined which I must choose.

In this framework, omniscience means that God fully knows:

All the possible decisions before me. All the consequences that would follow from each possibility. Exactly how He can accomplish His purposes regardless of which path I choose.

Therefore, God is not threatened by human freedom. He is sovereign enough to govern a world in which creatures have real choices. His sovereignty does not require that He micro-determine or pre-script every decision.

vspace*-0.9baselineskip subsubsection*The Problem with “Limiting” God’s Knowledge

By contrast, the limited-knowledge movement claims that God has decided to set aside knowledge that He otherwise could possess. On that view:

God chooses not to know some future things. We therefore “inform” God through prayer so that He can respond appropriately.

This portrays God as intentionally self-blinded about matters He could fully see if He wished. That is very different from saying that some aspects of the future, because of genuine creaturely freedom, are not yet settled realities and therefore are not knowable as fixed facts.

In short, I say: God knows everything that it is possible to know; the limited-knowledge position says: God could know more than He does, but purposely refuses to know it. I reject that.

subsection*Prayer and God’s Knowledge

The limited-knowledge movement often links its theology of God’s knowledge to a specific view of prayer: they say we pray primarily in order to inform God, because He otherwise does not know what is happening or what we desire. This, too, I reject.

subsubsection*Does Prayer Inform God?

We do not pray because God is ignorant. God already knows:

What we have done. What we are doing. All that is happening in the world. All that could happen in the future.

He does not need us to brief Him on world events, our circumstances, or our emotions. We should not imagine ourselves as God’s news service, alerting Him to things that would otherwise escape His notice.

subsubsection*Why Pray, Then?

Prayer is still meaningful and commanded, but for different reasons:

Relational expression : Prayer is a way for us to express dependence, trust, thanksgiving, and petition to God. It shapes our hearts even as we speak. Participation in God’s work : God has ordained that certain things will be given or withheld in response to prayer. He has woven our petitions into His governance of the world, not because He lacks information, but because He chooses to involve us. Self-clarification : As we articulate our concerns before God, we often see our own situation more clearly. Speaking aloud or formulating requests can reveal assumptions, expose wrong motives, or solidify right desires.

So while prayer may feel “informative” from our side—we finally put into words our fears, needs, and hopes—its primary function is not to supply God with data He lacked.

vspace*-0.9baselineskip subsection*Critique of the Limited Knowledge Position

There is one positive impulse I can affirm in the limited-knowledge movement: many of its proponents are trying to take human responsibility and free will seriously. They are reacting against deterministic theologies that reduce people to mere instruments in a prewritten script.

However, I believe their solution goes off course in critical ways:

It suggests that God has knowledge available to Him that He voluntarily refuses to have. It implies that God can be “caught unaware” or truly surprised in ways that threaten His wise governance of history. It makes prayer into an information channel that God needs, as if He were dependent on creaturely reporting.

By contrast, my view seeks to preserve both:

Genuine human freedom and responsibility. Full confidence that God knows everything that is logically knowable and is never taken by surprise in any way that compromises His rule.

God does not live in a fog of self-imposed ignorance. He is not learning basic facts about the world from our prayers. He comprehensively knows all that can be known and has designed His purposes in such a way that He can accomplish them in the context of real creaturely decisions.

vspace*-0.9baselineskip subsection*Conclusion on the Limited Knowledge Movement

To answer the question directly:

I reject the limited knowledge of God movement. I do not believe God has chosen to limit His knowledge. I do not believe we pray in order to inform God of facts He does not otherwise know. I affirm that God knows everything that can be known, including all possible futures, and is fully capable of dealing with every free choice we make.

The limited-knowledge movement is a well-meant attempt to defend free will, but it does so at the cost of misrepresenting God’s knowledge. A better way is to affirm that God knows all that is knowable, that some aspects of the future are genuinely open because of free will, and that God’s sovereignty is not threatened by that openness.