Does God Make Mistakes? Regret, Risk and the Perfect Plan

Does God make mistakes? No. A mistake needs a before and an after inside the one who errs, a moment of guessing and a later moment of finding out, and God's knowing and willing have no earlier moment in which He could have guessed wrong. The texts in which God regrets or grieves are true, but they report His grief as it meets human sin within time, not the discovery of an error. Below: the case for "yes" at full strength, four Christian answers, and four simulated attacks.

Key takeaways

• A mistake is a false belief, a misfired intention or a failed design. Each needs a guess and a later discovery in the one who makes it.
• The case for "yes" rests on four texts. Genesis 6:6, 1 Samuel 15:11, Jeremiah 3:7 and 3:19, and Jonah's forty days seem to show God regretting or expecting wrongly.
• The rival answers each pay a price. Augustine and Aquinas read the regret as metaphor; open theism lets God's likeliest expectations fail; Molinism adds a further kind of divine knowledge.
• Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) keeps the grief and denies the error. Where open theism gives up God's sure knowledge and the metaphorical reading of Aquinas gives up the grief, it holds that the regret texts report God's one eternal act as it meets sin in time.

What would it mean for God to make a mistake?

A mistake comes in three kinds. The first is a belief that turns out false: I thought the bridge would hold, and it did not. The second is an intention that misfires: I aimed at one result and produced another. The third is a design that fails its purpose: the maker looks at what he built and wishes he had built it otherwise. All three share one structure. There is an earlier moment in which the agent believes, intends or designs, and a later moment in which he learns that the belief, the intention or the design was wrong. A mistake is always discovered, and discovery takes two moments.

The search contains two questions. "Does God make mistakes" asks about the record: has He ever erred? "Can God make mistakes" asks whether erring is possible for Him at all, whether God can be wrong in principle. A firm answer to the second settles the first, and the second is where the argument lives.

Scripture grounds its hope in the reliability of God's word. "Because God wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purpose very clear to the heirs of what was promised, he confirmed it with an oath," and He did so by two things "in which it is impossible for God to lie" (Hebrews 6:17-18, NIV). "God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should change his mind" (Numbers 23:19, NIV). Through Isaiah God says, "My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please" (Isaiah 46:10, NIV). If God can misjudge, every one of those promises becomes a forecast. That is why the question belongs among the attributes of God and beside the perfection of God.

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The strongest case that God did make a mistake

The case for "yes" comes from the Bible's own words.

Begin with the flood. "The LORD saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain" (Genesis 6:5-6, NIV). Read at face value, the maker looks at his work and is sorry he made it. That is what we mean by a design that failed.

Then Saul. God chose him, and then the word of the LORD came to Samuel: "I am grieved that I have made Saul king, because he has turned away from me and has not carried out my instructions" (1 Samuel 15:11, NIV). Here a decision about a person, not a race, is followed by regret.

The sharpest text is Jeremiah, because it reports an expectation. Of faithless Israel God says, "I thought that after she had done all this she would return to me but she did not" (Jeremiah 3:7, NIV), and later, "I thought you would call me 'Father' and not turn away from following me" (Jeremiah 3:19, NIV). On its face that is a belief about the future that turned out false. John Piper has argued that the Hebrew can be read "I said" rather than "I thought," which would soften the point, but most English versions print "I thought," and the objector is entitled to the plain reading.

Last, Nineveh. Jonah walked into the city proclaiming, "Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned" (Jonah 3:4, NIV). Forty days passed and Nineveh stood. A prophecy that does not come true looks like a prediction that failed.

Greg Boyd, the leading open theist, states the logic of the objection exactly. "If the future was settled one way and God thought it would go a different way, then we'd have to say God was mistaken." His own answer, below, is that the future was not settled. But the sentence shows what the classical believer must face: either God knew what would happen and spoke of regret and expectation anyway, which seems to make the words empty, or He did not know, which seems to make Him fallible. The question also has a wider form, put to Billy Graham by a reader who asked whether God sometimes makes a mistake and lets things happen that should not have happened. If the plan included the fall, the flood and every grief since, did God make a mistake in the plan itself?

Each of these texts is taken up, in context, across the series.

