A parallel line of thinking, though, led to real confusion in the 18th and early 19th century in the field of philosophy. Immanuel Kant looked, not at ‘reality as such’ - which he thought we could not know - but at our experience of the world (whatever it might really be like) and, based on that phenomenology, reasoned FROM our experience TO what WE must be like; what must the mechanics of our understanding be, what must we humans be like, to have those kinds of experiences?
So in his philosophy, we experience only the phenomena; the ‘nuomena’, the ‘real world’ is beyond our reach. Kant wanted to put aside ‘knowledge’ (scientific/reductionistic/materialistic) to make room for ‘faith’.
There is a ton more we could say about Kant (who was a great great philosopher) but in a nutshell, his approach was found to be unsatisfactory as a representation of both reality and humanity. Still I should say that many neo-Kantians are still around, and I am sympathetic with their views to an extent.
I’m sure you see the parallel to your reply? The temptation is to look at ‘the world’ and especially the evil in the world, and then ask “What MUST God be like to account for all this?” If we do that - and I don’t want to mis-characterize your thought by stating that is what you said, so please correct me if I’m doing that - but if we do that, we can’t really say anything true about God UNLESS we accept the revelation He has given us in the scriptures, in nature and most of all, by His Son. In that light, we can see light.
I’ve taken a lot of flak here for the following stance, and I understand why, but I’ll stick to my guns and quote a Creed that I am NOT fond of, but I like this part:
Although the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God, as to leave men unexcusable;[1] yet are they not sufficient to give that knowledge of God, and of His will, which is necessary unto salvation.[2] Therefore it pleased the Lord, at sundry times, and in divers manners, to reveal Himself, and to declare that His will unto His Church;[3] and afterwards for the better preserving and propagating of the truth, and for the more sure establishment and comfort of the Church against the corruption of the flesh, and the malice of Satan and of the world, to commit the same wholly unto writing;[4] which makes the Holy Scripture to be most necessary;[5] those former ways of God’s revealing His will unto His people being now ceased.[6] (Westminster Confession)
I’ll go further - it is imo (and I am not speaking of you, Fe4R or anyone in particular here) a real lack of education in understanding the Bible that hampers our ability to understand and interpret experience. There is a biblical way to understand the cosmos, and to the extent we don’t understand the scriptures, it’s like looking at the world through a very very dirty windshield.
In any case, there it is, my mini-rant.
Again, thank so much for your contributions, even if you proceed to blow me out of the water with your next post.
I’m enjoying this thoughtful discussion Dave Thanks for your ongoing input. Sorry if we’ve hijacked your post a little, Dan.
I must say I’m very sympathetic to some of Kant’s views, and that I don’t think his views have been ‘found to be unsatisfactory’ at all, except maybe by modernistic culture at large, which is highly biased and which I think can be shown to be unsatisfactory in its own right! LOL. Whatever the case, its certainly not settled, and I think there’s a lot of truth to Kant’s views. We can only experience reality indirectly via our perceptions and understanding (which includes the possibility, at least, of other ‘non-real’ inputs). I would say similar things about Scripture and interpretation - we only experience it indirectly and with the possibility of other inputs (besides pure true interpretation of the Scripture). Hence our reliance on the Holy Spirit, and the need for humility and unity and love, and the variety of doctrines that can spring from and resonate with a heart of love for Christ (that is present within all believers).
That aside, the fact remains (as your article points out) that God WANTS us to observe Him (indirectly, by our experiences) by what He does and says and is, and to make judgments upon this, and then to have faith (which can only exist IF our perception and judgement of God is not completely perfect - i.e. if the windshield is dirty). So regardless, it must be good and proper to engage with and be concerned with and incorporate ‘reality’ (as far as we experience it), including evil and a dirty windshield, into our view of God. God wants us to grapple with the complexities of reality.
Of course this should be done in humility and trust (this is what any good Calvinist is actually doing), and will obviously be focused mainly on the most intelligible and informative aspects of reality when it comes to God - His Son, and His Scriptures. I agree with you that by rejecting these vital insights into reality, we leave ourselves with a very much dirtier windshield AND with no reason or possibility to have faith in the face of this dirt. But even with a clearer focus and faith, both Christ and Scripture remain subjective, and do NOT seem interested in exhaustively and perfectly explaining the intricacies of God in a perfectly ‘clear’ manner. They seem to deliberately leave questions, room for trust and relationship, dynamic and progressive but incomplete steps in revelation and relationship, etc. In other words, God seems to deliberately leave a need to grapple with reality and the existence of evil (as discussed above).
Since this is the normal way for God to reveal Himself (even in his clearer modes, such as Christ and Scripture), and since He wants us to consider this revelation and make judgments about Him and have faith, I don’t see it as a stretch to consider the rest of reality and Evil in the same light. God did it deliberately for His purposes, and He intends us to interpret it with humility and faith (based on the good that HAS been made clear).
Finally getting back around to this thread; sorry for the delay.
Thank you very much for the compliments, by the way.
Not to uphold (much less to enable) derivative free will, but not in contradiction to it. Boethian omniscience and omnipresence could still involve determinism of all events, but it doesn’t have to determine all events in order to truly see the future.
I appeal to God’s self-sacrificial and truly libertarian free will, to enable and uphold creaturely and derivative free will; with proper distinctions between God’s rational action and a creature’s limitations in freedom of rational action.
The problem comes from introducing a past-tense into God’s present-tense. If God is currently experiencing 2004 and 2014 (with them not being “at the same time”, by the way), God is not presently seeing 2004 in hindsight from 2014. All the history that actually happens happens, and God sees it and is present for it: God is equally present and seeing my choices now as for the choices I will make and the choices I have made.
It doesn’t, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t argue that it does. On the contrary, I talk about short-chain random determinism with reference to quantum behavior: merely reactive behavior is still deterministic, even if it’s short-chain, and even if it’s randomly generated (or alternately even if the generation isn’t random so much as incalculable to us). But I don’t regard the self-sacrifice of God’s self-begotten action as being itself merely reactive behavior (though I think it does result in a merely reactive Nature in which we live and contribute our own actions).
