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halo14x
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2002
Total Posts : 6
| Posted 5/14/2002 7:13 PM (GMT -6) |   | Someone posted this on a different board:
quote:
Regarding the tenth point: It isn't really saying anything about predestination. What it is affirming is that God knows all things including the future. This is included to defeat the error of neotheism (sometimes refered to as openness or open theology).
In a nutshell the tenth point is saying this:
Simply knowing for sure that a person will freely do something is not enough for God to control the world. This is because foreknowledge of an event does not imply direct influence or omnicausality or absolute determination, but merely knows what other wills are doing. In other words, foreknowledge doesn't mean absolute determination. A fine point should be sharpened at this time: God not only grasps and understands what actually will happen, but also what could happen under varied possible contingencies. If God's knowing is infinite, God knows even the potential effects of hypothetical but unactualized possibilities, just as God knows what has or will become actualized.
This idea stated as an argument looks like this:
1) God knows all potential choices.
2) God knows the exact choices.
Therefore, God knows not only what is, but what possibly could be.
Thus it is said that God doesn't merely have a will, but a knowing will. Therefore God's knowing is said to be:
1) Eternally actual, not merely possible.
2) Eternally perfect, as distinguished from a knowledge that begins, increases, decreases, or ends.
3) Complete instead of partial.
4) Both direct and immediate, instead of indirectly reflected or mediated (God knows all things simultaneously).
Therefore God doesn't "think," He knows (Thomas Oden's argument).
Comments anyone?
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Tom
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 5/15/2002 3:07 AM (GMT -6) | | Hey Halo-
Here’s my two cents:
Quote: Simply knowing for sure that a person will freely do something is not enough for God to control the world.
Tom: If God “controls” everything, then the future is eternally settled in his will. He knows it all because he controls it all. If God simply foreknows, then the future is eternally settled in his mind, which besides eing self-contradictory, would provide God no value in ruling the world. For example, God could never access this knowledge to prevent a foreknown evil from occurring.
Quote: This is because foreknowledge of an event does not imply direct influence or omnicausality or absolute determination.
Tom: We’re talking about choices right? So, it doesn’t imply that the choice was determined by the knower (i.e., God), but it does imply that the choice is less that libertarianly free. That is, the determinateness of my choices, if they are known by God before I make them, does not reside in me. Granted, it might not reside in God either. But it’s not residing in ME is what constitutes foreknowledge of them as certain a self-contradiction. Open theists don’t reject simple-foreknowledge because it implies that God has determined our choices. They reject it because it means the determinateness of our choices, that which constitutes our choices as definite and thus as knowable by God, does not come from us. Saying simple-foreknowledge doesn’t mean God’s the one determining our choices doesn’t solve anything.
Quote: God not only grasps and understands what actually will happen, but also what could happen under varied possible contingencies.
Tom: Agreed. But if spoken by an advocate of Middle Knowledge like Bill Craig, these words would mean something different than what they would mean if spoken by an open theist. Because Craig believes God possesses exhaustively definite foreknowledge (i.e., he knows all that will happen as settled), Craig believes God knows future possibilities only as that which might have been (cf. Doc’s article on foreknowledge in Four Views), not as that which may possibly be. There’s a big difference. Molinism holds, as I understand it, that God’s knowledge of possibilities includes only that which God unconditionally and eternally decided to exclude from reality.
Quote: If God's knowing is infinite, God knows even the potential effects of hypothetical but unactualized possibilities, just as God knows what has or will become actualized.
Tom: If by “unactualized possibilities” you mean “that which may be,” then this is the open view. If by “unactualized possibilities” you mean only “that which might have been” then you’re talking about Molinism (Middle Knowledge). If God’s knowledge is infinite, then God also knows what “may be.” In the infinity of God’s knowledge, make sure you include not only what might have been (i.e., possibilities forever excluded from reality, which are certainly known by God) but also that which may be (i.e., possibilities which God knows as possibilities now—which is why the discussion on ‘time’ is important; even if nobody can “prove” their take on God’s relationship to time, open theists need to show that it is at least reasonable to believe that God is not both absolutely timeless, in the sense argued by Paul Helm for example, and temporal).
Quote: Therefore God doesn't "think," He knows (Thomas Oden's argument).
Tom: What about Exodus 13.17? As Israel exits Egypt we are told that God did not lead them on the road through Philistine country though that was the shorter route. Why not? “For God said, ‘If they face war, they might change their minds and return to Egypt.’” Here we are clearly not dealing with events as they appear to our limited human perspective, for God is revealing here something about his own inner thought life, his reason for adopting a particular course of action over against another. In this case the reason is what may “possibly” happen. Since God did not want this possibility to come to pass, he avoided the circumstances which might have brought it about. So, God may “think” infinitely faster (!) than we do, but if possibilities are real to God, and if possibilities and their probabilities are constantly in flux, then God’s knowledge is constantly changing, keeping immediate, infallible, and co-terminus account of the state of reality. If by “God doesn’t ‘think’, he knows” Oden means God’s knowledge never changes to keep account of an ever changing world and that God’s choices are not influenced by what may possibly happen and the relative probabilities, then I’d disagree.
Tom 
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