If God knows the future, does His foreknowledge cause what happens?

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Whosoever Will · Accepted Answer

Whosoever Will, Knowing Isn't Writing: The oldest objection is that if the act settles what God knows, then the creature is making God’s knowledge, and God is a learner. Aquinas quotes Origen on Romans 8 answering it: “A thing will happen not because God knows it as future; but because it is future, it is on that account known by God, before it exists.” And Aquinas, who is nobody’s Provisionist, keeps the distinction. God’s knowledge is a cause of things, he says, only “in so far as His will is joined to it.” When he asks how God knows a contingent act with certainty, he does not say by having made the nature that produces it. He says the opposite: “whoever knows a contingent effect in its cause only, has merely a conjectural knowledge of it.” Certainty comes from presence: “God knows all contingent things not only as they are in their causes, but also as each one of them is actually in itself.” His picture is Boethius’s, a road seen from above: “he who sees the whole road from a height, sees at once all travelling by the way.” The road does not cause the seeing. It is what is seen. What the knowledge is of, and what causes the knowing, are two relations, not one.

If God knows the future, does His foreknowledge cause what happens?

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