I just read BLINK by Ted Dekker yesterday, whose books I thoroughly enjoy. Great, fast paced, can’t stop reading story. What was so interesting to me in this story was that a question I have often thought/wondered about was basically the spiritual theme running behind the story. I will butcher it, but this is the jest of it:
--There are 1000 things I could say; and for each one of those, you could have 1000 responses, each. That’s 1,000,000 possible futures at any given second. And every decision of each second brings on the next myriad of choices. So Seth, the character of the book, deduces that because of all the possibilities there could be, there cannot be an all-knowing God who knows the future.

My question has been a little different:
--If God knows what I am going to chose and already has plans made for it, how does prayer affect anything? Won’t I make the choice regardless of praying or not? And God knows if I will pray about it or not anyway, so He’s already made plans for that. (And on and on I could go spinning webs)

In the book, Dekker looks to something that C.S. Lewis wrote about (I guess) in THE GREAT DIVORCE. His summary of it as Seth is explaining it to another character:
“Time. Time and the natures of God. God had to have created time. By definition that would put him outside time. So the future, which is an element of time, doesn’t work for him like it does for us. That nature of him that is with us in time doesn’t necessarily know the future. But that nature of him that is in the future, so to speak, knows it as a matter of history. He’s already been there.”
…(lots of back and forth)
“I know a few things. I know that everything we do changes the future. I know that God changed my future in the desert. As I can see, the only reality that can accommodate both of those is at least similar to the one I’m suggesting. Do you realize the implications of this, Clive?”

“Tell me.”

“Prayer may just be the most powerful tool mankind has.”

So, anyone out there read THE GREAT DIVORCE or have any thoughts on this (Professor H?)?

In the book Seth was given the ability to see things that would happen before they did and could they chose the path he needed to follow to be safe. He slowly began to lose his gift. Then the question became, could he believe that God would still changed the future when he prayed even when Seth could no longer see the results of his prayers or choices?