From Thomas Flint, professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame:

Perhaps the first thing to note about the question “How could God know the future?” is that it could be taken in two very different ways. First, by emphasizing the “How,” one might think the question is asking for an explanation of something that we know occurs—i.e., as asking, “Given that God knows the future, what accounts for or explains God’s knowledge?” So understood, the question is akin to asking of a magician, “I know you made her disappear, but how did you do it?” Alternatively, by emphasizing the “could,” we might take the question as implicitly challenging the claim that God does know the future—as asking, rhetorically, “Why on earth think that God knows what’s going to happen?” Understood in this second way, the question is similar to reacting to a friend’s suspicions by asking plaintively, “How could I betray you?” On the contemporary philosophical scene, the question, taken either way, has been much discussed.
Those who call themselves “open theists” deny that God has comprehensive knowledge of the future. In particular, they deny that God can know what people will freely do. Some open theists think that there simply are no facts about future free actions; others say that, though there are such facts, there’s no way anyone can know them, or at least no way God can know them, since God’s knowing now that I will do such-and-such tomorrow would entail that I’d have no alternative but to do such-and-such tomorrow, and thus wouldn’t do it freely. All open theists, though, agree that God’s knowledge of the future is quite limited, and hence that God needs to take risks in interacting with creation.
Open theism, though, is very much a minority view among those engaged in philosophical theology. The far more traditional view—that God, being omniscient, has perfect and complete knowledge of the future—is still dominant. But traditionalists are hardly united in their explanations of how God knows the future.
One traditional explanation holds that God knows what will happen in time because God isn’t in time. The doctrine of divine eternity holds that God is not limited, as we are, by temporal or spatial boundaries. God’s is a perfect life, not one balanced on the knife’s edge of the present, the barely existing dividing line between the no-longer-existent past and the not-yet-existent future. God’s being outside of time, these “eternalists” say, affords God perfect access to every moment in time, much as (to use a favorite eternalist metaphor) an observer on a mountaintop can see in one glance every member of a single-file troop marching below him, while those involved in the march have a much more limited perspective. According to eternalists, speaking of divine foreknowledge is at best misleading. God knows what, from our perspective in the march of time, is in the future—but it’s not future to God.
Many traditionalists, though, find the eternalist explanation of how God knows the future unsatisfying. The observational metaphor it employs, they argue, points to a God whose knowledge of the future is purely passive. But the God of traditional monotheism, they insist, isn’t one who just likes to watch: God’s an active creator, the providential sovereign whose world develops as it does because God planned that it so develop. So even if God is outside of time, we can’t use that to explain God’s knowledge of the future.
Traditionalists who adopt this line have developed it in two very different directions. Some suggest that God knows the future because God determines everything that takes place. As the “first cause,” God has complete understanding of the causal ramifications, both short run and long term, of all that God does. Everything that occurs, then, can be traced back to God’s own creative intentions; in knowing God’s intentions, God knows our future. The metaphor of the author is sometimes used to explain how this divine determination is compatible with our freedom. An author decides how a character in her novel behaves, but in the world of the novel, the character can still be acting freely.
Other traditionalists find this account bizarre. If God is determining how we act, then we’re just fooling ourselves if we pretend that we have genuine freedom. God exists and acts in our world, not in a separate authorial plane. So if God’s causing us to act as we do, then we’re simply not free. The only way to reconcile God’s active foreknowledge with our genuine freedom, they say, is to see God’s providence as acting through the knowledge of how we would freely respond if God were to put us in various situations. Knowledge of this sort is often called “middle knowledge,” since, as knowledge of what would happen, it can be thought of as located between knowledge of what could happen (knowledge of what’s possible) and knowledge of what will happen (knowledge of what’s actual). A God who has middle knowledge and decides which situations we will be in, the advocates of this position contend, would know all that we will freely do—and know it without causing it, thereby safeguarding our freedom.
This “middle knowledge” answer to the question of how God knows the future has many advocates (including me), but also many critics, who charge (among other things) that there’s simply nothing in the world that could ground the sort of what-would-happen-if truths that middle knowledge requires.
So the issue of divine foreknowledge is one that is currently quite unsettled among philosophers and theologians. Where will this discussion head in the future? Only God knows. Perhaps.

Thomas Flint appears with Russell Stannard, John Polkinghorne, Ernan McMullin, Greg Boyd, and William Lane Craig in “How Could God Know the Future?” the 27th episode in the Closer to Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series, hosted and created by Robert Lawrence Kuhn. The series airs Thursdays on the PBS HD network and many other PBS stations. Every Friday, participants will share their views on the previous day’s episode.

From Paul Davies, physicist, cosmologist, astrobiologist, and director of Beyond: Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University:

Humankind has walked this planet for what, in cosmological terms, is but the twinkling of an eye. Our planet Earth should remain habitable for at least another billion years, which gives plenty of time for our descendants, natural or artificial, flesh-and-blood or machine (or a blend of both), to decamp to another locale. It will be hundreds of billions of years before brightly-burning stars become a rarity. Even then, there will still be black holes—the dead remnants of stars—which store a colossal amount of potentially usable energy. There is no fundamental reason why life and mind could not endure for trillions of years into the future. We can certainly imagine, as have many science fiction writers, that life and mind will slowly spread out into the cosmos, perhaps from Earth alone, perhaps from many planets that have spawned life. A progressively larger fraction of the galaxy will be brought under some form of intelligent control, that is, “technologized.” If that is the case, then in the far, far future, the distinction between “natural” and “artificial” will evaporate. More and more matter will be used to serve the purposes of sentient beings, to process information and create a rich mental world, perhaps without limit.
Some scientists have speculated that, as the timeline stretches toward infinity, an emerging distributed super-intelligence will become more and more godlike, so that in the final stage the super-mind will merge with the universe: mind and cosmos will be one. However, the final state of the universe simply cannot be predicted because it could be determined by physical effects at present too subtle to discern. The dark energy that seems to dominate the expansion of the universe today may cause all the galaxies in the neighbourhood of the Milky Way to retreat across an event horizon, leaving a sort of island universe of dying stars surrounded by chasms of dark emptiness. But if the dark energy slowly grows or decays, other grisly fates may lie in store for the cosmos, such as a big rip or big crunch. The only solace is that there is plenty of time left to figure out what, if anything, it all means.

