Is the Future Set in Stone?: A Biblical study of God’s relation to time and knowledge of the future

by Troy Edwards

The non-Calvinist “eternal now” believer has a real philosophical conundrum because he or she has a God who is able to observe all that happens in time but is unable to change any of it. Furthermore, the non-Calvinist “eternal now” advocate is unable to tell us who put in place the past, present and future events that God observes in His “now”. If all of these time periods exist then how did they come to be? If the non-Calvinist says that God created time itself did He know that the moment He created time that tremendous evil would occur within the time periods that He created? At what point in the “eternal now” could time have been created and at what point did God know that evil would take place in time? Such unanswerable questions reveals why the eternal now philosophy must be rejected outright. It holds no place in Scripture and does nothing more than create inconsistencies and contradictions in the study of God’s nature and attributes. While the Calvinist may find it helpful when promoting his erroneous beliefs, the non-Calvinist who disagrees with the Calvinist but embraces the idea of an “eternal now” and “exhaustive foreknowledge” has no logical or realistic response to erroneous Calvinist dogma.