Same here – though because people panic when I say that, I like to point out that I’m also a pan-ek-theist, all things from from God. The scriptures affirm both, sometimes together.
Pretty sure that would be the logical implication. By the same token, I have been warning my fellow apologists for years not to lean hard on arguments from the temporal beginning of Nature, because I strongly suspect sooner or later (and I’ve been seeing indications of this with increasing frequency) the scientists are going to realize they’ve been accidentally importing category errors into their calculations, the result being that they cannot in fact extrapolate back to a beginning-of-existence for Nature. Which will leave the philosophical naturalists (especially the naturalistic atheists) saying, “look, Nature has no beginning after all, therefore nothing produced it, nyah”. Ontological generation and distinction, though, is the key point, not whether natural time goes back to a point beyond which is nothing.
(Relatedly, the time-dilation effects which I fully expect scientists to incorporate eventually in their account of cosmic time, thus allowing for apparently ridiculous things like matter and energy expanding billions of times faster than the speed of light, will have the rather amusing side effect of invalidating current calculations of the age of the universe as being proportionately too long: the universe might be only 10 or 6 thousand ‘years’ old after all! That would be freaking hilarious. )
Complexity of influences and opportunities and impositions, doesn’t eliminate or replace rational action of choice between options. But accounting for complexity of a person’s situation, and other limitations, is why on the other hand I don’t like to call myself as proposing and defending “libertarian” free will: people expect I’m not taking such things into account.
Providentially (!?), the temp-file I opened to compose and save my replies for this thread, happened to contain comments I had written up but maybe never posted to a previous thread some months ago, concerning Boethian omniscience and time and free will!
So for convenience, in case I never got around to posting those, I’ll just follow on from there.
My reasons for believing Boethian omniscience to be true are related directly to certain rebuttal questions [asked in that other thread] about how it could even possibly work, so for convenience I’ll requote those:
Those are all fine questions, and I’ll even say they work fine as rebuttal questions when Boethian omniscience is presented apart from having a very specific place in a coherent developing metaphysical argument – which is how Lewis for example always presented it, and which is how I presented it upthread (both in the previous thread and in this one) in order to talk about it in a relatively quick fashion.
Consequently, to address those questions I’ll have to talk about how I infer in favor of Boethian omniscience, to provide a theological “setting” for how it connects in special ways to several other theological topics.
My following discussion is heavily summarized from chapters all across Section Three of Sword to the Heart, previously referenced.
0.) Various preliminary questions (covered in Section One btw) have to be addressed first, including but not limited to whether there is one or more than one foundationally self-existent level of reality. If yes (I answer yes, nicknaming it the Independent Fact or IF for short), then…
1.) Is the IF rationally active or not? (Obviously this requires a lot of discussion of what rationality means compared to non-rational behavior.) If not, then some kind of atheism is true. I inferred I ought to believe yes (in Section Two), so then…
2.) Is the IF statically self-existent (not depending on itself for existence), or actively self-existence (depending on itself for existence)? The former involves a contradiction in the idea of the IF being rationally active, since rational action would be only a secondary property of the ultimate reality; and also the former proposal introduces a schism between being logically caused and logically grounded.
(Describing the result of the argument shortly: “But if privative aseity is true, then we have every reason from its proposed characteristic of ultimate non-behavior, much less an ultimate lack of action, to believe that nothing else exists other than Itself, and that unlike us the IF does nothing. Moreover, there can be no logical relation between propositions, no consequents to grounds. Put another way, if privative aseity is true, we have every reason to believe that we cannot possibly have any good reason to believe anything, including that privative aseity is true!”)
Anyway for various reasons (related to topics from Section Two), I conclude I ought to believe the IF actively self-exists (positive aseity) not statically self exists (privative aseity). If so, then…
3.) At this point the next logical topic would be whether the positive aseity of the IF (the active self-existence of God, i.e. eternally self-begetting and eternally self-begotten) means there are (at least) two distinct Persons of the one and only God Most High. Although I answer yes, and this discussion factors into other topics later, I’ll skip over it for the sake of non-trinitarians in the thread and move along to…
4.) Does anything not-God exist? If not, then some kind of naturalistic theism (aka pantheism) is true. If so, then some kind of supernaturalistic theism is true (for example, nominal deism, or one of the Big Three Theisms, along with some other possibilities like various non-trinitarian Christianities – and strictly speaking ortho-trin could be true and yet Jesus might not be the incarnation of the 2nd Person of God any more than Elijah or Moses was, or the angel sent to John by Jesus toward the end of RevJohn to give a more provocative example.) I infer I myself am not-God, so I answer yes, and so move to…
5.) Is the evident reality I (the not-God entity) exist within God or not-God? If so, then practical pantheism would be true (Nature is God) even though strictly speaking some kind of supernaturalistic theism would still be true (since I am not-God). At this stage the most I can infer is that Nature doesn’t tend to behave the way I would expect from a rationally active fundamental reality, so Nature isn’t likely to be God; so I put a decisive belief on that question to the side for a while and moved on to the next very big question:
6.) How can God effectively create something not-God? And especially, how can God effectively create a not-God person like me?
It should be obvious that there isn’t any point even asking those questions unless and until the other topics get this far. But answering those questions turns out to have a huge bearing on how God’s omniscience and omnipresence works (if this theology is true). So please bear with this exposition a little longer.
On the theology developed so far, there can be no overarching reality within which God and something not-God already exists; and a proposal that God and a not-God system both independently exist would not only involve them being unable to affect each other (although God could choose to voluntarily let the not-God reality affect Himself), but also would end up implying a shared overarching reality. So there is no use proposing some sort of void ‘outside’ God, into which He can create.
Therefore, God can only create not-God realities (distinct from God self-begetting God), by voluntarily choosing to cease generating Himself in some way, while still remaining eternally self-generating. The choice to do so is itself an action, but the action is a choice to not take some other action.
