Yes! We agree there is a problem with traditional views. I like the Open Theist position because it solves many problems, not just the free will + foreknowledge problem. Most importantly I believe it presents a reasonable solution to The Problem of Evil (in my opinion, God literally did not know that evil would occur before it occurred--He saw the potential for it but the creation of free agents was worth this risk--until I read a better response to the Problem of Evil I will find it difficult to receive a different systematic theology--but I hope to be always open to being convinced otherwise).
I believe He can override human free will at specific times under specific conditions.
I believe He is omniscient with respect to the natural world and so can make predictions.
I believe some contingent possibilities remain true in all possible future scenarios.
I believe there is conditional foreknowledge -- e.g. Jonah.
I do not believe God knows every future decision of man -- if you disagree with this, can you present your reasons why?
On the one side you are saying we cannot do otherwise than what God knows we will do. On the other side you are saying True free will means we could have done something other than we did. Are these not contradictory statements?
Will you make the same decision every time when faced with the same circumstances? Here you seem to argue, no. But if you are arguing no, then God doesn't know our future actions based on His knowledge of our spirit. If you are arguing yes, then I do not see this as true free will.
Okay, so it seems you are saying that our future choices can not be foreknown -- even by God. We would agree. But if I have taken this line out of context, and you are saying our future choices can be known by God, same as before, are we truly free to do otherwise?
Good point, I haven't thought about God searching our hearts in this way -- that He searched our hearts because He didn't know what was there.
An inspiring, positive outlook that works biblically. More comforting that other views I've come across. Would you say with God's foreknowledge that He intended suffering and evil in this world?
There are a few basic ways that theologians connect free will and predestination.
There is the God is outside time theory. The problem with this theory is that from a human perspective then we have no real free will. Something or someone external made all our choices for us. For theologians this would be God.
There is the God decrees all events theory. The problem with that is there is no free will at all. God is the author of all evil. Many spend eternity in hell all because God chose that they should go there. They had nothing to do in determining their eternal destination.
There is the Open Theism theory, that God's knowledge is limited. God does not know future decisions of man. This becomes challenging to believe in when there are so many verses about God's foreknowledge, His predestination and God's perfection. He can never be wrong.
There is the middle knowledge theory. But this makes it even harder to see how God knows all things. God knows what men will do and He also knows what men would do in every given circumstance.
All these theories have one thing in common. God can only know what will happen if He decrees it to happen.
Another theory is that we don't know how but God must have been able to foresee our faith before the foundation of the earth. Under my theory God literally foresees our faith.
I have not given my theory a good name yet. I don't like the dream world. It sounds like it is a dream, not real. I think I will call it heart knowledge theory.
Psalm 139 says "God searches me and then He knows me. There are many places where it says that God looks at the heart, which has the same meaning as in Psalm 139. John 2:25 and 6:64 are good examples of this. This is all easily understood when it is referring to living adults that God searches the heart of. But these verses are not really looked at when talking about foreknowledge and predestination. This is because we think that at that time, before the foundation of the earth, we did not exist and so God could not do that. What I am saying is that maybe we did. Maybe we existed.
We know that angels are created beings. The angels or the morning stars sang when the world was created (Job 38:7). Yet nowhere in the Bible does it actually record the creation of the angels. However we can deduce that they were created before the earth's creation because they are not eternal like God is, so they had to have a beginning. Using this same reasoning, it may be possible that the thinking part of us was created before the foundation of the earth.
Acts 17:26 says that God has determined the preappointed times and boundaries of the dwellings of all men. Verse 27 begins with "so that they should seek the Lord." God knew men enough that He could decide the best place He could put them so that they would seek God. Verse 27 continues, "in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him." The sovereign God has to hope that man might grope for Him and find Him. God made man with a free will. God wanted man to seek Him and find Him but He did not make it so that it will be certain. So putting this altogether from this passage. God made man in some way before creation so that He would get to know men, how they would think. He used this knowledge to determine in what year and place and to which parents the person would be born to that would make it the best situation for the person to seek God.
So I seem to be the only one in the entire church history that seems to think if we would have existed in some way before the foundation of the earth, God can look at our hearts and have complete foreknowledge and be able to fairly predestinate man to their eternal destination. This is one way where you can have true free will and God has complete foreknowledge. Under no other theory does God have complete foreknowledge and man has true free will.
In Deuteronomy 18, a test of being a prophet is if he says something will happen and it does not come to pass, then he is a false prophet and he should be killed. God never makes a mistake regarding prophecy. If He did then according to the prophecy test that God imposed, God Himself would have to be killed.
Isaiah 44:6-8 and 46:8-11 are 2 of many passages where God talks about His vast foreknowledge. In 46:10 He says He declares the end from the beginning. Then there is Jeremiah 1:5 where God tells Jeremiah that He knew him before he was conceived.
According to Romans 8:29 God foreknew who would believe and predestinated to salvation those He knew who would believe. In Revelation 13:8 and 17:8 God has a book of life written before the foundation of the world. In John 2:25 Jesus knew all men, what they would do. In John 6:64 Jesus knew from the beginning who would believe him and who would not. He knew who would betray Him. David in Psalm 41:9 foretold that Jesus would be betrayed more than 2000 years before the event.
I could quote many more verses that support God's vast complete foreknowledge. God demands 100% accuracy. This is a major challenge for Open Theism.
