Uh oh...

Post Edited (MephEternal) : 8/28/2005 11:39:31 AM (GMT-5)

Mephi: Greg: God doesn't regret metaphysical necessities because they're... well....necessities.

Darnit, Doc. He should have known better than this. The ONLY way this type of argument would work would be to assume that creating humans and allowing them to live was a metaphysical necessity to God. TWT 1 may, to Doc, be a metaphysical necessity, but that's not the point. God regrets CREATING the humans, not just the sin they got into. But if creation was a completely free and NON-NECESSARY choice to God, then Doc's argument ain't worth squat.

Tom: Exactly. Creating the world was a metaphysical necessity, so it’s possible that God can “regret” it in the sense Greg doesn’t believe God can. But I’m sure Greg knows this, so I’m guessing that Greg’s reading the KI-clause “for having created humankind” as including somehow the SORT of humankind God created, i.e., libertarian persons designed to love.

Mephi, I don’t think you’ve yet come to grips with ALL that attributing error to the authors (of Gen. and 1Sam.). It’s not just that the author falsely believed God regretted having taken the risk of creating, that God makes ill-informed choices or is “rash.” It also entails the authors believing God failed to learn from such painful regret and turned around and repeated his mistake. If the text reflects the author’s beliefs (as we’re arguing it must), then the way the authors both tell their stories unavoidably leads to the conclusion that they thought God was a bit of a slower learner. And THAT if very difficult to imagine.

I mean, think of what one assumes about God when one says she believes God’s decision to create was “rash.” Rash? God exists all alone in triune bliss with no other pressures or demands to distract him. He’s got all the time (or timelessness) to ponder the project. Even if he wasn’t 100% in the know on future possibilities, it’s still unimaginable that one should think him capable of acting rashly in THIS state. We’re talking a Hebrew author(s), not some Greek with his pantheon of Greek Gods who were not all that talented, acted greedy, were jealous of each other, etc. Given the high view of God Genesis has otherwise, I just can’t believe its author also believed God was this off, this much of a dunce.

And consider this too, Mephi, about the Saul appointment. God says he regrets having appointed him “for disobey.” That’s it? For disobeying? Add all Saul’s mistakes up together and they don’t outweigh the detrimental influence OTHER kinds exercised over Israel and God tolerated them. What did Saul do that warrants God (and us) believing it was really an “unacceptable” risk? The total human depravity of Noah’s day? Well, OK. Maybe. But Saul’s behavior? One king who ruled a few years and failed to kill some cows? I just can’t believe that God finds THIS an unacceptable risk when we finds far worse behavior in others an acceptable risk. So the author believes God actually changed his mind and decided appointing Saul was not an acceptable risk and then has God immediately appoint another king facing the same risks of disobedience? Naw. It’s just not plausible to imagine the author was THIS MUCH of a nitwit. The authors are pretty tight elsewhere. They have a high view of God’s power, holiness, and wisdom elsewhere. And we’re supposed to believe that he (in the case of 1Sam) thought God really didn’t anticipate the possibility that Saul would fail to follow simple instructions? Might as well say the authors were schizoid. Dude, I think you’re taking the easy way out in assuming the authors held false views and not really facing all that’s entailed in believing they held false views on THIS point.

I’ll hold off judgment for the time being and trust that a plausible answer is out there. This isn’t the same as playing the mystery card like Piper. I really DO recognized the problem. I just really believe there’s an answer out there that let’s the author speak truthfully that which is consistent with God’s being omniscient.

Mephi: So, Tom. Just to let you know.  You're in a catch-22.  If you follow your current track of exegesis, taking the text as being true, and come to the conclusion that God is less than omniscient, you will end up surrendering a necessary GROUND for the assurance of the Bible's infallibility and/or inerrancy.  Which leads to the path that the Bible genuinely CAN be wrong. Which just happens to be the OTHER intellectually honest choice on the table regarding the text of Genesis 6:6 itself.