Whether that could make any sense in a more basic supernaturalistic theism I don’t know. But if at least binitarian theism is true, then such a creative self-sacrificial action wouldn’t be an utterly new thing within the self-consistent active self-generation of the Unity; because (on this theology) the 2nd Person of the Unity (God self-begotten, or analogically speaking ‘the Son’) must, as a Person, make a constant corollary choice whether or not to surrender to the Unity as the ‘Unity’ instead of trying to go ‘His own way’ or to do ‘His own thing’.
This leads to a number of interesting and (later) useful notions about what we may call the highest death and how not-God creatures would be expected to join with the 2nd Person in submission to God. But leaving aside the binitarian (and eventually trinitarian) details, the point is that any not-God system of reality can only exist by God’s eternal action of self-abdication.
That would include Nature if Nature (not just myself) is a not-God reality; and I’ll skip over a bunch of analysis here concluding that created persons like myself would need some kind of not-God spatio-temporal system in which to exist.
So now we’re up to God continually acting in a self-abdicating way (similar to but distinctly different from the self-abdicating action of God self-begotten if binitarian or trinitarian theism is true), to keep Nature in existence at all points of space-time. Somewhat similar to how a running electrical current continually generates a magnetic field at an infinite number of right angles to itself, or vice versa. (There are big differences, too, of course.)
{inhaaaaaaalllleeeeeee!!!}
And at long last now we’re at the theological setting for Boethian omniscience and omnipresence (and omnipotence – they’re all just about the same thing on this account).
On this theory, God is directly and intentionally acting to keep all points of space-time in existence with various properties and (via God’s voluntary self-abdicating self-sacrificing action) with their own not-God behavior. God is consequently omnipresent and omniscient concerning all points of created space-time at the most intimate possible levels. It isn’t like Nature is impenetrably not-God and so repels or makes it difficult or limits God’s ability to get accurate information about it: God omnipresently knows all the facts directly, as well as (by corollary) all hypothetical possibilities (which God may or may not act toward enactualizing in multiple natural systems, each of which contains a whole natural universe of whatever size.)
On this theory God isn’t determinately directing everything around, but still retains (and occasionally enacts) the ability to direct, create, and annihilate particles, injecting events into the not-God system, which the system naturalizes (so to speak) in reaction. Derivative rational spirits, brought into existence by a synthetic union of God and not-God Nature, have vastly much more limited capabilities of the same sort, even in the best circumstances (and those circumstances would be further limited by rebellion against God); and meanwhile God can see what we’re doing and what we’re thinking with our derivative freedom of introducing events into Nature which Nature of its own particular characteristics would not produce.
I’m not quite sure how to describe how the ontological relation of not-God nature with God solves this problem, but I know it does. It would be an incomprehensible smear to us, or to any created entity, but our relationship to a natural system (or any historical process within any natural system) is only slightly related to God’s relationship to Nature.
Similarly, even though as author of a story I can check in on any point of its invented space-time whenever I want, my relationship to the story is only faintly similar to the utter intimacy of God’s relationship to Nature (and to us rational creatures within Nature). So even though I’m ‘outside’ my story (and can introduce effects, including my own persona if I want, inside my story) in a faintly similar way with a couple of relevant parallels, I’d still be unable to know all events in my story simultaneously, even if I could be omnisciently aware of them somehow (which I cannot). If my relation to my story was the same as God’s relation to our Nature, that wouldn’t be a problem – but I’d have to be actively generating the reality of my story at all points of its reality in continuous continuity (so to speak). Which I can’t do (and can never do) because I’m only a creature.
Even so, I can be aware of a temporal sequence of events within my fictional story, despite my extremely limited ontological connection to it: e.g. first Portunista fights off Gemalfan, then she gets his notes, then studies his notes, then discovers the location of the Tower of Qarfax, then travels there, then invades it, then defeats its security systems, then fights off three other small armies trying to get the Tower, then packs up and marches to the city of Wye, etc. etc.
If my relationship to my story doesn’t increase, then my ability to know my story will begin to oversaturate from being unable to process the details; but the more my relationship to my story increases the more I can keep in mind about my story at-once. But my story and I are both creatures within an overarching reality (or actually within two overarching realities, Nature and God, the former itself dependent on the latter), so there are necessary limits about how far I can relate to my story.
On my account of theology, the existence of free will is the key distinction between a theistic and atheistic reality; therefore this is also the key distinction between a creation being a child of God (Who is the Father of spirits) and being a puppet, even if the puppet is set loose to ping-pong around doing various things like an earthworm.
Free will is also a decisively huge factor for morality on my theological account, although I haven’t gotten to that yet in my description above.
Consequently, free will is a huge factor for soteriology on my theological account. But I don’t think a creature’s free will to rebel counts as much as God’s free will to save rebels from rebellion, and that’s a big difference from the type of Arminian account where God is forced to quit because He’s beaten at last by evil. The type of Arminian account where God chooses of His own volition to quit even though He could feasibly continue until He wins, is a more properly theocentric soteriology than the anthrocentric version popularized (I’m sorry to say) by Lewis – but then (as Lewis very well knew) that other type of Arminianism, where God simply chooses to quit bringing about righteousness in creatures, denies trinitarian theism and the essential existence of God as an active love in other ways.
Um… I think I may have addressed, at least in passing, the other topics raised so far in the thread…? Except I haven’t gone on (in the description above) to talk about how morality relates conceptually to the self-begetting, self-begotten (and self-giving) God as the foundation of all reality; and how it relates to how we use our rational action capability to choose between options where those are presented to us.
Hi Jason Pratt: I like your discussion a lot Hypertemporalism, panentheism, etc are all integral parts of how I understand God and creation, from a deterministic point of view. Its nice to see it laid out well.
I’d like to raise a minor point God creating ‘non-God’ entities. Are you saying that God’s creation of ‘non-God’ factors into His own ‘space’, somehow disrupts the reality of ‘God’ that would have otherwise been (i.e. what you consider to be the perfect active self-generation of God)? Therefore this can only happen if we lose some of the ‘God-ness’ of his independent reality? I have a slight problem with that for two reasons.
