http://www.standfortruthministries.com/pdf_articles/TheWatchtowerMisunderstandingofGod.pdf
https://www.forananswer.org/Top_JW/JehovahWatchtower.htm
https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/jehovahs-witnesses-and-the-watchtower-1180
https://orthodoxchristiantheology.com/2014/12/07/refuting-the-jehovahs-witness-doctrine-of-selective-foreknowledge/
http://daenglund.com/the-watchtower-rejects-biblical-authority-regarding-gods-foreknowledge/
According to JW theology, the God is not inherently and actually omniscient, just has an "ability" to "foreknow", which he exercises "selectively" according to his will. This view was actually adopted by Jehovah's Witnesses from the Socinians, who believed that God's omniscience was limited to what was a necessary truth in the future (what would definitely happen) and did not apply to what was a contingent truth (what might happen). The Socinians believed that, if God knew every possible future, human free will was impossible and as such rejected the "hard" view of omniscience.
I don't think JWs would be able to give up this "selective foreknowledge" Socinian approach to God's knowledge without radically changing their whole theology. In principle, they only wanted to "solve" the whole "predestination vs. free will" issue, which otherwise required an explicitly chiseled investigation, in such a cheap way, with one cut of the axe, but in fact this Socinian view has a much deeper significance for them.
Because the JW view of "paradise on earth" and "two-class salvation" is derived from this very principle: God did not "foresee" that Adam and Eve would sin, and Christ's ransom sacrifice is practically aimed at restoring this Garden of Eden for humanity. So for this hypothetical "what if?" question is their whole theology is built on. If God is truly transcendent and omniscient, then from God's point of view there is no such thing as an "original purpose" to which the course of history should be redirected.
Since I acquired a significant part of my theological knowledge and discussion method through a long-term religious debate with a thick-necked, stubborn Calvinist (who, I admit, could corner me more than once), I therefore know the related views relatively well. Although I did not become a Calvinist, I was quite convinced during these times that the existing Pelagian and Semi-Pelagian tendencies, often found in many naive believers, should be avoided. This Socinian view is downright absurd.
He used to always say that every time this "but, but... my free will!" tantrum strikes us, we should just re-read the 9th chapter of the Epistle to the Romans.
God perfectly knows everything that is outside of Himself, including the smallest and most hidden things, namely, the innermost world of free spiritual creatures (cardiognosis); and He knows everything before it happens, thus also future free decisions. This is a dogma, as evidenced by the ordinary teaching of the Church, and explicitly set forth by the First Vatican Council. Only materialists deny this and pagans distort it.
According to Scripture,
a) God cares for everything and therefore knows everything most precisely: "He counts the number of the stars; He calls them all by name." (Ps 147:4) "Who can number the sand of the sea, the drops of rain, or the days of eternity? Who can find out the height of heaven, the breadth of the earth, or the depth of the abyss?" (Sir 1:2; cf. Job 28:23–28) He has even numbered every hair of a person (Mt 10:30; cf. 6:26, Heb 4:13).
b) God instantly knows the most hidden and secret things: The sin of the first parents is immediately known to Him; He hears Hagar in the wilderness, Eliezer in a foreign land (Gen 3:9, 8:21, 16, 24, 18, Ex 3:9). Later, it becomes almost a proverbial expression that God is the examiner and knower of hearts and kidneys: "And no creature is hidden from His sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account" (Heb 4:13, Jer 11:20, Prov 16:2, Job 11:11, 42:2, Sir 39:5, Lk 16:15, Acts 1:25, Rom 8:27, etc.).
c) God knows the future: "The Lord God knew everything before He created it," (Sir 23:29; cf. 29:25, Is 46:10, Dan 13:42, Sir 8:8, etc.) including people's future thoughts (Ps 139, 94:11, Jn 6:64). Moreover, God's foresight distinctly sets Him apart from false gods, as elaborated in thematic and sublime turns in the second part of Isaiah: "Declare what is to come, and we will know that you are gods" (Is 41:23).
Since the era of the apologists, the Church Fathers have been keenly and detailedly developing the argument from prophecy, and in opposition to paganism, with Augustine asserting, "He who does not know the future is clearly not God." Jerome says, "It is folly to see in God's majesty the knowledge of how many mosquitoes are born and die every moment"; but with this, he does not deny God's omniscience, which he also expressly teaches, but rather gives a somewhat sharp expression to the correct notion that God does not care for irrational animals in the same way as for humans.
