362.  Those who have confused this determination with necessity have fabricated monsters in order to fight them.  To avoid a reasonable thing which they had disguised under a hideous shape, they have fallen into great absurdities.  For fear of being obliged to admit an imaginary necessity, or at least one different from that in question, they have admitted something which happens without the existence of any cause or reason for it.  This amounts to the same as the absurd deviation of atoms, which according to Epicurus happened without any cause.  Cicero, in his book on Divination, saw clearly that if the cause could produce an effect towards which it was entirely indifferent there would be a true chance, a genuine luck, an actual fortuitous case, that is, one which would be so not merely in relation to us and our ignorance, according to which one may say: 

                                Sed Te
  Nos facimus, Fortuna, Deam, caeloque locamus,

but even in relation to God and to the nature of things.  Consequently it would be impossible to foresee events by judging of the future by the past.  He adds fittingly in the same passage:  ’Qui potest provideri, quicquam futurum esse, quod neque causam habet ullam, neque notam cur futurum sit?’ and soon after:  ’Nihil est tam contrarium rationi et constantiae, quam fortuna; ut mihi ne in Deum quidem cadere videatur, ut sciat quid casu et fortuito futurum sit.  Si enim scit, certe illud eveniet:  sin certe eveniet, nulla fortuna est.’  If the future is certain, there is no such thing as luck.  But he wrongly adds:  ’Est autum fortuna; rerum igitur fortuitarum nulla praesensio est.’  There is luck, therefore future events cannot be foreseen.  He ought rather to have concluded that, events being predetermined and foreseen, there is no luck.  But he was then speaking against the Stoics, in the character of an Academician.

363.  The Stoics already derived from the decrees of God the prevision of events.  For, as Cicero says in the same book:  ’Sequitur porro nihil Deos ignorare, quod omnia ab iis sint constituta.’  And, according to my system, God, having seen the possible world that he desired to create, foresaw[343] everything therein.  Thus one may say that the divine knowledge of vision differs from the knowledge of simple intelligence only in that it adds to the latter the acquaintance with the actual decree to choose this sequence of things which simple intelligence had already presented, but only as possible; and this decree now makes the present universe.

364.  Thus the Socinians cannot be excused for denying to God the certain knowledge of future events, and above all of the future resolves of a free creature.  For even though they had supposed that there is a freedom of complete indifference, so that the will can choose without cause, and that thus this effect could not be seen in its cause (which is a great absurdity), they ought always to take into account that God was