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According to Jehovah's Witnesses, How does God safely choose what to foreknow?

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It appears from this question and answer that the Jehovah's Witnesses hold a slightly different understanding of God's omniscience than the typical Orthodox view wherein God always and at all times knows absolutely everything past, present, and future. From what I understand, the JW position is that God **can** know anything He wishes to know but, when it comes to foreknowledge, He does not choose to exercise the ability universally. In other words, God chooses what things He will and, by extension, will not foreknow. Various branches of Open Theism attempt to describe how the future can be epistemically open to God and the two main branches hold the future to be either alethically settled or open. This related question outlines the 4 main branches of Open Theism and, of the four, I believe JW thought lines up most closely with Voluntary Nescience (although I am not sure if JW believe that the future is alethically settled): > Voluntary Nescience: The future is alethically settled but nevertheless epistemically open for God because he has voluntarily chosen not to know truths about future contingents ... Even if Vulontary Nescience is not an accurate summation of JW belief regarding God's omniscience, still they do assert that God chooses what He will and will not foreknow. Searching through the Scriptures it seems that there are a great many things which it was critical for God to have foreknown and which, indeed, He did foreknow. Most notably, all prophesy spoken by or through God consists of foreknown future events. I say foreknown because God is not guessing: He is telling beforehand what **will** come to pass. Some of those are things that He brings to pass and one might say that He foreknows what He Himself will do. Others are things that hinge upon human decisions (often a multiplicity). My question is, according to Jehovah's Witnesses, How does God foreknow which things He must foreknow and which things He can safely leave unforeseen without resorting to the equivalent of guessing? Another way of phrasing this is, If God chooses to foreknow certain things from the set of all of the possible things that there are to foreknow how can He identify the critical items and choose to foreknow them without knowing what all of the non-critical items actually are?
Asked by Mike Borden (24105 rep)
Nov 27, 2021, 06:11 PM
Last activity: Jul 30, 2025, 06:46 PM