This doctrine can also be understood by reason:
a) If there were something that God did not yet know, it would still be knowable to Him; therefore, He would still be capable in that regard. However, this contradicts His pure actuality. If God could increase in knowledge, He would no longer be infinitely perfect.
b) God created the existing things, that is, with absolute autonomy, He provided every aspect of their existence: the content of existence with conception, the fact of existence with a willful act. Just as things would cease to exist if God's creative will no longer sustained them, so too would they cease to be understandable, that is, contentually determined beings if God were to cease their conception. Therefore, it is impossible for something to exist that God does not fully conceive or, in other words, does not perfectly know.
Difficulty: If God knows future free actions in advance, they must occur, since God's knowledge cannot be deceived. However, if they must occur, they are no longer free. This has been a problem for many for a long time. Cicero (Divinat. daem. II cf. Aug. Civ. Dei V 9) and the Socinians, therefore, denied this knowledge of God, while the Stoics and fatalists denied human freedom.
Solution: In the face of divine eternity, there is neither past nor future; everything is perpetually present before Him; eternity is equal to every moment of time and is with every point in time just as the center of a circle stands in the same relation to every point on the circumference. Consequently, God contemplates future things in the perpetual present of His eternity, and this contemplation influences their future occurrences no more than a lookout's observation influences the direction of a troop passing below. Just as our reminiscence does not alter or influence the past, so His foreknowledge does not influence the future (August. Lib. arbitr. III 4, 4; cf. Civ. Dei V 10; Boeth. Consol. phil. 5 pr. 3.). Therefore, it is correct to say: "Something does not happen because God knows it in advance, but because it happens, that is why He knows it."
However, this solution only holds as long as we strictly consider divine knowledge, abstracting from divine will. In reality, however, God does not merely play an observant role with respect to future things; their existence is not independent of His will, which would then determine the divine intellect. How freedom can then be reconciled with this divine preordination is discussed in the context of divine cooperation. But these two truths stand unshaken: God knows the free future, and yet man has free will. Our understanding could fully reconcile these two truths only if we fully understood how God cooperates with creatures and what human freedom actually entails, or how it can coexist with divine causality. However, both exceed the capacity of the created mind.
God knows all possibilities, whether they are realized or not. Scripture presents God as omniscient without any limitation; thus, it does not exclude possibilities from His knowledge. Even less so, because it attributes omnipotence to Him, which presupposes omniscience. We have furthermore seen that God knows everything before it comes into existence (Sir 23:29, Rom 4:17; cf. Mt 19:26, Jer 1:5); then, it is only possible.
According to the Church Fathers, God created everything according to His eternal ideas; but His ideas concern not only actual but also possible things (August. Civ. Dei XI 10, 3.). It is not difficult to understand that
a) if God did not know the possibilities, there would be a gap in His knowledge, which could at least be filled "in idea"; that is, in this respect, God would be in potentiality, which contradicts the reality of 'actus purus', or infinite perfection.
b) According to the nomological argument, God is self-sufficient in understanding. In God, the content of existence and understanding coincide; His knowledge fully illuminates His nature, and therefore God knows Himself not only in His absolute reality but also knows that His absolute nature can be imitated through created existence in inexhaustible richness. But the imitability of God's nature outwardly is the world of possibilities.
God also knows conditional future free actions. A conditional future free action (conditionate futurum, futuribile) is a free decision that never happens but would happen if a certain condition were fulfilled; for example, John would convert on his deathbed if he received a priest; Stephen would not become a wrongdoer if he embarked on a different path in life. These are not merely possible free decisions (mere possibility: John might or might not convert); nor are they simple future events, since the condition to which they are tied is not fulfilled.
Scripture mentions several cases where God demonstrates knowledge of the conditional future: "He was taken away lest wickedness should alter his understanding" (Wis 4:11). When David learned that Saul was preparing to attack him in Keilah, he inquired of the Lord through the priest: Will Saul come down against Keilah, and if so, will the Keilahites surrender him to Saul? The Lord answered yes. David then fled, and when Saul learned of this, he did not march against Keilah (1 Sam 23:7-13). Christ says, "Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the miracles had been performed in Tyre and Sidon which occurred in you, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. And you, Capernaum! ... if the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Sodom, it would have remained to this day" (Mt 11:21–23; cf. Gen 11:6–8, 2 Kings 13:19, Jer 38:17, Ezek 3:6, Lk 10:13, 16:31, Acts 22:17).
