Post Edited (Chaz Finney) : 2/3/2009 1:46:12 PM (GMT-6)

Alan I think argument 1. begs the question in that it premise 1. defines "omniscience" which is the very issue that we are attempting to prove in the conclusion. Premise 1 "assumes" that omniscience entails that God knows or has considered all counterfactuals concerning the possible worlds that He could have created. 

Argument 2. premise 1 and 2 are what an individual may consider wise but not necessarily what God would consider as wise. We see in scripture the kenosis where Christ voluntarily emptied Himself and limited His omnsicience; with this in mind, it is not too farfeteched an idea that God would purposefully deny Himself knowledge of certain aspects of creation...

Again your closing remarks about God's inability to not entertain certain thoughts because of His essential omnisience is question begging. I am sure that there are scores of sinful thoughts that God does not entertain of His own volition; it is my opinion that God is a free moral agent and not limited by His nature. I view these concepts of nature as descriptive rather than perscriptive. I think that the sinfulness of man describes the lifestyle of choice and not a coercive law of original sin driving him to iniquity.

I think that it is more reasonable to assume that God's ways are not our ways, and His thoughts are not ours; I think we get in trouble when we limit His nature to our systems of logic and epistemology...

I don't think that God had to line up each possible world and review their consequences prior to His creating the actual world...

Thanks for the response.

Bruce; I think most would agree that if God knowingly chose to create a world in which you chose Him for salvation instead of a world in which you were condemned to hell; He would have essentially chose you for salvation...If God knowingly chose to create a world in which you didn't chose Him; I think we could build a case that He ordained you to damnation.

Post Edited (Chaz Finney) : 2/3/2009 9:05:00 PM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (PotOnWheel) : 2/5/2009 5:46:17 PM (GMT-6)

Chaz: I think to assume what and how God knows things is a presupposition that cannot be justified.

Jeff: Then why are you telling us we are wrong?

Chaz: I think it is quite easy to justify the position that we don't know what or how God acquires knowledge; on the other hand it is not possible to justify the positon that we do know how and what God knows.

Tom: Nice to see you back Chaz. Hope you’ve been well.

Jeff’s point I think is that if you’re right about it being impossible to know ‘what’ (forget ‘how’) God knows, then this applies to YOUR claim that God has the sort of knowledge about the future that YOU claim he has just as equally as you claim it applies to open theists who make claims about what God knows. But if you’re able to argue for a particular view of foreknowledge, you obviously think it’s possible to know ‘what’ God knows when it comes to the future, in which case human reasoning and deduction hasn’t prevented YOU from making claims about God’s knowledge. In that case, the open theist is just as free to employ reason and deduction (among other things) to make claims about God’s knowledge as you are.

Nobody’s claiming to be able to sit inside God’s mind and observe his thought processes (whatever they are or are not) from the inside. But we hardly need that kind of access to God to speak truthfully of God’s knowledge of the world.

Chaz: When we attempt to understand God and His knowledge acquisition, the best we can do is define it through the domain of human reasoning viz. our axiomatic or natural deduction. By doing this we are making the supposition that God's mind in His realm, operate by the laws of reason that us humanoids do. I think this is unreasonable…

Tom: It would be unreasonable for us to suppose that our descriptions capture the reality of God without remainder. Whatever we can say about God, in the end God is also more. But it’s not unreasonable to suppose that our language communicates something of the truth about God. If this is not possible, then we are doomed to an absolute agnosticism regarding God.

I like to describe the difference between our ‘language about God’ and ‘God’ as similar to the difference between a ‘map’ and the ‘territory’. The map isn’t the territory. And there’s much about the territory that simply can’t be captured, expressed or comprehended in terms of the limited capacities of a map. But that’s not to say there’s no real correspondence between the two, or that the map doesn’t mediate truth about the territory. One learns something of Chicago by studying a map of the city even if actually visiting and experiencing the city far surpasses anything the map could have communicated about it.

Them’s me thoughts.

T

Tom; did Eternal Security ever get his BB running again? It all seemed to happen when he sensored my comments on Original Sin...

Chaz: Did Eternal Security ever get his BB running again?

Tom: Don’t think so. Haven’t checked in a long time.

Chaz: I would say that there is more we don’t know about the mind of God than we do.

Tom: I’d agree. The question now is What do we DO with that? How do we relate what we do know about God (because God gives it to us to know) to all we do not and cannot fathom about God? This is where people part.

