Baltimore Catechism (edition 4):

Omniscience

18 Q. Does God know all things? A. God knows all things, even our most secret thoughts, words, and actions.

Certainly God "knows all things." First, because He is infinitely wise, and if He were ignorant of anything He would not be so. Secondly, because He is everywhere and sees and hears all. Darkness does not hide from His view, nor noise prevent Him from hearing. How could we sin if we thought of this! God is just here, looking at me and listening to me. Would I do what I am going to do now if I knew my parents, relatives, and friends were watching me? Would I like them to know that I am thinking about things sinful, and preparing to do shameful acts? No! Why then should I feel ashamed to let God see and know of this wicked thought or action? They might know it and yet be unable to harm me, but He, all-powerful, could destroy me instantly. Nay, more; not only will God see and know this evil deed or thought; but, by His gift, the Blessed Mother, the angels and saints will know of it and be ashamed of it before God, and, most of all, my guardian angel will deplore it. Besides, this sin will be revealed to the whole world on the last day, and my friends, relatives, and neighbors will know that I was guilty of it...

During the Watergate congressional hearings, then-Senator Howard Baker asked the question that would come to be the central focus of that entire political crisis: “What did the president know and when did he know it?” This question is often repeated when some new crisis comes along in a presidency or political career. In many ways, we throw this question back at God, assigning complicity to God for the evils, whether natural or moral, in this world. So the question is: What did God know and when did He know it? All and always. Not even exactly always, but even outside of and before time began, He already knew it. So if God knew it, then why did He allow it? The first inclination is simply to assign blame to God for our own misfortunes.
This has always been part of the classical “Problem of Evil,” in which we ask, “Well, if God is all-knowing, could He not have seen and prevented this evil from happening to me?” And, like Job’s friends, we look for someone to blame, whether it's ourselves, our spouses, our world, or even God.

In Scripture, we hear the story of Job, who is described as “blameless and upright… who feared God and avoided evil” (Job 1:1). Job would bless his many children each day, bringing them up rightly, and offering sacrifices for them– just in case they had somehow offended God (cf Job 1:5). Job, to his credit, proclaims his innocence in the face of the calamities and disasters that befall him, and refuses to curse God. Finally, under the weight of his sorrows and his not-so-helpful friends that tried to console him, he cries out, “Oh, that I had one to hear my case: here is my signature: let the Almighty answer me! Let my accuser write out his indictment!” (Job 31:35).

To which God finally explicitly replies, “Will one who argues with the Almighty be corrected? Let him who would instruct God give answer!” (Job 40:2). Where was Job when God created the universe from nothing? And who was Job to give the All-knowing God instruction? Job then repents of his haughtiness, and God blesses him even more than in days before.

God’s answer may seem like a non-answer to us, and indeed, it would be, if God were a man. Yet, God knows all things, as to their causes and effects, as to their substance and to their nature. Even if we planned out the entire genetic code for a fruit fly and studied it for a hundred generations, we could not even begin to understand what is a fruit fly in its very essence. We can only observe and try to deduce certain things, but we have not the slightest inkling of what being a fruit fly means to the fruit fly. We cannot even know ourselves fully, or our reasons for why we are the way we are, or do the things that we do. “More tortuous [deceitful] than anything is the human heart, beyond remedy; who can understand it?” (Jer 17:9).

Free Will is Not Free of Consequences

But as far as God is concerned, this brings up a great question: If He created everything from nothing, and knows how we will act and what we will do, doesn’t this make Him responsible? If we, for example, created a robot that we know will try to kill humans the first chance it gets, then we would surely be held criminally liable in court if it ever got loose and killed even a single soul. The robot we made does not have a true free will, but rather, it follows a set of programs and instructions. Some would argue that human beings and all sentient creatures do not really have a free will, so much as they are following genetic instructions which are formed by life experiences, what they learned, etc. If we have no true free will, even when we are not under threat or duress, then our legal system would seem to fall apart. There could be no culpability or blame assigned to the criminal, but rather only to God, or nature, depending on your view. One might argue that punishment is a way to guide our “programmed” nature. But common human experience does not seem to bear this out – people in very similar circumstances and upbringings might tend to do certain things, but may act in a much different fashion than simple genetics or education might allow. It is sometimes argued that out of need, poverty leads to crime. Poverty does not in itself cause crime. There are plenty of beautifully honest and generous poor people, and some very heinously criminal oligarchs and autocrats.

The classical Christian position is that God knows the future and all possibilities, and that we do have free will. But, hold on, if we do have free will, and it is God Who creates us, then how can we have free will, if it’s already been determined, so to speak, by God knowing beforehand what would happen?

A Limited Perspective Hinders Us

Part of the problem is that we do not see as God sees, and we do not know as God knows. We are attempting to grasp something that is by its very nature outside of our capacity to understand, in some way comparable to what we already know or see in nature. Adults seem incredibly marvellous to young children, for we seem to know everything. They are amazed that we can cook their food, that we can operated a motor vehicle, that we can fix one, that we know how to get money from these ATM machines on the walls, that we can add and subtract without seemingly putting much effort or using our fingers and toes. Wow! Children, of course, will come to grow disappointed in us when they realize we do not know everything. They realize much later just how much we actually did know, but they could not understand without their own adult life experience.