Firstly, I don’t think the distinction (between God’s perfect active self-generation, and His existence alongside and in relationship to the non-God creation) makes any sense. If He exists in any personal way, with a character and a desire to express that character, wouldn’t perfect self-generation necessarily include generation of all the necessarily attached extensions of ‘self’ (i.e. the expression, life, or ‘being’ of that self)? For God, I would argue that this includes His existence alongside and relating to temporal non-God entities. In other words, the ‘self-sacrificing’ aspect of God is not truly self-sacrificing in the sense most people expect, because it IS a part of the ‘self’ that God has been eternally generating. Using your EM analogy, I’m questioning whether it is most helpful to differentiate between the magnetic and electric components of a unified field, or to see them as one inseparable phenomenon.
This brings me to the second expression of my (minor) point, which relates well to Dan’s original point - what do we really mean when we say ‘non-God’ when referring to creation? The way you were using it seems to require a particular definition, whereby it is impossible for God to be perfectly self-generating while maintaining such ‘non-God’ entities. I would contest this. That would be like saying the electric current becomes less ‘electric’ when it emanates the magnetic field - actually, it finds a more full expression of what it means to be ‘electromagnetic’, and the concepts of ‘electric’ or ‘magnetic’ on their own begin to seem shallow. But these terms are still useful to simplify and clarify the topic for discussion, which is why I still use the term ‘non-God’ with a slightly different definition of distinction (rather than opposition). I think God’s essence and self-generation necessarily includes the maintenance of these ‘non-God’ entities. This view really does place a lot of emphasis on panentheism.
Anyway, its all semantics, and from the sounds of it our conclusions about God’s relationship to reality are very similar
I’ve heard a helpful analogy to demonstrate how hypertemporalism doesn’t remove God’s ability to experience time. Maybe its been tossed around before, but here it is:
Existing in the 3D world, we have the ability to observe multiple 2D planes in conjunction, and so if we are discussing phenomena we need to add an extra’ dimension’ to describe ‘which’ of these multiple 2D planes we are referring to. We call this ‘depth’. Being able to observe depth and multiple 2D planes at once, does not mean we can’t understand or distinguish between phenomena in terms of the 2D length and width as well. We then add the fourth dimension of time, meaning we can observe multiple 3D ‘spaces’ in conjunction, while still maintaining an understanding of 3D and being able to distinguish between phenomena in terms of the 3D dimensions. If God is hypertemporal, He can observe multiple space-time ‘entities’ in conjunction, but is still able to understand time and distinguish between events in a temporal sense.
Interestingly, this accommodates the emerging radical ideas about time’s impermanence vs permanence, its relationship to general relativity, and whether it’s ‘direction’ is merely an illusion. It doesn’t matter, since time is merely distinguishing between otherwise identical events. The ‘parameters’ we attach to it are useful for descriptive purposes, but not fundamentally important for distinguishing between phenomena and constructing a holistic picture from multiple space-time entities.
Regarding Free Will, it sounds like you might be sympathetic to the idea of Free Agency.
You’ve probably heard of it before, but for those who don’t know, Free Agency maintains that God values / respects / protects some fundamental attributes of our souls, so that we really do make real choices from our own innate drives and desires, and that these choices reflect only two things: our fundamental nature and character, and our perception of reality and the options available to us. However, it denies ‘free will’ as most people understand it, because (paradoxically) it is opposed to the basic assumptions of justice (e.g. without a basis, our choices are essentially random and thus not truly reflective of who we are, and not eligible for reward in any sense), and opposed to the realities of life (as any social worker or advertising agent will tell you). Although we really do make the choices, we never have the real ability to choose anything other than the best single option we perceive (subjectively) in any given context. And our perceptions and characters are highly stable and predictable, and mould predictably (again, with a basis, and not randomly).
From a Christian determinism perspective, since God is in absolute control of all of the things our choices are based upon, and all the things that mould our character, this makes Him in absolute control of our decisions, but NOT in a way which violates the properties of our souls. In other words, God has chosen to limit Himself to work in ways which our souls will respond to, in order to bring about His purposes in and through our choices. This is one big reason for the process we call ‘life’.
No, sorry for being unclear, on the theory I (radically over-)summarized God still remains fully God; creation doesn’t reduce the divine infinity. And the 2nd Person (for bi or trinitarianism) is still doing what He always does, though in creating not-God reality He does the same thing a different way so to speak.
Except that ontologically the creation isn’t a necessary characteristic of the self-existent action of God per se. God must self-generate in order to actively self-exist; God does not have to create not-God reality in order to actively self-exist. (But God does have to treat not-God reality in certain ways, in order not to act in contravention to God’s own active self-existence. This has massive and decisive implications in favor of Christian universalism, eventually.)
However, I don’t mean to be saying that temporally there was ever a ‘time’ when God wasn’t creating not-God realities. Within our natural spatio-temporal existence, God is always everywhere creating not-God realities, and as derivative creatures we could only get out of this timeline by going into another created nature, which from within its own perspective will also always everywhere have been being created by God.
Of course, the EM analogy breaks down in that the E and the M always necessarily co-exist, whereas creation doesn’t have ontological co-existence properties with God. (In that sense the EM analogy would better fit the co-existent Persons of God.) I only brought it up for the limited purpose of illustrating right-angle action to a system. Lewis would (and did) say that such an illustration (though I don’t recall him using an EM field, but it was something conceptually similar) substitutes a physical analogy for a temporal one, neither one being fully correct for describing what must be ‘sui generis’.
God doesn’t stop self-generating on my theory, just starts generating something other than Godself. I go into much more detail about what it means to be not-God in the chapters: once I infer that fundamental reality must be rationally active, to account for my own necessarily presumed (but not presumably necessary) rational action capability, one of the obvious next questions is whether I am God, and it doesn’t take a lot of self-examination to see that I am not. That implies distinctions in reality and then the question is how those distinctions relate to each other.
Re: the 3D/2D analogy, I haven’t used that for helping describe how God experiences created time, but it seems to work. (I use the 3D/2D analogies for other purposes.)
