jeffazi

Hi John,

I looked that the site you referenced, but it's way beyond me. Thanks for the reply, though.

jeff

jeffazi

Here's why. Some Christians have tried to reconcile God's perfect knowledge with human freedom. They say that God can
know something without causing it. Often, it is observed, we know what people around us will do just by knowing them well. People are predictable, and the rest of the world is even more predictable. So why can't God, who knows us prefectly, be able to foresee perfectly what we will freely choose to do?

If we set this in the context of the whole view of God's power and the traditional understanding of God's relationship to time,
including the affirmation that God is the sole creator of the world
of time, then it is obvious that this whole line of thought is
irrelevant. In the classical tradition there is no difference between
what God wills and what God knows and what God causes. It is all the same.

Nevertheless, consider the idea that God foreknows without causing our choices. It is obviously true, after all, that we often know what will happen without causing it ourselves. So let's imagine God for a moment as purely an observer of the world, having no causal power at all. Couldn't God have infallible knowledge of the future, even of our free choices?

No, not if we are truly free. Think again about our ability to
predict the future. We have some power to predict because the world is partly determined. Laws of nature limit our options. There is much that we are not free to do. God could certainly have perfect knowledge of those limits. Further, the past - our genetic heritage, our education, our own choices, all our experiences - strongly inclines us to act in certain ways. The past shapes the future. The fact that we can predict the future at all depends on all these limitations on our freedom. If the past TOTALLY determines the future, if heredity and environment, for example, combine to COMPLETELY control our actions, then there is no true freedom and God can perfectly predict the future.

But the whole idea of freedom is that the past does NOT totally
control the future, but only shapes it. Given my past, there may be a 75% chance that I will chose to eat the fish I have planned for tonight's dinner. There's a 15% chance that I might go to my mom's to eat, a 5% chance that I may skip dinner to make up for eating too many snacks today, and several other possibilities I can't even think of right now. What freedom means is that I really do have genuine choices in front of me and that I really could do different things, even though some are more likely than others.

If this description of reality is correct, then if God has perfect
knowledge of the world and of me, God will know exactly what all of the possibilities are and how probable they are. But even with
perfect knowledge God could not know what I will choose in the future because that choice has not been yet made and it is a real choice. For God to predict perfectly, gased on perfect knowledge of the past, the past must totally detemine the future "choices." That is, there wouldn't be real choices at all.

Think of it this way. Suppose I am trying to decide whether to have fish or beef for dinner. If we say that God knows I will choose fish, and that it is impossible for God to be wrong, then aren't we saying that it is impossible for me to choose the beef? We don't have to say that God caused anything. but there must be some way in which God has that knowledge. It may be that the world is a deterministic world in which the past totally controls the future. It may be, as Christians have traditionally said, that all of time is eternally present to God - that my "choosing" the fish is an eternally settled fact. But whatever the reason, perfect divine foreknowledge means that real freedom is impossible.

Jeff

John Page

Therefore god is an imaginary thing with imaginary knowledge that doesn't have any impact on reality except as a Christmas novelty.

Cheers, John