From Neal A. Maxwell’s book “All These Things Shall Give Thee Experience”:. . . . “The Father Needed to Know”
By foreseeing, God can plan and His purposes can be fulfilled, but he does this in a way that does not in the least compromise our individual agency, any more than an able meteorologist causes the weather rather than forecasts it. Part of the reason for this is our forgetfulness of our earlier experiences and present inaccessibility of the knowledge we achieved there. The basic reason, of course, is that, we decide, and act, we do not know what God knows. Our decisions are made in our context, not His.
This mortal probation (of which the Gods said before we came here, “Let us prove them herewith”) is therefore, a perfectly arranged test. We will all end up kneeling and saying to God that He has been perfect, in His justice and His mercy. In fact, we will acknowledge that we deserve the reward, or lack of it, which we one day will receive!
Perhaps it helps to emphasize—more than we sometimes do—that our first estate featured learning of a cognitive type, and it surely was a longer span than that of our second estate, and the tutoring much better and more direct.
The second estate, however, is one that emphasizes experiential learning through applying, proving, and testing. We learn cognitively here too, just as a good university examination also teaches as it tests us. In any event, the books of he first estate are now closed to us, and the present test is, therefore, very real. We have moved, as it were, from first-estate theory to second-estate laboratory. It is here that our Christlike characteristics are further shaped and our spiritual skills are thus strengthened.
Such a transition in emphasis understandably produces genuine anxiety, for to be “proved herewith” suggests a stern test, a test that must roll forward to completion or else that which has been invested up to that point would be at risk.
Some find the doctrine of omniscience and foreknowledge of God troubling because these seem in some way, to constrict their individual agency. This concern springs out of a failure to distinguish between how it is that God knows with perfection what is to come but that we, do not know, thus letting a very clear and simple doctrine get obscured by our own finite view of things.
Personality patterns, habits, strengths, and weaknesses observed by God over a long period in the premortal world would give God a perfect understanding of what we would do under a given set of circumstances—especially when He knows the circumstances to come. Just because we cannot compute all the variables, just because we cannot extrapolate does not mean that He cannot do so.
Omniscience is, of course, one of the essences of Godhood; it sets Him apart in such an awesome way from all of us even though, on a smaller scale, we manage to do a little foreseeing ourselves at times with our own children even with our rather finite and imperfect minds.
Ever to be emphasized, however, is the reality that God’s “seeing” is not the same as His “causing” something to happen. ~Neal A. Maxwell, All These Things Shall Give Thee Experience (Salt Lake City, Deseret Book; 1980), p. 19-20
