Can You Choose If Everything Is Known?

Imagine you’re about to pick a color for your new bike. Blue or red? You really think about it. Blue feels right. You choose blue.

Now imagine that someone—maybe a friend, maybe an all-knowing being—already knew, before you even started thinking, that you were going to pick blue. Did you really choose? Or was it just pretending to choose?

This is the puzzle that got a medieval philosopher named Abraham Ibn Daud to write a whole book. He noticed that the Bible seems to say two opposite things at the same time. Some verses say humans are free to choose. Other verses say God already knows everything that will happen. If God already knows, how can you really be free? And if you’re not free, then why bother making good choices at all?

Ibn Daud thought this was the most important problem a person could face. And he thought that the only way to solve it was to think really hard about some very strange ideas.

Two Kinds of Things in the World

To understand Ibn Daud’s answer, you first have to understand how he saw the world. He was following a tradition that went back to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who lived about 1,500 years before him.

Everything that exists, Ibn Daud said, is either a substance or an accident. A substance is the thing itself. A rock is a substance. You are a substance. An accident is a property that a substance can have or not have, like being wet, or being cold, or being blue. The rock could be wet or dry and still be the same rock. You could be happy or sad and still be you.

This might sound like just definitions, but it leads somewhere important. If your soul is just an accident of your body—like wetness is an accident of the rock—then when your body dies, your soul disappears, the way wetness disappears when the rock dries out. But if your soul is a substance, it could exist on its own.

Ibn Daud argued that the soul is a substance. He thought this was crucial because it meant that human beings could actually understand things that are not physical—things like truth, or goodness, or God. Your body can’t do that. Something in you can. That something is your soul, and it’s real in its own right.

A God Who Can’t Be Described

Now, if you’re going to talk about God knowing things, you first need to figure out what God even is. And here Ibn Daud ran into a problem.

If God is the most perfect being, then God must be absolutely one—not just the only God (that’s easy), but completely simple, with no parts at all. But if you say “God is good” and “God is wise,” it sounds like you’re saying goodness and wisdom are two different things inside God. That would mean God has parts. That would mean God is not truly one.

So Ibn Daud did something clever. He said that when we say “God is good,” we don’t really mean that God has the property of goodness. We mean something more like: “God is not bad.” We’re saying what God is not, not what God is. These are called negative attributes.

But that seems like cheating, doesn’t it? If all we can say about God is what God isn’t, we haven’t really said anything. Ibn Daud had another move. He said we can also describe God using relations—like calling someone a father or a son. Those words don’t tell you anything about what the person is like inside. They just describe how that person relates to others. Similarly, when we say “God is the Creator,” we’re not describing God’s own nature. We’re just saying that God has a relationship to the world.

This is getting abstract. But here’s why it matters for our original question: if God is completely simple and beyond our descriptions, then maybe God’s knowledge isn’t like human knowledge at all. Maybe God doesn’t “know” things the way you know your multiplication tables. So maybe the whole problem of “God knows what you’ll choose” is based on a misunderstanding of what God is.

The Chain of Intermediaries

Ibn Daud had another problem to solve first. If God is completely one and simple, how did all the messy, complicated stuff in the world come from God? You can’t get many from one directly. If you pour water from one cup, you get one stream. If God is perfectly one, only one thing can come directly from God.

Ibn Daud’s answer was borrowed from Muslim philosophers: there are intermediaries. Between God and our world, there exists a chain of intelligences—non-physical beings that gradually get less and less perfect as they go down the chain. The lowest of these is called the Active Intellect, and it’s the one that has the most direct contact with human beings.

Ibn Daud identified these intelligences with the angels mentioned in the Bible. This might sound weird to us, but it was a clever move. It meant he could read Bible stories about angels and interpret them as descriptions of the chain of intelligences. The Bible wasn’t wrong; it was just speaking in language that ordinary people could understand, while the philosophers could see the deeper meaning.

This matters because it’s through the Active Intellect that human beings can understand things. And it’s through these intermediaries that God’s knowledge and power get passed down to our world. God doesn’t directly control every little thing. The intermediaries handle the details.

What Evil Actually Is

Before Ibn Daud could get to free will, he had to deal with another problem: if God is good, why is there evil? And if God knows about evil and doesn’t stop it, doesn’t that make God partly responsible?

Ibn Daud said that evil isn’t really a thing. It’s an absence, like darkness. Darkness isn’t a thing; it’s the absence of light. Evil isn’t a thing; it’s the absence of good. And absence can’t be created. You can’t “make” darkness. You can only remove light. Similarly, God doesn’t create evil. Evil happens when something lacks the goodness it should have.

The main source of evil in the world, Ibn Daud thought, is matter—the physical stuff that everything is made of. Matter resists form. It doesn’t want to be shaped into something perfect. So evil comes from the material world, not from God.

But here’s the twist: human beings can overcome their material nature through knowledge. When you understand something true, your soul connects to the Active Intellect and becomes more like the intelligences—more spiritual, less material. The more you know, the less evil affects you.

The Big Answer: God Doesn’t Know

And now we finally get to the free will question.

Ibn Daud’s solution was startling. He said that when it comes to human choices, God simply doesn’t know what we will choose.

This was a radical thing to say. Almost no Jewish philosopher before him had been willing to limit God’s knowledge. But Ibn Daud thought he had to. Here’s his reasoning.

Some things in the world are necessary. They have to happen. God knows those things as necessary, and that’s fine.