Can’t have a responsible argument without it. I don’t think it denies free will as most people understand it, though, since most people on reflection realize there are some pretty obvious limits to creaturely free will even if/though they agree creaturely free will exists.
I don’t regard our natural micro and macro environments as the basis for justice, though; and I noted earlier that so far as I was discussing my argument trail I hadn’t gotten to morality yet. (That’s Section Four, the largest in the book. )
On the contrary, it is entirely possible to choose against the single best perceived option available, for better or for worse. When I’m working out I can intentionally prefer to continue even though realistically I am forced to stop as the single best option available. That preference isn’t merely a feeling; it’s how I search and reach past my currently perceived limitations.
I didn’t mean to imply that you thought God’s divinity was reduced by creating non-God entities, but merely ‘changed’ somehow to be no longer the ‘perfect pure self-generation’ of God.
Essentially I don’t think this is the case. I DON’T think the EM analogy breaks down, because I DO think that E (A personal, soulish God) and M (the expression of that personal soulish God) DO necessarily co-exist.
In order for God to actively exist, He must not only self-generate, but He must be true to His own characteristics within that self-generation. For a more basic God, I agree, this is a fairly mute point. But for the God I see in Scripture (and the nature of reality), in order to be true to His characteristics I believe He MUST be expressing Himself through creating non-God entities.
In other words, I DO think that the creation of non-God entities is an ontologically necessary characteristic of a personal soulish God like the one described in Scripture, if He were to actively self-exist.
I don’t think this damages the rest of your argument in any way. Like the EM analogy, it is useful (and real, in some sense) to distinguish between E and M, but it is shallow to not recognize a fundamental and ontologically necessary unification. I think the rest of your discussion (utilizing the ‘God’ vs ‘Non-God’ distinction) still works well.
Regarding Free Agency, my experience has been that most people are unwilling to let go of some semblance of ‘randomness’ to our decisions, or the (limited) ability to choose in a way that violates all the things our decisions are based upon. Free Agency denies this, so this is why I think Free Agency denies free will as most people understand it.
Also (although I personally agree that justice incorporates many factors more important than our natural macro/micro environment) most people DO consider justice primarily from this perspective, and hence free will (I think) is logically inconsistent for them. Especially since many use this perception of justice as the reason for rejecting determinism.
I think you misunderstand what I mean by ‘the single best perceived option’. If you choose to act otherwise in your workout, for better or for worse, this is because you have perceived it to BE THE BEST option for you (however you define it in your current context and state of ‘soulishness’). I realize that my terms are not crisply defined here, but it doesn’t matter. The bottom line is that Free Agency maintains that, however difficult it is to predict or define, our decisions are entirely based upon elements of our soul and perception and context, which are all under God’s deterministic control or intimate foreknowledge, making our choices entirely malleable in a deterministic way.
This does not mean that God has not limited his determinism in any way out of respect for something in our soul - he has chosen to work with our soul’s unique characteristics and how it will respond and mould to various contexts and inputs and events, etc. But Free Will per-se is not the element that He has chosen to protect.
I’ll just step in between you two guys for a second, then butt out -
If you did not use the adjective ‘ontologically’ - would your opinion still hold?
Could God have created two angels, nothing else, to relieve the necessity?
I’m not being facetious, actually. I’m just very interested in your use of the word ‘necessary’ in relation to the God of the scriptures.
Is God, then, the Author of evil?
This particular statement - “which are all under God’s deterministic control or intimate foreknowledge” - may not be true necessarily (in the logical sense). I understand the parallel game of 'Do we have free will, or are we determined, or do we simply have free will enough (My choice) to serve God’s purposes, or to rebel against them? It is my belief that, as fun a game as it is, noone can win it, this side of Glory (as my father-in-law was fond of saying ). But that is just me.
I’m sorry if I come across as ‘sniping’ - maybe that’s one reason my posts are always short, it makes me a smaller target - I do appreciate people who are obviously working hard to make sense of a topsy-turvy world and how it relates to God. Please continue.
I am neither a determinist nor a compatibilist. I believe that normal people have libertarian free will. I also believe in the universal reconciliation of all people to God. I don’t see why this would be “impossible to predict”. It is true that free-will agents can and do change their minds. But there is also stability in free will agents, since their choices also crystallize their character.
God haters may carry their hatred throughout this short life of no more than 120 years. But God is love, and his love results in action. God will work to lead people to repentance and submission to Him in the after life, for He knows this will result in the greatest joy and mental health for everyone. Can the God-hater hold out in defiance of God’s love in his rebellion forever? Maybe he can hold out for a million years or so. But can he hold out forever? If he can, then his hate must be stronger than God’s love. This implies that he is the winner, and God the loser. I don’t think so. God will never stop loving, but eventually every hater will repent and stop hating of their own free will.
Today’s Maverick Philosopher column, dealing in part with the theology of Simone Weil and the question of Absolute Goodness relative to man’s goodness, has the following line, appropriate to this thread, I think:
“The absolute good, existing absolutely (ab solus, a se), is absolute in its existence without prejudice to its being necessarily related to us in its goodness. If God is (agapic) love, then God necessarily bestows His love on any creatures there might be. It is not necessary that there be creatures, but it is necessary that God love the creatures that there are and that they find their final good in Him.”
That is also the way I would talk about ‘necessity’ - again, in the logical sense - as it relates to God.
Does that make sense to my fellow threadees?
edit: JP said something akin to this above:
"Except that ontologically the creation isn’t a necessary characteristic of the self-existent action of God per se. God must self-generate in order to actively self-exist; God does not have to create not-God reality in order to actively self-exist. (But God does have to treat not-God reality in certain ways, in order not to act in contravention to God’s own active self-existence. This has massive and decisive implications in favor of Christian universalism, eventually.)
I’m not sure what you mean by your first question. What I’m saying is that IF God is at all ontologically consistent, I think that His very existence must necessarily be true to the characteristics He has. Now sure, you might decide he doesn’t need to be ontologically consistent, but I don’t think there’s much point discussing that option from a pragmatic point of view, and besides I think the Bible describes God as ontologically consistent.
