Let's go to Don in Calamette Park, Illinois. Hi, Don. Hello. So, you know, I'm a Catholic. My son went to school, his whole life, to a Catholic school. But he just had COVID. He was dying, you know, tested positive for COVID a few weeks ago. And during that time, I was listening to your show. And I went back on the podcast. And you had been talking to Tony and his wife, Martha, and they were having a disagreement about, is God, does he know all and that, and how can God be all-knowing, and does he still give us free will?

And you had indicated on your show that he does know everything that's going

happen between birth and the time you die.

And I had been talking to my son, and I said, son, I'll pray for you.

And he said, well, it doesn't matter if you pray.

It's not, nothing's going to come of it.

It doesn't matter.

And it kind of got me thinking about if God knows everything from the day you're born

to the day you die, does it really matter if we pray?

Of course it matters that we pray.

There's a, the problem at the heart of what your son is saying is a kind of fatalism in assuming that because on the one hand, God knows everything that can be known. I mean, if he couldn't know everything that could be known, he couldn't be God. He would be missing something. There would be some knowledge that he didn't have, in which case he's not infinite. So it would be directly contradictory to God's own nature as God. So we have to begin

there and say that as God, he has, but he is, maybe more specifically, the sum of all his

perfections. There's nothing he can gain, ergo. There's nothing God could know that he

doesn't already know. So with that as our starting point, we have to find the resolution or find the

harmony between that fact and the fact that God created us with free will. And we know that he created us

with free will because the only plausible reason

that he would create anything, because he doesn't need anything, he doesn't need company,

doesn't need distraction, he doesn't, he's not bored up there with nothing to do, so he decided

to make things. None of those are reasons why God would create anything. Really the only

plausible reason is out of love. And therefore, because as we

know from experience, God not only created us with the capacity to be loved and to love him in

return, but also he gave us an intellect so that his revelation to us is intelligible. There's meaning.

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