Spenser

My comment wasn't really about free will, just that he could make prophecies. That of course was IF he was real...

BadBadBad

Prophesy is an inspired prediction of the future. A man, inspired by God can supposedly predict the future. God doesn't merely prophesize about the future, and who would inspire him anyway? God supposedly knows the future. He is omniscient with respect to the past and future, so christians say. If so, there's no difference in the immutability of the past as compared to the future.

As for your problems, they're obviously based upon a presupposition that God exists, he is omniscient, and that includes the future, and the Bible is full of actual prophesies. There's no problem with those being not true.


Again you presuppose that it's possible to know the future. You can't know how to draw a square circle. I don't have to change the meaning of omniscience to exclude knowledge it's not possible to have.

Wayne Delia

No difficulty with that at all. God knows all the (potentially infinite) possible outcomes, but does not necessarily know which choice we will make, so he is omniscient. Similarly, I know all 36 of the possible outcomes of two dice thrown, so with respect to throwing dice, I am comparably omniscient. One problem I've noticed is that for someone who is supposedly omniscient about dice throws, I do quite poorly at the casino craps tables. Not sure why that is, though. Perhaps I'm not as omniscient as I thought I was.

WMD :-)

rainbow walking

There is a relative amount of ignorance built into this universe. Since it isn't possible to accurately predict the path of every sub-atomic particle, there will always be a degree of unpredictability to our state of affairs. It is in this unpredictability that a limited degree of autonomy of will is sustained. Thus you could argue that ignorance is the foundation of freewill.

As to omniscience, there are several definitions that can be applied. The logical definition would negate complete full foreknowledge since that which does not yet exist is not certainly knowable but only probably so. That omniscience would entail knowing every probable outcome is logically consistent. That omniscience must include the ability to know every actual outcome, isn't.

As far as prophecies in the bible, the majority of them are conditional statements. If you refuse to repent then X will happen. Again, this doesn't require an inconsistent omniscience to predict and see it turn out accurately to the prediction. For instance it isn't hard to predict that if nation X continues to attack its neighbors and pillage their lives, sooner or later the neighbors are going to elicit help and conquer those who persist in these atrocious acts. It doesn't take a genious to figure this out. Most of the prophetic aspect of the bible is just laying down a religious explanation for man's grasping at political and military dominance of greater and greater regions around his homeland.

Likewise it isn't hard to predict that if your political and military successes were made possible in part due to your zealous dedication to one religious system, and you start entertaining other counter-religious systems with contrary practices to the one that encouraged you to accomplish your aims, that sooner or later you're gonna lose the impetus to resist and your enemies will over-flow your borders.

I can as easily predict that if Americans take such liberties as they have left for granted, and always trust government officials to preserve those liberties, that one day they'll awaken to the sound of marching boots outside their door come to conscript them into the military to go off to foriegn soils and expand an empire they never realized was being propogated right beneath their lemming little noses...and all in the name of freedom...imagine that.