On one end are those who say that all we can’t know about God (because God’s being is uncreated and infinite) qualifies what we can know and qualifies it in an antinomian manner so that what we can know is essentially contradicted by what we cannot know. God doesn’t resolve quandaries and contradictions—God IS the quintessential contradiction, and as finite thinkers we’ll just have to get used to that.

Somewhere near the other end (not on the extreme end though) are those who say that who, what, and how God is are ultimately rational, that is, God ultimately makes sense. There are no ‘ultimate’ contradictions and reality is not intrinsically contradictory. All is resolved in the totality of the truth that God is. So if God is ‘love’ and we can know this, that also means there’s nothing about what we cannot and do not know about God that would ‘contradict’ this. Same for God’s being ‘holy’ or all the other stuff God gives to us to know about him.

So while I agree that there’s more to God than we can possibly know or experience of God or that God is always ‘more’ than he reveals himself to be, I say that this ‘more’, whatever it is, does not contradict what God has revealed of himself to us. I believe God and creation ultimately make sense.

I don’t mean to invalidate Greek Orthodoxy’s basic apophaticism either. There is a sense in which anytime we open our mouths and say “God is…” we’re also saying “God is not….” No language or proposition can capture ALL the truth about God. Like a “map” (language/proposition) that truthfully describes the “territory” (God) but is not itself the territory, cannot capture the ‘reality’, and will always be superseded by an experience of the territory itself, so our language about God. The reality will supersede (not contradict) the map. Likewise, our theology will be superseded (not contradicted) by the experience of God. And ultimately, we won’t need maps at all. We’ll know even as we are known.

Chaz: Scripture gives us a glance through a keyhole but, the bible declares that nobody can search the unsearchable mind of God, his knowledge is limitless.

Tom: Does God know that Chaz is a monkey? No, God does NOT know THIS. So some would say this represents a kind of ‘limit’ to God’s knowing. That is, God knows only what’s true. Falsehoods are things people believe in all the time. But having "limitless knowledge" obviously doesn't include believing things that are false. To say God's knowledge is "limitless" is to say nothing limits God's apprehension of reality and knowlegde of the truth. It doesn't mean that there are truths God can't or doesn't know. God's knowledge is limited to the knowable in other words.

This might seem a bit tautological, but it’s important because what you might say is true about the future I might dispute as being true. You can disagree with me about the truth-value of this or that proposition about the future, but you can’t say that I (as an open theist) am “limiting” God’s knowledge. On the contrary, I would never disagree about anything that’s ‘true’ that God knows it’s true.

Chaz: God's word is not an exhaustive revelation but rather a partial one.

Tom: For sure.

Chaz: His word is sufficient for salvation and holy living but makes no claims with regards to revealing what He knows.

Tom: The Bible makes NO claim whatsoever about what God knows? Really? Scripture has nothing to say about this?

Chaz: As I said in an earlier post; the concept of absolute foreknowledge does not entail that God lined up every possible world before creation, observed the consequences, and then decided which one to choose.

Tom: Chaz, I’m not a believer in the sort of foreknowledge you’re defending, so it’s hard to get motivated to discuss whether or not God's foreknowledge on your view entails knowledge of possible worlds. But don’t you see that you’re exempting yourself from rules you insist must apply to others? You just said the Bible makes “no claims” about what God knows. Well, if that’s true, where do you get your belief in “absolute foreknowledge”? It can’t be from the Bible. You just said the Bible “makes no claims about what God knows” and the 'absolute foreknowledge' view is a claim about what God knows. And you earlier said “God’s knowledge is limitless” (which presumably is a reason why you believe in absolute foreknowledge at all). But if “limitless knowledge” entails absolute foreknowledge, how would such knowledge NOT also include possibilities (possible events, consequences, etc.)? I mean, in removing the knowledge of possibilities from God’s knowledge, you “limit” God’s knowledge. The possibilities are certainly there. And they're there to know. They’re not impossible to know. To not know them would constitute an objectional sort of "limit" to God's knowledge. So a God whose knowledge was really limitless would presumably known all there is to know, and that includes the knowledge of possibilities. But you've just removed the knowledge of possibilities from God’s knowledge. So how is God’s knowledge still “limitless”? And where you do get any of this if the Bible “makes no claims about what God knows”?

Chaz: Frankly none of us knows what His thoughts were before creation or how He went about creating the universe and what exactly His relationship with the universe is that allows Him to condescend and walk with mankind?

