Martin Luther is credited with arguing that, because God always knows what we are going to do, we can never act freely. On this view, human freedom exists in name only. If God knows exactly what we are going to do, then we don’t have much choice about it. This approach was unacceptable to Catholics, and it hasn’t pleased many Lutherans either. But it’s no surprise that we can wonder how our future acts can be free, if God already knows them.
We human beings definitely don’t know the future. The future doesn’t exist yet, so it isn’t something we can know for certain. We can predict the future, and derive some kind of knowledge of what will come to pass from our knowledge of the present. Doctors and weather forecasters do this, and so do we all. From what we know about the present, we can make conjectures about the future.
