It used to be universally accepted that precognition was possible, and indeed surveys of modern people in developed countries have shown that even now a large proportion of the population believe in precognitive dreams - dreams that foretell the future.
Given that most people have always believed that this this happens; the question of how it is possible has been a subject for speculation. It is a matter of particular concern to Christians - since our religion assumes that we have 'free will' or individual agency: because we must choose to believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, if we are to receive the gifts he promises. And if there is real choice, then how can the future be known in advance?
The way that I personally explain this, and which seems perfectly clear and comprehensible to me! - is yet apparently so unusual that I have never found it articulated by anyone else; so I plank it down here, for what it's worth.
Everything has meaning and purpose - nothing is random, and nothing is merely passively, 'mechanically' determined.
(Not every 'unit' of occurrence has individual meaning/ purpose; not every distinguishable thing nor every distinguishable time-slice; but every-thing and time-slice is part-of divine meanings and purposes.)
Therefore, God is 'behind' everything that happens - and at the same time, how we personally respond, think-about and act after these happenings, can be our-own, comes-from our-selves.
So the totality of happenings is a combination of God's will and the multitude of interacting wills of people (and other entities with will).
How then does God pursue his plans? Well, the situation is always 'in flux' but God is continually acting-upon that flux. God is shaping the flux in his desired direction... this is sometimes termed Divine Providence.
I envisage it as God working behind the scenes to set-up the scenes; but how each scene plays-out is not under God's control. Yet he can and will continue setting-up scenes in hope that they will, sooner or later, play-out as desired.
Mortal life is (in brief) about experiences and learning from them; so God is always working to provide each person with the experiences that they need - but whether or not we learn from them what God wishes us to learn is not under God's control. Therefore, he will often repeatedly set-up experiences in order to give us the type of experience we most need, and these experiences will be repeated until we have learned.
For example, we may need to learn that pride is a sin, and will repeatedly get experiences from-which we ought-to infer that pride is a sin - but it may take many such experiences before 'the penny drops' - and indeed, we may never learn that pride is a sin; no matter how frequent and harsh the lessons we are given.
So precognition is possible because God is trying to accomplish certain things, and provide us with the kind of experiences - indeed specific experiences - that are potentially useful experiences.
But the well-validated, convincing precognitive experiences (including prophecies) are (almost always) only partial, often distorted, and are not given exact timings... Actual precognition does not give a complete, exact and exactly-timed prediction.
This is because God is working via human free will. God can make an exact thing happen - but not at an exact time if it is subject to free will; or, God can make 'something' happen at an exact time in the future, but what exactly happens is is not predictable insofar as it is subject to free will.
So precognitions are either: exactly-X will happen - sooner or later; or 'something' will happen on the exact time/date of X; or some combination of the two.
This also explains why - although everything is, in-principle, meaningful and purposive, we only very seldom understand actual things.
The world operates to provide experiences and opportunities for learning, for everybody alive (and indeed all living things - which is every-thing). But we do not know the experiences that every-body else and every-thing else needs; nor whether they have learned what they need - therefore, we do not understand most things, most of the time.
(We can, in principle, learn and know what we personally need; and therefore we can understand our own lives in terms of Divine Providence. We can ultimately understand and can know everything that is understandable and knowable - however, this will be a cumulative process, happening in time; and will be from our personal perspective, 'seen' from our 'point-of-view'.)
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From my perspective, precognition is no more inexplicable than memory.
Whether you accept that the present is all that there is, and that it undergoes ordered transformation to become the future and abolish the past, or believe that the past continues to exist in some manner after we cease to regard it as the present, and thus that the future may already exist in the same sense but in the opposite direction.
But humans often deal with the issue of volition as if it gave them unlimited potential to change a future that doesn't yet exist, but has no power over the past which is both real and fixed.
I can see no logical basis for such an asymmetry. First off, it is factually incorrect. Most of our volitional power in any moment must be focused on altering our relationship and view of the past in order for it to be effective in shaping our future. To dream only of the future without studying and learning from the past (and these are vastly different things) is to ensure that one cannot have any realistic conception of things as they will actually occur.
The future is not more amenable to being radically altered by our present volition than is the past, what we can do is choose our attitude towards it. And this is also what we can do with they past, what we must do with the past if we are to see the future that is rather than be deluded by false hopes or terrors.
Men often like to think as if, by cheering for one horse or another, they can determine the outcome of the race. But they cheer for a horse because they have bet on it. Betting changes their relationship to the outcome of the race, it doesn't change the outcome.
Rather than making long-odds bets and cheering for a horse that isn't going to win, the clever (I do not say wise) look at the past and offer attractive odds on the horse that will win. Of course, being clever rather than wise, they aren't always content to be strictly honest in their dealings. Nor do seeds thrown on fresh manure rather than rocks go to Heaven as a result. Any analogy breaks down if you try to push it too far.
The repentant gain power to learn from their past and thus wisely choose their relationship to the inevitable future. This wisdom makes their perceptions of the future precognitive rather than delusional. But it comes from letting go of their delusional misapprehensions about the past and remembering what really was rather than what seems most flattering to their desires to feed their vanity.
Cognitive science demonstrates amply this malleable aspect of memory, though it is generally couched in different terms there.
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