How Christians have answered: four views at their strongest

Four answers have serious defenders. Each protects something true, and each pays for it somewhere.

The classical answer: God's will never changes. Augustine faced Genesis 6 directly in The City of God. "The anger of God is not a disturbing emotion of His mind, but a judgment by which punishment is inflicted upon sin." God, he continues, "does not, like man, repent of anything He has done, because in all matters His decision is as inflexible as His prescience is certain." Thomas Aquinas made the logic precise. "The will of God is entirely unchangeable," he writes, and "to change the will is one thing; to will that certain things should be changed is another." A will changes only when the one who wills learns something new or becomes something new, which requires change "either in the knowledge or in the disposition of the substance of the willer." Neither is possible for God, whose knowing and being are one, as the doctrine of divine simplicity holds. Aquinas quotes Gregory the Great for the slogan: "The sentence of God changes, but not His counsel."

The strength of this answer is that every promise of God stands. Its strain is the grief. Aquinas says the words of Genesis 6 are "to be understood metaphorically, and according to the likeness of our nature," and the reader is left to ask whether God grieved at all.

The accommodation answer: an unstated condition. John Calvin read the prophetic threats as speech fitted to its hearers. Threatenings, he wrote, "contain in them a tacit condition dependent on the result," and "When Jonah prophesies that in forty days Nineveh will be overthrown, he does it in order to prevent the overthrow." Piper extends the same reading to Jeremiah 3, holding that God had implicit conditions in mind when He spoke of what He expected. This answer handles Nineveh well. It handles Saul and the generation of the flood less well, because grief over what has already happened carries no condition to supply.

Open theism: real expectations, real risk. Open theism takes the regret texts at face value. On its view, as the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes it, God "has created a world in which He takes the risk that many of us will reject Him and act in ways opposed to Him." God knows every possibility and every probability, but free choices not yet made are not yet there to be known, a position the article on whether God can know the future weighs in full. Boyd applies this to Jeremiah 3: "God was thus not mistaken in expecting that the Israelites would follow him even though it turned out they didn't." But, he adds, "it does mean that what the omniscient God thought was most likely to occur did not occur."

The texts keep their force, God's grief is real, and freedom is real. The cost is that an expectation that fails is, on any ordinary use of words, a misjudgment, however reasonable it was, and a God whose likeliest outcome can fail at any point offers promises that are well-founded forecasts.

Molinism and the Reformed decree: no risk at all. Molinism removes the risk from the other side. God knows not only what will happen but what any free creature would freely do in any circumstance, and He chooses which circumstances to create knowing exactly how things will go. Nothing in His plan is a gamble. The cost is the grounding objection: nothing seems able to make those conditionals true before any creature exists. The Reformed tradition reaches the same security by the decree, holding that God ordains all that comes to pass, as its account of the sovereignty of God sets out. Its critics press the authorship of sin, and its defenders answer with God's permissive will.

Every rival named here is weighed chapter by chapter in the books.

How Frame-Indexed Classical Theism answers: does God make mistakes?

Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) is a research program in analytic theology that resolves classical theological dilemmas by diagnosing them as artifacts of a single error: one term carried across two frames as though it meant the same thing in each. Its answer here is no, and the reason sits inside the word "mistake." Beings whose natures differ in kind know reality in different modes. God knows it in His own frame, the Absolute Metaphysical Frame, where His knowing and willing are one eternal act. We know it in ours, the Human Finite Frame, where everything arrives one thing after another. On this question it parts from open theism, which narrows what God knows, and from Molinism, which adds to it.

"Mistake" is a term that carries its frame with it. Every mistake needs a before and an after: a guess and a discovery. That structure belongs to a knower who meets reality in sequence. The series holds that in God's own frame there is "no 'before' or 'after,'" no potential that is not already actual. So the question "did God guess wrong?" has nothing to fasten on. There is no earlier divine moment in which He believed one thing, and no later one in which He found out another.

The grief, however, is real, and here FICT parts company with the metaphorical reading of Augustine and Aquinas, while agreeing with open theism on that one point. Volume Four argues that God's affections are not passions that rise and fall but are held whole in His one act, and that creatures meet that one fullness in sequence: wrath as it meets unrepentant sin, mercy as it meets repentance, and grief "as it meets the corruption of what He loves." What is removed from God, in the book's phrase, is "not warmth but weather." Genesis 6:6 is therefore a true report of God's grief at human wickedness, not of a design He wished He had drawn differently. The article on whether God has emotions develops the point.