During the time of the Church Fathers, there were repeated non-Catholic attacks against theodicy in the name of divine foreknowledge of conditional future events. The Church Fathers never refuted these attacks by denying this knowledge but sought other solutions. For example, the Manicheans said: God knew that man would sin; why did He create him? Or why didn't He provide circumstances under which man would not have sinned? In the Pelagian debates, Saint Augustine himself discusses the question: Why didn't God take away all sinners (in the sense of Wisdom 4) before wickedness corrupted their minds? And when the Semi-Pelagians said that the baptism or non-baptism of infants occurs with regard to their foreseen conditional merits, the fathers did not deny God's relevant knowledge but objected to the conclusion.
It can also be understood by reason that
a) the events and actions of the conditional future are truly possible; therefore, they cannot be excluded from the scope of divine knowledge according to the previous proposition.
b) God's knowledge can only be called complete if it penetrates not only the fruits but also the flowers and roots of creatures and events; true world governance is possible only based on such deep knowledge of creatures. – Therefore, the scope of divine knowledge is infinite; not only insofar as it primarily and specifically targets His self-knowledge towards the infinite, but also as it extends to possibilities.
The world of possibilities spreads before the intellect as an unfathomable yet well-ordered boundless realm: infinitely many genus and species ideas, each with infinitely many possible combinations of types and individuals, with the endless possibilities of knowing and willing beings; the human mind reels at the thought of these infinite dimensions, which are faintly suggested by the concepts of transfinite numbers, infinite sets, sequences, and systems of infinite determinants, cf. Cf. August. Civ. Dei XI 10 XII 18; Thom I 14, 2; as far as God's knowledge concerning existing things is infinite when their number is actually finite, see Gent. I 70; Ver. 2, 9 ad 2. Lessius VI 2, 17.
It is inconceivable that the divine world knowledge, relatively independent of the creative decisions, which signifies a new mode of knowledge, is not mediated by the object of knowledge; direct divine knowledge of the world cannot be anything other than knowledge caused by the world. This, however, contradicts the absolute nature of divine knowledge.
Knowledge of the existing world, independent and distinct from God's creative decisions, cannot add any new element to the knowledge conveyed in the creative decision. This already includes every aspect of the created world's existence; no named reality, whether in terms of essence, existence, substance, or accident, would exist if it were not for God's conception and realization giving it existence. Thus, the existing world cannot tell God anything new. Knowledge from causes is more fundamental and thorough than knowledge from effects; the latter can only supplement the former for creatures, and the design engineer's implementation can only bring something new to his plan because he is not the complete cause of his creation (he does not supply the material, the physical laws; often, he is not capable of the technical execution). The same considerations apply to the question of the mediating medium for possible things. However, the mediating medium for the knowledge of future and conditional future free actions requires separate consideration.
Divine knowledge is a unified, undivided act that encompasses everything knowable with the utmost intensity at once. Therefore, it does not involve a transition from potentiality to actuality, from lesser known to better known, from premise to conclusion, or generally from one piece of knowledge to another; in other words, divine knowledge is not discursive (August. Simplici. II qu. 2, 3; Thom I 14, 7 15; Gent. I 55–57).
Consequently, God's knowledge is a single idea, which, however, equals the totality of the knowledge forms of all knowable realities; that is, it is of multiply infinite value. If there is no progression from subject to predicate, i.e., no judging knowledge in God, it does not follow that the excellence of this mode of knowledge is lacking in Him; only what constitutes imperfection in it, the discursive element, must be excluded (Aug. Civ. Dei XI 10; Trin. XV 14).
God's knowledge is exhaustive: it embraces everything knowable to the degree of its knowability, without the obscuring and distorting influence of mediating or reflective mediums. Therefore, in God's knowledge, there are not first (even logically) goals as opposed to means, laws as opposed to individual cases, effects as opposed to causes, accidents as opposed to substances, or vice versa, but His unified and eternal understanding comprehensively and completely grasps everything at its root at once.
In short, it can be said: God's knowledge is intuitive in the fullest sense of the word; that is, it is not symbolic or emblematic, like human knowledge, which is tied to signs (we think in words and argue in words), but it grasps the thing itself; it does not cling to appearances but opens to the essence; it is not merely observing, but creating; not progressive, but instantaneous.
