I've been thinking about God's relationship to time. This is thought experiment stuff, not anything to do with anybody's (mine, yours, your neighbor's cats) beliefs, though you can certainly believe it if you want to. I started out thinking about Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen
and his relationship to time. I found myself wondering, if God can comprehend, all at once, everything that will ever happen, what, if anything, does that imply about free will?
If you think of time as linear, if the end of the line is predetermined then there can be no free will. A line, however, is one-dimensional and time is supposed to be the fourth dimension. Even a two-dimensional representation of time, like the one I seem to remember Doc Brown drawing on a chalkboard in Back to the Future, Part II (refresh your memory—someone's printed it on a T-shirt), allows for choice. From line to plane to space, there are more and more directions to wander off in; time, therefore, must be so full of possible directions that there aren't even words (up, down, right, left, north, east, south, west) for all of them.
Dr. Manhattan seems to his human fellows to perceive all of time simultaneously; but, as he observes, he is no God, merely "a puppet who can see the strings." He is locked into a single line of time and has no sense of how making a different choice at a given moment might impact the future.
A proper God should be able to see the whole four-dimensional enchilada: every possible choice and every possible outcome all simultaneously apparent and all of it fully absorbed and understood (someone who can see it all but just thinks it's a bewildering mess probably still is a god, albeit a sad and pathetic, lower-end of the pantheon sort of god). From a vantage point outside existence as we understand it, none of these choices or outcomes would be any more real than any other. To a God with the view I'm imagining, the things I did today wouldn't be any more real than the things I chose not to do. Every time I've made a choice, I've done the right thing and the wrong thing across an infinite number of parallel moments, none of which is the real moment, because there isn't one.
If that is how God sees us, it would seem to render superfluous quite a few of the more popular notions of the world's religions. There would be no need of a multi-level Heaven/Hell system to sort people into; the best version of everyone could be taken from the segments of time in which they had made the most of their lives. Everyone would be saved, no one left behind (though this obviously depends on one's point of view and the numbers would dictate that the vast majority of available views would tend to disagree). It's more like infinite reincarnation until you get it right than Heaven if you're good, Hell if you're bad. It's more like Groundhog Day than reincarnation, except we don't get to be aware of what's going on or learn from our mistakes.
But if we're not learning from our mistakes, what's different each time? Does it make any kind of sense that confronted with exactly the same situation I can make an infinite number of different choices? Why don't I do the same thing consistently? Can I steer my own course, or am I at the mercy of blind luck? What makes me think I have free will?
Perhaps that doesn't matter so much, though; it may be enough that I do think that I have free will. Like the idea of a quantum event that can only occur if it is observed to occur, perhaps free will is only possessed by those who believe they possess it. To contemplate free will is to begin to understand the spider's web of time as a tangled mass of possibilities rather than a single thread spinning toward the future. To choose one must first perceive the choice.
Often I find myself frightened to make a choice because the outcome of any action is hidden from me. It is an attribute of God to understand all that any given choice means, but I take a stab at making them anyway. Perhaps that is what most separates humans from other animals: we aspire to be Gods. Maybe someone is looking in at us from outside, maybe not; maybe someday (maybe now, as time hardly matters once your standing outside of it) it'll be me.