Yes Gene, God Knows the Future
Gene Callahan has an odd post where he writes:
It might seem that the doctrine of divine omniscience means that God knows the future. Many have so interpreted it.
I think that is wrong. God can only know what can be known. But the future is just a name we use for what has not yet happened and it does not, in fact, exist. What does not exist cannot be known.
God is surprised every moment, just like we are.
What’s even odder is that in the comments, Gene has no problem with viewing God as standing outside of time.
Well, I don’t have too much to say except, “I disagree with Gene on this one.” His whole argument rests on the premise that the future is, in principle, unknowable. But that’s sort of the thing under dispute. I claim that the future is, in principle, knowable–after all, God knows it!
My personal metaphor is that God is an author who wrote His story–history–and we are each one character in this amazing narrative. It’s not merely that we are in a certain chapter of a serial novel, where that author kinda sorta knows where things are heading. No, I think the novel is already written, and yet it seems to be unfolding in “real time” to us, just like Luke Skywalker really doesn’t know what he’s going to face at Cloud City. But those events are certainly “knowable”; George Lucas knew them for a while, and now so do those of us who have seen The Empire Strikes Back. (This is analogous to people who die and go to heaven. I think they become joined with God in some fashion, and suddenly see the whole divine plan. Among other things, now it is blindingly obvious why it was not only necessary, but a good thing for Awful Events XYZ to occur, even though we mortals, with our unimaginably small subset of the relevant information, get furious with God for allowing them to happen.)
In closing, here are some Biblical passages to show that Gene’s interpretation cannot be squared with standard Judaism or Christianity. (That doesn’t mean he’s wrong, but just pointing out how unusual his stance is.)
Jeremiah 1:5: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; Before you were born I sanctified you; I ordained you a prophet to the nations.”
Matthew 24:3 – 36 (with me editing out a lot):
3 Now as He sat on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to Him privately, saying, “Tell us, when will these things be? And what will be the sign of Your coming, and of the end of the age?”
4 And Jesus answered and said to them: “Take heed that no one deceives you. 5 For many will come in My name, saying, ‘I am the Christ,’ and will deceive many. 6 And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not troubled; for all[a] these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. 7 For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be famines, pestilences,[b] and earthquakes in various places. 8 All these are the beginning of sorrows.
…
23 “Then if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or ‘There!’ do not believe it. 24 For false christs and false prophets will rise and show great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect. 25 See, I have told you beforehand.
…
32 “Now learn this parable from the fig tree: When its branch has already become tender and puts forth leaves, you know that summer is near. 33 So you also, when you see all these things, know that it[d] is near—at the doors! 34 Assuredly, I say to you, this generation will by no means pass away till all these things take place. 35 Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will by no means pass away.36 “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven,[e] but My Father only.”
And this final example is pretty crystal clear, from Mark 14: 27-30:
Jesus Predicts Peter’s Denial
27 Then Jesus said to them, “All of you will be made to stumble because of Me this night, for it is written:
‘I will strike the Shepherd,
And the sheep will be scattered.’
28 “But after I have been raised, I will go before you to Galilee.”29 Peter said to Him, “Even if all are made to stumble, yet I will not be.”
30 Jesus said to him, “Assuredly, I say to you that today, even this night, before the rooster crows twice, you will deny Me three times.”
In that last example, not only does Jesus correctly predict what Peter will do in the near future–“correctly” of course if we are taking the Bible at face value in any way–but Jesus is giving one of many examples in the New Testament where He explains how He is fulfilling Old Testament prophesies.
I will stop here and let Gene speak for himself, because this obviously isn’t a matter of the weight of the evidence. In other words it’s not that Gene hasn’t come across passages in the Bible where the God of Moses or Jesus predict things that later come true. But, having given Gene the benefit of the doubt, I don’t know what else to do with his post. I cannot predict his response, that’s for sure…
According to Einsteinian physics, i.e. Minkowski space-time or block time, the past, present, and future all exist at once. Not like flowing from past to present to future but all together existing. I therefore disagree with Gene since his view of the future is based on everyday human interactions in the low energy environment, i.e. everyday Earth events.
I also disagree with Bob Murphy since it seems in his view we are all robots acting out God’s programming thereby lacking free will.
I think the future exists but since we have free will, our free will/soul being outside the universe, by our free will we can change the future. God still knows our future and what we will do but nowhere do our future actions exist in time. In that way it’s similar to Gene’s view but in my view only our free will actions do not exist in the future but events of inanimate objects in the future do exist though we can change them.
Time is not what we think it is and both Gene and Bob seem to be ignoring free will.
