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Jim Mottl
Registered Member
Date Joined Oct 2003
Total Posts : 57
| Posted 7/12/2004 9:55 AM (GMT -6) |   | If OV says that God cannot know what does not exist, then did He not know the outcome of creation until after He created it?
Thanks,
Jim | | Back to Top | | |
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John Earp
Registered Member
Date Joined Oct 2002
Total Posts : 1715
| Posted 7/12/2004 2:17 PM (GMT -6) | | quote:
Originally posted by Jim_Mottl
If OV says that God cannot know what does not exist, then did He not know the outcome of creation until after He created it?
Thanks,
Jim
Actually, I don't hear too many OVers saying God cannot know what does not exist any more. I could be missing something, but it appears to me that most OVers (at least on this board) define omniscience as:
"God knows all truths, and believes no falsehoods."
Where the OV differs from the classical view is that we find Scripture to indicate that some of the truths God knows are possibilities. In other words, the OV says that the future is to some extent composed of possibilities, while the classical view says that that content of the future consists of 100% certainties.
Given this understanding of the OV, your question is not pertinent to the Open View. The Open View has never said God doesn't know what HE's planning to do (such as, think before he speaks, "let there be light.")
"The Discovery of new truth will modify old views and opinions, and there is perhaps no end to this process with finite minds in any world." Charles G. Finney, Systematic Theology.
revivaltheology.net
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Jim Mottl
Registered Member
Date Joined Oct 2003
Total Posts : 57
| Posted 7/12/2004 2:50 PM (GMT -6) | | quote:
Given this understanding of the OV, your question is not pertinent to the Open View. The Open View has never said God doesn't know what HE's planning to do (such as, think before he speaks, "let there be light.")
I understand what you are saying, I mean, I know what I'm thinking. But, that is not my question. I want to know if God knew that the creation He created before He created it was going to be the creation He was planning to create? In other words, did God know the future of His creation? Or did He say, "Oh no, the Sun is a little too hot, I better cool it off a bit" Does that make sense?
So, even though God knew He was going to create, it still doesn't exist. Therefore, to me, and what I have read from Greg and others, is that if something does not exist, then God cannot know it. God only knows all of reality, that is, of all things that exist, God knows.
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Jim | | Back to Top | | |
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John Earp
Registered Member
Date Joined Oct 2002
Total Posts : 1715
| Posted 7/12/2004 3:35 PM (GMT -6) | | quote:
Given this understanding of the OV, your question is not pertinent to the Open View. The Open View has never said God doesn't know what HE's planning to do (such as, think before he speaks, "let there be light.")
quote:
I understand what you are saying, I mean, I know what I'm thinking. But, that is not my question. I want to know if God knew that the creation He created before He created it was going to be the creation He was planning to create? In other words, did God know the future of His creation? Or did He say, "Oh no, the Sun is a little too hot, I better cool it off a bit" Does that make sense?
The Open View affirms God's infinite intelligence, which I'm pretty sure would preclude the question you're raising. If you mean that God had to fiddle with his creation a bit to get it "just right," then I would say that would flatly contradict his supreme and infinite intelligence. The status of the future is not really relevant to this issue, as far as I can tell--as God's knowledge and intelligence is PERFECT, the creation that he designed would likewise be perfect (when he created it, not after sin marred it).
quote:
So, even though God knew He was going to create, it still doesn't exist. Therefore, to me, and what I have read from Greg and others, is that if something does not exist, then God cannot know it. God only knows all of reality, that is, of all things that exist, God knows.
What the Open View says is that future contingencies are indefinite, and that they do in fact have to be resolved (actuated) before they can be said to be "definitely this and not that." The Open View affirms the Scripture as expressing reality when it reveals God saying, "if" with regard to future possibilities.