IF He is true to his characteristics, we need to decide what these are. I think Scripture defines Him very specifically, and not as a blank or vague being, and not merely as ‘love’. If these descriptions were all we had for God, I can understand that there is no ontological necessity for created beings. However, I think the Bible describes God much more specifically, e.g. as soulish (with a character desiring to express itself), relational, powerful and creative, exclusively ‘good’, etc, etc (add to the list whatever you think is Scriptural). Basically the God I see in Scripture has characteristics that, if He were true to them during His existence, would ‘require’ the creation of a space-time entity which is the universe, humanity, Christ, heaven and hell, etc.
Also, I don’t see it as a necessity that needs ‘relieving’. Its a glorious drive to express Himself and be true to Himself.
Yes, I do think that God is the ‘author’ of Evil in a certain sense. The Bible says this itself (Isaiah 45:7). Obviously this doesn’t mean ‘God has evil motives’ or that ‘God is involved in creating evil outcomes, ultimately’. But this isn’t what you’re asking - even if God has good motives and ensures a good outcome, you’re main concern seems to be with God performing particular actions. The ‘evil’ you are concerned about is a quality of the action, not the consequences or the motives. And this is exactly how Isaiah is using the term ‘evil’ when he says that God does it. I also think the Bible teaches that God is the author (in a certain sense) of the unique balance of sin/faith within each individual.
I understand there are many potential ‘problems’ that people have with this, but I have yet to find one that sticks when examined closely - which is good, because I don’t like feeling uncomfortable with any of the (real) implications of my particular theology!
I personally think the game of free-will and determinism can be ‘won’ But its certainly debated by a great number of Christians who know God much better than I do, so I try to stay humble and open about it! I don’t think God would ever expect us to stop seeking cognitive knowledge about Him merely because it is difficult or uncertain. There are, however, a great many ways we can use our efforts, and we do probably use too much energy on this particular game. What I ultimately care about is unity in the body of Christ THROUGH a diversity of doctrines, love for those struggling where we never use their ‘Free Will’ as an excuse to reduce our efforts, and an unshakeable hope for good in all things (including evil) through our sovereign God.
As to the rest, there’s no need to argue over speculations! I have no doubt God is greater than anything we can think.
I’ll leave it to you and JP and the others for now.
Hey peoples!
I have been enjoying the comments, even though they are rather heavy at times lol. Great thoughts! I thought I would chip in a little here. Thanks for the chime Paidon.
I love your understanding of God in that He will never give up on people or let evil win!
My reply would be that since God knows that all people have a nature where we will eventually become subject to God’s love, then we must have that particular nature as part of our being. I cannot conceive of that nature being random (as in making random choices not related to any particular nature), nor do I like to think of that nature being random. However, as you said God’s love is stronger than hate. The quality of God’s love has a certain (not uncertain) effect that outweighs the power of hate.
Because you say that freewill works with a solidified and mouldable character, does that mean that one day we will not have free will? Our solidified characters would have taken over our ability to choose?
Jason you said: “The problem comes from introducing a past-tense into God’s present-tense. If God is currently experiencing 2004 and 2014 (with them not being “at the same time”, by the way), God is not presently seeing 2004 in hindsight from 2014. All the history that actually happens happens, and God sees it and is present for it: God is equally present and seeing my choices now as for the choices I will make and the choices I have made.”
Thanks for the write up. It was a great read!
From the sounds of it, you don’t seem to believe in free will, as in, you believe more in free agency. So this comment may be pointless. However, even if God had no concept of past tense and was present at all times, at the same time; wouldn’t that mean that “change” could never happen?
If God is presently involved in all chronological time with no concept of past tense, then He would not be able to change anything. Change means to move from one form to the next which requires past tense. There would be no new decisions or actions from God along the chronological time scale. It is fixed. If it is fixed to God then it must be fixed to us. Though from our perceptions it feels like we choose.
Thus any “freewill” we may have is still fixed.
This is certainly our point of contrast, then; because I cannot logically regard God’s active self-existence to necessarily involve God’s creation of not-God entities in order to continue self-existing. Not-God reality is not God, and does not actively self-exist; there is no and cannot be ontological parity between God and not-God. (Call that shallow if you insist. I call it logical.)
Nor do I regard God in His infinite self-existence to have changed to be no longer the perfect pure self-generation of God. That God must act differently from the action of self-existence, however, must be true for not-God entities to exist; but that does not and cannot involve God self-begetting and God self-begotten (and God self-giving) ceasing instead to act in self-existence.
I do grant the most intimate possible points of connection between the self-sacrificing action of God and (not-God) Nature as an ongoing result of that self-sacrificial action – but the real distinction of a creation (by the Lamb slain at and as the foundation of the world, so to speak) means any not-God Nature (however many such systems of created existence exist) is not itself ontologically on parity with God. Similarly, an ever-increasing number of such systems can always be increasing in number, perhaps even at infinite speed, without that number ever ‘adding up to’ the infinity from which those numbers come.
What I do insist on, in regard to God’s continuing ontological self-existence, is that God shall not treat rational creatures in those Natures in any way which would run in contravention to the fulfillment of fair-togetherness between persons. (I don’t mean that I’m ordering God to do that, of course; only that I cannot accept an idea about God to be true that involves this, without denying orthodox trinitarian theism.) But even this does not require God to be creating not-God entities in order for God to self-exist.
I don’t think free agency at all denies, but rather affirms, at least a limited ability to choose in a way that is not determined by all incoming environmental effects. But we probably have very different ideas of what free agency per se involves, and so are inadvertently talking at cross purposes here using similar terminology. “The bottom line is that Free Agency maintains that, however difficult it is to predict or define, our decisions are entirely based upon elements of our soul and perception and context, which are all under God’s deterministic control or intimate foreknowledge, making our choices entirely malleable in a deterministic way,” doesn’t sound at all like “free agency” to me even in a limited way. “Free” “agency” == “our choices” are “entirely malleable” by, “entirely based upon”, “deterministic” influences?? That sounds like the total opposite of any even slightly real free agency.
