The Foreknowledge of God

(refer in this text to Alma 13:3-5)

“Respecting the foreknowledge of God, let it not be said that divine omniscience is of itself a determining cause whereby events are inevitably brought to pass. A mortal father, who knows the weaknesses and frailties of his son, may by reason of that knowledge sorrowfully predict the calamities and sufferings awaiting his son. Can it be said that the father’s foreknowledge is a cause of the son’s sinful life? … Our Heavenly Father has a full knowledge of the nature and disposition of each of His children, a knowledge gained by long observation and experience in the past eternity of our primeval childhood … He foresees the future as a state which naturally and surely will be; not as one which must be because He has arbitrarily willed that it shall be.” (James E. Talmage, Jesus the Christ, pp. 28-29)