Commenting on my post on God’s omniscience, Godlessons objects that the doctrine of the omniscience of God contains paradoxes. (I’m thinking that he—or she, but I’m betting on he—means contradiction rather than paradox.)

In order for God to be omniscient, he can’t not know something. This means that not only would he know all possible futures, he would know the future that was going to happen as well, which means there is no other possible future.

How can I resist? Here’s my response:

You are equivocating on the term possible futures. When you use possible futures in the way you first use it, the term means something like “all the things God has the power and knowledge to accomplish—events God could have planned to occur had he desired.” They are possible in that sense—God has the ability to bring them to pass if he wanted to. They are conditional possibilities: They are possible, had God willed them. In this sense of the term, there are innumerable possible futures and God knows them all. 

In your second use of the term possible futures, you are refering to “the one conditional future which can actually come to be because God has planned for it to be.” This category contains the one conditional possible future for which the condition is met by God’s decision to bring this future into existence. In this category, we’re talking about actual possibilities, not conditional ones. There’s only one actually possible future, and God knows it because he decided it.