God's word or human reason?

So you're saying that God isn't omniscient and has limited control. Please back up that theory with some Scripture please.
So here you're saying that God needed to learn and gain experience being God. Again, please back this with Scripture.
For me it's as clear as mud. If this is essential to understand God and His Word then the answers should easily be derived from Scripture itself, right? I have yet to see them.

First, God gave us a free will. That means no one can predict our actions, not even God. He could not foresee Adam's decision, otherwise the whole test with the tree in Eden would not have made any sense.

But I do agree with this. Genuinely free choices cannot be detected before they are made, not even by omniscience.

Just as God could not know that Adam would disobey, neither could he know that Jesus would obey. Jesus also had the free choice that Adam did.

So, God takes risks.

btw--that doesn't mean God is less than omniscient either. Nor does it mean that God is unable ultimately to accomplish his will to the fullest.

Once you understand that, you'll see Scripture in a totally new way. All the apparent errors and contradictions of Scripture are suddenly resolved. There is no conflict anymore between Scripture and morality, history, and science.

Don’t any of the theistic evolutionists here have anything to say about the Relativity topic? Gluadys or Mallon? Both of you seemed to agree with the essay in my OP about how we need to listen to what science can teach us about God’s actions, even if that means having to interpret the Bible in a different way from how you would otherwise. But this principle applies to more than just creationism and evolution.

It’s really strange the way so many theistic evolutionists agree with this idea when it comes to evolution, but on the topic of predestination they’d still rather ignore what science has to say. I think I might find this mindset even more confusing than creationism. For creationists, their interpretation of the Bible is the highest authority that exists, so it’s not difficult to understand why they ignore any physical evidence that contradicts it. But if you agree that one should be willing to change one’s interpretation of the Bible based on physical data, why apply that principle to some areas but not others?

If God is omniscient, how do you think it’s possible for him to not know the future? You’re probably aware that according to both of Einstein’s Relativity theories, the distinction between space and time, or between past and present, isn’t something fixed like the distinction between North and South—it’s more like the distinction between left and right, changing depending on what reference frame one uses. There isn’t any event in the history of the universe that couldn’t be considered to be part of the past, present, or future, depending on one’s reference frame. And this isn’t just some kind of illusion; these distinctions themselves are relative, and the only reason this can’t be observed as readily as the relativity of left and right is because on Earth these effects are too minor to be measured without using precise equipment. Astronauts are the only people for whom it’s significant enough to be noticeable on ordinary clocks.

From the moment that the universe was created, there would have been reference frames from which Adam’s disobedience had already happened, or was happening currently. If God knew everything there was to know about what was happening in the universe at what people on Earth would have considered the present, it would not have been possible for this not to include the future also. If God created the universe, that means also creating the universe’s entire history, since space and time are just two different ways of looking at the same medium.

I think the Bible also implies that time isn’t any limitation to God’s knowledge.

It contains lots of prophecies that were made about events that would occur hundreds of years in the future, including some about what Jesus would do. If God’s omniscience didn’t extend to predicting things like Jesus’s obedience, how do you think he was able to prophecy it?

Because I believe in an open future---a future which has many possible future histories. Call them parallel worlds if you like.

The universe does not have a single future. What God can foresee is all possible futures. But in granting us free will, God has delegated to us the power to determine which future will be actualized.

So, yes, God always foresaw the universe in which Adam was choosing or had already chosen to disobey. But he also saw the potential universe in which Adam did not disobey. What God could not know, until Adam made his choice, is which of these potential universes would be actualized.

Compare this, if you like, to sub-atomic particles which some physicists have described as "waves of probability". We know many paths the particle can take. We even know which are the most and least probable. But until the wave collapses we don't know which it did take.

