Boethius and divine foreknowledge

Boethius uses this concept of eternity to try to resolve one of the most famous problems in the philosophy of religion, reconciling God’s foreknowledge of human actions with human free will. In The Consolations of Philosophy Boethius first poses the problem. Human freedom, in the sense required for moral responsibility, seems to require that humans have alternative possibilities, since people are not held responsible for doing what they could not help doing. However, if God knows beforehand what a person will do, and if God is necessarily omniscient and cannot be mistaken, it is hard to see how a person can do anything else than what God foresees. Boethius first argues that merely knowing what a person will do does not causally necessitate the person to do a particular action, since we can observe a person who is acting freely without negating the freedom. He then argues that since God as eternal has no temporal before and after, it is false to say that God foreknows any human action. God simply knows—in his timeless, eternal mode of being—what a person will do, but for God this is not foreknowledge. Every moment of time is for God “present.”—Evans, A History of Western Philosophy, 152