Tom: Looks right to me. So you’re saying Jeff’s view is self-refuting? He holds that God isn’t omniscient and doesn’t foreknow possible undesired outcomes. So on what basis would one argue that God was able to so act to insure an inerrant text (the text he claims inerrantly teaches us that God is such-and-such and does such-and-such). I’m not sure this really works. On Jeff’s view God is still omnipotent. Perhaps God can just decide to foreclose that aspect of the future and in effect determine that the authors turn out documents that are inerrant. So they weren’t libertarianly free to compose outside of the very truths God wanted them to convey.

John: It seems to me that the main point of the passage in question is that when moral agents turn out evil, it is something God NEVER intended or planned to have happen--it is MORALLY inconceivable to Him. I seem to recall Dr. Sanders in his lecture at the EEM Conference last year, referring to this as "the mystery of iniquity." Given all the reasons in favor of doing right/acting benevolently, WHY do moral agents use their freedom to do evil rather than good?

Tom: So future contingent evil choices, because they’re irrational, can’t ground propositions describing what agents might and might not do?

Jeff, looks like you’re gaining a following dude!

John: It seems to me that the proto-Openness view of God's knowledge, known of as "divine nescience of future contingencies," avoids this problem. It doesn't posit the "infinite intelligence, counterfactual knowledge" bit, it simply says God doesn't know precisely how moral choices will be turn out until they are actualized.

Tom: But Mephi and I haven’t suggested that God does know precisely how moral choices will turn out. Of course God doesn’t know how they’ll turn out. But he knows how they MIGHT turn out. He knows the possibilities. That’s all. In addition to believing that God doesn’t know “precisely how they will turn out” (which any open theist would agree with), Jeff claims that God doesn’t know how they might turn out, and that’s something that doesn’t necessarily follow from God’s not knowing precisely how the future will turn out.

Tom

Post Edited (jefscott) : 8/28/2005 2:23:06 PM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (jefscott) : 8/28/2005 4:09:35 PM (GMT-5)

Jeff: The proto-Open view that John mentioned…

Tom: There’s nothing ‘proto’ about it. Calcidius (5^th century) held my view, as did the open theist L. D. McCabe. That is, they believed God knew the contingent as contingent. I beg you guys not to popularize the notion that there's an original version of open theism that denies God knows what future contingents there are. I can't think of one of the authors of The Openness of God who would agree with you.

Jeff: Jeff: I agree. It seems that God KNOWS (at least NOW, He does) that a little leaven will leaven the whole lump. On the other hand, given LFW and the original benevolent conditions…

Tom: What’s benevolent about the original conditions if they included God’s being ignorant of the possibility that his plans might land him in regret for having created at all and in response destroying everybody when he COULD have known this had he wanted to?

Mephi: Do you not see, Tom, that there are differing theological represenations of God in the Old Testament?

Tom: Yeah, I just don’t see the author’s believing God was a total idiot as being one of those theologies. What would you call anybody who started a project that included exposing all of humanity to extinction, regrets his having done so later, fixes it by destroying the human race except for one family, and then before the bodies of all the dead have decomposed decides to do the same thing again? I think we’d call such a person an irresponsible idiot. Now, it’s one thing to say the authors used myths to convey truths about God. It’s another thing to say one of the truths they believed was that God was an imbecilic retard (which IS what we’d call anybody who did want God did).

By the way, Mephi, doesn’t your own view on errancy/inerrancy leave you in Catch-22? You believe God is omniscient and infinitely intelligent because (in part at least) the Bible leads you to believe so. But you believe those who wrote the Bible capable of being in error about this very question (omniscience and infinite intelligence) as is evidenced by the authors of Genesis and 1Samuel. So if two authors (already) can be in error on divine omniscience, on what basis do you believe other biblical authors to be accurate in believing God to be omniscient? How is your judgment on who's right not entirely arbitrary? I mean, why can’t those authors be wrong and these two authors right? Given your view of scripture, how would you know?

