If you don’t believe in God, don’t bother to post here. Thank you.
An Episcopal priest I know has a new book out. One of the issues he tackles is God’s omniscience. We talked about it at some length this morning during his presentation at our church’s Sunday adult forum. The priest believes that God knows everything that ever happened in the past, and everything that is happening right now, but doesn’t know what the future holds other than probabilities. God, he said, is capable of being surprised. That’s not my understanding. I always thought God’s omniscience ran from the very beginning of time to the very end of it; whether or not He chooses to act on that knowledge is of course up to Him. And to make prophecies come true and thus fulfill them - most notably the martyrdom of Jesus - I would expect God to take a direct hand in how events unfold.
What do you think? If God is omniscient, is He such only up to the present moment?
I think the priest also believes in libertarian free will (and knows how this relates to defending against the Problem of Evil) - in which case, his conception of God won’t be able to predict with 100% certainty the choices of humans in advance.
This is an interesting question. To what degree is omniscience at odds with free will. I’d tend to agree with your priest, but guess that it’s possible for God to know what we will do, but not ourselves. Like I said, interesting. As far as the prophecies, is it possible that their are different roads that can be taken but that they will all lead to certain intersections? For instance, you and I may start in New York, meet next year in Milwaukee, the year after that in Dallas, then Miami, Tulsa, Seattle, Sacramento, Bangor and Denver, but not travel on any of the same routes.
That assumes that God exists within time: that the past, present, and future are past and present and future to God. I disagree. To me, it makes no more sense for God to be at a particular point in time than for God to be at a particular point in space.
The position you hold has been the Classical Theism position. The priest’s position seems to be Open Theism. Big debate right now- especially in Arminian (free will) circles. Evangelical theologian Greg Boyd is one of the main “popular theological writers” who have championed it.
One way of trying to reconcile the two views is to hold that God knows every possible contingency & where they will lead, like seeing an entire tree & knowing how the branches may bend but not absolutely knowing which way they WILL bend. Also, even Open Theism says that God knows what He will do, hence making Prophecy possible.
I believe that God is eternal, outside of time. All times are alike to him. He doesn’t predict the future; he sees yesterday, today, and tomorrow, all equally, all as the eternal now. Nor do I see any conflict between this notion and that of free will: We choose, and God knows what we choose.
It is an interesting take. It would allow God not to be a right bastard if he does not know the future. Otherwise he comes off a jerk much more then compassionate. An All-knowing and knowing the future God is pretty tough to accept, one that does not know the future and has had some spectacular failures when he tried to interfere directly makes a lot more sense to me at least.
I figure the OP is just trying to cut the “there is no god so your question is stupid” posters off at the pass.
I’ve always assumed that “omniscience” includes knowledge of future events as well as past and present. I’m actually quite surprised to hear a priest make that argument.
If God knows all, then from his vantage point, we don’t have Free Will and he has no business punishing us for how we turn out, because he has the power to change anything and everything.
But for us to have Free Will, God has to have a much more “multiversal” vision, seeing every possible solution and outcome, and allowing us to chose our paths, and thus the path of the World as a whole, with minimal intervention.
Then the answer to “Why does God allow X” (suffering, evil, etc) becomes “because if he doesn’t, then there is no free will, and we are only dolls for him to play with”
But then again, one has only to look at the Universe as a whole to see, as I have said, that it is both incredibly hospitable to life, and incredibly hospitable to death. It is not “fair”. Everything that lives feeds off other things that live. Incredibly nasty things happen to everything that exists. But as I also say, the beauty of being Human is that we DO have the power to create Justice, create Fairness in our world. This is the real gift of intelligence.
Wouldn’t knowledge of the future also be a necessary part of “omnipotent?” If God doesn’t have the power to see the future in perfect and accurate clarity, he’s fallen a bit shy of being “all powerful,” hasn’t he?
Exactly… If God knows his own future, then does he have free will?
A more ordinary problem with knowing everything is…knowing that you know everything, and then knowing that you know that you know everything, etc. It’s like memorizing the entire encyclopedia…but then memorizing all the information in all the brain cells where the memories of the encyclopedia are stored…then memorizing all the information in all those brain cells… Recursive to infinity… You’d spend infinitely more memory on duplicate images of the primary knowledge than on the knowledge itself…
Obviously, a religion can get around this by decreeing “it’s a miracle, and you can’t understand it.” But at that point, don’t discussion threads like this became hopeless impasses? Okay, it’s a miracle, and I can’t understand it…
How so? By comparison, I know the entirety of Lord of the Rings, beginning to end, and no matter how many times I read it, the events therein will unfold in the same way. Does that mean that Tolkien didn’t have free will in the writing of it?
Not at all.* If you knew exactly how LotR was going to turn out before he wrote it, then it would indicate that Tolkien had no free will in the writing. However, you are reading it after the act of writing was completed, in a frame of reference that only allows unidirectional time transfer.
If your reading took place in a reference frame that allowed it to take place before or at the same time as the writing, then that would be another matter.
*Of course, the whole idea of free will is bullshit to begin with, so Tolkien didn’t have any anyway.
I think you and I have talked about a similar subject in the past: time as in the block universe (aka the B theory of time). This view fits this description perfectly, but it means that God couldn’t have created the universe.
Actually, I should say that I don’t see how this view is consistent with creating the universe.
Maybe I’m misinterpreting what you are saying though, can you clarify your view of time, creation, and God.
I dunno. Let’s look at the actions of Humans on this Earth and this World. On a macro scale of the Universe as a whole, we’re only so much Quantum Foam. Our actions don’t change the paths or Stars or Galaxies. They only change the trajectory of this Illusion we create and call “The World” on one hand, and impact the rest of life on this planet on the other. Given the Omnipotence and Omniscience of a Creator, I don’t see how we can say for certain that this being could not allow us our free will AND observe the entire Universe as a whole, from beginning to end.
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