That is not an answer. Do you or don't you accept the existence of antinomy within the Christian faith? Most Christians do so this isn't some sort of trap, I'm just asking.
I'm not talking about things that we don't fully understand like the Trinity or how God could have existed for an eternity into the past. I'm talking about opennly contradictory things which the theological community, Reformed theologians in particular, call antinomy.
an•tin•o•my
n. pl. an•tin•o•mies
1. Contradiction or opposition, especially between two laws or rules.
2. A contradiction between principles or conclusions that seem equally necessary and reasonable; a paradox.
It was a lot more than a good guess but it was nevertheless still a prediction; a prediction which God Himself could easily have helped to bring to pass (and probably did). God (Jesus) knew Peter better than Peter knew himself and so knew that he would not have the courage to face was about to happen. All that God would have needed to do was to bring Peter to someone's mind who had seen him before (which would not be difficult for God to do) and then once Peter had denied him a third time (he probably would have done it a fourth and a fifth and a sixth time, I think Jesus was being merciful by have said three), all God had to do was to tickle the throat of the nearest rooster. For God, all of this would have been really, really easy, no steeling a sneak peak into the future was necessary.
Further Peter could have chosen not to deny Christ. Had he done so, Jesus would have been astonished at Peter's faith the way He had been towards the centurion's or the Samaritan woman's faith. Peter would not have ruined God's reputation or fouled up the Bible for having done the right thing that night. The only difference would have been there would have been yet another passage in the Bible that Calvinist would be forced to call a figure of speech.
It was not intellectually dishonest. It may have been overly brief but I was at work at the time. Give me at least a little bit of a break here will ya? You know as well as anyone here that I do not play idiotic games like that.
I quite sincerely do not believe that there is any Biblical evidence that God knows the future exhaustively. There certainly isn't any passage that says "God knows the future exhaustively.", nor is there one that says anything like that. There are certainly plenty of passages that speak about God's ability to predict the future and that He has the ability to bring particular things to pass but that doesn't even come close to saying that God knows every event that will ever happen, it just doesn't say that. This coupled with the several instances where God makes a specific prophecy that never did and never will come to pass as stated is proof positive that God does not know the future exhaustively.
Further, as the last hundred or so posts on this thread clearly demonstrate, attempting to reconcile God exhaustively knowing the future with the concept of a free will almost immediately lands you in logical quagmire that cannot be escaped. The whole Christian faith becomes an incoherent mass of meaningless or self-contradictory nonsense.
God cannot know the future because the future is not knowable. The best that can be done is very accurate predictions but that is not the same as knowing for certain. Saying that God cannot know that which cannot be known does no injury to His "perfection" (in quotes because Plato's idea of perfection was stupid) or to His deity. Knowing the unknowable is a logically absurdity. God cannot do the logically absurd no matter how perfect He is. His not knowing the unknowable future does not more harm to His perfection than the fact that God cannot make perfect spheres with 17 sharp corners and 3 rippled sides.
Resting in Him,
Clete