Regarding awful events, I don’t think it’s necessary for them to occur but God being God can bring about good even though they do occur. Regarding Peter’s future actions I don’t think it’s a prediction but Jesus, being the Son of God, knows what peter will do even though Peter’s actions don’t exist anywhere in the future yet.
For a second, I reacted similarly, but ultimately I don’t think this necessarily follows from Bob’s post. Humans can have free will and make their decisions independently, and yet God can still predict — accurately — what decision the individual is going to make.
I agree that God knows what we will do but it seems Bob is saying our actions were already programmed into us by God thereby making us like robots with no free will. Where there’s no free will then there’s also no sin and that’s not what the bible teaches.
There are differences regarding that question between the Christian confessions. Catholic theology tends to believe in a deterministic world through its interpretation of the concept of divine providence.
Catholic theology tends to believe in a deterministic world through its interpretation of the concept of divine providence.
The issue is actually a matter of open debate between different schools of thought within Catholicism. I could go into detail, but I’m not sure anyone would be interested in the finer points of the Thomist vs. Molinist debates.
I would.
Anyway, the concept of open debate within the Catholic church seems somewhat odd to my European understanding of Catholicism. I always thought these questions were decided by the congregation for the doctrine of the faith and ultimately by the pope. I think I recall him saying something like “I wonder what the divine providence holds for me”. I’m not sure what exactly he said, though.
Anyway, I’m happy to learn new things!
Your perception is somewhat accurate. Usually the pope only makes a declaration after intense debate has persisted for decades or centuries, and it is reasonable to assume that new perspectives aren’t likely to drastically alter the landscape of the argument.
I also would be interested.
It’s Calvinism that is especially deterministic, not Catholicism.
Only Hyper Calvinism. Calvinism in it’s orginal since, as taught by Calvin, Luther, and Paul, is not deterministic. Calvinism states that, we all have free will. However, our wills are naturally bent away from God. Because of this, we naturally, and willingfully choose NOT to accept God. However, the bible makes clear that there are some whom God chose to make alive in Him, giving them a desire for Himself; a desire not natural. Only then can the dead man, made alive, respond to Christ and have the ability to live for Him.
Hyper Calvinism asserts that God forces man to sin. This cannot be true. That would make God, not man, responsible for Sin. Man freely chooses to sin because he wants to. He cannot freely choose God because he does not naturally want to.
This is compatible with free will only if God exists out of time., which frankly sounds just as a meaningless word combination to me.
If God is temporal then the fact that he may know what I will do in the future means that my behavior is determined by past events and thus that I don’t have free will.
So for me this incompatibility is one of the reasons to believe that the concept of Christian God is nonsense.
If God is temporal then the fact that he may know what I will do in the future means that my behavior is determined by past events and thus that I don’t have free will.
Would the existence of time travelers mean that your behavior is determined by past events and thus that you don’t have free will?
I guess so. Isn’t that the great paradox of time travel that no movie is able to solve?
Humans can have free will and make their decisions independently, and yet God can still predict — accurately — what decision the individual is going to make.
How can you know of a God who predicts accurately, if you don’t know that God’s predictions? Even if you did know of that God’s predictions, that would rule out your having free will, because it would be equivalent to you knowing your own future.
In other words, one can’t know of a perfect predictor’s predictions about one’s life, AND know that one has free will. It’s one or the other.
Only by starting off with the position that you know of a God that has knowledge of your future, but you don’t know what such knowledge actually consists of, can you retain free will. But then from whence did your knowledge arise that this God knows your future?
Aren’t we merely postulating something like “I can have free will, EVEN IF The Amazing Kreskin knows what card I will pick!”
Strictly speaking this phrase
”According to Einsteinian physics, i.e. Minkowski space-time or block time, the past, present, and future all exist at once.”
is false because from the idea that the past, present and future are modelled as points on some axis, it doesn’t follow that they “all exist at once”. Otherwise, the words “at once” are meaningless.
Einsteinian physics is reversible (and Newtonian physics is also reversible). That is to say, all the same equations could be put together the other way around and time could run backwards just as easily as it runs forwards. This leads to a number of absurd conclusions — the traditional example being that it is much easier to stir the milk into your coffee than it is to stir the milk back out of your coffee (even turning the spoon backwards doesn’t fix this). The other common example is a snooker break where the red balls start in a triangle and scatter out all over the table, so try to set it up where the balls are all over the table and cluster together to land in a neat triangle — impossible to really do but all the Newtonian equations say it works.
By the way, if you search on YouTube, there’s an example of Richard Hammond demonstrating how to stir the milk back out of your coffee but he totally cheats. Interesting never the less.