Tom

Post Edited (TGB) : 8/28/2005 3:26:41 PM (GMT-5)

Tom: There’s nothing ‘proto’ about it. Calcidius (5^th century) held my view, as did the open theist L. D. McCabe. That is, they believed God knew the contingent as contingent. I beg you guys not to popularize the notion that there's an original version of open theism that denies God knows what future contingents there are. I can't think of one of the authors of The Openness of God who would agree with you.

Jeff:  I was just using John's term which, I suspect, was referring to some of the views held decades before the current wave of OV thought.  Whether Christ or Moses held your view, I think, is debatable.

Post Edited (TGB) : 8/28/2005 4:12:00 PM (GMT-5)

Why should I have to make you wait a LONG time for a response?  

First off, Jeff, I’m looking for any part what I posted that comes across as insulting. I don’t agree with your view and find it has weakness that I think disqualify it, but what did I say to insult you? I think you’re a great guy and have a great mind. So let me apologize for making you feel that way. I don’t want to come across as insulting, so if you thought I was insulting you I must have done a poor job of communicating. I hope you caught the humor in *#&@! remarks about heretics. That was meant to be a complete joke.

Jeff: I have no idea what you just said. What I highly suspect, though, is that your continual misunderstanding of my view is based upon your inability to imagine that God's providential actions are MUCH less than the "minimizing-evil" view you hold.

Tom: Actually, I’d have the same problem with your view on the assumption that God isn’t necessarily committed to minimizing evil in the world. This was all spelled out in the lengthy exchange we had many months ago over this issue. If God was interested in providentially preparing for ANY future contingency in the sense required by YOUR view of just how much evil God’s interested in minimizing, I'd still object to your view.

Jeff: I would certainly agree that THAT particular view requires LOTS of foreknowledge. But give me an example of something God plans to do, PER scripture, and then explain to me why He MUST KNOW ALL that could possibly happen thereafter to be able to implement the plan. When you do that, you've done your job. Until then, you're just wasting disk space insulting me. Somehow, I think I'll be waiting a LONG time for a response.

Tom: The issue from my point of view, Jeff, is your inability to explain how God’s nature as such goes about determining whether or not some truth of which he is ignorant is important for some plan of God. On your view this determination is logically prior to any actual knowledge God has of truths, because on your view God only knows truths that are sufficiently relevant to his plans and purposes. Now, of course I agree that there are some truths about the future that don’t bear on some divine plans. I’m not saying all truths bear equally on all God’s plans. But there are some truths that do bear on some of his plans, and that creates your problem (again, from my point of view). The problem is that by insisting God only comes to know some truth when knowing that truth is sufficiently relevant to his plan given his purposes, you move the determination of the relevancy of truth to God’s plans OUTSIDE of God’s knowing and locate it somewhere else in God, which leaves me wondering where else in God (other than his knowing) do you suppose this determination takes places and just how the right information and only the right information is served up to God’s conscious mind for providential planning. I don’t see any way for God to establish in his own mind the relevancy some truth has (or doesn’t have) for his plans without FIRST actually knowing the truth. But this isn’t possible on your view since God only ‘knows’ truths AFTER their relevancy to his plans is established by some function of God’s nature other than his knowing. So what is it—what trigger or mechanism—in God’s nature do you suppose does this job and then sends to God’s mind for his conscious contemplation only those truths sufficiently relevant to his plans and never any truth not relevant to his plans?

(Mephi, do YOU follow my objection to Jeff here?)

Now it’s usually at this point that you respond by telling me I have yet to understand your view. I guess that’s possible. But at this point I think you can shoulder the responsibility. You’ve spelled out your view a lot, and I try to read you carefully because I respect your brains Bro. So if take responsibility for writing in such a way that offends you though I didn't intend to do so, you can take responsibility for writing in such a way that leaves me in the dark about your view. When you’ve done that you’ve done your job. Until then you’re still infinitely loved and valued by God. So take THAT!

Hugs and kisses!

