 This last approach to explaining how God knows the contingent future starts with an observation concerning foreknowledge and providence that advocates of open theism have made very clearly and forcefully. Why would knowledge of the future be useful to God? Well, presumably knowledge of the future enables God to make decisions about how to exercise divine power in order to accomplish the purposes behind creation. But there is a problem here: knowledge of the future is just knowledge of what will happen (since the future is by definition whatever will happen), and once God knows that something definitely will happen, then it’s too late to do anything about it. (This may sound like a limit on God’s power, but probably it is not: not even God can make something false while that same thing is known to be true.) As William Hasker says, “In the logical order of dependence of events, one might say, by the ‘time’ God knows something will happen, it is ‘too late’ either to bring about its happening or to prevent it from happening” (Hasker 1989, 58). So what God needs, for the purposes of providence, is not just knowledge about what will happen, but also knowledge about what could happen and what would happen in certain circumstances. 