Do you mean the “hamster” Richard Hammond, or another one?
I think it was this one —
http://www.metro.co.uk/tv/reviews/862675-richard-hammonds-engineering-connections-was-an-excuse-to-blow-things-up
Yep, that’s the hamster.
Newtonian physics was devised before the concept of entropy, but I dunno how to reconcile Einstein’s physics with it
Future events can be predictable without being strictly knowable. An otherwise-omniscient God who does not know the future could still accurately predict a fair amount of it from his perfect understanding of physics. A God who “knows the hearts of men” could also predict human actions, at least in the near future as with Peter’s denial. Also consider that many “prophecies,” especially related to the end times, are really just promises that God will do what the prophecy says.
I think we humans may not be able to tell the difference between a God who genuinely knows the future and one who doesn’t but still knows everything else.
It sounds like Gene is advocating “open theism”. This is not the traditional view held by the Christian church, and I agree that the Bible passages that you quote are evidence against this view.
This kind of seems like, “Could God make a bowl of nachos so hot that he himself could not eat it?” It’s one of those questions which seems to make sense because of the language construct, but does not describe the reality of the situation. The two parts make sense, but together they become dribble. The logical structure of our mind does not allow for us to understand the sequence a < b < c < a. We cannot say God does or does not know unless God exists in the same way we exist. If God created the universe, then it is certainly possible he knows the effects of his creation which would seem to us as future knowledge. If we have free will, then God did not cause our actions. I am posing that one, none, or both could be true and it would not change anything. We perceive free will and so we must carry on as such. To believe otherwise makes renders our decisions inconsequential.
The logical structure of our mind does not allow for us to understand the sequence a < b < c < a.
No, the logical axioms of mathematics reliably infer that “a < a" is necessarily a false statement. These axioms are only assumptions really and may of course be completely incorrect (or may not be applicable to the physical world) but if you are going to deny those basic mathematical axioms then what do you mean by proposing a statement like "a < a" in the first place?
It must be boring to know everything in advance with apodictic certainty. I would argue that God made himself forgetting the future, so that he can be surprised by things to come. And I think God wouldn’t give a damn about what Einstein or Minkowski said about that..
😉
Nice. God’s got Himself a Neuralyzer just like Tommy Lee Jones.
That solves the predestination problem.
Next.
I am confused. I thought the whole purpose of our time on earth was to test our faith. Why test it if you already know the outcome — why not just skip the earth stage?
Yes, I agree. For my point of view you definitely need the existence of real free will in people for religion like Christianity to work. You don’t need it for economics (there you only need a currently existing ignorance of what really drives human decisions), but religion cannot make sense without free will. And wouldn’t this imply some sort of (maybe self-inflicted) ignorance in God’s knowledge?
Computer programmers cannot program true randomness, they can only do pseudo randomness or borrow their “seeds” for their code from some natural event.
What if omnipotence means to be able to create true randomness, real unpredictable free will?
I think you are partially correct.
Free will does permit religion; either you chose to believe or you don’t. But, free will negates the existance of an omnipotent, omniscient deity and vice versa.
This question was precisely what set me on the path to atheism in 8th grade when I posed it to my Catholic school religion teacher.
Sufficed to say, she had no answer.
This question was precisely what set me on the path to atheism in 8th grade when I posed it to my Catholic school religion teacher.
Sufficed to say, she had no answer.
It’s a good thing you never asked your 8th grade math teacher a question she couldn’t answer. It would be hard going through life not being able to count.
Hasn’t hurt Gene.
More to the point, JFF said the lack of a clear answer started him on the striahgt and narrow, not that it was what kept him there.He still hasn’t heard a good answer is my bet.
In about grade 4 I got tyhe deepest lesson in theology. Explaining some mystery my Sunday school teacher asked “Do we understand? No. Do we believe? Yes.” Not me was my (ungrammatical) reaction, but agian, it was only an early step.
Perhaps from God’s standpoint, there is no substantial difference between skipping it and not skipping it.
So that we can see what our choices will be.
If Matt G is correct (I’m not certain he is) then we should look at what else is changed . . . us.
I thought the whole purpose of our time on earth was to test our faith.
You’ve been misinformed.
“His whole argument rests on the premise that the future is, in principle, unknowable. But that’s sort of the thing under dispute. I claim that the future is, in principle, knowable–after all, God knows it!”
I like where this is going!
“No, I think the novel is already written, and yet it seems to be unfolding in “real time” to us, just like Luke Skywalker really doesn’t know what he’s going to face at Cloud City. But those events are certainly “knowable”; George Lucas knew them for a while, and now so do those of us who have seen The Empire Strikes Back.”
