Kenny

Paddy,

God doesn’t know what He “will choose” “prior” to His choosing it. In terms of logical priority, God’s choices preceed His knowledge of those chocies. Since this is all in terms of logical rather than temperol priority, however, it is also consistent to say that there never was a time when God didn’t know what His choices were. In a single eternal a-temporal act God comprehends the fullness of His own divine nature and as a consequence obtains His natural knowledge of all that is within is power to do, all logically possible worlds that He could choose to actualize. He is also simultaneously fully aware of His own desires and, via His natural knowledge, aware of the best way to achieve them. Consequently, God’s natural knowledge is immediately accompanied by God’s free knowledge, which is God’s knowledge of His own choices, including their effects, made in accordence with His natural knowledge and His desires.

Since God’s choices are logically prior to God’s free knowledge, it is not correct to say that God knows what He “will choose” prior to His choosing it. On the other hand, given that the priorities involved in the various forms of God’s knowledge are logical and not temporal, it is also consistent to say that God has always known what His choices were (or, rather, are – verb tenses get tricky when talking about a-temporal realities). Consequently, there is no inconsistency in the classical doctrine of God’s omniscience and the classical notion that God is also a free agent.

God Bless,
Kenny

[ October 22, 2002: Message edited by: Kenny ]</p>

Kenny

Jobar,

I couldn’t and I didn’t. I never said that God does not know all parts of His own thoughts. God’s natural knowledge and His free knowledge (and His middle knowledge if you include it as a distinctive cateqory) together constitute the totality of God’s knowledge of which God is eternally fully arware. All I asserted is that is consistent to view God’s knowledge as divided into sub-categories with differing logical relations and logical priorities.

God Bless,
Kenny

sandlewood

I’m not even sure the idea of God making a choice makes sense to me. I usually think of making a choice as a process going from one state to another. In the first state you have the possibility of doing multiple things but haven’t decided which one. In the second state you have decided which you will do. But since God is changeless, I don’t see how he makes choices as we define the word “choice”. For him there is only the second state.

Now you’ve said that God makes a choice based on natural knowledge. That would seem to imply that there is a choosing processing going on. I’m not familiar with this concept of God’s varieties of knowledge. So I’m only going by what you’ve just posted. But this theory seems to have separated out the free knowledge (what God’s choices actually were) and then magically declared that God’s choices are not affected by this knowledge. I’m not sure why they shouldn’t be. Seems like hand waving.

The only way I can imagine this is if everything—God’s choice, the result of that choice, his knowledge of that choice—comes into being simultaneously. It would be like an electrical circuit that had a feedback loop in which the electricity was switched on. There would be a kind of race condition set up. Except that in the circuit, electricity has a finite speed whereas the “God circuit” would be instantaneous. I believe this is what you refer to as a “single eternal a-temporal act”.

But then there are two problems I have with this. One is that the phrase “logically prior” doesn’t really mean anything. (I’m not sure what it means in any case really) The other is that I still see this as determinism. There is only one way that things could happen.

An additional problem I see is that if God’s choices affect and change the natural world, wouldn’t that then be natural knowledge? In other words, the effects of God’s choices would be part of “all possible worlds”. So what’s the criterion for separating free knowledge and natural knowledge?

An ever-present danger in propositions like this is in obscuring the point via redefinitions. If assertions A and B become obviously contradictory with each other when placed side by side, there is a tendency to shift the definition of B so that A and B can cohabitate when you are talking about both of them together. But then when you talk about B alone you switch back to the original definition of B. So the result is that you can maintain contradictions in your head by mentally shifting back and forth between the two definitions of B. I think a lot of this goes on and it can become hard to root out the exact cause sometimes if the issue is sufficiently obscured.
Yes, it seems more likely to me that free will doesn’t exist.