Tom: Sure, none of us can fathom it all. But that doesn’t mean we don’t know anything about these things. Like you said, we can know what God’s revealed. Well, looks to me like the Bible describes/reveals God as countenancing ‘possibilities’ (possible events that never occur). So it seems safe to assume that the sort of limitless knowledge God has includes knowledge of ‘possibilities’ as well as ‘actualities’. Do we really have to question whether this is true simply because we’re limited finite creatures who only have a partial revelation of God? Besides, the part that’s revealed (the Bible) reveals God as contemplating/knowing ‘possibilities’ (and basing his providential choices on these possibilities).

Blessings,

Tom

Post Edited (Tom) : 2/6/2009 3:48:37 AM (GMT-6)

Bruce, are you the engineer from Revival Theology BB?

BTW did you know that Paul said that of his PRE-conversion experience, he later goes on to say thanks be to God through Jesus that he was delivered from the his bondage to the flesh. In Romans 6 Paul tells us that grace sets us free from having to sin daily...

"Be ye holy for I am holy"

                    ~The Father

Post Edited (Chaz Finney) : 2/6/2009 7:18:50 PM (GMT-6)

Here's the thing, as we DEFINE determinism, absolute foreknowledge is inconsistent with LFW. Just like there are some things that are true or false as apprehended under the relations of 3-dimensional space and 1-dimensional time. And yet, if there are other dimensions of time and space they are inconceivable to the human mind and thus have nothing to do with our definitions and apprehensions. And thus, they have nothing to do with actual conceptions or deductions humans can make.

In short, it is pointless to pretend that we can have definitions having to do with relations inconceivable to the human mind. Moreover, everything IS explicable with open theism anyway. So the ignorant view doesn't contribute anything to what rational philosophy is about--namely, accounting for, in a manner consistent with our HUMAN categories of thought, our experience. The minute philosophical inquiry steps outside those bounds, it's all subjective and, thus, relative to the tastes or absolutely UNIQUE experiences of the individual.

Post Edited (Similtude) : 2/7/2009 12:44:07 PM (GMT-6)

You are right Sim;

The ignorant view contributes nothing but merely plays the mystery card and is "philosophically uninteresting". But the IV is painfully truthful; there is much that is unexplainable and unknowable and what mysteries God has revealed in His word cannot be answered by philosophy or logic. But some of these mysteries are accounted for in the philosophic community too.

For example epistemologists employ the concept "clairvoyance" to describe a 6th sense or the power to foresee the future; yet no one can explain it by logic. God may have this clairvoyance by which He see's the future as well, so the IV isn't so tautological or vacuous as some may say it is.

Another conundrum: God exists in three persons, yet God is one, this doctrine seems to violate one of the primary laws of thought viz. identity; yet many of us trinitarians are willing to play the mystery card as well. I think the Christology and incarnation also may violate certain laws of reason as well.

So, a philosopher doesn't necessarily have to understand or have an answer for all things to be considered to have a valuable position or opinion.

I have posted on this BB many times that every single theory or view of knowledge begs the question and is circular; none the less most epsitemologists are common sense realists and willing to grant that we possess knowledge dispite the fallacy of circularity. Some will argue this point, at least those who get paid for teaching epistemology, but I have read all the arguments from the naturalized folks, the externalists, the coherentists, and foundationalists, and they all fall prey to these fallacies. Coherentists and some externalists are the worst in that they attack the foundationalists for their "basic beliefs" and then come up with their own stealth version of basic beliefs or systems of beliefs, or reliabel sources. They call them "properly basic" or put special empahsis on sense knowledge - but a rose is a rose by any other name.

If you don't believe me, try proving that your eye sight is a reliable source of knowledge without relying on your eye sight to prove it. Try to prove that you have an instance of knowledge by a criteria that doesn't rely on an instance of knowledge...The Correspondence theory of truth (which is what most of us submit to) is subject to an infinite regress or circularity as well. Again most of us are willing to overlook the circularity for sake of pragmatism.

In closing, all philosophy is plagued by circularity, infinite regress, or mystery, it is only a matter of how much one is willing to accept. So the IV isn't as useless as you may think it is. Do you realize that for Jesus to predict that Peter would deny Him three times would have required that Jesus knew millions of free will decisions leading up to the denial? I would attribute His foreknowledge of this event to a sort of clairvoyance that is unexplainable to the human mind.

If you are only going to accept that which doesn't violate any laws of logic or reason, you are going to end up in the tank with Descartes and assume that we know very little. Most of our natural deduction and axiomatic systems are grounded on certain presuppositions that the philosophic community generally agrees on.

Food for thought,

Chaz

Post Edited (Chaz Finney) : 2/7/2009 2:51:57 PM (GMT-6)