wdog

your first paragraph says absolutely nothing. free will has nothing to do with the realization of one unique future, it has to do with the knowability of it.

your second paragraph is almost complete nonsense. i have seen that before, some apologist must have made that up to try and get around this contradiction. to be be able to 'see the future as if it were the past' is a complete self-contradiction with no meaning. I am curious as to how you have all this insight into the 'physics of god', please tell who originally said this stuff.

If god already sees our future, then it is settled, since then from our point of view our future is knowable and there is no free will. free will applies to us in this way and this way only since we are creatures of time.

claiming that someone exists 'outside' of time does absolutely nothing to change our own experience of time and how knowability of the future is connected to free will.

luvluv

K:

K, if God lives outside of time, then there was no "before" for him. From His perspective, there was not a time when you weren't, and then a time when you were. From His standpoint, you always were, since every moment is present to Him.

Causally and epistimelogically, your actions predate his knowledge, but because you are in time and He is not, His knowledge appears to you to predate your actions. But this is simply a trick of the workings of time. Your perception that He knows what you will do before you do it is equivalent to an optical illusion. He knows what you will do only because He is CURRENTLY in your future SEEING you do it. Not because He has a script of what you will do, but because he has seen the play of you actually doing it.

What I am trying to do is apply some sort of an observational epistemology to God. Christians say He knows everything, including the future. So I am a proposing a MEANS by which He knows them that would be consistent with human free will. If He knows them by means of observation, then obviously He has no causal responsibility for anyone's individual action. He is responsible only for creating free beings who have the potential to do what it is in their power to do.

No matter how many times you guys type it, or how adamantly you believe it, it simply does not follow that because someone can observe your future actions that those actions were not freely chosen. It does not follow from the simple fact that someone can observe your future action, that your future action could not have been different.

YOU are writing the script. God just sits at the end of time with a copy of a script that YOU have written. The fact that He can see the script in no way, in absolutely no way, means that He wrote it.

More in a minute:

luvluv

HRG:

So if I say it is going to rain tommorow, and it rains tommorow, then my prediction caused the rain?

If I know that tommorow is October 12, did my knowledge cause it to be October 12? Would it be October 12 if I wasn't here? I know the sun will rise tommorow, does that mean my knowledge restricts the sun's free will? My knowledge determines that the sun will rise? Again, epistemogically, this is backwards.

Bibliophile:

I'm not sure where you got the idea that it was my intent to protect the Bible. I am not, and do not plan on becoming, an innerantist. I am trying to tell you what many Christians believe, which does not necessarily always 100 percent correlate with what the Bible says. As I've told others, my faith is informed with equal parts scripture, personal experience (the Holy Spirt), and corporate experience(past and present). Each source is checked against each of the two others in most cases. That's the way I was taught and that's the way most Christians actually operate (quite often even the inerrantists, though subconciously).

Now, I only told you there was some Biblical support to keep you from the notion that I am making any of this up off the top of my head with absolutely no support. This has the support of at least two of the three means available to me (scripture and church history) and is part of the historic tradition of Christianity.

I further don't really see how this matters to the argument on this thread. The question was whether redemption combined with omniscience was a logical contradiction with free will. If we can conceive of a way in which this is possible, then the argument fails regardless of whether this way is in the Bible or not. It is entirely possible that God just didn't feel it was necessary to mention this in the scriptures. It is such a confusing concept that it seems like that would be a wise editorial decision.

I said:

You said:

I was trying to make a distinction between something being false and something being incomprehensible. Many incomprehensible things are true. I am not aware of any law of logic which states that things which are difficult to conceive cannot be true. While I admit that much of what I am trying to communicate about God's nature is difficult to picture, that in no way points towards it's being incorrect. Can you really conceptualize what it means to say that space, that heighth, width, and length, curve? But do you therefore question general relativity? I may in the end be wrong, but simply stating that something is difficult to conceive is not an argument and does absolutely nothing to establish your counter claim.

As I said before, for the sake of this debate, isn't that all I need to do? I seriously doubt I could ever make anyone accept that this is TRUE, and I am not trying to. All I am saying is that the original argument is not sound: free will, redemption, and omniscience can co-exist.

This still, in no way, implies that the prophecy preceeded the act from a causal standpoint, only that, from our perspective, the prophecy appeared to precede the act temporally. Am I correct in thinking that your putting quotation marks around the word forced means that you are conceeding that the action only appears forced? As far as your saying that an action must happen, we would b just as justified by saying that from God's perspective, it already HAS happened.

Automotan:

The entire point of everything I've said is that there ARE NOT two possible worlds. To God, who sits at the end of time, there is only the one world that actually happened.

[ October 11, 2002: Message edited by: luvluv ]</p>

luvluv

Intriguing question:

If humans invented a time machine, and could travel undetected into the future, without being detected, and could come back with knowledge of what was to occur, would that invalidate free will?

Lets even go so far as to say that the time travellers never revealed what was going to happen to anyone, and who died immediately upon their return. Lets say they compiled a complete notebook on everyone's future actions and the notebook was buried in some accident that caused their deaths. Would humans at that point be free.

