Mageth

Not quite what I'm saying. I'm saying it is impossible for God to know you are going to eat a pizza tommorow unless you really are going to eat pizza tommorow. Again, you've got the whole thing backwards. He knows because you do, you do not do because He knows. It is your action which informs His knowledge, not His knowledge that informs your actions. He sees THE future, the ONE AND ONLY future that will actually occur.

So there is this "one and only future" which God knows before I even exist to make a choice. Any time confusion does not matter - God knew what I was going to do before he created me. Therefore, I have no power to change the "one and only future". I was doomed to follow the path I have, am, and will follow before I was born.

All the magic words about god, his relationship with time, and our supposed confusion over it don't matter one bit to my perspective. I live in this universe, in this time. If this universe has one and only one future, known by god, I'm doomed to live it out according to god's foreknowledge and am powerless to change it.

It is therefore mistaken to think that God could ever see you doing something that you did not do: if you didn't do it He wouldn't see it.

I don't think anyone's said that. Anyway, it follows from this statement that if he hasn't seen it, I won't (can't) do it.

Amos

Well, as it says, "if you as much as look at a woman in lust you have already committed sin" to render the act itself not sinful.

Or, "if the first sin cost me heaven, the second one is free."

luvluv

Here's the whole problem with your argument. Won't and can't are two different things.

Mageth

It is possible, you just didn't do it.

If I didn't do it, it's not logically possible that I can do it. How would it be possible for me to do something that I didn't do? That's the whole point.

If you choose to do something, and God sees you in the future doing it, then He will see what you do. You can only do ONE thing, that's the nature of the beast, and that's what He sees you do, but that doesn't mean that you could not have done something else. If you were going to choose to do something else, that's what God would see.

You seemed to be a bit confused about time here with the "going to". My understanding is that god already sees me eating a hamburger tomorrow. To god, it's not "going to", it's "is". And if god "sees" that I'm eating a hamburger at lunch tomorrow, then I can't choose to eat pizza at lunch tomorrow. It's not possible for me to do so.

Mageth

Here's the whole problem with your argument. Won't and can't are two different things.

If I can't do it, I won't do it, right? I'll reword the sentence to more directly indicate what I mean:

"Anyway, it follows from this statement that if he hasn't seen it, I won't, indeed can't, do it."

Or if you please we could drop the "won't" and just leave the "can't". Either way I will only do what god knows I will do.

[ October 10, 2002: Message edited by: Mageth ]</p>

luvluv

It in no way means that. It just means that you aren't going to eat pizza tommorow. That in no way implies that you COULDN'T have made the choice to eat the pizza.

Yes, can't effectively equals won't, but your argument is that won't effectively equals can't. That's where your argument goes off track. It does not follow that because I won't do a thing that I can't do it. I can't jump 60 ft into the air unaided, so therefore I won't jump 60 ft into the air unaided. I won't jump off a 50 story building but I CAN jump off a 50 story building.

No, it doesn't follow. Understand that you can now do ANYTHING that it is within your power to do. However, ultimately, you are going to actually do only a finite number of certain things by your own choice. God knows the future, and so knows the things you will do BECAUSE YOU DO THEM. His knowledge is informed by your actions. God sees YOUR future, BECAUSE OF WHAT YOU DECIDED TO DO. You do not decide to do what he has seen. Epsitemeologically, you've got the whole thing backwards. Your action informs his knowledge, not the reverse.

In a certain sense, your actions predate His knowledge, however because He lives outside of time, nothing can predate his knowledge, since He has access to all times. Causally speaking, however, your actions are prior to His knowledge of them, even though He knows them before you actually do them. However, this is a function of your being limited to one dimension of time and His not being so limited.

(Incidentally, I didn't have a chance of spelling epistemelogically right when I woke up this morning.)

Mageth

Well, we disagree obviously, and I've already said everything I want to say on this, so I'll leave it at that and drop out.

No wait...I want to stay in, but...no...god already knows I'm dropping out, dammit, so I can't stay in.

sandlewood

It’s not knowledge of the future that directly causes the contradiction. It’s predestination. But knowledge of the future implies (and requires) predestination. Predestination directly contradicts free will. It’s a simple enough, and yet people jump though endless linguistic hoops to try to avoid that simple contradiction.
No. Free will means that you were not necessarily still going to eat the hamburger. It doesn’t mean that anything could happen but only one thing does. It means that anything can happen.
Yes, but that’s the way it happens only after it happens.
You certainly pretend to know the nature of time yourself. I doubt you got that from the bible. It’s very convenient to use the phrase “outside of time” and push all the contradictions into obscurity. My first problem is that I don’t know how you derived that theory from the Bible. I see passages that seem to imply that God does change with time. For example, he becomes angry. You can try to argue that the Bible is just worded that way so that our puny minds can understand it. But still there is nothing to indicate that that is so. Why not take it at face value? And if you can understand the nature of time as you seem to claim, then it really isn’t so difficult and God could’ve written the Bible in less misleading way.
But the real problem is that I don’t see how “outside of time” makes any sense. Can you conceive of anything existing that doesn’t change with time? Even consciousness as we know it is a sequence of though processes, one thought coming after another. Without time, how can you claim that an entity like God is “thinking” in any sense? Each time you utter the phrase “God thinks” you have to qualify it with the statement that God doesn’t think in the same sense that we do and we really don’t understand the nature of God’s thought. So when we said “God thinks”, we really wouldn’t know what we meant.

It’s the same with the phrase “God wants”. If Gods wants something, does it mean that he doesn’t have something now but he would like to have it later? If God exists in all time, then all the people who have ever lived and ever will live are already in heaven and he is already being worshiped by them. So he has what he wants. And there was never a time when he was without it because he is supposed to be “outside of time”. In fact, how could God have created the Universe? The word “create” implies time. It should mean that there was a time when the Universe didn’t exist followed by a time when it did. And that is not only from our perspective but also from God’s. But if God is outside of time, then surely there was never a time for him in which the Universe didn’t exist. From his point of view it always existed, so he could not have created it. Trying to make sense of “outside of time” leads to more problems than it solves.

So you end up with a hypothesis that (1) doesn’t make any common sense, and (2) the Bible not only doesn’t support but seems to indicate the opposite. So why would a person claim that God is outside of time in the first place? To attempt to sweep existing contradictions under the rug? Instead of trying to patch up contradictions, why don’t you take them as clues that there is something wrong with the original hypothesis?

Walter_Mitty

LuvLuv,

If I could be serious for a minute...

Can you please explain how you know God exists outside of time?

How do you know this?

Nonetheless, as near as I can tell, science does not know what it really means to be "outside of time."

If your god knows everything, he knows what HE himself will do in HIS "future" (in any dimension including time). He must have known that from the very start of HIS existence or He is not omniscient.

Therefore, He would have to know what He is going to do in his own future. According to the Luvluv time theory, for God to know what He is going to do in the future, His own actions would have to inform Him.

This makes no sense.

I would propose this to you:

A) You cannot provide me more evidence for your God existing outside of time, than you can for Him NOT existing outside of time. Therefore, from an epistemological (and dare I say scientific) view point, I must deny that your God exists outside of time.

Unless you have some proof...

beliefisbunk

When it comes to free will I think there's either a countless amount of beliefs (countless beliefs, of course, = interpretations, interpretations=no god) or the creator is a career criminal by day with a heart on the sleeve at night (50% is not omniscient.)

Excellent example: again (I hate to repeat myself) but any man/made disaster/tragedy that occured within the past thousands of years. Some say an act of free will, others feel an act of god: one cannot be the same as the other, so, which is it?