According to Genesis 2:17, God told Adam "in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die", not "IF you eat of it, THEN you shall surely die." According to 1 Peter 1:20 the Son was chosen as ransom before the foundation of the world. Ephesians 1:4 likewise.
From God's omniscience, it directly follows that God cannot not know anything. Moreover, this notion is flawed for the reason that God exists not in time but beyond time; thus, from His perspective, everything that happens in the created world essentially happens "all at once." If He knows what happens in the created world (and He does), then He knows everything that will ever happen in the created world. Therefore, if you thoroughly consider the JW's argument on this matter, it would significantly diminish God, as it metaphorically suggests that God was nervously biting His nails, anxious about whether the first human pair would sin, realistically hoping they would not. This is complete nonsense.
God's omniscience is not His exclusive attribute, but it is an unalterable, inherent attribute. To put it more profanely: because He is God, He knows everything. But the definition can also be reversed: anyone who does not know everything is not God. For instance, I would consider God's love as a different type of attribute than omniscience. Translated, it means that it is inherent in God's nature to be omniscient, since anyone who does not know the future is clearly not God. However, conceptually, we could suppose a God who is not loving, like the Muslims' Allah, a rigorous, hard-hearted God. An unkind God would still be God, but an omniscient God would not be God. If God punishes, I wouldn't interpret it as God "balancing" between His attributes, picking this one out of His pocket, but rather, in His unchanging arrangement, punishment has its role, aiming for people to return to Him, the source of life.
God does not merely foresee the future like a fortune-teller but is present at every point in time, including the future. God sees the future because what is uncertain future to us is present for Him, making the future as certain for God as the past. Thus, it follows that God knows the future, and yet humans have free will.Therefore, the objection brought up in this context can be refuted through mere logic. God's omniscience is as much an inherent attribute as it is inherent in human nature to have a heart, lungs, etc. If one did not have these, they would not be human. God is literally omniscient, and we can reverse the definition: nothing can exist that God does not know about. God cannot not know anything. Why? The answer is the same as to those amateur atheist "philosophers" questioning whether God can create a square circle. The answer is no, because God's omnipotence means He can do anything without limits, except what contains a conceptual contradiction. A God with any lack of knowledge about anything is a conceptual contradiction (paradox), just like a square circle. Therefore, God is incapable of not knowing something, just as He is incapable of non-existence, etc.
According to the Jehovah's Witnesses, God had an "original plan" that He designed with the hope it would succeed, but it failed, and He was not even aware of its failure. However, logically considered, even according to the Watchtower, it's not God's original plan that ultimately materializes, because the original plan was for everything to remain without sin, thus we've taken a detour, which is not the same as the supposed "original plan." You admitted that God anticipated the possibility of the first parents sinning, therefore, while He cherished this so-called "original plan" at heart, He suspected it might not turn out that way. However, there is no uncertainty in God, only certainty. This means that even by your account, God was not completely ignorant about the fall into sin, but if He anticipated it from the start, wouldn't it be simpler to say that He knew it in advance? Is God such a being who needs to play two lottery tickets to hit the jackpot?
In this process, among other things, the Jehovah's Witnesses relativize God's omniscience to a possibility, like deciding whether to take out and drink the coke in the fridge, and if so, when. However, God's omniscience does not stem from some optionally available prophetic ability but from His absolute and infinite reality, which conceptually transcends all created beings, naturally encompassing all dimensions (space, time) that organize our existence into limits, which do not exist for Him. They relativize God's supremacy, essentially implying covertly that God is somehow limited by a structure He created, specifically time. Think about it: before the created world was made, time did not exist, but God did not create the framework of time for Himself, such that now the clock starts ticking over Him too; this only applies to the created world. When we start talking about time in theology, it's useful to logically define the concept of time. The concept of time is nothing other than that time is the measure of change. That is, the passage of time measures the degree of change, just as a video recording consists of frames. And this is what the Bible says about God in this respect: "with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change." (James 1:17) Now, if time is the measure of change, it follows that in whom/which there is no change, time does not apply either. For God, every moment of the entire created world condenses into a single moment, a cosmic "now": for God, the fall into sin happened at the same time as the current moment. For God, there is no past, present, and future. He always has "today," there is no passage of time for Him, He is beyond time, so from His perspective, it makes no sense to talk about "foreseeing the future," because what is future for us is present for Him.This issue also points out how much better Thomism's approach is, that things must be derived "from above", we must proceed from the larger, more abstract categories down to the more concrete ones. Then, if we encounter apparent contradictions along the way, we have to find solutions. This is the deduction. All other metaphysical trends are fundamentally infected with nominalism, they do not start from abstract categories, and their epistemology is inductive.
