Prescience

Prescience (Lat. praescio, to know before it happens) is all attribute of God popularly known under the term Foreknowledge, and ascribed to him in different degrees and extent by Arminians and Calvinists. The doctrine is deduced from the perfection of God's nature. But as man has no analogous faculty, it is difficult, if not impossible for us to conceive of God's prescience. Man's knowledge of what is future is so obscure and inferential that it is in vain to fathom God's beholding of all things. Yet in the attempt made there arises the great question, how to reconcile the prescience of God with the liberty of man; and hence the doctrine becomes of vast importance to theologians of both the Arminian and the Calvinian schools.

I. False Theories. — Three leading theories have been resorted to in order to evade the difficulties which are supposed to be involved in the opinion commonly received.

1. Chevalier Ramsay (Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion [Glasgow, 1748, 2 vols. 4to]) among his other speculations, holds it a matter of choice in God to think of finite ideas; and similar opinions, though variously worded, have been occasionally adopted. In substance these opinions are that though the knowledge of God be infinite as his power is infinite, there is no more reason to conclude that his knowledge should be always exerted to the full extent of its capacity than that his power should be employed to the extent of his omnipotence; and that if we suppose him to choose not to know some contingencies, the infiniteness of his knowledge is not thereby impugned. To this it may be answered