Kenny

Hello Sadlewood,

I think that the model I presented concerning the logical relationships between various categories of God’s knowledge shows that it is consistent to think of God as making choices in a manner analogous to what you have described above without there actually being a time before God made His choices and a time after He made them. God’s natural knowledge, given that it is logically independent of God’s choices and given that God chooses in accordance with it, is analogous to knowledge of several possible options from which to choose. Likewise, God’s free knowledge, since it is logically dependent on God’s choices, is analogous to the state you describe as already having decided. The difference, of course, is that there is no temporal separation between God’s knowing what His options are and His making His choices and His knowing the results of those choices.

Well, I don’t see anything “magical” about postulating that there are logical priorities within God’s knowledge. God’s choices aren’t affected by His free knowledge because His free knowledge follows from the choices God makes. If God had made different choices, His free knowledge would have been different. God’s choices affect God’s free knowledge and not the other way around.

Yes, that is precisely what I am proposing. Since God knows perfectly what His own desires and purposes are and knows exactly which options are available and which options are best suited towards His purposes, there is no hesitation in His choosing. God’s natural and free knowledge both come into being simultaneously though the later is logically dependent on the former.

To say that A is logically prior to B is simply to say that B depends on A, but A does not depend on B. God’s natural knowledge (which contains God’s knowledge of all possible options to choose from) is the same regardless of what God’s choices actually are whereas God’s free knowledge is derived from what God’s choices actually are.

Actually, I agree that there is a form of determinism going on here. Since I hold a compatiblist notion of free will, however, I don’t see that as a problem. God’s choices are not constrained by anything external to Himself, God has literally has all logically possible options from which to choose, and the only thing that is determining which logically possible option obtains is God’s choices in accordance with His own desires (which also originate solely from within God’s self). I don’t see how that is anything other than free will to the maximal degree possible.

No; the word ‘natural’ is being used in a different sense here than that which pertains to the natural physical order. God’s natural knowledge is entirely independent of the physical world. Natural, in this case, simply means innate. God has this knowledge simply because it is part of who He is, independent of any choices God makes or anything that occurs external to Himself. It is part of God’s essence and cannot be different than it is in any possible world. God’s free knowledge, on the other hand, is a function of God’s choice to actualize a particular possible world and therefore varies from possible world to possible world.

I’m not sure what you mean by this. Possible worlds are simply maximal descriptions of logically consistent states of affairs. As such, they are merely logical abstractions (just as numbers are) completely independent of the choices made by any rational being (God or otherwise).

By now, hopefully, it should be clear. God’s natural knowledge is distinguished from God’s free knowledge by its being logically independent of God’s choices.

I agree that such often happens, but I do not think that it is happening here.

God Bless,
Kenny

[ October 24, 2002: Message edited by: Kenny ]</p>

Jobar

Kenny:
All I asserted is that is consistent to view God’s knowledge as divided into sub-categories with differing logical relations and logical priorities.

I disagree. If God is omniscient, then He must be always aware of every part of His own mind. There is no way he could have knowledge divided into sub-categories.

I am interested, though, in your take on determinism/free will. Looked at one way, God has total free will; change the angle a bit, and He is totally determined. I am reminded of the wave/particle duality in physics.

But that is denying God's changelessness, I think- if you claim God is *not* totally determined, then you must deny omniscience; if you grant that God has no free will, then you must deny His omnipotence. There must be some sort of phase shift, of change, occurring for both omniscience and omnipotence to exist.

Xixax

I find the term "intended" when used with God to be impossible to reconcile. At what time did he go from "undecided" to "decided" upon that decision? If he -always- "intended" on doing something, there was never a point for which the idea of forknowledge would apply in the first place. He could not ever know he was going to make a decision, since that decision would have to be in the infinity of the past.

Like it was said earlier: How surprising, God makes no sense.

Kenny

Since I’ve been arguing all along that it is consistent to view God’s knowledge as divided into sub-categories with differing logical priorities and to assert that that God is “always aware of every part of His own mind,” taking in the various categories of His own mind simultaneously, I’m not sure what to respond to here. How are these two things inconsistent, exactly?

