The_Ist

I think this is the right forum for this, but anyway...

I have always been a proponent of a God with exhaustive divine foreknowledge (EDF), and still think it is a justifiable position. However, I've run across the Open Theism (OT) position lately, and it seems appealing to me.

Basically the OT position says that God can't know exactly what will happen in the future, because, quite simply, the future doesn't exist. It does not deny that God is omniscient - omniscience implies knowing everything there is to know, and since the exact future, as not existing, is not something that can be known, God can't know it. The reason the future doesn't exist determinately from the OT position is that humans have libertarian free will (LFW), which means that there are many possibilities in the future, any of which could conceivably be actualized. The OT position holds that since the future, granting LFW, is necessarily indeterminate, God, in his omniscience, knows it exhaustively for what it is - indeterminate. He knows all of the possibilities that could occur in the future given his ability to absolutely know the determinate factors of the universe (e.g. that which accords with the laws of nature), and he knows all of the possible outcomes of the indeterminate factor, i.e., human LFW. I always picture it as a huge branching of possibilities - if person A chooses X, such and such will occur; if he chooses Y, something else will occur, etc., for all beings possessing LFW.

I think that, if this view is tenable, it could deflect some common atheistic arguments (though these arguments are not necessarily convincing to me from an EDF point of view):

1) It gets around the apparent contradiction between God knowing the actual future and the existence of human free will.

2) It posits that God chose to place himself in time with us, thus deflecting some arguments centering on some being existing "outside of time." Notice that this "limitation," i.e., being inside of time, does not detract from God's omnipotence, because he chose to place himself within time's bounds.

3) It provides a very literal and reconcilable interpretation for those passages in which God displays emotions, acts surprised, or acts as if something occured that he didn't expect or know about.

4) It reconciles the apparent contradiction between EDF and omnipotence, dealing with God's power of lack thereof to learn. Under an OT paradigm, God can and does learn.

5) It gets around the problem of a being knowing an exact future that, according to an A-theory of time, does not yet exist.

6) It gets around the common objection surrounding God creating a universe in the first place in which he knew beforehand that so many people would choose evil.

Those are a few off the top of my head.

The only problem I see with this view is with regard to God's ability to prophesy the future and cause future events to occur, in accordance with his sovereignty. The only clear solution I see is that, in cases where God prophesies something or wants something to definitively occur in the future, he intervenes and blocks all of the possible futures that do not lead to this outcome. Now, ostensibly, this solution seems to be problematic, in that it amounts to what seems to be an egregious loss of LFW.

However, I do not think this is necessarily the case. Suppose that God predicts a future event or definitively causes a future event to occur, by blocking all possible futures that don't lead to that event. Insofar as the effect of the display of God's power to his creation (via prophetic abilites) or the importance of the caused event outweighs the lost cases of LFW, then it would seem that such action by God is justified.

On the surface, it seems likely that God would not definitively bring about some future event that would negate the actual free will decision of some person to accept and come to God. That would seem unfair to that person, because they would be predestined for hell.

I'm interested in anyone's thoughts.

Philosoft

Are you using libertarian free will to mean all outcomes are equally probable a priori? True LWF seems to entail that decisions are fully acausal. But, as human behavior is at least somewhat predictable, true LWF does not seem to obtain. Ignoring that for the moment...

This appears to be a form of the rather unsatisfying Unknown Purpose Defense. But the real problem, I think, is two-fold. Allowing God unlimited temporal freedom to instantiate a possible future strains the notion of acceptable LWF loss. If, in 700 BC, God wishes George Bush XIII elected US president in 2764 AD, an immense amount of LWF is going to be sacrificed to ensure that future happens. Second, as soon as God instantiates a possible future, you're no longer in the framework of Open Theology, because God now knows definitively at least one future outcome.
I don't understand. Above, you said there might be overarching reasons why God would sacrifice LWF to instantiate a possible future. If God can't know beforehand what LWF decisions will obtain, by instantiating any possible future, God is necessarily going to determine the fates of at least some people.

Conchobar

OT makes more sense than traditional Christian Theism. How can even God know what has not happened and does not exist?

Personally I don't believe there is no evidence that there is any evidence for god. The universe and all that happens makes enough sense to me without a god hypothesis. Otherwise for those with a genetic or neurobehaviour need to believe in gods, it is an advancement from archaic and rather barmy traditional Christianity. Christianity is so stiffling and mind controlling, a more reational or near rational replacement would be welcome.

Conchobar

Silent Dave

OT does solve a number of problems, but unless it can be reconciled with prophecy it pretty much rules out Christianity -- Jesus' qualifications as the Messiah, according to the NT, was that he did such and such "in accordance with prophecy."


Dave

Jobar

Another problem- if God is not 'outside of time' then where is he? Does He exist within the spacetime He created?

Also, is God limited by relativity? That would follow from OT. If He is omnipresent, are His thoughts creeping across the universe at lightspeed?

I think that OT will not satisfy most believers; the consequences to the supposed power of a time-enclosed God are considerable.

Dr. Retard

Off the top of my head, one big problem is that free human decisions account for a whole lot of what happens in the world. Especially if you take into account the "a single choice has far-reaching effects on the world" doctrine, the one we all learned from the Twilight Zone.

So if God doesn't know beforehand what choices people will make, God can't know much at all.

Darkblade

The real problem with open theism is that it precludes the existence of free will (supposing that free will didn't obliterate itself out of logical necessity). If the future is not caused deterministically (in order that somebody known as God wouldn't know it), then it must be caused at random. Random occurrences can not logically be called choices, therefore no one could ever make choices. If people couldn't make choices, they couldn't very well have free will, could they?

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by The_Ist :

I think the problem just needs to be reformulated slightly. God cannot perform "to learn something someone else knows already", or "to learn a fact that has existed for some period of time", or something similar. These are logically possible actions that God cannot perform.

This is an interesting solution, but I don't think it will succeed in the end. If God predicts x, then God knows that God will block all alternate lines of determination that don't lead to x. So if God predicts x, he's limiting his own LFW. And indeed, he's probably limiting some humans' LFW too. Finally, there doesn't seem to be any Biblical support for the idea that when God's predicting x, he's really just choosing to make sure x obtains.

Of course, there are all the problems with LFW itself left to be solved, too.

beastmaster

But Jesus professes foreknowledge of human intent:

How do you reconcile this prediction with O.T.?

T. E. Lords

What if God, instead of creating the universe is a product of its creation? Maybe god exists somewhere along the lines of the universes’ consciousness.