Question

Hello Rabbi Michi. The question of divine knowledge and free choice has been asked many times, and you have addressed this worn-out topic at great length.
I know your conclusion (that there is no prior knowledge), as well as the arguments that lead to it. Among other things, you reject those who try to solve the problem by appealing to the dimension of time, saying that they are not solving anything at all but answering the wrong question. If I were asking about the very fact of the Creator’s knowledge—given that I can choose what to do, how does He know what I will choose? After all, it still hasn’t happened yet. I myself still don’t know what I will do, so how does He know? Then indeed one could say that He is above time and can pull out an event that has not yet happened.
But that is not the question of knowledge and free choice. The big question is whether, after He has obtained the film, I still have free will. If He knows in advance what I am going to do, then I do not really have genuine possibilities. Assuming the future information is in His possession, how can I choose otherwise? In other words, it turns out that the problem here is not that God knows. Rather, the very existence of the information contradicts free will, and the Creator’s knowledge merely serves as a sign that the information already exists, and so the original difficulty returns in full force.
 
I would like to continue the discussion of the time dimension, but from a different direction—challenging the concept of time that the contradiction itself assumes.
It seems to me that the question that presents divine knowledge and free choice as contradictory actually assumes a linear and fixed conception of time, in which “past,” “present,” and “future” are absolute and well-defined concepts.
According to contemporary science, time is not linear and not an absolute thing at all; time depends, for example, on place. Time is a dimension like the dimensions of space and depends on them. According to Einstein’s view in relativity, time is not absolute but each coordinate in space-time has a time related to it depending on the other dimensions. Our current understanding of time as observer-dependent and place-dependent clarifies that there is no essential obstacle to past, present, and future existing in parallel rather than as a linear sequence. (Of course, a human being has no practical ability to access this because of physical limitations, but it is not impossible that the Holy One, blessed be He, who is not dependent on time and place, knows things in a different way that our intellect cannot grasp.)
Therefore, when you present the Creator as watching a film and pulling information from the future, so that it turns out the information already exists and therefore contradicts free choice, that is a conception of linear time with earlier and later—and that is precisely what I want to challenge.
The question assumes that the future must come after the present. How do we know that? The existence of information within the time dimension creates a contradiction only when I set up the future as something absolute and later than the present. Today’s conception of time does not put things in contradiction, because there is no absolute time; the future is not necessarily after the past, just as the table in my house is not behind the refrigerator in any absolute sense—it all depends on where you are looking from. If I look at the dimensions of space and ask myself what is in front of the table and what is behind it: if I look from one side, the refrigerator is in front of the table, and if I look from the other side, the table is in front of the refrigerator. According to relativity, time too is a dimension like space. Therefore, time is no different in this respect. From the human point of view, things arrive one after another, but from another point of view perhaps that is not so, and from a higher perspective perhaps there is no real relation at all between the refrigerator and the table, and when I say what is before what, that is only my attempt to create a connection between the two from my own vantage point—but who says that this is the only possible perspective?
 
It is important to me to note that I am not claiming this challenge answers the question—quite the opposite. It raises many difficulties and problems that are hard for us to grasp. The question here only becomes more complicated. What this challenge advances is that the question assumes an incorrect conception of time, and therefore I could reply that the question assumes something mistaken and thus leads to mistaken conclusions.
Moreover, challenging the conception of time uproots the question entirely, because it removes the contradiction from the outset. The contradiction stems from an incorrect understanding of time that says the future comes into being after the present choice, and therefore the present determines the future, so if the future already exists, then the present that led to it must already be fixed as well (and cannot be chosen). That is true in a linear and absolute conception of time, but contemporary science does not say that. As I emphasized, for me this is only a challenge, not a solution, because I solved one problem but created another—namely, how can the past and future exist not as a sequence but in parallel? That question is indeed very difficult to answer, but modern physics is also trying to deal with it, and if so, this is a question about science itself and not specifically about the believer. Just as a scientist can be rational even though he has not yet answered this question, so too the believer is no different in that respect.
Incidentally, I think it would be useful to discuss Dr. Yakir Aharonov’s “double-wave effect” (a Nobel Prize candidate and discoverer of the Aharonov-Bohm effect), who argues that there are influences from the future on the present [I can’t find the exact source, but you can see, for example, here: https://www.calcalist.co.il/local/articles/0,7340,L-3365730,00.html]
Effects of that sort in physics can empirically strengthen the claim that the conception of time as linear is mistaken.