This is mighty convoluted, (I'm typing quickly off the top of my head) but you get the idea.

wdog

luvluv,

you are proposing an almost nonsensical idea that at best is undeveloped.

that is weird from the perspective of a god. he sees nothing unfold in time, therefore his creation is nonevolving static display. how boring, and why would he allow it knowing all the evil he created ahead of time.

and no matter how many times you try and put up this 'out of time' construct, you still can't justify it as something meaningful.

I agree that simply saying something a lot doesn't make it true, but it is still true that if your future is knowable, then it is predestined. If it can be observed before we live it, by god or whoever, then it is predestined. no matter how many times you try and deny it, we are creatures of time with freewill and predestination defined as temporal concepts. your attempts to define 'out of time' does nothing to alter that fact. and making something 'out of time' therefore is meaningless in regard to free will and probably meaningless as you have stated it.

the only way for us to have free will is for out trajectory in time to be undermined the future, therefore even your god will have to wait to find out what i do sunday.

I think this out of time stuff must come from the flatland idea where 3-d creatures can be 'out of the space' of flatland's two dimensional creatures. In that case we could look into their 2-d world and see all points at once while they are only aware of certain directions (lines in their 2-d world). Or also someone with access to a fourth dimension could see all points in our 3-d body at once.

well to make an anology, spatial free-will, as opposed to temporal free-will, would correspond to positional uncertainty for the 2-d creatures. they simply must have latitude to assume more than one postion in 2-d space, or they are predestined to occupy one certain point, or area (in our case we would be predestined to occupy one certain trajectory in 4-D phase space). the fact that that we can see all points in their space at once does nothing to alter the uncertainty or the fact that there must be uncertainty for spatial free will. And us, as god seeing all their points at once, will also have to observe the same uncertainty. we simply cannot simultaneously know their position and allow them spatial free will. god simply cannot know our future trajectory in phase space and allow us to have free will whether he is in time, or 'out of time'.

Amos

It is much easier for God to exist outside of time then for us to exist inside of time because every day we must go outside of time and have a sleep so we can remain time conscious for the next of the day until we go outside of time again.

Time as we know it exist only in our conscious mind and so if God is not part of our conscious mind God is outside of time already.

K

luvluv:

I really have no idea what existing out of time could possibly mean. I will grant that it may somehow clear up some inconsistencies. However, it is at the expense of creating a rather anemic God who bears absolutely no resemblance to the Christian God. For instance, if God does exist out of time, then Jesus could not possibly have been divine. If there was a historical Jesus, he clearly did not exist atemporally.

luvluv

K, that's just totally false. This is a long, LONG held belief of Christianity. It's not something somebody made up a week ago. And it wouldn't invalidate Christianity at any rate it might just invalidate some forms of the Trinity (which some Christians do not believe in anyway) and I can think of a few ways around even that (special limitations placed on Christ's portion of the Godhead during His time on earth). At any rate, this notion is part of the historic tradition of Christianity so there must be something off target with your statement.

All you guys have done is repeatedly say that God's residing outside of time is inconceivable, you have done nothing to say that it is not possible. This is an argument, and you need to demonstrate that what I am proposing is a logical contradiction, because if it is not then God BY DEFINITION can do it, since He can do all things that are logically possible.

(If I remember correctly, I even thought I read somewhere that string theorist suggest than in addition to other dimensions of space there may be other dimensions of time.)

Further, the unintelligibility argument is totally useless. Can you really conceive of 6 or 7 extra dimensions of space? And do you believe in string theory?

wdog:

You are stating that in order for something to be causally prior it has to be temporally prior. If God lives outside of time, that is not the case. What I am saying is that God only sees your actions AS you do them. Your actions are causally prior to God's knowledge. You cause God's knowledge of your action by doing them. However, since you exist in time, it appears to you that God's knowledge exist temporally prior to your action.

This is only true if BOTH you AND God exist in time.

You are trying to assign God's knowledge a time PRIOR to you WITHIN time. But his knowledge along with the rest of his existence are totally outside of our time line. In the statement "God knew this before I did it" the word "before" already commits a category mistake by placing God in time. God could only "know something before" if He lived in time. He doesn't. So you're whole line of reasoning is fallacious. You are not demonstrating that the Christian idea of God living outside of time is logically contradictory, because the only way you can disprove it is to drag God back into time, specifically into some time prior to your actions. But at this point you are begging the question.

Unless you have some means of proving that God does not exist outside of time, you have to provide some means for proving that such a feat is logically contradictory without using words like "before" or "after" in their classical sense, because once you do this you are automatically begging the question by placing God inside our time line.

wdog

I showed you above luvluv that even with your construct, god still cannot have perfect knowledge of our future. it IS logically impossible to reconcile it with free will.

luvluv

No, you presented a very flawed analogy having to do with space. I don't really see how that demonstrates anything. Maybe you could flesh it out a little more and make it more applicable to the issue of time? God does not see a flatspace He sees a complete time line (and you do understand that even that is a rough analogy, right?), so I don't see how your spatial analogy applies.