Religious forms of life include, among other things, both factual beliefs and moral convictions. In theistic traditions, however, these two components do not combine in an easily understandable way, since factual belief in God's omniscience appears to be incompatible with belief in free will, which is a prerequisite for morality. This apparent incompatibility is illustrated by St. Augustine: Now, against the sacrilegious and impious darings of reason, we assert both that God knows all things before they come to pass, and that we do by our own free will whatsoever we know and feel to be done by us only because we will it. But that all things come to pass by fate, we do not say; nay we affirm that nothing comes to pass by fate. I Augustine certainly does seem to be, as he declares himself, "against reason." If the Creator of the world is omniscient, then the events that God foreknows, including all our choices, do appear to be forced on us. 2 However, I shall argue that this is not so, and that a created being's choices within the universe of an omniscient Creator can be understood to be free. In undertaking this task I shall not attempt to develop a complete theological system, explaining nature, man, God, and their relationships to each other. I shall, rather, attempt the more limited philosophic project of demonstrating that simultaneous beliefs in God's omniscient foreknowledge and man's freedom represent something that could be experienced, that is imaginable, conceivable, and even reasonable. I will suggest, furthermore, that this conceivability and reasonableness could be presented in the form of an imagined model of theistic experience, stripped down to its essential features. If we could accept that the imagined model makes sense, as one in which the believer does make a genuine decision, we might also accept that seeing the course of one's life as both foreseen and chosen freely makes sense.
The model would have to contain the following essential features: foreknown events, an omniscient Being who foreknows them, finite beings who perceive his apparent desires, a reward for doing what he desires and a punishment for not doing it. Since the omniscient Being foreknows the finite beings' decisions, they apparently must occur, and his rewarding or punishing them may seem manifestly