That PROVES it!
“36 “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven,[e] but My Father only.””
Alternative interpretation: God actually has the power to make things happen on earth. So he can choose when to flood and start a war, even if he doesn’t know their exact outcomes.
“30 Jesus said to him, “Assuredly, I say to you that today, even this night, before the rooster crows twice, you will deny Me three times.””
But this is something Jesus has direct control over.
I think religious study will eventually incorporate more simulation-style reasoning.
We can think of God running the universe program. He can always pause the program, copy it, run the copy off to the side, and see what happens. He can then resume the normal program and nudge it toward or away from some result state.
marris that’s surprisingly close to how I reconcile God’s sovereignty with free will. I predict I will blog on this within the next 2 weeks.
My simulation concurs.
BTW, my thinking on this heavily influenced by computer science. I think this discussion of Newcomb’s Paradox is an example of how to do really cool, really modern high philosophy.
http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec18.html
Im still not liking this who programmer analogy….
it suggests too much about God not having knowledge of actions and that He is somehow waiting around for us to act.
full disclosure, me = programmer
What does “waiting” mean when you can speed up the simulation?
Agreed. I’m also a programmer . . . and this seems to imply more than I’m willing to accept without considerable more thought.
Nor do I like it. It just seems a confused notion. First I thought god was omnisicent, so why should he wait? Next, not all programs halt, and the halting problem is unsolvable. If god can solve the halting problem he has capabilities far beyond needing to wait. And then of course, how does god know there isn’t a bug in his code? If he can know that without testing then again why does he even need to run the simulation?
> First I thought god was omnisicent, so why should he wait?
This program analogy is a way to wrap one’s head around omniscience. It doesn’t really matter whether there *is* a universe computer… just whether thinking about a computer provides a good way to grasp the relevant concepts.
> Next, not all programs halt, and the halting problem is unsolvable. If god can solve the halting problem he has capabilities far beyond needing to wait.
Why would the halting problem be an issue here? We’re talking about running the simulation and seeing what it does. I think the questions that arise are all recursively enumerable, not Turing.
[BTW, I think God would be able to solve the halting problem if he can run the universe on a Zeno computer, but it doesn’t really matter here.]
> And then of course, how does god know there isn’t a bug in his code? If he can know that without testing then again why does he even need to run the simulation?
OK, now I’m *really* not sure what we’re talking about. Code has *bugs* because it’s behavior does not match some separately specified description. Here, we’re talking about what program *as constructed* does.
Why wouldn’t the halting problem be an issue? Bob gas god ‘fine-tuning’ parameters willy-nilly. Collapsing wave functions. How can you say all god’s problems are RE? [Are you omnicient? 🙂 ]
The metaphor has god waiting to see. I don’t see how that helps explain omniscience. It might explain how god can insure that his plans come to fruition, that suffering is maximized or that cancer is never cured or any other whim of his could be fulfilled, I can see how it is a metaphor for his POWER but not his omnicience.
> Why wouldn’t the halting problem be an issue?
I don’t see where the halting problem arises here, or what “fine-tuning” or collapsing wave functions has to do with it.
If all God cares about is whether, given the current configuration, Ken B can get from point A to point B *within Ken B’s lifetime,* this is a finite problem. The halting problem does not arise. Maybe there is some complexity issue, but not a halting one.
I think there is another point, however which this universe simulation analogy does not address. Real omniscience means more than being able to answer questions about your universe simulation. It probably *does* mean that you can answer other questions as well, like whether a computation will halt. But I’m not sure why you wouldn’t run into a “can God make a stone so heavy even He cannot lift it” paradox.
The good thing about the simulation model is that it provides a really powerful computation model, without raising this kind of paradox.
And it’s clear enough to resolve disputes raised by Bob and Gene.
> Why wouldn’t the halting problem be an issue?
I don’t see where the halting problem arises here, or what “fine-tuning” or collapsing wave functions has to do with it.
If all God cares about is whether, given the current configuration, Ken B can get from point A to point B *within Ken B’s lifetime,* this is a finite problem. The halting problem does not arise. Maybe there is some complexity issue, but not a halting one.
I think there is another point, however which this universe simulation analogy does not address. Real omniscience means more than being able to answer questions about your universe simulation. It probably *does* mean that you can answer other questions as well, like whether a computation will halt. But I’m not sure why you wouldn’t run into a “can God make a stone so heavy even He cannot lift it” paradox.
The good thing about the simulation model is that it provides a really powerful computation model, without raising this kind of paradox.
And it’s clear enough to resolve disputes raised by Bob and Gene.
