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The topic has changed several times anyway.
ARCHIVE: Open Theism part 2
- Thread starter Nathon Detroit
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The topic has changed several times anyway.
God does not need to learn how to create. He is all-knowing and therefore knows everything knowable.
Yet post creation, God learns in a different sense. God created beings with a will, and therefore He learns in the sense that He sees what these creatures do with their will.
For instance....
God didn't need to enroll in the class "How to create Adam 101". Yet God did learn what Adam would name the animals as that event transpired.
Genesis 2:19 Out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them. And whatever Adam called each living creature, that was its name.
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elected4ever
New member
God knows all things knowable so then He must also know what is not knowable so God knows all things.
elected4ever
New member
1. God has the power to remove our will. A blatantly false statement. God cannot remove our will without violating His on Word. To do so would cause Him not to be God.
2. God does not typically (if ever) remove our will. sense this statement hinges on the validity of the first statement it is false as well. The true statement is that God never removes the will of man.
Lon
Well-known member
1. "cannot without." Once you put the qualifier in: "God cannot because...."
It becomes "Will not..." Because it becomes a discussion of "Can" (which Knight was saying) Vs. "Won't."
2. I don't even want to address this. I wonder if at one time I did.
(Lon moves off into self contemplation......)
"I'm looking for strings. Ah yes, there is one there called "Sovereignty," it appears to be attached to my head. Another called "Controlled by the Spirit," seems to be attached internally somehow. Here's "Love of the Father." Ooo look: "Sound doctrine!" Why didn't I see these strings before? Am I free or what?!!!"
( He 'almost' voices these quiet contemplations): "Was that outloud?"
"I got no strings to tie me down, to wind me up, spin me around. I got no strings, its plain to see, there are no strings on me......" (jiggy dance time)
elected4ever
New member
I think you are grasping at straws here. Having a will is part of the way God created man. let me ask you, Lon, Is God bound by His word or not? How good is God's word to you? To me, the entertaining of the idea that God would change his word is horrible. I shows a basic mistrust of God. I have enough problems dealing with people who are two faced, I can't deal with a god that is also two faced. There is no hope in a lying god.
We would not impugn the character and ways of God by blaming Him for heinous evil. The perpetrator, not God, is culpable and will be judged in the end.
We would remind her that God neither intended nor desired evil.
Suffering does not happen in order for men to be free. It is a possibility because we are free to love or hate. It is not a certainty or necessity. Love, freedom, and relationship are higher good for God and man despite the possibility of abuse and negative consequences.
God in his wisdom does not always intervene immediately. The world would be chaos if He did. If He did so all of the time, He basically would have to destroy us in justice and not extend patient mercy. God's delay of justice is not a denial of it. Revoking freedom has implications as much as allowing evil to flourish for a time.
There is vastly more comfort and clarity to recognize that other free moral agents can do things contrary to God's will and that they will be judged and held accountable for these things, than to try to reconcile a holy, good, loving, just God with meticulous control and the problem of evil and suffering (apart from recognizing other agents that can rebel, disobey, resist...for a time).
God, in His love and mercy, is able to provide hope, comfort, ability to forgive, and heal in Christ, in the interim until we see Him and are made whole.
God is grieved and broken-hearted over sin and its consequences. He is not impassive. He came and died to mitigate our self-created disaster. Saving the soul trumps physical or emotional healing (long vs short term). He does not affirm evil as His will, but resists and rejects it as contrary to His will. The gospels present a warfare model of sovereignty, not a blue print model.
Properly understood, there are more credible answers and comfort from a free will theism worldview than a deterministic one.
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God is infinite in wisdom, knowledge, and ability. He knows the past and present exhaustively.
The issue is that the future does not exist to be known as a certain object of knowledge. It is correctly known as possible, not actual.
God is infinite in intelligence. He is all-powerful. He can rationalize, think, contemplate. He is creative. A human artist or inventor can use our finite intelligence and create things of beauty or useful function. How much more can the infinite God do this inherently without needing to 'learn'.
The way God's knowledge changes is when contingent, possible choices/events become certain or actual. He then knows reality as it is. He knows it as certain, instead of possible. This is unrelated to raw intelligence and ability to think, create, act, relate, etc.
e.g. God contemplates creation, speaks the Word, and it comes into existence. This does not require a learning curve. It is part of His ability as a perfect, infinite, intelligent being.
Yesterday, God knew that it was possible that I would sit on TOL and type some responses. Based on His knowledge of my past (tendencies, desires, etc.), He knows what I may or may not do today. He did not know this trillions of years ago, because I did not exist nor did my choices exist. Now that I am actually typing, His possible knowledge of contingencies as moved to certain knowledge. The potential, open future is now the fixed past through the present. He sees my posts, my spelling mistakes, etc. and has learned new things as I bring new realities into existence (he has not learned new theology, but has now seen what I posted with my own creative mind). This post simply was not a possible object of certain knowledge trillions of years ago, so it was no deficiency in God's omniscience to not know a nothing?!