There are many challenges with God decreeing everything that man will do. God would have to be the source of all evil. God would be a cruel tyrant for sending millions to hell when there was no way those people could have done anything to avoid this.
I do believe that God can do miracles of nature but He has chosen to do them not too often. It is the same for miracles of free will. God can at times cause or decree a person to do what God wants them to do, although He never causes anyone to believe or not believe in Him. God convicts and draws people to repent, but it is up to man to make a personal decision to believe in God and be saved. God caused Abimelech not to touch Abraham's wife in Genesis 20:6. God caused Joseph's brothers to sell him in slavery so God could use it for good and to bring Israel to Egypt. God hardened Pharaoh's heart so that Pharaoh would not let the people go until after the plague of the death of the firstborn or the Passover. That was God's purpose in the hardening of his heart, it was not to make Pharaoh not able to believe in God. God already knew that he never would believe in God. God caused David to call a census so that God can punish Israel, not David (2 Samuel 24:1). God used foreign nations (who already hated Israel) as a tool to war against Israel to punish Israel. Later God would punish the tool as well for they already hated Israel. God caused the people to crucify Jesus when the time had fully come, people who long before already wanted to kill Jesus but could not because the time was not yet right.
In this way God can control what happens when God wants to. But He does not control everything all the time.
I do not believe God knows every future decision of man -- if you disagree with this, can you present your reasons why?
It is possible that God may not know when I will scratch my back or even what I will eat and when. God may not care to know and so He did not create with the intent to know this beforehand. On the other hand maybe God would want to know this, and where there is a will there is a way, especially with God. God knows how much hair we have (Matthew 10:30) so God is interested in trivial things.
So I don't know if God knows ALL future decisions of man. However as far as knowing who would believe in God, that God would know before the foundation of the earth. In short, whatever God wants to know before He created the foundation of the earth, God will make a way for Him to know this beforehand.
There are two basic ways how God could make man before the foundation of the earth as far as I can imagine. He could basically have it just like it is today, except instead of everything being real it would be in a dream world. When in the dream world another person is born, then that person begins his dream at that time. When someone dies, their dream world ends. So dreams would last the length of each person's lifetime. The Bible would exist in the dream world but would not contain prophecies for God would still not know the future decisions of men. Then when Jesus comes to judge the earth, everybody's dreams would end. Then God creates the world. Then God could decree that man does exactly what they did in the dream world. Man would have free choice since in the dream world they did everything by free choice. God could know all future decisions of man for He saw all what man did in their dream world. I doubt that this is the way God did this though.
Another way God could get to know man before the foundation of the earth is to in some way interview people in the dream world. Man would first have a learning experience where they get to learn how the created world will be like. Using human time frame this could even be done instantly. God would just put this knowledge in their head rather than have them learn it the way man does today, the slow way.
Today when men make decisions of any kind, they reason in their head what they will do. Sometimes we do this without even consciously knowing that we are reasoning beforehand. Things may come to mind, like maybe I should call Mary or whoever. Then we have to reason if we should do so now or should we do it later. After sitting and working for some time, like on this forum, I may decide to do something else for a change. To make this decision I would have to reason within myself often, should I continue or do something else? Should I get something to drink or maybe later? God knows every thought that goes through your head at all times, your entire lifetime. So He should be able to know beforehand what you will do for He knows you so well. It does not take long and you become very predictable to God. God knows how you think, what causes you to do things and what causes you to change your mind about anything. The latter is important to determine if you will believe and stay or stray from the faith.
God made man. He knows how they function because He made man. He knows how man makes free choices, what determines what he will do. God can make man in such a way that God can know how man thinks and yet man has free choice to think how he wants to.
Romans 10:17 says faith comes by hearing and hearing comes by the word of God. "Have they not all heard?" Paul asks. Yes, indeed their sound has gone out to all the earth. In Romans 1:19,20 says that God made Himself known to all people. Why do some people believe and others not? Thousands of unbelievers can hear an evangelist preach but only some of them believe and others don't. What caused these unbelievers to even come in the first place to hear the evangelist? God only knows why some believe and why others that heard the same words do not believe. God hears every thought we ever make, so He knows how we think. God created man. God could make man in such a way that man has complete free will and God has complete foreknowledge of what man will do with this free will.
It is easy to see how God can know an adult that is living, how he thinks and everything that he would do in every given situation. A Bible believer also has to believe this because the Bible clearly says that God knows all men, He can see their hearts, He searches man and He then knows man. But man has to exist in some way to make free will choices. Even God cannot search the heart of someone that has never existed. For if God did, then that there could be no true free will.
This is why I am suggesting the theory of God making man before the foundation of the world. In the pre-world man would exist in some way but certainly not with a body yet. God would learn from man, how he thinks. Then God would make it that each man be unconscious and forgets their prehistory until they get born.
This is much better than the God decreeing idea for then man would have no free choice. God would be the author of all evil, a cruel tyrant sending millions to hell when they could do nothing to prevent this. God being outside time is no solution at all for from man's perspective, his whole life is determined before he is born. There are many passages about God looking at the heart, but these verses cannot be used to explain God's foreknowledge and predestination if we did not exist in some way before the foundation of the earth. So that is why my theory is a new way to explain how God's foreknowledge and man's true free will can both be true.