“But I’m not sure why you wouldn’t run into a “can God make a stone so heavy even He cannot lift it” paradox.”
For the record I agree. That paradox has no answer. The reason is that an unrestrained god iwho can do ‘anything’ is an inconsistent idea. Gene’s god can make 1=2. Usually only Gene’s arguments lead to that conclusion.
The simulation argument assumes something major though:
A dimension that we inhabit that God is also constrained by, in this case time. So any equation can only be “solved” by God in two ways
1) God has to discretize that unknown dimension, which introduces necessary prediction errors, such as numerical diffusion or advection. Hardly a good prediction model if there are numerical uncertainties that accumulate over time.
2) God has the analytical solution to the equations; in which case there is no reason to run a simulation since can God already solve the equation(s) assuming the appropriate number of knowns and equations.
I’m not saying your analogy has to be perfect or anything but that analogy clearly is limiting God’s All-knowing because you are requiring God to “solve” something time-dependent (iterating over time or space or whatever). This means the God marris described just doesn’t know whats going to happen that is why Marris-God has to wait, even if just for a fraction of a second. So your God cannot be reconciled with God being timeless.
Bottom line is that any analogy you use must place God outside of time and therefore actions requiring time like “lifting” or “solving” are useless and invoke a limitation or lacking being ascribed to God. That ain’t right or consistent with scripture.
I feel like I’m kind of agreeing with Ken on this one.
“I feel like I’m kind of agreeing with Ken on this one.”
As Ronald Reagan once said , it only hurts the first time.
🙂
I don’t understand this discretize argument. It’s not like me trying to model a complicated smooth-ish structure by breaking it into pieces.
In the analogy, the universe *is* a program. God is not creating a program that models a *separate* universe. There’s no need to discretize anything. If he runs his simulation with a Plank-length, then that’s all we will observe in the universe.
There is no need to solve an additional closed form or anything.
Don’t get me wrong though…
I just agree with you that the analogy is not functional and opens the door for the “lifting a stone” paradox. It is agreement nonetheless i suppose!
Just the question “Can God create a rock so heavy he cannot lift it?” is constraining God with the question because it assumes God somehow “lifts” like we do and has limited might.
But maybe ill just leave it on a the positive note that we agree… 🙂
I look forward to that post 🙂
That comes back to the halting problem… which is Godel’s Theorem in disguise. It is provable that within all the well-known computing engines (i.e. binary arithmetic, Von Neumann architecture, etc) at least some computer programs exist for which the only way to figure out what they do is to run them.
Quantum computing (as far as I know) does not suffer from the halting problem, but then again, it doesn’t presently work properly either. If it so happens that the halting problem is deeply embedded in the process of finding those results at all, then this would also imply that a class of algorithms exist that cannot be run on a quantum computer. This may not be an issue for people using a quantum computer to solve some other algorithm, but you have to ask yourself how the atoms “know” which algorithm is being run over them (i.e. how the “know” when to work and when not to work).
Biblical prophecy, it’s the only explanation.
Or the bible is made up of stories written down long after the fact. Hillary Mantell’s Wolf Hall, which was written just a few years ago, accurately predicted the execution of Thomas More.
Or vague phrases are given explicit meaning retroactively. Nostradamus is vindicated year after year, for the same predictions.
Or the stories are just made up later for theological use. George Washington chopped down a cherry tree.
Ken B. wrote:
Biblical prophecy, it’s the only explanation.
Ken, why do you always insist on being such a wiseguy, when no one here holds the view you are knocking down? I specifically said when I started quoting the Bible that doing thus doesn’t mean Gene is wrong. If you go and read the comments at his post, he was acting like his views were compatible with the Bible’s claims, and so that’s why I went through this demonstration.
I could ask Bob, why you always insist on letting your personal dislikes get in the way of dealing with substantive criticism? My comments bear directly on your use of Mark 14. (And of course on your argument by martyrs, where you claim Jesus prophesied his own death & resurrection, so it is not true that no-one holds the views I criticize here.)
Bob,
There are a few alternatives that are not explicitly refuted by your verses. First, is the concept of predictive foreknowledge where God knows enough to be able to accurately predict the future. Second, is akin to Brownian motion where God knows the mean, and thus the major events, but the free “random” choices fall within a distribution, so that nothing “surprises” God. Thirdly, God chose to make “predicted” events happen.
I am interested in Gene’s thoughts since Augustine, the Doctor of the Catholic church, clearly believes in foreknowledge of the Bob Murphy variety and explicity rebuts Cicero’s concept of free will which Gene seems to adhere.