Tom

Post Edited (TGB) : 8/28/2005 6:32:32 PM (GMT-5)

Tom:  I don’t see any way for God to establish in his own mind the relevancy some truth has (or doesn’t have) for his plans without FIRST actually knowing the truth.

Jeff:  Tom, it's just like we do.  You, too, have made plans IN TIME.  You, too, concern yourself about directions to college ONCE you decide to go to college.  You did NOT have to first know how to make that trek.  You could have DECIDED to go to college FIRST.  We do this ALL the time.  It's no mystery. 

What makes that analogy to God so difficult is the fact that God has SO much more power than we do, that we can't really know when His POWER is utilized interventially VS. pre-arranging things based on foreknowledge. 

You see, my view just accepts as a possibility that God might be more like us than tradition has accepted.  It can't pin everything down, just like I couldn't have pinned down the fact that you would have eventually concerned yourself with where to turn next to get to college UNTIL you decided to go to college and NEEDED to concern yourself with those details.

Have I done my job, yet?  If not, explain why you MUST have known how to make turns from your house to get to college BEFORE you decided to enroll in college.  I'm in the dark as to how one MUST know all details relevant to a purpose BEFORE the purpose is made.  Maybe the word "plan" is the problem.  I'm meaning PURPOSE.  The implementation of the PURPOSE can follow the mental PURPOSE.  Does that make more sense?  When God purposed the incarnation of Christ, did He REALLY have to have a specific detailed account of how that would come about to know that He could, in due time, bring it about?  I don't see how.

But I know there are parents that have children COMPLETELY oblivious to any calculated risk who end up regretting those children.  One of my co-workers admitted that to me just the other day.  But that doesn't mean he was oblivious to the FACT that failures were happening all around him.  No, it was just not in his nature to treat that decision in terms of a calculated risk (nor, BTW, did his lack of risk calculation have any moral implications about his decision). 

Now, I certainly can't PROVE that God has constraints like this in His nature.  I'm just hypothesizing it to explain the passage in question and similar ones like "it never entered My mind..."  If you can come up with a good metaphorical view of the verse--one that seems more plausible than the literal view--I'll embrace it.  Though, that would STILL not suggest to me that God's knowledge about contingencies is eternal. 

Meph and I are at opposite extremes, and you seem to be in the middle.  I allow the text to constrain me to the point of SILLINESS and work from within until I can brainstorm more plausible alternatives.  If I didnt' do this, I would still be a very immoral person, because biblical imperatives that once seemed counter-intuitive to me NOW seem quite reasonable.  Fortunately, I believed those imperatives even WHEN they seemed arbitrary and silly to me. 

Meph works from the other end.  You seem to be somewhere in the middle.  The point is, we're all willing to embrace greater plausibility within our own paradigms once it comes along.  But our respective paradigms impose upon us corresponding constraints which define what IS plausible for us.  As I told Meph, I have never read ANY BIG PICTURE world view that did not entail some aspects that are profoundly implausible or silly-looking from a purely objective point of view.  Personally, I don't think a completely plausible and coherent world view exists as of yet.  That's why I'm content, for now, to just believe the bible in the way Meph claims Christ did, knowing full good and well that it has it's own unique aspects of seeming silliness.  I mean, if I gotta be silly, who's better to emulate than Christ, eh?

Post Edited (jefscott) : 8/28/2005 9:04:20 PM (GMT-5)

I think using modern day psychology to interpret God’s reasoning or emotions such as regret fall among the same lines.

But the one thing that does make a lick of logical sense to me in scripture is that the Apostles of Christ where perpetually baffled. They were living it, but didn’t have an inkling on what was going on. But, then again from my standpoint that proves to me that it was all-true, logically speaking.

Post Edited (Dragon Chaser) : 8/28/2005 10:52:09 PM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (JEE) : 8/29/2005 12:09:54 AM (GMT-5)

Finis Dake, whom we have discussed here before, could be well described as a "proto-Openness" writer. Dake's view does not seem to me at all to say that God ponders all possible evil or good courses of action which mankind might take.