“If God knows what we are going to do, he has no right to reward the good and punish the wicked” Discuss.

God is seen to be eternal, omnipotent, omniscient and Omni-benevolent. It is a matter of debate as to whether these items fit together and work together. It may depend on how we see these ideas of God. Changing our definition of just one these Attributes has implications for the others. Religious believers are aware that the idea of God can be contradictory but both statements appear true, this is called paradoxical. These statements are; that God is both separate from the physical world, transcendent, and that God is closely involved in the world, immanent. However, people would argue that this is due to our human limitations.

Different thinkers suggest that; God is timeless: past, present and future; God is everlasting and God moves through time with his creation, but changes with it. For us humans, we experience everything in time; this is not exactly the case for God. God is seen to be outside of time. God can see all events in eternal present, e.g., your GCSE results are all visible to God ‘now’. Thomas Aquinas made an analogy that says, “He who goes along the road does not see those who come after him; whereas he who sees the whole road from a height sees at once all those travelling it.” A timeless god is, then, thought to observe the entire course of history at once, just as a person might observe the events along the entire course of a road at once. The fact that God can see what we are going to do before it happens, he has no right to reward or punish us because, if he was immanent he would be able to intervene and stop us from doing bad things. So, if God could stop the bad then no one would be good. But people would argue that God is timeless. However, because God is perfect, he cannot intervene in our time because he does not change, Plato tells us this when talking about forms, so, people would say, that God has the right to punish and reward because he couldn’t do anything.