The issue is the nature of the future and what is a possible object of certain knowledge or not (the crucifixion is historical fact and known as such; who will win the 2010 Superbowl involves contingencies and is not settled yet, so it is known as unsettled; God knows reality as it is). The issue is not God 'learning' or whether or not He is omnipotent or omniscient (He is).
There is a sense that God learns. The exact model of cars in our modern world, the way medicine or engineering has evolved, etc. has an element of man's creative ability that may not have been contemplated in certain detail from eternity past. God could imagine a car and know the strong possibility of how man's understanding of transportation would grow, but that does not mean He knew there was a Ford, Toyota, Honda, GM company from eternity past (there was not) or exactly how many cars would be made, sold, destroyed, what things would go wrong with these cars on any given day, etc. These contingencies became objects of knowledge in real space-time, not in eternity past or in some parallel 4th dimension universe.
(this assumes that simple foreknowledge and determinism are problematic and that the open view is correct: there are two motifs where God knows some vs all things and correctly distinguishes possible/actual; past/future).
rehcjam
Member
Wouldn't that be against His character?
Wouldn't that involve annihilation or, in other words, removing someone's personhood which would not be possible as we are eternal?
Doesn't our will define us as persons?
Free will is generally irrevocable, but it can be influenced or limited.
It would also be highly exceptional, not normative, for God to exercise undue influence. The pitiful mess the world is in is evidence that God is not meticulously controlling everything, that God does not unilaterally intervene in everything/always, and that God's will is not the only factor in the universe (by His sovereign will/choice).
Given His omnicompetence and ability to respond to any contingency, we know that evil and evildoers will be 'resolved' in the end. Revelation shows that God will triumph. The gospels show that there is a war between God and Satan/demons/evildoers. Jesus came to oppose sin, Satan, sickness, evil, not affirm it as God's will. He defeats and destroys the enemy at the cross and at a future consummation. In the meantime, God does not always get His way (by His sovereign choice), but justice and truth will prevail in the end (but not always in the moment...see Psalmist's complaints).
rehcjam
Member
How is a non-existent universe knowable? This is similar to the future.
and
How does God learn in a different sense?
rehcjam
Member
This is neither here nor there but Ron Paul has got to be the most annoying avatar.
rehcjam
Member
How does God even know the universe as a possibility when it does not exist and it is not even necessary that it does?
If God is living and growing and learning, how is it that God knows some things and yet needs to learn other things?
I think that you answered pretty well, I am just having a hard time understanding this.
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rehcjam
Member
Don't you think that "free will" is redundant and "will" is sufficient by itself.
The spiritual aspect of someone is their will, it is what commands the physical and is itself not physical.. I view a persons will as their spirit or their essence and while someone or something can impose on a persons will, they cannot, ultimately, destroy it.
elected4ever
New member
It is to most commies and neo-cons.
rehcjam
Member
Hey, no need to be rude.
elected4ever
New member
I wasn't rude. I was just stating a fact. I didn't bring up the subject of my avatar.
rehcjam
Member
Oh. It sounded like you were calling me a commie or neo-con.
I have given hints to resolve the apparent contradiction (nature of reality vs God's intelligence).
I can imagine the possibility of going on a vacation or building a house even though they do not exist in reality. God is perfect in intelligence, creativity, thought, imagination. He is personal and can think. He can contemplate a plant vs animal due to His intelligence and then bring them into reality by His power. Thought precedes action.
The content of reality is changing and growing. Possible, contingent events are becoming actual and certain as we speak. The WAY God knows this (actual vs possible) changes because reality is changing and He knows reality as it is. He still knows all that is knowable. The future is knowable as possible, not actual, in advance. When the potential future becomes the fixed past through the present, God's knowledge changes to reflect the new reality.
Before this generation was born, God did not know the existence of every person and every moral and mundane choices they would make. He does not know how every person will die yet or who will ultimately receive or reject Him (a baby may be murdered before adult choices could ever have been made; a dying baby may be resuscitated, opening up new variables that would not have existed if the baby died; forget science fiction time travel movies...they are absurd since time is unidirectional). As reality and choices change, God learns about these things instantly and knows them exhaustively (unlike us who are limited in knowledge, location, and understanding!).
God knows what He intends to bring to pass. This does not mean the cross was real and finished before Gen. 3 when God announced His plan of redemption. It also does not mean the cross exists now, but that it is a mere memory. God knows reality in the present. He knows the past as a memory, but no longer actual. He knows the future as possible and His knowledge increases as the future unfolds or changes from possible knowledge to certain knowledge. He can know in advance that the First and Second Coming of Christ will happen because He has the ability to actualize what He intends. This still does not mean God sees the Second Coming before it happens of places it chronologically before the first coming.
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