My problem is when you elide that over into the circumstances of “the best perceived option” creating the (apparent) choice of (actual) behavior. Being forced by circumstances to quit doing something that I willingly intend I would continue if I could, highlights the distinction of events involved. The core intention, even if clouded by perception, is what a person is personally responsible for, and what the person is actively choosing.
I would say instead the free will per se is the only way in which a person is actually a person and not an illusion of a person; and this active agency can only come from God (the Father of spirits). God, I agree, authoritatively chooses to let our free will exist in subjection, currently, to many non-rational and non-moral stimuli, affected by causes; but this cannot be the end or the beginning of our will. In one sense I can agree that God therefore does not choose to protect our free will in various ways (imposed death being the most obvious example); but in the only ways that can possibly have meaning, our free will is the only created thing about us which God ultimately protects, our existence as free wills being why God voluntarily self-sacrifices to create not-God reality at all.
A not-God natural system teeming with any number of impersonal not-God entities, is after all only a work of art at best. Derivatively created spirits are children, not puppets (even if we and/or our ancestors have currently tied us up in bundles of knotted strings woven from the threads of Nature, her maternal dress becoming our shroud until the time of childbirth has been entirely fulfilled.)
Yep, as your noticed afterward I said much the same thing upthread; and also in SttH (at muuuuuchhh more detailed length. )
For what it’s worth, Fe4r, I don’t agree that Free Will is any excuse for us to reduce our efforts to love those who are struggling with their lives, including with sin in their lives. On the contrary, I would say Free Will is why people exist to be loved (and to love) at all. Recognizing and acknowledging the environmental problems of a person does not require denying the ability of the person to make personally responsible choices (though a person may be crippled so far that their choices are poisoned or ineffective against their environment). Affirming personal responsibility, and helping that responsibility grow, honors the person as a person, and helps the person grow as a person.
Maturity could even be defined, I’d say, as coming to take increasing responsibility for one’s environment, and for one’s behaviors within that environment. There’s even a common scriptural phrase connected with that idea: “enjoying the allotment of the inheritance”! It’s practically the whole point to the “son-placement” idea, translated in English as “adoption”, described by St. Paul.
Actually, I believe they’re basically the same thing. But i acknowledge that the active will of creatures has natural limitations, and that this will always be true even in the resurrection to eonian life however much we grow in effective capabilities within the Natures we inhabit. Right now our wills are highly hampered by natural processes and environmental effects, though different people through discipline and training can improve their capabilities of interaction with natural processes to various degrees.
Change would still happen; God would just be present at all times and would know all changes (also, I suppose, all possible changes which never happen).
I’m not sure I would say (and didn’t actually say) God has no concept of a past-tense, but His concept of it would be a concept of our concept of the natural past: He knows how we perceive the past.
(Nor, by the way, do I think God would need an Incarnation to have that knowledge, though being Incarnate would give Him a way to ‘naturally experience’ that knowledge. There is a way in which, being omnipresent and omniscient, God knows of my eating more thoroughly and intimately than I ever can, yet what He knows thus is my eating, not His eating; what He knows in the Incarnation is His eating.)
The question of God being able to change something is kind of moot, since God at all points of space-time contributes to the shape of natural history in various ways – first and perhaps foremost by providing for natural entities to do things to have a history at all, but this keeps a way open for Him to introduce effects more directly into the system, too. From His divine present He sees all effects He introduces, without which introductions natural history would have had a different shape.
It isn’t a question of it being fixed against God’s ability to choose to contribute to the shape of the history; the history exists in its shape thanks to God’s choices as well as the choices of created agents, though unlike God we move along the history contributing our choices one at a time as we go. (The Incarnate Son is a way for God to experience and contribute to history along the story as well as from above the story, too; I strongly suspect the Son also travels around history in time and space as His personal natural history, which He starts in Bethlehem, or possibly at the conception in Nazareth, goes forward! – and that this accounts for a lot of the anthropomorphisms attributed to YHWH, especially to the visible YHWH, in the OT.)
If God wants to actively contribute to histories with different shapes, He ‘simply’ makes other histories in parallel with ours, though I doubt He contributes to, or authoritatively allows, every possible actualization and so every theoretically possible history. But there may be one best-possible-history which God prefers to bring about. Or there may be any number of best-possible-histories which God brings about but which are historically quite distinct from each other: to give an example of that idea, Narnia isn’t an alternate history Earth, so something like that would be brought about (on this theory) and not Lewis’ Space Trilogy stories which feature him and other persons from our history as well as persons not found in our history.
The question there would be whether, in short, God creates multiple Jasons in alternate universes. I can see arguments for the possibility of multiple universes without me; for multiple universes with different me’s yet similar enough to be recognizable as me though all different actual persons; and for one natural history that happens to be the only one God thought fit to create. However, I don’t have a main reason for some theologians like William Lane Craig to insist on the one-best-possible-history idea: it would seem weird on Arminian soteriology to have multiple persons existing, some saved and some damned (since if God doesn’t save everyone and doesn’t choose by election to save only some, then there would be at least some risk of multiple persons of me being perma-damned); and God electing to ensure the salvation of one version of me while damning another version of me would run against Calvinistic expectations in a different way (though a Calv might be a little more comfortable with close-parallel universes, where the same persons are always elected or not to salvation by God’s choice.) Either Calvs or Arms would I think be okay with more distinctly different natural histories being created with altogether different persons, though they might still have reasons for thinking God would only make one natural history. (WLC’s rationale for one-best-possible world is only partially soteriological, for example.)
I don’t think you or your approach is shallow LOL! I feel honoured that you’d address my arguments at all, to be honest…
I’m wondering if some of our differences are due to your progressive-logical-argument perspective (where simultaneous and ontologically integrated phenomena are dealt with separately and in sequence, because one is required to understand the other). From that perspective, yes, God’s active but isolated self-existence can be seen as occurring ‘first’ or being more ‘fundamental’ (in a logically progressive sense) than anything proceeding from this.
