- 7 - To assert that something shall occur as a free exercise of will and at the same time be predestined is in itself a contradiction. Anything of which God had a definite foreknowledge would necessarily happen, for even God’s knowledge is subject to eternal laws, and, hence, the law that 2 times 2 is 4 applies to God as well as to every other spirit. • In the absence of anything which might serve as a basis, there can be no knowledge or foreknowledge, not even on the part of God, for even He is bound by the axiom: ‘Nothing exists without a cause.’ If God knew for certain how His creatures were going to act of their own free will in future situations, there would have to be a reason for His knowledge; and the only possible reason would be that God so forcefully influences the exercise of that free will, that only one course is left open. This, however, would eliminate any freedom of choice on the part of His creatures. • Ignorance of future decisions to be freely made by His creatures does not indicate that God is in any way imperfect. It is the necessary outcome of the freedom of will, the greatest gift God could have bestowed upon His creatures. Just as there are many things that God cannot do because they are self-contradictory, as, for example, not even He can make 2 times 2 equal 5, so He cannot create a free agent whose future actions He can foresee with absolute certainty, in which case those actions would be bound to occur. Freedom to decide and being forced to decide in a certain way are two things that conflict inherently, and absolute certainty that an event will take place is invariably tied to the absolute necessity of its taking place. This is an axiom that none of your theologians can refute, let them write what books they will teaching the contrary. Their conclusions are fallacies that serve only to bewilder mankind. They are utterly in the wrong when they assert that for God there is only a present, that for Him there is no future, and that everything that is going to happen, even the voluntary actions of His creatures, is an accomplished fact in His eyes, and therefore known to Him. • No more than a house that you may be planning to erect is already built are the events of the future accomplished facts with God. I might add that the very idea of freedom of choice means that there is a question whether the events dependent on such choice will occur at all, and if so, just how they will occur. You know that I am telling you the truth also in this, as I have done in all else. You have had plenty of proof of the fact that I am a truthful spirit. For this you have my oath, taken in the name of the Almighty, the true God. When I tell you that God has no foreknowledge of the voluntary actions of men, I am not detracting from His greatness; it is you who would dishonour God by teaching the contrary and thereby picturing Him to man in an odious light, for there are many people who deny the existence of God because they cannot conceive of a deity capable of creating beings, knowing them with absolute certainty to be predestined to everlasting unhappiness.. You teach, although you are wrong in this, that the damned will remain eternally damned. According to this doctrine, God is supposed to have created millions of human beings with the full and unalterable assurance that they would be everlastingly damned. Such a God would not be a God, but a monster!
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