One of the ways that physicists view the universe and time is by using the “Block Universe” model, in which we can see all of Creation and all of time as one static “block” that has already preceded and finished, according to an outside viewer. We see the Bible, for example, and we might think, “Oh yeah, God wins in the end.” But if we were in the pages of Scripture, we could never know that. Or, think of our life as a kind of flip book, where one flips pages, and the drawings or photos form a kind of movie. In each individual frame, we are making a decision, choosing freely. We are active agents in our own story. But if someone were holding the book of our life, he or she would easily be able to see and know everything we do or think. If we are living our lives inside this flip book, we cannot know that. To us, as we live the continuum of our lives, page by page, instant by instant, we act as human beings.

But God does more than “hold” the book. He sets the flip books of the universe in motion, and He creates the “space-time” or universe of the countless numbers of flip books that flow together and intersect and interact in various ways. He created our nature, and He created who and what we are, and we do act according to our human nature, but in our own human nature, He allows us to have free will. Indeed, He respects our free will so absolutely, that He will even allow us to tell Him “no.” Someone once described Heaven as the soul finally surrendering to God and saying, “Thy will be done,” and Hell as the soul finally withdrawing from God, and God telling us, “Thy will be done.”

Could He have made us or things around us to work differently? Certainly, but then He would be interfering in our free will and destroying it. He does not cause our individual acts of free will, but allows them. Why? Well, because there can be no love, or any moral act, without the possibility of free will.

Now, some things God allows in order to teach us, and educate us along the path of righteousness and understanding, and we can only really learn the hard way. I know of a few parents, who, when their young kids would ask them if they could smoke dad’s cigarettes, for example, would freely allow them to try it out. After one nauseating experience of the wonders and marvels of tobacco, many kids would swear off such a bad habit for life. No amount of verbal cajoling would work on the kids as well as experiencing that first (and hopefully final) drag on the cancer sticks. Of course, we would not do the same thing with kids running around loosely and unsupervised with fireworks or cars, for example, since we know the results would be disastrous. And human history is nothing if not filled with disasters. We cannot foresee every action our kids might carry out driving our cars without proper training and supervision, but we can certainly stop our kids from carrying out their free will in this regard.

But, God has allowed such terrible things to happen – wars, genocides, violent crimes… Does God not see? Does God not care? He does indeed see, and He does indeed care. He is careful not to destroy who we are, and part of the image and likeness of God is having our free will. Still, He enters and guides human history from its most disastrous end – eternal separation from God, by sending His only Son. He allows the greatest evil, the torture and putting to death of His innocent Son by His own guilty creatures, and His answer is to bring the greatest good possible out of our greatest evil. Only God can do this and allow this, because He has the proper perspective to see all things and know how to do this while balancing our free will.

An Exceedingly Timely Example
As I type this very sentence, Pope Francis has just been buried, and the conclave to elect the pope has begun. The way some well-intentioned people speak of God electing the pope makes it sound as if God always picks the best guy for the job, or He is the only voter, or that if God has allowed the election of a pope, then by necessity it must be the best option, or at least, always a good man. This is where we can see how God works in spite of us and with us.

Pope Benedict, while yet Cardinal Ratzinger (yes, “only” a cardinal, but still in charge of doctrine as head of the Congregation for Doctrine of the Faith), in an interview with Bavarian television in 1997 replied, when asked if God chooses the pope:

“I would not say so, in the sense that the Holy Spirit picks out the Pope… I would say that the Spirit does not exactly take control of the affair, but rather like a good educator, as it were, leaves us much space, much freedom, without entirely abandoning us. Thus the Spirit’s role should be understood in a much more elastic sense, not that He dictates the candidate for whom one must vote. Probably the only assurance He offers is that the thing cannot be totally ruined… There are too many contrary instances of popes the Holy Spirit obviously would not have picked!”

God guides and counsels the pope away from that which could destroy His church, but popes, if they are bad or immoral, can certainly cause much harm. In addition, in times past, secular nations and states would try to influence the election in their own ways, having varying amounts of success in “guiding” the cardinals.

Nevertheless, He is the one that allows the pope to be chosen, but the pope does not have his own free will surgically removed upon election to the papacy. There has been corruption and evil in the hierarchy before – Our own Lord chose Judas as a warning to us that even those in the highest office can fail. He also chose Peter to show us that even those who deny their very Lord at His greatest hour of need can be restored and redeemed.

This should give us some pause and cause for concern, and once again reinforce the need to pray for our clergy and leaders, but also give us no small cause for joy, in that God has also taken our own stupidity, foolishness, and immorality into account when He calls us to our own vocation. In the parable of the Prodigal Son, the Prodigal Father had to allow the Prodigal Son to go his own way, in order that the Prodigal Son might come to fully experience and understand the love and mercy of the Prodigal Father and not take him for granted. The elder son in the Prodigal Son story never failed so horribly, but He did not need to learn the same way, although he still had to learn how to forgive his foolish brother.

The Good and the Bad of Omniscience

The good news is that God knows everything. The bad news is that God knows everything. Only when we truly enter outside of normal natural time will everything come to our knowledge. Scripture tells us that “He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will manifest the motives of our hearts, and then everyone will receive praise from God” (1 Cor 4:4b), and “nothing is covered that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known” (Mt 10:26b). That will be when we will have our big “a-ha!” moment, when it will be revealed and we will come to understand, as best we can, how God’s will has been carried out, in spite of our best efforts to thwart it.

In the next issue, we will move to part of an issue we brought up in passing in the beginning when we spoke of the problem of evil, namely, if God is all just, all holy, all merciful, and all perfect. God, of course, already knew that we would do that.

Novena to the Sacred and Immaculate Hearts - 2025

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