The sheer fact that God exists outside of time means that using phrases like “waiting around” or “predicted” are meaningless for describing the nature of God. The Bible (Old testament) even states quite clearly that God just says Be and it is (cannot remember the exact locations but comments like God is the beginning and the end; the alpha and the omega; …etc). There is no processing time. It just is. Things just are.
The wonderful example or analogy of this is the Flatworld concept which only 2D people inhabit. To a 3D person looking down on Flatworld we could take a 3D object on the table surface, say a cube, and lift it and place it somewhere else. To the Flatworlders it would appear as though a square just teleported from one place to another.
Consider time as being another plane of which God exists outside of. To us it would appear as though things are moving forward in time and so everything is happening in a sequence (the arrow of time). To God things aren’t happening, they just are, and therefore there is no need to predict anything. So in this case, we simultaneously have free-will to the extent that God permits it and God already knows our choices because he isn’t waiting for us to move. The lack of intervention is God permitting us to be free and is a mercy on all that exists.
QED?
One can never see anything as it is in the present.
We’re always seeing things as they were in the (often very recent) past, no sooner than t = d/c ago, where d is distance and c is the speed of light.
This isn’t even including the time it takes for our minds to make a conception after receiving visual stimulation, which is also required before knowledge can be considered to exist.
There is no empirical knowledge of present events. There is only empirical knowledge of past events. Some past events can only repeat, while other past events do not have to repeat. Physical laws fall into the former category, while egoist action falls into the latter.
You looking out your window at a tree and you forming an expectation that it will be there in the future, is similar to you looking at the Sun (not too long I hope!) and forming an expectation that it to be there in the future. It’s an induction.
If the tree disappears for some reason, then you won’t know about it until t = d/c has elapsed. If the sun disappears for some reason, then you won’t know about it until around 8 minutes have elapsed The further out into space you look, the further back in time the events that you claim as knowledge have occurred.
Why do people make inductions of past events, based on constancy? This inference of constancy over time for empirical events is ultimately rooted in the constancy of the self, the subject. I am constantly re-creating myself by re-recognizing my body, and in so doing I develop a unique and constant “me” that is carried over through time. I might have looked different in the past, I might have had different knowledge in the past, I might have been physically different in the past, but there is still a very clear and very real “me” throughout that time. It is this inkling of constancy, derived from self-awareness, that frame one’s thinking of objects.
The “self” is constant through time, and so why not look for constancies outside of the self? Ergo God is born. God is the self reified outside the self. God is awakened in the mind that seeks to find its constant self outside of the self.
This is why creation stories resemble the form “The self (God) starts as singular and perfect, and then splits itself to form subject (God as creator) and object (Earth as creation).” The grand and lofty creation stories are a product of how the minds works.
Each individual “me” in the world is unique. They each occupy their own independent locations, their own independent event horizons, their own independent bodies. Each “me” that is self-aware realizes itself to be unique, that is, some one thing and not anything else. How each self deals with that realization is up to each self.
All the implications of the unique constant self are responsible for the belief in an empirical unique constant God. It is why believers in God as a group have never completely agreed as to what God is and what God does. Each individual has their own independent conception of God. Since individual humans are similar in some respects, there arises similar attributes of God that are agreed to, such as all knowing, and all powerful. But these agreements are not exhaustive. They only go so far. There are differences in conceptions of God, and these differences arise from the fact that each individual is itself unique beyond the similarities they may share with other individuals.
No matter what you think of me, you will only ever address a part of me. Human, male, blond haired, 200 lbs, anarchist, etc. These names will never exhaust me. I am unique. Names and attributes can only ever refer to common attributes between me and other things. Unique entities cannot be fully described by other entities. Full experience of unique entities can only be had by the unique entities themselves.
Similarly, no names and no attributes can fully express a unique God. Theists may believe the God they have in mind shares certain attributes with the theists, such as “good”, “knowing”, “creative”, and so on, but these attributes can never exhaust a unique God, for the same reason the unique Ego can never be so exhausted. Hence there has never been, and never will be as long as self-aware beings exist, universal agreement among believers as to what God truly is and what God truly does. For theists will only ever be manifesting their own unique selves.
——————–
Imagine a bowl consisting of an orange, an apple, and a grape defining the God of all fruits. The fruits may agree that God is juicy, sweet, and round, but the grape will insist God is purple, the apple will insist God is crunchy, and the orange will insist God has thick skin. Moreover, each fruit in the basket will only recognize the juicyness, sweetness, and roundness of the other fruits. The grape won’t know what it’s like to have thick skin like the orange or have crunchiness like the apple, the apple won’t know what it’s like to be purple like the grape or have thick skin like the orange, and the orange won’t know what it’s like to be purple like the grape or to be crunchy like the apple.
