That’s a meaningless question. God is eternal and unchanging, existing apart from time. God has no past or future, just being.
Precisely. Did you know I was going to post that? 
Meatros, thanks for that link. Very interesting.
So what do you all think: Is God capable of being surprised? I think not.
Probably not what you’re looking for, but I hoped that maybe it could add a little something to the debate. I don’t know if you’ve seen them or not, but there was a study or two recently which the media (NPR) said calls into question the absolute supremacy of free will. Basically, as I understand it, the researchers, by analyzing info from the participants brains, were able to determine whether the participants would choose A or B before the participants themselves were aware of having consciously made the choice.
Also, do believers in predestination believe that God’s omniscience extends into the future, and that’s why they are predestined?
There is another link to a similar, or possibly the same, study. I’m on an iPod using tapatalk, so the link will have to be in the next post bc I can only copy one thing at a time.
FTR, I recognize that the study is not saying that free will doesn’t exist, and the scientist’s predictions were not 100 percent accurate. Feel free to rip it to shreds, I just thought it might be pertinent.
There is the other link. Sorry, it appears to be for phones. Well, at any rate, I just googled study free will or something to find them.
Personally, I don’t think the studies say that free will doesn’t exist, just that part of our subconscious makes a decision before our conscious selves are aware of the decision having been made. I would think that if the scientists were able to detect what choice the participants had made before they were aware of it, maybe a religiously minded person could argue that an omniscient deity could do the same.
Again, feel free to ignore those studies completely, or to rip them to shreds or whatever you want. I just thought this could add something to the debate. If it doesn’t, and if this isn’t the type of debate where scientific studies would help or are the types of info needed, then carry on…
First your views are as valid as your priest, he has no extra pull with God then you do.
There are some interesting quotes of the Lord of scripture on this:
[QUOTE=Jeremiah 7:31]
They have built the high places of Topheth in the Valley of Ben Hinnom to burn their sons and daughters in the fire—something I did not command, nor did it enter my mind.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Jeremiah 19:5]
They have built the high places of Baal to burn their children in the fire as offerings to Baal—something I did not command or mention, nor did it enter my mind.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Jeremiah 32:35]
They built high places for Baal in the Valley of Ben Hinnom to sacrifice their sons and daughters to Molek, though I never commanded—nor did it enter my mind—that they should do such a detestable thing and so make Judah sin.
[/QUOTE]
God simply can not be with sin, as sin is without God. So these things, outside His will: 1: happen, and 2: are irrelevant to His plan.
God does not look at sin
So in this world we can stray, but that doesn’t matter at all, as God guides our steps all the way in the spiritual.
Interesting! I’d never heard of those Jeremiah excerpts. Thanks.
And neither does He.
My two cents worth: 7062 angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Heretic!
I don’t believe in God but I’m willing to accept the premise for the sake of debate.
But I can’t argue with the OP - I agree with his idea on omniscience. An omniscient God must, by definition, know everything that will ever happen and therefore cannot be surprised.
A temporally limited omniscience - knowledge of everything that is happening in the present - would be clairvoyance not omniscience. True omniscience has to also incorporate precognition.
I disagree. I see no contradiction between divine omniscience and individual free will.
The individual is still making all of his or her own choices. But an omniscient God knows what those choices will be.
As an example of this, suppose you own two cars, a Ford and a Toyota and you can drive either one to work. Now suppose I know that you chose to drive the Ford to work yesterday. Does that mean I made you drive the Ford yesterday? No, you made the choice and I am merely aware of your choice.
Now suppose I know that you will choose to drive the Toyota to work tomorrow. Does that mean I am making you drive the Toyota? No, you will make the choice and I am again merely aware of your choice. You could have chosen to drive the Ford tomorrow instead and in that eventuality I would have known that choice. But my foreknowledge of what your choice will be does not negate your free will in making it.
I find myself in the somewhat heretical school of thought - I’m of the view that, in the very act of creation, God managed to limit himself in how he CAN act within finite time and space - at least without causing more harm than help. Send a vision, yes. Smite Haiti with a hurricane, no. – But, if the priests didn’t claim he was all powerful, then who would keep them in a cushy job?.. Omnipotent? Let’s just say he could break the world and remake it, but he can’t change a lightbulb without mortal help.
What about omniscient? Does he know how it all will end? I think he gave us free will for a reason, and I think he sees the multitude of possibilities, and that sometimes he tries to give us tiny nudges in his preferred direction… But whether it takes us (the human race) 10 generations or 10,000 to get where we’re supposed to go is up to us.
