From: D. F. Siemens, Jr. (dfsiemensjr@juno.com)
Date: Fri Jul 04 2003 - 14:59:00 EDT
On Fri, 4 Jul 2003 08:25:10 -0500 "Glenn Morton"
<glennmorton@entouch.net> writes:
in answer to Howard: <snip>
>
> >
> >Meanwhile back at the ranch of earlier issues, do you really want a
> God who
> >predetermines all things? Is the coercive power to predetermine
> >all things a
> >quality to admire in a Deity?
>
> I see no other way for the Deity to be able to predict the future.
> How
> could the predictions of Christ's advent have occurred without
> foreknowledge? Without control, I see no way to have
> foreknowledge.
>
> Glenn
>
Sorry, guys, but you're involved in a what philosophers recognize as a
category mistake. Knowing is not necessarily connected to causing. Are
there not many things you know (at least as well as human beings can
claim to know) which you do not cause? Are there not also in principle
many things you are sure are caused but which are outside of the scope of
your knowledge? Granted, in our finite state, our ability to predict is
circumscribed by the empirical states and causal connections of which we
are aware. And then, apart from vague generalities and hand waving, it
pretty much has to be linear equations even though we recognize
nonlinearities. Much of this springs from the fact that we are creatures
in space and time. We can remember events 5 years ago without spending 5
years getting back to the remembered situation: it's close to
instantaneous. We can similarly imagine events in the future, but this is
more like the wag's claim that imagining is an insurance policy, for the
things he worried about did not happen.
If you insist that God is temporal, then he is similarly restricted. He's
much brighter, but can't know the future. Hence, it is only dumb luck
that the universe has not crashed and burned as the result of unforseen
consequences of the chaos of nonlinearities. One also has to explain what
God was doing before he created the universe and why it took so long
(infinite past time to the Big Bang) to begin the process. I contend that
these and additional problems produces a nonsensical notion of the deity.
What is clearly true in creation is that God sets the rules. None of us
can turn off gravity or turn back time. Moral rules and consequences are
also not in our hands. But this does not necessarily mean that all our
moral decisions and actions are produced by God pulling puppet strings.
Were that so, then no decision would be moral. Note that compulsion
pretty much excludes moral judgments. Almost anything anyone does with a
gun at their head is excused, even though the individual has the option
of saying, "You can kill me, but I won't!" Depending on the
circumstances, we judge the person a fool or a martyr. But if God is
compelling, there is no "I won't!" option, no morality, no "whosoever
will." God's foreknowledge and election (Romans 8:29f; Ephesians 1:4) has
to function with our freedom to chose moral alternatives, something that
cannot be if he is temporal. So he has to be outside of time, seeing the
whole without causing all the events, in control despite human freedom.
This requires that he be beyond human imagination and comprehension, not
one made in the image of the creature.
Dave
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