Many brilliant medieval philosophers have answered these questions this way, (these philosophers include Anselm, Boethius, but most famous Aquinas etc)

Free Will and Divine foreknowledge (that god knows the outcome of future events) are not mutually exclusive. God knows the outcome of events and is responsible for them in that he crafted humans, BUT, when he crafted us, he crafted us with free will and thus he gave us the ability to make our own decisions. So, in one sense God is a cause of future events, insomuch as he created our nature, but he is only a remote cause because he leaves it up to us to make the decision. Our own free will is what they call the proximate cause, i.e it is the reason I decied to drink my coke right now. Thus, God is A Cause, but not THE Cause.

Another reason that future contingency and God's foreknowledge are compatible is as follows:


When people argue that because God knows the outcome of future events they must necessarily happen, they usually fail to realize that in their explanation they are assuming the fallacy of trying to personify god. Its hard for us to understand how Divine Foreknowledge and free will are really compatible because for us things happen in a temporal context, meaning we experience past, future, and present.

To God, and as is inherent to the nature of God, He experiences things in eternity, which is to say that he doesn't experience things in time. To God everything is happening at once. Imagine what you would consider the ever-fleeting moment of the present. What you did 1/100 of a second ago is the past and will never happen again, and what has not happened is the future and thus it has not happened. For God all events are experienced simultaneously. They are all in the present. He experiences your birth and your death at exactly the same time. He experiences the rise and fall of the roman empire all at the same time and at the same time as your birth ( you get the idea).

Thus, it is true that God does know the outcome of future events. Nevertheless that does not mean that we have no free will. It is simply that God knows that some things happen out of contingency and some happen out of necessity. Simply because God knows that I am going to look at porn tonight doesn't mean that it is not my decision to look at porn. It is my decision, it just so happens that God experiences my choice, and understands that I had options of looking and not looking and looking is the choice i made


Thus, I think it is safe to say that God's foreknowledge of an event does not mean that it happened out of necessity. It does however mean that it necessarily will happen, which is different from the former assertion because it just means that what God knows to happen is definitely going to happen. However, as human we don't know future events, and we choose them using our own God given free will. So remember, if you masturbate tonight, God knows your masturbating, but he knows you just as easily could have not masturbated - it was up to you.

Thats how i think certain (Aquinas) philosophers would answer this question, (minus my own foul examples)