Sorry, but I don’t need to pick one. I maintain (along with much of traditional Christianity) that God is both transcendent and immanent.
You do if you care about logical consistency. If God must be X because he exists *outside *of space and time, then he cannot also be y, y being an attribute that exists *inside *space and time. At least not without degrading the meanings of *inside *and *outside *beyond useful meaning.
I’m not sure what you’re saying. As in the analogy used above, a director can make changes without being in the film. The director can even put himself in the film, while still being the director off-screen. It’s not a necessary contradiction.
This is kind of a tangent, but what we’re discussing is the understanding that Jesus, in taking on the nature of a human being, voluntarily gave up some of the attributes that made him God (for example his omnipresence). It’s called Kenosis:An apparent dilemma arises when Christian theology posits a God outside of time and space, who enters into time and space to become human (Incarnate). The doctrine of Kenosis attempts to explain what the Son of God chose to give up in terms of his divine attributes, in order to assume human nature. Since the incarnate Jesus is simultaneously truly human and truly divine, Kenosis holds that these changes were temporarily assumed by God in his incarnation, and that when Jesus ascended back into heaven following the resurrection, he fully reassumed all of his original attributes and divinity. Jesus’ imperfect foreknowledge was an attribute of the Incarnation.
I was using your analogy. You said that an author could make changes without being in the book. But she cannot make changes without physically altering the book, just like God cannot change anything in space and time without physically altering space and time. And anything that is physical is a part of space and time.
Any change to the film would neccesarily be physical. See above. The actor/director apparent dichotomy is just a red herring.
Imperfect foreknowledge is still foreknowledge. Prescience is prescience.
He knew Peter would deny him thrice, and was spot on with that one.
Gotcha. Yes, God can alter space and time. Jesus himself, in Christian theology, is God manifesting himself in space and time. But that does not make God limited to space and time.
Yes, it seems apparent from the Gospels that Jesus knew some things, but not everything, about the future. Are you saying that the fact that Jesus knew Peter would deny him, made it impossible for Peter to do otherwise?
Then what point is advanced by claiming that he does not exist in space and time, when he manifestly does?
Well, unless God can be wrong about something, yeah. Otherwise he didn’t really know it, did he? The point seems to hinge on how we define “know.” I suppose it is technically true that humans cannot really know anything to be true. It’s all predicated on one axiom or another, right? Do we really want to bind God with the same shackles? Where does this leave him with respect to omniscience? Trapped in a frame of reference?
Another tack:
I have decided of my own free will to make a pot roast tonight. Does knowing a priori that I am going to eat it change the free will aspect of while sitting at the table making the decision to eat it?
God as defined in the Abrahamic tradition lies outside of the physical universe that dictates the laws of cause and effect (which, for that matter, we don’t totally understand, anyway.) There’s no reason such a God knowing the future precludes free choice because they aren’t connected by any physical law.
The point that God has sometimes (well, according to the Bible; I’m an atheist) interfered with the physical world does not change His position outside it.
Frankly, I’ve never really understood this attack on God at all, and that’s something coming from a guy who doesn’t believe in God. God is GOD. He is not even limited to logic, much less physical law. The God that Christians have set themselves up with is totally beyond any limitation a human can comprehend.
You do not have knowledge that you will be making a pot roast later-you have decided to make post roast later. This allows you to determine something else later, if you wish. After the meal is over, you will then know whether or not you had pot roast.
You can decide what will happen in the future-you can only know it happens after the fact.
Is God the soul occupant of “outside space and time”? Is God all powerful “outside space and time”?
That is planning to do something. That is much different than knowing.
What if your house burns down while you make the pot roast? What if an old friend calls you and wants to have dinner tonight?
Point being that you don’t know if you are having pot roast, you just think you will.
EDIT: Or what Czarcasm said.
But if Saint Cad had the perspective coming from next week, he would know whether or not he was eating pot roast tonight, but he would still not be compelled to from his persepctive today.
Hmm, interesting questions. It seems to me that any being existing outside time would have to be eternal, without beginning or end. Since God is the only uncreated being, everything else must have a beginning at some point, when it is created by God. So I’m going to speculate that God is the only thing that exists outside space and time. But this is my uneducated, off-the-cuff answer; I’d have to do more study to see how this question has been answered in the past.
The second question, is God all-powerful outside space-time? I’m not sure what ‘all-powerful’ means in this context, but I think Yes. If God is the only being who exists from the persepective of outside the universe, I don’t think you can say that anything else is more powerful.
Study? What is there to study if there is no evidence of God and/or the location or attributes of “outside space/time”. You have speculation, and that is the most any other person on earth at this time has. At this point, you qualify as an expert on this subject as much as anyone else.
It does matter if they are connected or not. If *anyone *can **know **the future then free will is an illusion.
Why are some people assuming that seeing everything at the same time is some sort of advantage?
There is 2,000 years of theological study and tradition: I’m quite sure that more disciplined minds than mine have asked this question, and it would be foolish of me to ignore all of that. One wouldn’t presume to be an expert in philosophy without having read Plato.
Why?
At this stage in the discussion, I want to see why you think so, and why you think that assertions that foreknowledge and free will are not incompatible (such as Frylock’s in Post #67 or Augustine’s quoted in Post #54) are invalid.
Hence, my issue with Christianity and religion.
How do believers reconcile the belief that they know anything of significance about God (e.g. his likes/dislikes, his ability to love, his will), with the belief that he’s so unreal that he defies everything we understand about natural law and logic? Seems to me that once you accept that the only way a omniprescent and omniscient God exists is if he exists outside the universe as we know it, you might as well discard all pretense that he’s knowable (or even understandable) by are minuscule minds.
I could “create” a line or a period, both entities of fewer dimensions than myself, but would I love and cherish them and offer them gifts? Would I care if they were destroyed? Would I bother to even find out if it was possible to communicate with either one?
I’m not sure that insisting that God exists on a higher dimensional plane than ours works out to our advantage in the long run.
Not if God decides otherwise.
The Christian/Jewish/Muslim God can simply make it so that His knowledge of the future doesn’t conflict with your free will. You can’t trip up this being with a “rock so big He can’t move it” argument. God, as Christians understand it, isn’t subject to logical rules.
The theological question that you with the face raises is a far more interesting one, to my mind, than the old “if He knows the future I have no free will” argument. You’re arguing, from the perspective of a being locked into space and time, about the abilities of a being that by definition isn’t subject to any logical or scienitific objection you will ever be able to state.
No matter what objection related to predestination and free will you can raise, it’s trumped, absolutely and completely, by the fact that it’s God. God can make it so He knows your freely chosen future. Why? Because he’s God. It’s senseless to argue that a being outside of time and space is subject to the laws of time and space. God can also make it so two plus two equals nine, if He so chooses.
Do I believe any of this? Again, no, I’m not arguing for God’s existence; but the God as (usually) defined by Christianity is not logically inconsistent with free will, as defined by Christianity.
Why I think you with the face raises a better question is that Christians have defined a God that is so beyond human comprehension and understanding that it’s difficult to understand, theologically speaking, why such a being would be concerned with human matters.