How Can I Have Free Will If God Is All-Knowing?

Question

How can God have control over the world if we have choice? I can choose to kill myself and God won’t make a miracle to stop it, therefore I have control. And He doesn’t. How is that?

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Answers

  1. The Just Ask! - AskTheRabbi.org Team

    Free will is a complicated topic, as I am sure you appreciate. Here is the answer of the Rambam to this perplexing question.

    Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Repentance 5:1,3; 5:5
    “Man is given the option, if he so wishes, of taking the path of goodness and of becoming righteous; or, if he so wishes, of taking the path of evil and becoming wicked… And this is a major principle and it is the foundation of the Torah and of the commandments… A person can choose to do any activity he wants whether good or bad… Lest you say, `Does God know everything that will be before it happens, that this person will be righteous or evil, or does He not know? If He knows that he will be righteous it is impossible that he will not be righteous, and if you say that He knows he will be righteous but it is possible that he will be evil, then He does not know the future with clarity!’ Know, that the answer to this question is longer in length than the world and wider than the sea, and a number of major principles depend upon it. However, you must realize and understand that which I am about to say. We have already explained… that God does not know things with a knowledge that is outside of Himself like people, whose knowledge and whose selves are separate things. Rather, He, May His Name be exalted, and His knowledge are one, and a person cannot comprehend this idea clearly. Just as a person cannot comprehend God’s true reality… so he cannot comprehend God’s knowledge… Since this is so, we have no power to know how God knows the actions of all creatures, but we know without doubt that the deeds of a person are in the person’s hands and God does not entice or decree upon him that he should do this.”

    However, there is an idea that, at some point, the deeper one gets into the levels of reality, everything is God’s will. This is what is alluded to by a great Chassidic master. Rav Nachman of Bratzlav (Likutei Moharan 21:4) writes that when humanity arrives at the point where we understand the solution to the paradox of free will and God’s omniscience, we will have arrived at a degree of perception in which we will no longer have free will… and indeed this is the task of humanity… to come to the realization that everything is the will of the Creator…

    Best wishes from the AskTheRabbi.org Team