There are a couple things you should realize about this. The first is that even for quantum events whose outcome is inherently random, according to Relativity their outcome still always already exists from certain points of view. The collapse of a wave function with random results is just another event that occurs at a certain point in space and time, whose position “before” or “after” any other event depends on one’s frame of reference. Even though the outcome of these events can’t be predicted on the basis of any other events which caused them, that doesn’t affect the flexible nature of when they occur relative to other events.

There is a hypothesis about these events producing multiple possible universes, but it’s different from the idea you’re describing here. The idea is that rather than a wave function collapsing into one of its possible outcomes when it’s measured, the wave function never collapses at all—the person making the measurement simply becomes part of the wave function, existing simultaneously in multiple states, although in each of the possible universes this person would only be aware of the one outcome which exists in that universe. In other words, if this hypothesis is true there is no particular future that gets “actualized”. All possible futures would exist simultaneously, and we just happen to inhabit the one where things turned out the way they did.

I don’t think this is what you’re imagining when you say there are multiple possible universes resulting from “free will”, since it would mean that Adam both sinned and didn’t sin, and it’s just a matter of chance that we exist in the universe where he did. But this is the only way multiple possible universes can exist under General Relativity. Unless space-time itself splits into multiple universes, all of which exist simultaneously, the future cannot be considered any less determined than the past because there’s no objective distinction between the two.

In the 1970s, Benjamin Libet, a physiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, wired up the brains of volunteers to an electroencephalogram and told the volunteers to make random motions, like pressing a button or flicking a finger, while he noted the time on a clock.

Dr. Libet found that brain signals associated with these actions occurred half a second before the subject was conscious of deciding to make them.

The order of brain activities seemed to be perception of motion, and then decision, rather than the other way around.

In short, the conscious brain was only playing catch-up to what the unconscious brain was already doing. The decision to act was an illusion, the monkey making up a story about what the tiger had already done.

Dr. Libet’s results have been reproduced again and again over the years, along with other experiments that suggest that people can be easily fooled when it comes to assuming ownership of their actions. Patients with tics or certain diseases, like chorea, cannot say whether their movements are voluntary or involuntary, Dr. Hallett said.

In some experiments, subjects have been tricked into believing they are responding to stimuli they couldn’t have seen in time to respond to, or into taking credit or blame for things they couldn’t have done. Take, for example, the “voodoo experiment” by Dan Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard, and Emily Pronin of Princeton. In the experiment, two people are invited to play witch doctor.

One person, the subject, puts a curse on the other by sticking pins into a doll. The second person, however, is in on the experiment, and by prior arrangement with the doctors, acts either obnoxious, so that the pin-sticker dislikes him, or nice.

After a while, the ostensible victim complains of a headache. In cases in which he or she was unlikable, the subject tended to claim responsibility for causing the headache, an example of the “magical thinking” that makes baseball fans put on their rally caps.

The debate between Christopher Hall and John Sanders over openness theology ["Does God Know Your Next Move?" May 21] properly focuses on Scripture, but as a scientist, I am troubled that some of Sanders's statements are incompatible with modern science.

He says that God's knowledge of the future is not really limited because "the 'future' does not yet exist so there is nothing 'there' to be known. … God knows all that can be known, and to say that it is a limitation for God not to know 'nothing' is ridiculous."

The actual existence of past, present, and future is required by Einstein's theory of relativity. All space and time form a four-dimensional continuum that simply exists; the theory does not permit time to be treated as a dimension in which the future is open or incomplete. The theory of relativity has measurable consequences and has been validated by rigorous experimental tests. It is only with great trepidation that one should abandon it.

From a Christian point of view, it is reasonable to conclude that the temporal and the spatial extent of our universe were created together, and thus the entire four-dimensional structure resides before its Creator in an eternal present. Thus our modern scientific understanding of the nature of time fits quite well with the Christian tradition that God has knowledge of all time, past, present, and future: "Before Abraham was, I am."

Can you please address what I’m saying about why even apart from what our actions are caused by, Relativity doesn’t allow the universe to be “open to ongoing creativity”?