Only the egoist grape, the egoist apple, and the egoist orange, will know that there is something about the other two fruits that is completely unique, and so would be silly to either design laws based on grapeness, appleness, or orangeness (statism), or to insist that there can be agreement in describing a God of all fruits (religion).
Some things I think people get wrong. There can be NO free will unless that part of the human soul which we use to freely decide exists outside the laws of physics, i.e. the human being is composed as a physical part that is bound to the laws of physics and the soul which is not bound to the laws of physics.
Bob, I suspect that all Biblical passages such as the ones you cite are consistent with my hypothesis. The one’s you cite certainly are.
I don’t claim God knows *nothing* about the future. My claim is that He cannot know it in the same way he knows the present, since it does not yet exist. This would explain the vagueness of much prophecy: He can see the general outlines, but the details still will surprise him.
I am not the first person to put forward a view like this, by the way: Collingwood did, I believe, but, more importantly, Tolkein did: read the The Music of the Ainur, where Elves and Men can surprise God. (Elves are Tolkein’s version of angels, by the way.)
I wish I had time to read Tolkien (really).
But if God is outside of time (as you said you had no problem with), then to Him, the last day of the world is right in front of His face, just like the first day of creation. It’s like He’s looking at a timeline. Your position would be akin to saying, “God knows what is happening in Brooklyn in this bar, since that’s where I’m blogging from, but He is only dimly aware of what’s happening on Pluto, since He can only infer things using a telescope.”
May I ask why Tolkien is more important on this issue?
Tolkein was the better fiction writer.
Just for the record, since also Gene got it wrong. It is “Tolkien” not “Tolkein”.. !
😉
Thread winner!
Tolkien?….Gene starts musing about the infinite being circumscribed by that which he created( or rather spoke) and he references not Isaac the Syrian or Clement of Alexandria or even the starsy Seraphim of Sarov but Tolkien. It is kairos to stop visiting his blog
Bob,
I think I can clear up some of the confusion here. Gene is a philosophical presentist, meaning that he thinks only the present exists. For a presentist, God being outside of time doesn’t mean that he can see the future, because there is nothing there to see.
I don’t accept presentism myself. But from a presentist perspective what Gene is saying will make more sense.
Blackadder wrote:
I don’t accept presentism myself. But from a presentist perspective what Gene is saying will make more sense.
Well, right, and it “makes more sense” when you tell me so-and-so is a materialist, and that’s why he writes such odd things…
If God learns of the future only as it becomes present, then God experiences temporal flow, which is against the supposition of his being outside of time.
I will add: I think it’s really hard to square presentism with Christianity, though perhaps there is a way to do it. Squaring presentism with modern physics is even harder.
“I think it’s really hard to square presentism with Christianity.”
How so? Presentism does not imply a lack of divine foreknowledge, though it’s of course consistent with it.
“Squaring presentism with modern physics is even harder.”
If you’re talking about special relativity, it’s actually not very hard. All a viable presentist theory requires is a universe-wide relation of absolute simultaneity. That is supplied by neo-Lorentzian theories, such as that of Michael Tooley.
As someone earlier said, the assertion is part of “open theism”, a position advanced by certain theologians, some of whom come out of Protestant, even evangelical, background. Clark Pinnock was one of the main lights of this position. He was a decent man; I became aware of him in the Vancouver, Canada area during the 1970s.
Here’s an interview of his: http://www.homileticsonline.com/subscriber/interviews/Pinnock.asp
And his obit from Christianity Today: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/augustweb-only/43-22.0.html
Open theism is a position contrary to standard (evangelical) Protestant doctrine. It brought Pinnock a lot of criticism.
God exists outside of time and is not constrained by linear chronological time as we understand it. He can cause two events to happen hundreds of years apart (to us) with a single stroke of his omnipotent will. We cannot really imagine anything other than one dimensional, linear time but God apparently sees our past present and future as one already formed “object”.
I submit that to constrain Him to the time dimension that He created for us to live in is to misunderstand the meaning of “eternal” as it is applied to God.
One person left the comment “The sheer fact that God exists outside of time …”. How is that a fact? The Bible doesn’t once say that God is outside of time. I am not even sure being ‘outside of time’ is a coherent statement. Outside of sequence? If time is a statement of the succession of events – this happened, then that happened etc – then what reading of the Bible has God being outside the succesion of events.
Some of the commentators have been right on the following though.
Open theism logically isn’t possible if you go with the whole ‘God is outside of time’ thing. But most Open Theists believe that God is temporal ie inside time.