I am a compatiblist in that I believe in a form of determinism and a form of free will, and see no contradictions between the two (in fact, I would argue that there is no significant free will unless there is also determinism). I believe that a choice on the part of a personal agent is free if it originates from within the agent herself without being strictly determined by any external factors.

But, I think the model for the divisions within in God’s knowledge which I have described could be adapted for just about any conception of free will (and such actually occurs in the theological community).

.

God isn’t determined by anything other than Himself.

Not at all; since omniscience strictly entails only that God knows all that there is to know. Prior (in any sense you want to take it) to God’s making His choices, those choices don’t exist as part of reality and therefore are not knowable. Once God chooses, His choices become part of reality and God knows them. I have argued, however, that it is not necessary to say that there ever really was a time that God did not know what His own choices are, since God’s knowledge of His options, God’s choices, and God’s knowledge of those choices can consistently be conceived of as coming into being simultaneously, while still retaining differing logical relationships and logical priorities between them.

How so, since omnipotence means that God can actualize any logically consistent state of affairs He chooses, omnipotence means that the only constraint on what God can choose to do is logical possibility. Omnipotence grantees to God nothing less than the maximal degree of freedom possible.

God Bless,
Kenny

[ October 25, 2002: Message edited by: Kenny ]</p>

Kenny

I don’t think that there really was a time when God went from undecided to decided on His decisions. Infinite wisdom requires no hesitation in action. It is meaningful to say, however, that there is a logical progression from God’s knowing what all possible options are, to His having particular purposes which He wants to see accomplished out of those options, to His choosing a particular option, to that option being actualized. Furthermore, there is no reason why this progression could not be strictly logical without involving any temporal divisions.

Foreknowledge, strictly defined, refers to God’s perfect knowledge of the results of all possible choices He could make prior (in terms of logical priority) to His actually making them.

If God makes His decisions in the a-temporal manner I’ve described, then that is true, but does not pose any difficulties.

God Bless,
Kenny

[ October 25, 2002: Message edited by: Kenny ]</p>

Feather

They aren't inconsistent, necessarily. However, to claim that God is therefore omniscient implies that God therefore does not have free will, since he can never make a choice (unless you want to redefine "choice," at which point we can play a game of semantics). This in turn implies God is not omnipotent, since at least one activity (choice) is forbidden to him.

Correspondingly, if God has free will, he cannot possibly omnicient.

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by Kenny:

"Not at all; since omniscience strictly entails only that God knows all that there is to know."

I think this is best direction for the theist to take. Am I correct, however, that you still must deny complete determinism, because to know the present state of the universe and the effects of all these states entails knowing what the next state of affairs will be?

I also wonder whether God's moral perfection limits His free will. I think we can say with certainty that God will never perform an evil action. This implies to me that if we possessed omniscience, we could predict every action God takes in any situation, which doesn't seem consistent with God's free will.

Further, every time God is faced with a decision, He can think to Himself "Okay, I'm morally perfect, so there's really only one thing I'm going to do in this situation." If this is so, it seems that God's free knowledge does indeed logically precede the choices themselves. This knowledge would be dependent upon the fact that God is morally perfect.

The only response I can see is that for God to know He is morally perfect really just involves the fact that He knows what choices He "has" made, but I think we can analyze "morally perfect" without appealing to this sort of God-observing-His-choices.

"How so, since omnipotence means that God can actualize any logically consistent state of affairs He chooses..."

I'm not sure this is an adequate conception of omnipotence. I think there are logically consistent states of affairs that God is unable to actualize. Let S be the state of affairs in which someone or other learns something, and S' be the state of affairs "someone or other brings about S." I can bring about S' and S, but God can only bring about S. The reason is that if I cause myself to learn, I have brought about S' and S, but God cannot cause Himself to learn and therefore can only bring about S -- He could cause me to learn, but, e.g., He could not cause me to learn without being caused to learn by an outside force. This is a fairly crude formulation, but I think it could be expanded to be a real argument.