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I never accused anyone of such. I merely stated my own opinion: we should be concerned only with what God says about himself in his Word.
Ok, but what would inspire you to bring this up in the first place? I wouldn't think you're going around saying this in all subfora in such an unsolicited way.
It helps me to realize that by definition the epistemic always depends on the ontological, whether we're talking about "regular" knowledge or foreknowledge. This means no matter if God "foreknows" (or "perceives" from eternity), his knowledge is dependent on our actions that are being "foreknown". Another way: because nothing ever is caused to be by knowing, so nothing is ever caused to be by foreknowing.
You are right in that your example doesn't deal with free will. It deals with "robots" well.Doesn't all of this presuppose that God encounters time as we do?
What if time is a created thing, and time as we know it has a beginning and an end?
What if God is present before the beginning, and after the end, and in the present?
I see no necessity that knowledge of an event causes it to happen.
It is a poor example (I cannot think of a better one) but I can see an ice cube on a hot day and know with 99.9999999999999% certainty that it will melt (barring some strange cosmic event - and being God He would know about those, so He could have 100% knowledge). But I didn't CAUSE it to melt.
There is no free will in my example, but the principle is the same. And if God knows because "He is already there" then His knowledge is necessarily perfect.
Molinism is a soteriolgical system that attempts to reconcile free will with God's sovereignty.
It is named after the Spanish Jesuit, Luis de Molina, who sought to reform the Catholic Church, and agreed with the Church on some things and with the Reformers on other things.
Many of its modern day proponents are Protestants such as William Lane Craig.
Doesn't all of this presuppose that God encounters time as we do?
I see no necessity that knowledge of an event causes it to happen.
You are right in that your example doesn't deal with free will. It deals with "robots" well.
Any view outside of Open Theism that I know of, puts God in total responsibility for every single evil thing that ever happens. Why? Because He already saw it would happen this way (He is outside of time, as you say) yet continued to create free-agents anyway. Open Theism solves this because there was a chance that there would be no evil or suffering. God took a risk in this view, and we/evil-agents acted against His desire. In theory it sounds nice to say "the reward is worth more than the evil" and so God chose to go ahead with the evil, but in practice, with young people tortured etc. I don't think it holds much weight. I thinks it's more correct to lay the responsibility for evil on the Devil and our own bad choices, than on God. But who knows, as I spend time pondering these things my views often ebb and flowAll these things are quite difficult to comprehend, really.
Which He doesn't, of course: God is outside time. That means that it's easy to write English sentences about God that are simply nonsense, because they implicitly assume that God is subject to time.
Well, there are two relevant implications of God's knowledge:
(1) Irrespective of causes, knowledge of an event that to us is in the future means that the event has to happen that way; no alternative is possible. Since God knows the future perfectly, that means that the future must be fixed. It's like we are characters in a book: we don't know what the next chapter holds, but God does.
(2) God created this Universe (out of all possible Universes) knowing how it would turn out. In a sense, that means that God, by creating the Universe, caused all events that have taken place or will take place.
I still place the responsibility for evil on those who chose to do it. To me, that really makes logical sense, to make any free agent responsible for their own choices. That ought to be the price of freedom.
... what if we imagine a long, healthy, and happy life lived by a person at the cost of an injection that saved their life in infancy. That shot might have hurt the baby, made him cry, might have been a terrible painful injection even. But ask him when he's 85 and having had a wonderful life if it was worth it? It's possible that in the end, we might regard this age of suffering and evil as being of no more import than that painful injection, by comparison.
Of course, you might not comfort suffering youngsters with such a thought.
It has served me better to consider everything from a more eternal perspective, as much as I can conceptualize it, and then nothing needs explaining away.
Agree.I think that one comforts them by telling them to trust Father. Father loves you.
You don'tForgive me if I sound dismissive, or condescending, or offensive in any way.
Agree.
You don't
Can I ask, which of these points you disagree with?
1. God knows His own future
2. God is free to do as He pleases
The two are incompatible, they contradict one another, don't they?
I think I see your point, Radagast, but again, in the case of number 1, it seems to confuse God being subject to time.
Can I ask, which of these points you disagree with?
1. God knows His own future
Ugh ... I've been up for 24 hours (and a bit under the weather) ... I missed that very simple point when replying.We have a past and a future. God is outside of time; He does not.
Goes to illustrate my point that it's so easy to write nonsense. I was careful to write "an event that to us is in the future," but then later on I should have said "our future," not "the future."
As you say, God is not subject to time.
That's where the book analogy works, imo. To the character in chapter 7 (or to the reader reading chapter 7), chapter 8 is "the future." To the Author who wrote the book, the book is one completed whole. The author is outside the timeline of the book.
(In the case of God, however, there is one exception: God becomes a character in his own book. God the Son is not subject to time, but through the mystery of the Incarnation, Jesus was.)
Some of these issues get explored in film in interesting ways. I liked the ending of Terminator 3, for example, where the future is known because people and robots come back from the future to describe it.
The film ends: "By the time Skynet became self-aware it had spread into millions of computer servers across the planet. Ordinary computers in office buildings, dorm rooms; everywhere. It was software; in cyberspace. There was no system core; it could not be shutdown. The attack began at 6:18 PM, just as he said it would. Judgment Day, the day the human race was almost destroyed by the weapons they'd built to protect themselves. I should have realized it was never our destiny to stop Judgment Day, it was merely to survive it, together. The Terminator knew; he tried to tell us, but I didn't want to hear it. Maybe the future has been written. I don't know; all I know is what the Terminator taught me; never stop fighting. And I never will. The battle has just begun."
That is, the future may be written, but there is still a moral imperative to choose well in the here-and-now.
Ugh ... I've been up for 24 hours (and a bit under the weather)
Been trying to do that.Ouch! Get well soon!
No. I am saying that our only concern should be what Scripture says about God, not what a philosophical system says God must be like.
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