Prophesy is more about God’s omnipotence than God’s omniscience. re.Peter’s denial – if God can create the world, making a bird crow at the right time isn’t hard.
I’ll add this. The problem is around the nature of the future and time. Not around God’s omniscience. The problem is that Christians have so ingrained the idea that time is a created thing and therefore God is outside of it (Even though the Bible no where speaks of this) – that they have trouble with the Open Theist concept. As soon as the idea is grasped that God isn’t outside of time, then it becomes clear that saying that God cannot know the future in advance, isn’t denigrating His omniscience. It is of the same name as saying ‘God doesn’t know the colour of my daughters hair’ (when I don’t have a daughter). God can’t know the logically impossible to know (like the hair colour of non-existent daughters. Similarly, events involving choices of free will creatures by definition can’t be known in fixed terms in advance because there is a free will element to it. That future hasn’t happened in any kind of way because there is no ‘outside of time’ observer. There isn’t such an observer because it is logically impossible to be outside of time. It is a nonsense sentence to say ‘outside of time’ .To put ‘God is’ in front of that sentence doesn’t make it any more logical.
You can’t go out and buy a bucket full of time. It isn’t a ‘thing’. Hence, it wasn’t part of the creation. It is merely the description of the succession of events.
Lots of things divergent of a Christian understanding of God’s effect on the universe in your comment and as well as others above.
1. Everyone’s understanding of time is flawed as it relates to the physical universe. Both space and time form one continuum, i.e. space-time. They are NOT 2 distinct things.
2. “A certain future hasn’t happened or has happened…”
It’s all relative. In certain frames of reference certain events can be in the past according to one observer or in the future according to another observer… so who is correct?
Did the so called event happen in the past or in the future? It’s all relative as in the “special theory of relativity” or general theory.
Both the past, present, and future exist all at once. You’re all stuck on thinking in 3 dimensions. Space-time is a 4 dimensional continuum.
Free will and purposeful human action has to exist beyond the laws of physics otherwise it isn’t free will.
I think it’s clear that facts about the future exist, and statements concerning the future are presently either true or false. Consider the statement, “Bob Murphy will eat bacon tomorrow morning.” That is a statement about the future. It is presently either true or false. Either it or its negation is a fact. Thus, even if the future is not yet real and so not yet experienced, there is presently a truth/falsity value to statements concerning the future. So what prevents God from knowing the value of such statements?
More interestingly (to me), I don’t think it follows from God’s foreknowledge of actions that those actions occur necessarily (and not as a result of a person’s free will). That is, the mere fact that God knows that a person will behave in a particular way doesn’t mean that that person must necessarily behave in that way–only that the person WILL do so. But the fact that a person WILL behave in that way has no bearing on WHY the person acted that way or, more to the point, whether he or she did so as a result of free will. To illustrate, if God knows (accurately) that “Bob Murphy will eat bacon tomorrow morning,” it follows that Bob Murphy will eat bacon tomorrow morning, but it does not follow either that Bob had no choice in the matter or that God caused Bob to eat the bacon. Foreknowledge is independent of causation and necessity (though someone could posit that the two are related by some other concept, such as I understand Calvinists do by claiming that both God’s foreknowledge of some act and the act itself result from God’s foreordaining the act).
On this second point, I think that the book and program analogies have something to offer, even if they fail (and I’m not saying that they do) in other respects. Namely, the fact that a person (the reader in the book analogy or a user in the program analogy) has foreknowledge of events (what a character will do, on a second read-through, or how a program will behave, after running a copied version) is NOT causally related to those events, and does not necessitate those events–the foreknowledge is, again, independent of the necessity and causation of the event.
” “Bob Murphy will eat bacon tomorrow morning.” That is a statement about the future. It is presently either true or false. ” – actually no that isn’t correct.
It isn’t true or false. Instead it may happen or may not happen. That is a different category than presently true or false. In fact it can’t be presently true or false- because at this present time Bob eating Bacon tomorrow hasn’t been decided upon at all. Up until the last moment it could go either way. It isn’t true or false until tomorrow morning. Until then it is maybe or maybe not. Saying true or false is an a-priori commitment to believing that an observer can be outside of time and know what Bob’s choice was before he made it. But that is the very thing that hasn’t been established (that a being can be outside of time).
Again, it isn’t true or false until tomorrow morning. Until then it is maybe or maybe not.
It makes me so sad when people possess the critical faculties necessary to critique statism but not religion. If we tell people to believe us on political and economic matters because we have rationally sought out evidence for our claims why blow it by telling them they should be christians as a matter of faith? We do damage to the liberty movement by associating it with religion.
If you can read Krugman with skepticism why not Moses?