Paul Davies appears with Freeman Dyson, Saul Perlmutter, Lawrence Krauss, Ray Kurzweil, Frank Tipler, and Robin Collins in “What’s the Far Future of Intelligence in the Universe?” the 26th episode in the Closer to Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series, hosted and created by Robert Lawrence Kuhn. The series airs Thursdays on the PBS HD network and many other PBS stations. Every Friday, participants will share their views on the previous day’s episode.

From Frank Wilczek, Nobel laureate and a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Theoretical Physics:

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is a commonplace. “Beauty is in the mind of the beholder” cuts deep.
In the microcosmos, where unaided eyes see Nothing—empty space—active minds discover the primary stuff of reality. Everywhere and everywhen, our equations tell us, the world is full of spontaneous activity: the play of quantum fields, dancing to the music of symmetry. Our eyes are attuned only to deviations from the norm. Evolved for survival in a changing environment, they filter out as background what our minds reveal as fundament.
In the macrocosmos, where unaided eyes see points of light against a blank black emptiness, active minds discover mighty globes of nuclear fire, each far larger than all Earth, and in numbers vastly more than our eyes make apparent. They learn, too, that the apparent stability of the world is illusory. The universe as we see it today arose from a fierce and nearly featureless Chaos, out of which gravity, following its inexorable logic over incomprehensible times, slowly distilled structure.
And in life on the scale humans live it—the mesocosmos—active minds find new perspectives, which expand experience. A rainbow is a magnificent spectacle and a marvelous exercise in refraction and caustics; love is a grand experience and a fascinating study in the effects of oxytocin and vasopressin.
In this mind-constructed mix of symmetry, grandeur, and enlightenment, beauty abounds. But Nature’s beauty is Her own. To reach it, we must work honestly and hard, and we must be ready to accept what we find. Her beauty is, it appears, free of emotion and deeply amoral. A quirky quantum fluctuation might initiate a cancer; a supernova that delights astronomers might mark the sudden end of a brilliant civilization.
Does beauty color the cosmos? Yes, absolutely—if you seek it, construct it, and accept it!

Frank Wilczek appears with Peter Atkins, Roger Penrose, Fotini Markopoulou, Stephon Alexander, and Freeman Dyson in “How Does Beauty Color the Cosmos?” the 25th episode in the Closer to Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series, hosted and created by Robert Lawrence Kuhn. The series airs Thursdays on the PBS HD network and many other PBS stations. Every Friday, participants will share their views on the previous day’s episode.

From V.V. Raman, emeritus professor of physics and humanities at the Rochester Institute of Technology:

There are at least three aspects of time: experiential, conceptual, and physical. Experiential time may drift ever so slowly (often for the young, who are impatient for adulthood) or flee all too fast (especially as one approaches the precipitous terminal cliff at an advanced age). Experiential time is perhaps the most insubstantial element in human consciousness. It is with us all through our waking hours, apparently drifting silently and ceaselessly in the external world as well as within the very core of our being.
Conceptual time is like an imaginary straight line that can extended to infinity in either direction, taking us to realms way beyond the bracket whose bounds cosmologists proclaim as the big bang and heat-death. It has no beginning and no end, just an imaginary stretch the mind constructs.
Then there is the steady flow of physical time in a given frame of reference, the sort that is measured by physicists and chronometers, taking advantage of periodic changes, either at the lunar and stellar levels or at the microcosmic domain of atomic transitions. Physical time, as per current cosmology, had its birth with the big bang and was nonexistent prior to this ignition of the physical world.
Theologians have argued about whether God created time. The simple answer could be, “Of course God did, for did not God create everything?” Or, “Certainly not, since there was no God prior to thinking man.” In other words, the two simple answers depend on whether a person is a theist or an atheist. The Svetasvatara Upanishad describes God as the “architect of time”: kâlakâro. For Pythagoras, time was the soul of the world.
What is relevant to recognize is that experiential time plays a role when we are bored or having fun, conceptual time comes into the fore when we are logically analyzing the nature of time, and physical time matters when we are doing serious physics or cosmology.
Shakespeare once described time as both our parent and our grave. Indeed, each one of us tastes a slice of time, and when the lights go off in conscious life, we drop out of the steady stream in which we seem to be drifting. It is conscious life that perceives the presence of the stream. When we are thrown into the invisible stream of physical time, it turns into experiential time, a portion of a stream that continues indefinitely. What we do during that interval is what really matters.

V.V. Raman appears with Brian Leftow, the Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne, Ernan McMullin, William Lane Craig, and Robert Russell in “Did God Create Time?” the 24th episode in the Closer to Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series, hosted and created by Robert Lawrence Kuhn. The series airs Thursdays on the PBS HD network and many other PBS stations. Every Friday, participants will share their views on the previous day’s episode.