Scripture marks the distinction itself. In 1 Samuel 15 the LORD is "grieved that I have made Saul king" (15:11), Samuel declares that "He who is the Glory of Israel does not lie or change his mind; for he is not a man, that he should change his mind" (15:29), and the narrator closes, "And the LORD was grieved that he had made Saul king over Israel" (15:35, NIV). The writer brackets the denial with the grief because both are true, one of God's act as it met Saul in time and one of God in Himself. The relenting texts are worked through there in full.

Jeremiah's "I thought" reads the same way. God's call to Israel was spoken as expectation because it was a real summons to a people who could have answered it, and God states the rule for all such speech in Jeremiah 18: His announced intentions toward a nation carry their condition with them. The expectation is the true form the summons took within Israel's history, not a forecast that failed inside God.

Open theism keeps the grief by letting God's expectations fail, which is a mistake under a gentler name. The purely metaphorical reading keeps God errorless by thinning the grief to a figure of speech. Molinism keeps the plan risk-free by adding a third kind of divine knowledge. Frame-Indexed Classical Theism keeps the grief and the perfection together with no addition, because once the frames are distinguished they already hold both. It also says what would defeat it: if "mistake" carried no temporal structure, the answer would have nothing to work on and would fail. The statement of FICT sets the position out, and whether God is omniscient has its own article.

Volume Four, Resolving Immutability & Interaction, works through the regret and relenting texts one by one.

Four simulated attacks: was God wrong after all?

We have run thousands of simulated attacks against Frame-Indexed Classical Theism, drawn from academic and peer-reviewed sources. Four of them bear directly on whether God makes mistakes, and each is answered below; they come from evangelical exegesis, the Reformed reading of the prophets, the Molinist debate over middle knowledge and the classical doctrine of the fall.

If God regretted making mankind, wasn't creating us a mistake?

Here's one of those attacks and how the Many Beings framework would address it.

The attack comes from a careful grammatical-historical reading of the text, asking whether the passage asserts what the classical answer needs. The usual reply to the relenting texts treats them as one decree holding a warning, a condition and an outcome. That fits Nineveh, where a threat was announced and then withdrawn, and Sinai, where Moses interceded. Genesis 6:6 and 1 Samuel 15:11 are different. No warning was issued, no condition was offered, and the judgment was carried out. The regret comes after the fact. So the conditional-decree reply never touches these texts, and the regret stands as the maker's verdict on his own work.

The answer is that the relenting texts fall into two classes. The first, Nineveh and Sinai, is the conditional warning. The second is backward-looking grief, and it is read through the account of God's affections given above, not through the account of conditional threats. God's grief is real and held whole, and the generation of the flood met it in sequence, as grief at the corruption of what He loved. It is grief over what creatures did with what He made, not a judgment that the making was wrong. The next verse shows the purpose continuing through the judgment: "But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD" (Genesis 6:8, NIV). The full treatment of these texts lives in the article on whether God changes His mind.

Was God wrong about Nineveh?

Here's one of those attacks and how the Many Beings framework would address it.

The attack comes from a Reformed confessional reader of the prophets. Jonah announced destruction in forty days and stated no condition. Destruction did not come. Either the prophecy failed or the interpreter is reading a condition into a text that has none.

The answer is that the condition is not read in. God states the rule Himself: "If at any time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed, and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned" (Jeremiah 18:7-8, NIV). The Reformed tradition calls such a warning a comminatio, a threat under an unstated condition. Volume Four adds that the verb Jonah used, nehpaket, can mean overturned or turned around, and in the second sense it came true. The warning was not a failed prediction. It was the instrument that worked.

Without knowing the future in advance, isn't God's success just luck?

Here's one of those attacks and how the Many Beings framework would address it.

