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Open Theism Discussion Board > Public Forums > The raging debate continues here... > Is Nothing Impossible with the OVT God?

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Sahid
Megistered Rember

Date Joined Jun 2004
Total Posts : 2013

Posted 8/30/2004 4:10 PM (GMT -6)

I would say that in this hypothetical deterministic world God has limited his power by not creating free creatures. But it's not that big a deal. Tongue

Watch me fly. Freedom like wings and I will use them. Freedom like wings and I will spread them wide. - Stavesacre

Mordecai
Registered Member

Date Joined Jul 2004
Total Posts : 19

Posted 9/3/2004 3:47 PM (GMT -6)

quote:
Originally posted by Sahid

That's how I think of it. When we look at Jesus, it's entirely within his character to limit himself.

But that's not OVT. It's not like God is able to know the contingent future but simply limits Himself so that He doesn't.

Mordecai
Registered Member

Date Joined Jul 2004
Total Posts : 19

Posted 9/3/2004 3:55 PM (GMT -6)

quote:
Originally posted by TGB

quote:
Originally posted by Mordecai
QUESTION: Why couldn't it be said that God in essence created an unliftable rock (a logical impossibility) when He created a world whose contingent future He cannot fully know?

You could look at it that way! But most people who offer this specific example do so to pit God's attribute against one another in an attempt to show God doesn't exist. Qualified the way you have, I don't see a problem with it.

Tom

I can see why people would use this to show that God doesn't exist. So why isn't it a problem that God basically created an "unliftable rock" by creating a world whose contingent future He cannot know?

Tom
Registered Member

Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353

Posted 9/4/2004 3:46 AM (GMT -6)

Mordecai: I can see why people would use this to show that God doesn't exist. So why isn't it a problem that God basically created an "unliftable rock" by creating a world whose contingent future He cannot know?

Tom: I'd find a word picture other than "unliftable rock" to express this; but what's undoable, or logically contradictory, in my view, is God's "determining another's choice to love (or not love)." "Determining another's love" is the "unliftable rock" here. Now, people usually use the unliftable rock in a literal-material sense to signify some very huge rock much larger than our universes, as large as it would need to be for God to be unable to literally lift it. In THAT sense the "unliftable rock" argument against God's omnipotence is unsuccessful. God actually is lifting, i.e., sustaining, all the matter in the universe at present. There's every reason to believe he could sustain a universe 100 times the matter that our universe contains. So the question is silly. But the general question about God's ability to do what is logically contradictory is not silly, and that's what DOES come into view with the open theist's claim that the future is partly open, that possibilities are real, and that omniscience rather than suggesting God is incapable of knowing the truth of such possibilities, actually demands that God know them as possibilities.

I tend to nit-pick on how things are expressed here, so be patient with me, but I wouldn't agree that "God doesn't know the contingent future." He does know it, but he knows it "as it is," that is, as contingent. Foreknokwledge of a contingency counts as knowledge too. So what we're really wondering, then, is whether or not God's foreknowing contingencies (not "not knowing contingencies"), that is, God's knowing the future as what "might and might not" happen, is logically contradictory. And the answer to this is 'no'. There is nothing logically contradictory in a true "might and might not" proposition.

Some might want to argue that God's creating a world in which there exist some true "might and might not" propositions is logically impossible. God can't do it. But I can't think of any reason why the existence of such propositions should be thought to be logically impossible (the way we live everyday presupposes the existence of such true propositions) or why God should be believed incapable of creating a world in which there existed some such true propositions. Being omniscient, God would know the truth-value of such true propositions.

Tom

Sahid
Megistered Rember

Date Joined Jun 2004
Total Posts : 2013

Posted 9/4/2004 11:40 AM (GMT -6)

quote:
Originally posted by Mordecai

quote:
Originally posted by Sahid

That's how I think of it. When we look at Jesus, it's entirely within his character to limit himself.

But that's not OVT. It's not like God is able to know the contingent future but simply limits Himself so that He doesn't.

But, could God have made a world without freedom? I say yes. It's not that God is able to know certainties in a future that is not certain. It's that God could have made the future certain in the first place. I think that God making free creatures is limiting to himself. I don't think that he contiuously keeps himself ignorant. On the contrary, I think he knows everything. He creates not all at once but in an ongoing way. He has also supplied us with a little of that ability. So, maybe I'm saying God limited himself in creating free creatures, but not in sustaining free creatures. Their existance is a kind of limit.

Watch me fly. Freedom like wings and I will use them. Freedom like wings and I will spread them wide. - Stavesacre

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