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Thread: Foreknowledge without predestination

  1. #1
    Senior Member Colonel's Avatar
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    Foreknowledge without predestination

    That should be easier said than done. To you and me it's quite impossible but not to God.

    So how does that work ? I don't pretend to understand that exhaustively but it's quite approachable.

    We may agree that if God is like us and is confined within the flow of time then he cannot know the future without predestining it. Because of the complexity of the myriad of free will decisions that depend on each other to some degree, he cannot know the future exhaustively and predicting it with almost any level of accuracy decades or centuries into the future seems impossible. Except that which he himself will do and which cannot be thwarted by anyone.

    So if God is going to let us act out of free will and not out of predestination then he will have to find himself outside of the flow of time to stand a chance of knowing the future.

    From our early childhood we human beings are used to thinking of the world around us as having three dimensions and as passing through time. That doesn't mean that that is the only way of looking at it. I think the easiest way of visualizing God placed outside time is by thinking of the Universe throughout time as a string of beads going from creation and into eternity. Each bead represents our three dimensional world at one point in time, the next bead represents the next point in time and so on. One may see each bead as a cross section along the time axis, a three dimensional cross section on a four dimensional object. God may interact at any point in time but he is fundamentally placed on the outside of the string and looking at all the beads. He may look at any one bead and he's looking at what is going on in our world at that specific point in time. Which may be any point from beginning to end.

    The big question now is if his looking at one bead and figuring out someone's free will decision made somewhere in our world at that point in time will "lock" that decision. The answer to that is "no", his observation of the decision depends on what that decision is, not the other way around.

    "But that doesn't make his knowledge of all times fore-knowledge" you might say. Fore-knowledge requires that one knows something will happen at an earlier time than when the event actually takes place.

    That's right, it doesn't. Not until he decides to interact with us at an earlier point in time, bringing with him the knowledge he acquired by observing that decision. Meaning he looks up an event in say 1000 AD then interacts in say 300 AD, which could include prophecying in 300 AD what will happen in 1000 AD. Now it's fore-knowledge. The fore-knowledge still depends on the outcome of the event as it happens in the future and not the other way around. Because it was acquired by observing it as it happened, from the outside.

    This is where things get complicated. As most people know who have watched movies about time travel and have thought about the effects of time travel, affecting the past will implicitly affect the here and now. Issuing an exact prophecy of a future event will affect that future because the prophecy itself changes what would eventually develop into the future prophecied of. Knowing the future is one thing but once a prophecy is issued, that future will change and the prophecy is no longer accurate !

    Issuing the prophecy would change the future event which would change the required prophecy which would change the future event and so on, in an infinite loop. Can God cope with that ? Yes, he can. Can he do that without becoming a master manipulator but instead interacting with us in a meaningful way ? Yes, he can. A human being would be unable to figure that out but to God who is all capable, this should be no problem.

    At this point I could introduce the fifth dimension and discuss the results of every possible combination of free will decisions as four dimensional cross sections along the fifth axis. Some would find that impossible to follow, some would think of it as less than a true challenge. Whatever you think of that sentence, I can assure you that I'm in not kidding in any way. It would be a little bit interesting but it's not that important.

    None of the above is particularly philosophical in nature, kind of like "is what we perceive real, or a dream or a lie or maybe something else". It's not much more than applying some hard thinking and logical reasoning to what we all know about our world, that it consists of space and time and that God exists and isn't as restricted by this world as we are.

  2. #2
    Senior Member Colonel's Avatar
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    The nature of prophecy vs free will.

    If God prophecied 100 people's exact doings on some day in the future and told everyone including them then at least some of them would try hard to make his prophecy fail. Maybe they would have done those things if He hadn't issued a prophecy in advance but now that they have been told, they will do something else.

    So how is it possible to prophecy anything since there will be naysayers that will now have an opportunity to prove the prophet wrong ? The answer to that is that it isn't possible to prophecy with detailed accuracy what someone will do of their own free will. It's in the nature of free will that it cannot be done.

    What can be done is to prophecy with some obscurity and then those who have discernment will understand when the things prophecied come to pass. The book of Revelation largely falls into this category. An other possibility is to prophecy with detail but in such a way that noone will be able to figure it all out until after the events prophecied have come to pass. Daniel's prophecies concerning empires four centuries into the future fall under this category.

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  4. #3
    re: "That should be easier said than done. To you and me it's quite impossible but not to God."

    Does He have any input in the creation of a person?

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    Super Moderator Quest's Avatar
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    I recall a lengthy debate here some years back...I was perplexed that some believed God 'could not...'. Can He truly KNOW the antichrist is going to have a man...

    I was reading an article the other day about companies that were implanting their employees....as someone who has been around a lot of years I can SEE that human beings, despite what they know will still chose things ...the power of the will to direct the brain to override facts and information still amazes me even in my own life...

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