If God already knew what would happen in the future, as if everything were planned and unchangeable, does that mean our world is just a story that’s already been scripted?

No. It means our world is a story that’s already been read.

Picture a man standing with one foot at Point A and another foot two feet away, at Point B. It’s not even worth visualizing, right? It’s just how people always are—occupying Point A, Point B, and all the points between, simultaneously.

We are spatially extended—i.e., we occupy dimensions in space, rather than merely occupying a singular, 0-dimensional point.

But we are not temporally extended. At any given instant, we occupy only a single instant in time, and that instant moves inexorably in a single temporal dimension, forward at one second per second.

There is no reason, however, that this must be the case. Time, so Einstein tells us, is a dimension just like the three spatial dimensions. There is no reason some entity could not be temporally extended, occupying a “spread” of points along the timeline all at once rather than sequentially.

Now, because we are spatially extended, there is nothing weird at all about the fact that I, standing at Point A, can observe or even influence what is happening at Point B without ever ceasing to be at Point A.

Right?

I mean, how strange would it be if you were sitting in your chair, reached out to pick up your glass of milk off the table… and your dining companion were to exclaim, “How did you do that?!? You were over there, and then you moved the glass way over there!”

You’d look at your companion like he’d gone insane. Has he really never seen someone reach out his arm before?!

Likewise, imagine a person takes two steps away from you… and acts like he’s invisible to you. “How could you see what I was doing? You weren’t there! You were two whole feet away!”

Weird, right?

God is temporally extended.

That is, it’s not that God, at Time A, foresees or predicts what we will do at Time B, later. Rather, God, at Time A, is already also at Time B, and is simply seeing us take those actions, as easily as I can see you across a room.

He doesn’t know what we will do before we’ve done it. He knows what we are doing in the future when we do it—but for Him, the future is already happening while He is still, simultaneously, in the Now.

That sounds odd or even impossible to us, because we have no experience of what it would even be like to be temporally extended. But for God, that’s normal.

Yes, God is the divine Author. But He has delegated to us the privilege of writing our own parts in the story. He doesn’t write them for us—but He does read them and write around them, weaving them seamlessly into His own narrative.

He simply has already read the parts that we haven’t yet gotten around to writing.