The title pretty much says it all. There is a subset of people who believe that their god is omniscient, omnipotent, omni-etc but also that where they will be spending their afterlife is based upon their beliefs and actions and is unknown until their demise.
These two statements seem to be mutually exclusive to me. An all-knowing god knows whether you’re going to spend eternity walking streets of gold or getting buggered by beelzebub and a horde of horny horned demons a thousand years before you were conceived. If he doesn’t know, then omniscience is out the window.
Please note that this thread is about beliefs and not the actual existence of deities. Comments about said existence are totally irrelevent and posters entering such are predestined to experience my eternal scorn.
I don’t understand the contradiction. Knowing something is going to happen is not the same as making, or willing, it to happen. An omnipotent being can choose not to act.
Omniscience implies infinite ability to know the knowable, but until you have made your choice, your action is not knowable. It’s just like omnipotence doesn’t imply the ability to make a beef burrito so hot you can’t eat it; it’s only up to easy stuff like creating a universe ex nihilo or causing a virgin to become pregnant or bringing a dead person back to life.
Take the deity out of it for a moment and you’d be fine with having a disbelief in predestination, right? You could then make your free-will choices in a godless universe, and wind up rich and fat or poor and thin or whatever – nothing to reconcile, or something to reconcile?
So now we send back, um, Marty McFly in his DeLorean, or something. Except this isn’t one of those fun movies where he changes the past; he goes back in time and simply watches the same events play out, with you making those same free-will choices right in front of him. Does that introduce something we need to reconcile, or not?
Yes it does; if the future is undetermined then just going back should be enough to drastically change it (butterfly effect), which means that he shouldn’t have made the choices that sent him back to watch in the first place, which means that the past wouldn’t be perturbed because he didn’t travel back in time, which means that the future where he travels back should occur after all, which means he should be there watching, which means the past will be changed by his presence, which means that the future where he goes back won’t occur, which…
Ask me about something that doesn’t exist. “Hey Heyhomie, tell me all about Outer Slombovian Chardonnay, vintage 1994.” I can’t tell you anything about that wine, because it doesn’t exist.
Ask an omnipotent God about the future. What’s he going to tell you? There’s nothing for him to tell you - the future doesn’t exist.
Saying God doesn’t know what I’m going to do in the next five minutes doesn’t detract from God’s omnipotence; the next five minutes don’t exist, so there’s no reason for God to know what’s going to happen in them.
Suppose that 2 of us are looking at a math problem. I know the answer. I know the answer that you will arrive at assuming that you solve it correctly. How does my knowledge of your future effect your getting there?
Which is the same as saying that you can’t say anything meaningful about God whatsoever. Including what you just said, since it is also a logical argument.