The philosopher Robert Merrihew Adams pressed this in "Middle Knowledge and the Problem of Evil" (American Philosophical Quarterly, 1977). If God permits a free creature to act before it is settled how that creature will choose, then any good that results is, in Adams's words, "due to God's good luck rather than His wisdom." He drew the conclusion bluntly: "Without middle knowledge God must take real risks if He makes free creatures." Nor does a timeless God escape, Adams argued, because the priority he means is "in the order of explanation," not in time. A theology that rejects middle knowledge must then choose between a God who gambles and a God who determines every choice.

The answer is that the demand carries a creature's way of deciding into God. A reason that must come before a decision, a decision that is lucky if it lacks one, and an outcome that may disappoint: that is the structure of finite deliberation, in which an agent weighs options it cannot yet see the end of. The series holds that God's knowing and willing are one act, with no "before" in which He consults a conditional and no "after" in which He learns how it went. That one act knows the whole actual history and orders it to good. Luck is a creature's word for an outcome it did not control. Volume One argues that no middle knowledge is needed for this, and that God's knowledge of a free act does not make the act necessary.

Was creation flawed from the start?

Here's one of those attacks and how the Many Beings framework would address it.

The attack takes its standard from the theologian Hans Madueme, who has defended the classical doctrines of original goodness and the fall against evolutionary revisions of them. That standard supplies a sharp test. The classical account of natural evil says that earthquakes, weather, mutation and competition between creatures are needed for a stable, working world. But if they are needed, they were there in Eden, and so death and pain were built into the very good creation. Then either the design included suffering, which makes it flawed, or the fall explains nothing about natural evil.

The answer separates the processes from their outcome. Volume Two states it in one line: "The processes named above belong to the good created order; what sin introduced is death and suffering as their outcome." The necessity attaches to the processes, which God made and called good: "God saw all that he had made, and it was very good" (Genesis 1:31, NIV). The fall attaches to what those processes now produce. "Cursed is the ground because of you" (Genesis 3:17, NIV), and the creation "was subjected to frustration" in hope that it "will be liberated from its bondage to decay" (Romans 8:20-21, NIV). Nothing is said to be both built in by God and introduced by sin, so creation was not a design error. The article on whether God created evil carries the privation account further, and the post on why God allows suffering takes up permission.

Volume Two, Resolving the Problem of Evil, meets the objections from natural evil in full.

Frequently asked questions

Can God make mistakes?

No. Making a mistake requires believing or intending something at one moment and finding it wrong at a later one, and God's knowing and willing are one eternal act with no earlier moment to correct. This is not a gap in His power. As Augustine taught, what God cannot do, such as lie or be deceived, belongs to His power rather than limiting it, a point the article on the omnipotence of God develops.

Does God regret creating man?

Genesis 6:6 says the LORD "was grieved that he had made man on the earth." The grief is real, but it is grief over what humanity had become, not a verdict that creating humanity was a mistake. The same chapter goes on with Noah, and Genesis 9 with a covenant for every living creature, so God's purpose continues through the judgment rather than being abandoned.

Did Jesus make mistakes?

Scripture says Jesus "grew in wisdom and stature" (Luke 2:52, NIV), that of the last day no one knows, "not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father" (Mark 13:32, NIV), and that He "has been tempted in every way, just as we are," yet "was without sin" (Hebrews 4:15, NIV). Not knowing something is a limit, not an error. The limits were real and belonged to the human nature He took up, as the discussion of kenoticism explains.

What does "God doesn't make mistakes" mean?

The phrase is often said about a person's body, history or circumstances, echoing Psalm 139:14: "I am fearfully and wonderfully made." It is true in the sense that God's making never misfires. It does not mean every condition of a life is as God first intended, because the fall introduced death and suffering into a good creation. The post on why God chose to create explores what God intends in making anything at all.

If God makes no mistakes, why do bad things happen?

Because God permits evil that He does not author and orders it toward good. Joseph told his brothers, "You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives" (Genesis 50:20, NIV), and Paul wrote that "in all things God works for the good of those who love him" (Romans 8:28, NIV).

Where to go from here

The question is whether God has a "before" in which He could guess and an "after" in which He could find out. Once that is seen, the regret texts stop looking like confessions and start reading as what they are: true reports of a perfect God's grief as it met real sin in real time. So does God make mistakes? He grieves, He warns, He relents, and He never errs.

Volume One lays the groundwork for all of this, and you can read it free. The series carries the same method into evil, time and God's changelessness.