"The Discovery of new truth will modify old views and opinions, and there is perhaps no end to this process with finite minds in any world." Charles G. Finney, Systematic Theology.
revivaltheology.net
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Newcomb
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 116
| Posted 7/18/2004 6:13 AM (GMT -6) | | quote:
Originally posted by Jim_Mottl
I want to know if God knew that the creation He created before He created it was going to be the creation He was planning to create? In other words, did God know the future of His creation? Or did He say, "Oh no, the Sun is a little too hot, I better cool it off a bit" Does that make sense?
So, even though God knew He was going to create, it still doesn't exist. Therefore, to me, and what I have read from Greg and others, is that if something does not exist, then God cannot know it. God only knows all of reality, that is, of all things that exist, God knows.
I would answer a little different from those above.
I think that God did fiddle with creation as he created. Some things look like this. WHile everyone believes in micro evolution (guppies change colors and make variations, but they are still guppies) I do see the way things are ordered and wonder if God didn't create an animal or plant then change the design and create another based on it with other variations.
To the latter point: If God decided not to create something he had originally planned to create, say, a much larger predator than T-Rex, he might have done so because he knew its potential damage it would do to the other animals or balance in creation. He could certainly know the potential of this animal he didn’t create just as I can know the potential of making a bomb and setting it off without actually doing it or without actually knowing who would use it or who would be injured by it in the future.
Conversely, say he created a certain kind of flower and liked what he did (he does) so he decided to add another with certain characteristics of the first but somehow different. Say, he created the apple and liked the blossom more than he anticipated, and decided to make the rose based on the same five petal design.
He certainly can learn from his creation. He certainly can change his mind to the negative (deciding not to created something he had planned, or destroy something he already created, see Genesis 7-8) or in the positive (create something he hadn’t originally planned).
If he decided not to create my super T-Rex, then he might have done so because he knew the potentiality of the beast, not because he wanted to save a specific animal that might have been killed. He would not have known the thoughts of a specific uncreated animal but would have know the potential of the uncreated animal.
I know how to make great aquariums. I know I can choose to set one up in my living room. I can choose to do so or not to do so. If I decide to do so I can choose the plants I want to grow in it. As I do the layout I may change my mind about a plant based on the knowledge of how that plant might behave, and then choose not to put it into the aquarium. While I do not know exactly how the plant would behave, I would know the potentiality of that plant to, say, take over the aquarium and become a pest.
Likewise I can think about putting a Plecostomus into the tank then change my mind because it has the potential of easting too much of the other plants. In the same manner, I could opt to periodically replace plants because I value the Plecostomus.
We see a reflection of this in the original test in the garden. God created the potential for sin, but did not determine the outcome, or it would have been an invalid test and he would have been responsible for the result because the result (good or bad, sin of no sin) is the responsibility of the free will agent who caused the choice. It is not the responsibility of something that had no choice but to follow a rule.
Zip forward a few thousand years to 1945. It is the responsibility of the officers of the Third Reich to disobey orders sent from the high command precisely because they did have free will and could have chosen otherwise. We didn’t imprison the guns of the Nazi because they did not have a free will to choose what to do.
Animals have free will but not moral free will. What they do is not morally right or wrong. God does have free will and if he knew with certainty that man would choose to sin, then it would be morally reprehensible to allow that situation to continue because he would be the author of sin.
However, if he did not predetermine or foreknow the result of creating man with a free moral will, but the choice to sin was indeed man’s choice, no sin would exist on God’s part and that is teleologically and morally necessarily the case.
Now the test was only one test. Of all the choices Adam could make in the garden, there was only one morally wrong choice. The case can be made that the choice was biased in his favor. God knew he would create the moral choice, he did not know what the outcome would be, so he knew the bifurcated potentiality of the creation he was about to make, but not all the individual choices that would go on after creation.
More to your point, I don’t see anything in scripture that indicated the creation minutia itself was predetermined or preplanned in minute detail, say, that the surface temperature of the sun must be 27,000,000 degrees F.
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