Yes, God could be (and is) far more competent, powerful, able, and effective than any human being who does not possess exhaustive foreknowledge. But, if the underlying assumption of your question is to then argue that God could accomplish His purposes by respecting the liberty of indifference (libertarian free will) of His creatures, and thus not being able to know the future, I contend that such an position gives no guarantee of the eschaton to God’s children in Christ.
If God is genuinely responsive to humans and to the course of history, and if God cannot infallibly know the future free decisions of man, it is in principle impossible for God to know infallibly what He will do in the future as well.
If God is like a Grand Master chess player, yet human freedom is truly libertarian, how can God guarantee He will be able to respond to every move in the cosmic chess game that is made by free creatures?
Yes, God's wisdom, skill, and resourcefulness is infinitely greater that the greatest Grand Master chess player, but what guarantee do you have that the novice (human) will not simply stumble by blind chance into the one in a million move that the Grand Master cannot respond to? As long as libertarian free will always exists this must be conceded to be always a possibility, even if the likelihood is small.
In other words, with such a view, God's knowledge of His own actions in the future is at best probabilistic. Thus, God's statements that He will ultimately triumph over evil is no absolute guarantee. But, I know we all agree that God is not a liar, so the assumptions by those that deny God's exhaustive foreknowledge must therefore be incorrect. The problem then, lies with these persons' assumptions of what God knows and God's sovereignty.
When we examine the 4,017 predictive prophecies in the bible, we find that 2,323 are related to a future human decision or event (See Steven Roy, How Much Does God Know, Ph.D. dissertation, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 2001, or his book How Much Does God Foreknow?: A Comprehensive Biblical Study, Intervarsity Press, 2006). Therefore, if God does not know the future, how does God predict the future with such detailed accuracy?
From the above are we then forced to observe that if the view that God does not possess exhaustive foreknowledge is true, the scriptures in some way in some places must be false. But which ways and places? Could not these tenuous means and places be the very narratives and optatives of prophecy that those that deny God's exhaustive foreknowledge depend upon to make a case for its own dogma? Indeed, if God's knowledge is not exhaustive, how can anyone appeal to the bible to even claim anything about God's knowledge?
Given this erroneous conceptual probabilistic view of the nature of God’s future actions, for anyone to insist on a guaranteed final outcome in history, either:
(1) God must be able to unilaterally intervene and override libertarian free will, or
(2) Such persons must assume that God's ultimate plan to eliminate evil is not an absolute certainty.
And, if God unilaterally intervenes, the question remains, given the assumption of libertarian free will, how God can infallibly know when it would be the right time for Him to intervene? In effect God must make His decision to intervene based upon incomplete knowledge.
Moreover, if God intervenes, such intervention overrules assumed libertarian free will, for God’s intervention seen to be 'coercive'. Given unsettled theism’s position on moral responsibility and sin, these persons would be forced to conclude that there is no moral responsibility for those that would be held accountable by God who have had their free will overridden by God's intervention.
On the contrary, if God is not wholly sovereign (as normally understood by classical theism), He has no certain plan, for nothing God plans is a knowable factuality. God cannot guarantee any plan with autonomous creatures in the mix, whose acts He cannot know in advance. In fact, God cannot even know when to plan.
The act of ordaining by itself does not entail that future things will happen. What is needed in order to secure that future things will happen is some further property of God. This is true of any Christian belief system.
For something to be true and knowable there must be something we or God can access that makes the claims in question true. There are two aspects of this claim. First, truth requires a truthmaker. Second, by accessibility, I mean that whatever these truths are, they must be knowable. Since God is infallible, what He knows He knows infallibly. So if God holds a belief about a certain event that is based upon something else, then the basis itself cannot leave open the possibility of the belief being mistaken, else God would be mistaken, and therefore, not infallible.
For truthmakers to function as knowable truthmakers, and thereby allow the some to claim that only some parts of the future are known, the features truthmakers possess would have to be something about God or about the world. I would assume that such a claim by such person would be something about what God ordains about the future.
Let’s say that God ordains a certain event in the future will occur and this ordinance itself is a knowable truthmaker for the future truth. There is no problem to propose that God’s possesses the self-knowledge needed for Him to know what He ordains and what He does not ordain. That said, it is not easily defended that such ordinances are in fact truthmakers. Why? For a truthmaker to be a truthmaker, the thing in question must entail the truth in question. For example, if God ordains it will be windy tomorrow, it must logically follow that it will be windy tomorrow. That is, it is impossible for the ordinance of God with respect to a windy tomorrow to presently exist and it not rain tomorrow.
As a classical theist, I have a simple explanation and solid defense why the entailment is indeed present: God’s character is immutable, thus God cannot will one thing to occur at one time and then change His mind to will something else. But some, such as the open theist, see God’s nature changing in response to the indeterministic unfolding of the world He has created. Thus, unlike the classical theist position, the ordinances of God have no such immutable character to the open theist. Consequently, God’s ordinances cannot be functioning as truthmakers, for they do not entail the content of the ordinance. If God’s will is not immutable, God could very well ordain that it will be windy tomorrow and yet tomorrow it does not rain because God changed His mind in the meantime. Restating: the act of ordaining by itself does not entail that future things will happen. What is needed in order to secure that future things will happen is some further property of God. This is true of any Christian belief system. God’s immutability is that further property of God.
From this it should be apparent that from the open theist's position, no part of the future can be known as true.
AMR