What did you start with? That we _feel_ that we are free, for example, if I want to raise my hand, I will. But when we deal with metaphysics, we think about the abstract category of existence, we have to do it in a non-inductive way, starting from our feelings
Can we imagine that if God knew all along that I would raise my hand at this moment, then ultimately I had no real choice? Not from God's point of view, because from his point of view it makes no sense to talk about possibilities, only certainty. However, it made sense from my point of view, since I run my life path by making decisions.
In my opinion, the scientific world, imbued with an immanent positivist philosophy, frequently suggests that everything is determined, there are no miracles, and there is no Omnipotence, and thus no divine Grace either. Everything is determined by atoms and their interactions, and this determinism renders not only sin meaningless but also every human act and indeed everything Human. The untenability of this view is evidenced to me by the fact that both psychological and anthropological theories repeatedly fail to describe or understand the whole person while forgetting even the mere assumption of the existence of God and human orientation towards God. For my part, I reject the principle of determinism and listen to God's free self-disclosure, as revealed about Himself and about man, his true nature, ultimate purpose, and the feasibility and path to this ultimate goal in Revelation.
Furthermore, even without Revelation, humans are capable of recognizing the dignity and freedom of creation, which is most fully realized in the feeling of love. We exist, but since our existence is not the foundation of being, someone must have ordained us to this existence, meaning someone wanted us. If someone wanted our existence, it implies that they love. And since love is only complete and perfect when it occurs in proper dialogue and accordingly, from free will and freedom. God does not love us as we might love a doll, but rather, approximately, as we love our child when they cuddle up to us and call us father or mother.
Human freedom fits perfectly within causality. Freedom does not lie in choosing or changing the effect but in choosing in the fulfillment of causes. That is, our freedom is not in whether adding one and one makes two or something else, but in whether we add or not. Every person is created for communion with God, hence there is an intrinsic or fundamental cause within humans that always directs towards God, and this is also the final cause. However, humans are simultaneously affected by other causes, potentially contrary to the fundamental cause. And here freedom comes into play; we can choose which cause will causally create the new form.
What determines our decisions, we do not know (even the scientific world cannot calculate what will happen to or in a person an hour from now), but I am certain that our decisions are not predetermined. Of course, a decision is influenced by learned behavior, a person's current mood, and a thousand other reasons, but the decision itself can still be free. Since the resulting cause-and-effect event is never necessary but contingent, based on contingency. Brain activity is neither the cause nor the counterpart, but at most a condition of, for example, mental phenomena. We can command our desires, educate ourselves, make sacrifices, take up our cross, etc. This is precisely what Jesus wants to lead us to. Original sin wounded and weakened our will, and thus limited our freedom, but did not destroy it. Those who have undergone conversion could tell the most about this. We are slaves to our desires and inclinations, but Christ can lead us out of this bondage by showing the correct human nature and the true goal of humanity, because "the truth will set you free." Indeed, with our relationship to transcendence, infinity, and eternity, we can transcend physical determinisms.
This achievement of the goal is aided by divine Providence. God created humans not only for salvation but also helps them achieve it. His omniscience indeed knows everything in advance, but this knowledge includes the foreknowledge of actions carried out by human free will. And He respects even our wrong decisions. But He stands at every person's heart and knocks (only rarely pounds) on its door. Thus, Providence (providentia) intervenes in the created world with two aspects regarding the individual and the world: it directs beings towards a purpose and enables, through cooperation, the realization of this goal. It does not govern in a way that excludes freedom from events, nor does it change the events of the world retrospectively (after a decision). Rather, based on His Omnipotence, the moments of creation unfold in such a way that they include the independent realizations of both natural and free causes. For example, Thomas Aquinas writes about prayer: "We do not pray to change the divine decree but to obtain what God has decided should be obtained through the mediation of prayer."
If your question remains unclear and you are still confused, I suggest reading some neothomist (e.g., Maritain), but mostly personalist literature, or philosophy books that often discuss this question as well. Books by Mounier or Lacroix might provide a more professional and detailed answer.
