Can God Guess the Future? Why Open Theism’s “Dynamic Omniscience” Falls Short

Can God really know the future, or does He just make really good predictions?

Some Open Theists claim God “knows” the future—not because He sees it as it truly is, but because He exhaustively understands all possibilities, necessities, and creaturely tendencies. That might sound impressive, but is it really knowledge—or is it just a glorified divine guess?

That question was insightfully raised by Taylor, a commenter on my recent blog. He wrote:

"When I think of God ‘knowing’ something, I don’t think of Him merely being aware of different probabilities or possibilities and then guessing what’s the most likely to happen. But how is that characterization of ‘knowing’ avoided if that’s all God has epistemic access to? It seems God guesses the future, but doesn’t actually have knowledge of it."

Exactly. Let's dig into that a bit more.

1. What Does It Mean to Know Something?

Let’s begin with the basics: What is knowledge? Philosophers traditionally define it as

justified true belief. In other words, to know a proposition means:

1. You believe it.

2. It is true.

3. You are justified in believing it.

This isn’t controversial. It’s what separates mere opinion, luck, or guesswork from knowledge. If God believes that X will happen, and X does not happen, then God did not

know X would happen. He may have had a good reason to believe it. But if it wasn’t true, it wasn’t knowledge. That’s a serious problem for any theological view that implies God could be wrong about what will happen.

2. The Problem with Dynamic Omniscience

Many modern Open Theists (especially those defending so-called "Dynamic Omniscience") believe that future-tense propositions like:

"Person A will freely choose B" ...are not true or false now. They hold that the future is genuinely "unsettled"—and so, there are no facts about what will happen. There are only facts about what might happen.

But here’s the catch: if a future-tense proposition is not true right now, then God cannot know it. He can hope. He can anticipate. He can assign probabilities. But He cannot know. Because there is nothing to know until the event happens. This leads to the deeply awkward conclusion that God doesn’t know the future. He guesses.

3. Does God Just Guess the Future?

Let me be clear: I’m not saying Open Theists believe God is ignorant or dumb. On their view, God knows everything there is to know. But they limit what can be known. And if future-tensed propositions don’t have truth-values yet, then even God can’t know them.

On Open Theism, God’s “beliefs” about the future are not beliefs about what will happen, but about what might happen. That distinction is important—because there’s a categorical difference between belief about a settled fact and belief about an unsettled possibility.

So what does that make God’s “beliefs” about the future? At best, educated guesses. At worst, divine speculation masquerading as knowledge.

Imagine someone saying this:

"God believes X will happen, but He might be wrong."

Would that count as omniscience? Not a chance. Let’s use an analogy. Suppose your weather app says there's an 80% chance of rain tomorrow. Is that knowledge of rain? No. It’s a probabilistic forecast. It might rain. It might not. No one says the weather app knows the future. But that’s what Dynamic Omniscience (when married to Open Theism) offers for God. At best, it gives Him a perfect weather app for the soul—not foreknowledge in the biblical or classical sense. So, when Jesus confidently proclaims that Peter will deny Him three times in a short window of time, that simply means something like there is an 80% chance of sin three times before the rooster crows.

This is absurd. 

Some Open Theists try to get around this problem and say that God determines these specific prophecies and that's why we can trust them. But this just makes God the deterministic author of sin and evil.

In this case, God causally determined Peter to deny Him, then causally determined Peter to deny Him again, and then causally determined poor Peter to deny Christ one last time before the rooster crowed!

These Open Theists are in the same sinking boat as the Calvinists they tried to oppose.

That, too, is theologically absurd. 

4. Enter Mere Molinism

Molinism offers a better way. On this view, some future-tense propositions are true now. For instance:

"If Tim were placed in circumstance C, he would freely choose to resist sin tomorrow."

That’s a counterfactual of creaturely freedom (CCF)—a proposition describing what a person would freely do in a given circumstance. God knows these truths not because He determines them, but because He is omniscient. That is, God knows what free creatures would do in any possible circumstance.

So, unlike Open Theism, Molinism preserves both:

• God's perfect foreknowledge, and

• Human libertarian freedom.

God doesn’t guess the future. He knows it.

5. Why It Matters

This isn’t just theological trivia. It affects everything. If God can only guess what you will do, then:

• His promises about your future might fail.

• His prophecies could be mistaken.

• His providential planning becomes a high-stakes gamble.

That is not the kind of God the Bible reveals. That is not a maximally great being. That is not the kind of God worthy of worship. Mere Molinism offers a picture of God who is not merely smart but truly all-knowing. A God who plans history with perfect knowledge, not probabilistic projections. A God who can genuinely say:

"I declare the end from the beginning" (Isaiah 46:10).

Conclusion

Taylor was right to raise the concern. If Open Theism (and especially Dynamic Omniscience) boils down to God making extremely good guesses, then it falls short of true omniscience. The biblical and philosophical vision of God is far grander. God doesn’t just make predictions. He has justified TRUE beliefs about the future. He

knows. And because He knows, we can trust Him.

Stay reasonable (Isaiah 1:18),

Dr. Tim Stratton