But other things are possible. They could go either way. And Ibn Daud said that God actually created some things as truly possible—meaning that neither outcome is fixed. If God already knew which way it would go, it wouldn’t really be possible. It would be secretly necessary. So for human choices to be real choices, God has to genuinely not know.

“How can that be?” someone might object. “Isn’t that a limitation on God?”

Ibn Daud’s reply: it’s not ignorance. It’s just that God created some things as possible, and knowing them as possible means knowing that they could go either way. If you say “God must know the outcome,” you’re assuming that the outcome is already determined. But that’s exactly what Ibn Daud denied. The outcome isn’t determined until the person chooses.

Think about it this way. Suppose you’re playing a video game where you can choose which path to take. If the game already has only one possible ending no matter what you do, your choices are an illusion. But if the game genuinely branches based on your decisions, then even the game’s designer doesn’t know which path you’ll take until you take it. The designer created a genuinely open situation.

Ibn Daud thought God created human beings in a genuinely open situation. Your choices are real. God doesn’t know them in advance because there’s nothing to know until you choose.

What About Those Bible Verses?

But what about all those Bible verses that sound like God controls everything? What about Pharaoh, whose heart God “hardened” so he wouldn’t let the Israelites go? Doesn’t that mean God made Pharaoh act badly?

Ibn Daud had an answer for this too. The angels—those intermediaries we talked about—help people carry out their choices. When Pharaoh chose to be stubborn, the angels (the intelligences) helped him stay stubborn. The Bible says “God hardened Pharaoh’s heart” as a way of saying that the universe supported Pharaoh’s own bad choice. God didn’t make the choice for him. God just provided the support that let Pharaoh’s choice have its full effect.

This is how Ibn Daud harmonized philosophy and religion. The Bible speaks in the language of ordinary people, saying things in a way that makes sense to everyone. Philosophy reveals the deeper truth underneath. They don’t contradict each other; they’re talking about the same thing at different levels.

The Point of It All

Here’s one more thing that’s strange: Ibn Daud’s book is mostly about physics and metaphysics and the soul and God and angels. The free will question only shows up at the very end. Why wait so long?

Because Ibn Daud thought you couldn’t understand free will without understanding everything else first. You need to know what a soul is before you can understand what it means for a soul to choose. You need to know what God is before you can understand how God relates to human choices. You need to know about evil before you can understand why people make bad choices.

And at the very end, Ibn Daud turns to practical life. Once you know that you’re truly free, you have to decide what to do with that freedom. His answer: use it to pursue justice and knowledge, and to serve God out of love and gratitude.

This might all feel very abstract and distant. But here’s what’s at stake: if you’re not free, then you’re just a puppet. Your sense of choosing—blue or red, kindness or cruelty—is an illusion. Nothing you do really matters. But if you are free, then your choices are real, and they matter enormously. Ibn Daud chose to believe in human freedom, even though it meant saying that in some way, even God doesn’t know what you will do next.

Appendices

Key Terms

Term	What It Does in This Debate
Substance	The thing itself, not just a property of something else; Ibn Daud uses this to argue that the soul is real and can survive death
Accident	A property that something can have or lose without ceasing to be itself
Negative attributes	Saying what God is not, rather than what God is—a way of describing God without making God seem to have parts
Intermediaries	Chain of non-physical beings (angels/intelligences) that connect God to the world, so God doesn’t have to directly handle everything
Active Intellect	The lowest of these intermediaries, which helps human beings understand things and connects to their souls
Evil as privation	The idea that evil isn’t a real thing but an absence of good, like darkness is an absence of light

Key People

Abraham Ibn Daud (c. 1110–1180): A Jewish philosopher who lived in Muslim Spain and later in Toledo, where he wrote his big book on philosophy and religion; he was the first Jewish thinker to systematically introduce Aristotle’s ideas into Jewish philosophy.
Aristotle (384–322 BCE): An ancient Greek philosopher whose ideas about logic, physics, and the soul shaped Ibn Daud’s entire approach; Ibn Daud never met him (obviously) but relied on his framework.

Things to Think About

If you could know everything you were going to do for the rest of your life, would you want to know? Why or why not? Would knowing change anything?
Ibn Daud says God doesn’t know your future choices because they’re genuinely undecided. But if God created you and knows everything about you, doesn’t God know what you’ll probably do? Is “knowing what will happen” the same as “knowing what someone will probably do”?
If evil is just an absence of good, the way darkness is an absence of light, does that make evil less real? Or does absence still matter—after all, you can die from the absence of air.
Ibn Daud thought studying philosophy would make people better at religion. But what if studying philosophy leads someone to stop believing in God? Is that a good reason not to study it?

Where This Shows Up

In debates about AI and prediction: If an algorithm can predict what you’ll do with very high accuracy, does that mean you’re not really choosing? Companies like Netflix and TikTok get better every day at predicting what you’ll pick next.
In arguments about justice: Almost every legal system assumes people are free to choose. If we discovered that human choices are actually determined by brain chemistry or genetics, would it be fair to punish criminals?
In discussions about God and evil: Ibn Daud’s idea that evil is the absence of good is still defended by some philosophers and theologians today, though many others think it doesn’t fully explain why bad things happen to innocent people.
In everyday life: Every time someone says “I had no choice” or “It was totally up to me,” they’re drawing on one side or the other of the free will debate. It’s an argument that shows up in school, at home, and everywhere people make decisions.