But then, I also take John 14:2 to mean that most religions that preach basic 'do unto others…" are equivalent in the eyes of God – many paths leading to the same destination…
Which tends to upset the fundies for some reason.
If you look at the actual study, this becomes less meaningful. Basically, they gave the subjects two tasks, selecting a letter flitting across the screen at half-second intervals and selecting which of two buttons to use to make the choice. It was the latter which could be predicted at about seven seconds in advance. Not a very interesting result, IMHO.
Supposing God exists, that omniscience is coherent, I don’t really know. That sounds like a cop-out, I know.
I think it depends on one’s view of time.
If you suppose presentism and you also suppose that God can enter into time in a limited fashion (say as Jesus) then on the surface it would seem that God could be surprised.
I’m not sure if that would hold up to a critical scrutiny, but it’s my first impression.
Another interesting theological bent is called ‘open theism’. I’m not sure this fits the description of the OP either, but it seems relevant, from the link:
If God is unknowable,an invisible being, then no one can, did, or does, know anything about Him. They can just belive. Too much said, told etc. about God is just an opinion and many opinions clash!
That is why there are so many religions and sects of various religions. If the priest was correct it would explain why God punishes innocent people,when He is angry at others. Too much contradiction between believers; it seems he started a mess but can’t correct it!
That’s not quite heretical, although not quite within the mainstream, either. Most theologians believe God generally does not constantly smite people with blatant signs. However, they do mostly accept that He keeps the entire universe in existence, and without his active consideration, all of existence would simply unravel. And for that matter, that he can and does do miracles when neccessary (or maybe when he feels like it).
This is also not heretical, though most believe He does send signs, lessons, and so on as well as the odd miracle. Catholic and Episcopalian theologians certainly would agree that choosing to love God is vitally important.
I for one, do not believe in the Problem of Evil. That is, it was obvious (to me, anyway) that when you ask why evil exists in the world and why God doesn’t do something about it, the answer is quite clear: we’re the problem with the world, and in all honesty all the natural troubles are a tiny pinprick compared to the mess we make ourselves. And the natural evils would be vastly more tolerable if we didn’t make those messes. When we ask God to clean things up and sweep out the bad - we should be cautious, because he’d be sweeping us out with it! Likewuise, Free Will does not, to me, conflict with God’s omniscience. God does know how things turn out, but it’s specifically what we have chosen that he knows. Of course he’s free to fiddle with things along the way.
Maybe not heretical, but I’m not even sure it makes much sense. The notion of God limiting himself leads to paradoxes — can God erect a barrier against his own action such that He could not overcome it? I suspect that conceiving of God as an actor is, while analogically useful, an ultimately misleading way to look at His relationship with the created order. (Disclaimer: I’m not Catholic or even Christian, but I find the philosophy of religion terribly interesting and consider myself something of a quasi-Scholastic.)
This is my understanding of the orthodox point of view. The Catholic Encyclopedia:
I think of this as something like a compatibilist position: sure, God knows everything; no, we can’t explain exactly how human freedom works; but it doesn’t really change anything one way or the other. We still choose. (And if libertarianism were true, the relevant component of our choices would be essentially random — which I think undermines even the possibility of choice.)
If you’re the slightest bit philosophically inclined, I’d very much recommend checking out Fr Brian Davies’ The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil. Very readable treatment of what evil really even means (and it serves as a nice introduction to the practice of negative theology).
You know, I think someone told me about this book, and I completely forgot. I will try to grab a copy. Thanks!
OK…
This doesn’t seem to follow. I can create a program, for example, that depends on random variables and I can have it create a log of its state at every iteration. So, I’ll know its past and present, but not its future. And, if I don’t have it log its state, I won’t even know its past. In other words, it doesn’t follow, in my opinion, that just because a being created the universe, that it has to know everything about it.
Similarly, I can plant a tree and walk away, never to return, and I wouldn’t know the first thing about whether it survived, grew large, branched, reproduced, etc.
Anyway, back to the OP, it’s possible, I suppose, to define omniscience as knowing all things that are knowable. Assuming quantum uncertainty is correct, the future is unknowable, so God wouldn’t know it, even if He/She knows everything that has happened and has full knowledge of the current state of the universe (within uncertainty limits).
So, He would know that a light particle is heading towards a double slit, but won’t know which slit it will go through until it goes through one.
I’m setting aside, of course, problems with relativity – could an omniscient being know what happened in a star light years away from it? If the being is somehow everywhere, can parts of it communicate with other parts at faster-than-light speeds?