But it does not follow that there is no ontological necessity with subsequent phenomenon (as you yourself demonstrate). I think you’re saying that God’s active self-existence somehow ontologically entails that He act in a particular way toward non-God entities (i.e. in a way consistent with all the attributes of Himself). I agree with this. But if there can be ontological links between God’s self existence and his behavior toward non-God entities, what is so special about the act (or continuous process) of ‘creation’?
Also I’m not arguing for anything as drastic as parity, let alone parity between any being (e.g. God) and another being (e.g. non-God). I’m comparing two of God’s activities. And I’m not talking about a hypothetical as-yet undeveloped or unspecified God (a blank minimalistic God, for whom isolated eternal self-existence may well be possible without violating its nature). I’m just saying that I think there is an inseparable ontological integration between the Scriptural God’s act of self existence (which is in accordance with his specific nature), and His natural unrestricted expression of Himself (including the act of creation).
Of course the act of creation is ‘different’ in terms of description or logical progression, to the act of self-generation (i.e. they have no true ‘parity’). I’m not so radically pantheistic to want to deny this! I’m saying these two activities/processes cannot occur without each other - as if they were both ontologically necessary manifestations of an underlying process, or as if one were are description of merely one facet of the other.
Regarding ‘Free Agency’, my understanding of it is that it is a deliberate term designed to distinguish itself from Free Will, by describing what is actually Free (the agency of the person, rather than the will). In order for the agency to be truly free, every phenomenon that is derived from the soul must reflect and express that soul, meaning that technically (if everything was known, i.e. in God’s mind) the soul can be truly and accurately interpreted from the phenomena derived from it, from its ‘expressions’. This means that emotions, desires, the will, perceptions, etc, cannot have ‘random’ or unpredictable / uninterpretable factors that distort the expression of the soul (i.e. that limit the freedom of that soul’s agency). This is why Free Agency states that the will cannot be directed at anything other than whatever the soul currently perceives as the ‘best option’.
BTW, the ‘will’ in Free Agency has nothing to do with physical ability. Of course you can will something (perceive it to be the best option) that you can’t actually achieve.
Free Agency makes a point of using the word ‘freedom’, to battle the notion that we are puppets. We are our own agents with distinct characteristics, and we have freedom to actually express who we actually are in a meaningful and interpretable way in the world. The reason God can actually ‘judge’ us based on our actions, will, emotions, desires, etc, is that these really do express our souls. ‘Responsibility’ in this picture is more a statement about the actual state of our souls - if you perform an evil act or desire evil things, you are responsible because it means your soul actually has evil in it. I think God preserves our agency, by NOT arbitrarily forcing to act / will / feel / desire / perceive a certain way, but rather limiting Himself to allowing our souls to express who they actually are.
We know that our souls change over time, and the phenomena derived from them also change. People grow, conversion happens, faith and sin are not static. And this reflects itself in our wills, emotions, actions, etc. But the way our souls grow is itself a phenomenon derived from that soul - some souls are harder to change in a particular way than others. So for God to preserve our Free agency, He must not only ensure that our wills / emotions / actions actually reflect our soul (rather than being forced against our wills, like puppets), but He must also ensure that the growth and development of our soul is true to itself (rather than being arbitrarily forced to have certain characteristics, so that it will will and act as God intends).
I’m getting tongue-tied I’m writing this far too late at night…
Basically God has limited Himself, and does respect aspects about our humanity that make us special and responsible and meaningful agents. But this does not preclude Him perfectly designing the development of our soul to have the will / emotions / perceptions that He wants us to have, and to behave the way He wants us to behave (over time, via influences that He knows we will respond to).
I’m always interested to hear how people think Free Will is superior to this kind of Free Agency. I personally have not yet seen why it would be required for e.g. love or responsibility or ‘Image of God’, or for God to be consistent with His own character, etc. You mention several times that you do think it is required. Can you describe why?
Haven’t posted here in a while, but wanted to chime in here.
Free agency seems to me to be only compatibilism with a different name. How does it account for the existence of our seemingly brute “natures”? They either come straight from God as they are (which would make him responsible for any evil they contained) or there is some other truly independent causative power (i.e. our free wills) which have messed things up.
By they way, I would like to express again my concerns with the whole “Boethian” timeless view of God. By itself (as presented by Jason), I find the doctrine incoherent. For there must be some logical priority, even if we view time as a single “now”, among the acts of the free creatures throughout the space-time continuum. And if this is so, God cannot be interacting “simultaneously” with all those acts in such a way that violates that logical priority. The easiest way to see this error is this way. When Jesus foretells that Peter will deny him, it is asserted (on Boethius view) that he is able to foretell this, not because God has predetermined Peter’s acts, but simply because he “sees” them in his eternal now. However, the Peter that God would be seeing who is denying Christ would himself be a being who had already experienced the foretelling prophecy. In other words, before Peter is told the prophecy, he must deny Christ, but before he denies Christ, he has to have heard the prophecy. What is given with one hand on this theory is at the same time taken away with the other. The reply at this point is often - by Lewis and Boethius - that all God’s “acts” in eternity with his creation are really a single act, “incorporating” everything at once. But, even if this were so, this single act would have to uphold this logical interaction, for the temporally posterior acts of free creatures are dependent on temporally prior acts, not vice versa, and therefore what is temporally prior, even with time removed from the equation, is also logically prior. Thus, acts which occur earlier in time must be logically before acts which come later in time, and the latter are “dependent” on the former; not vice versa.
I do think there is a better view of divine atemporality, free will, and providence, which actually incorporates this Boethian view of Lewis’ with his more “open theistic” beliefs, in terms of God “risking” when he created beings with free will, the “two way traffic” of causation between God and creature and God’s impassibility (or lack thereof), and, perhaps the most enlightening metaphor he’s given us on the subject, his chess piece analogy at the end of the Great Divorce. For those interested I’ll post a short summary of that theory below from something I’ve written in the past.
"By combining various elements of CS Lewis’ views of God’s relationship to time, free will, foreknowledge and impassibility, I think I have something pretty close to a “Lewisian” response to the grounding objection in Molinism.
I have attached a diagram which explains it best, but, to put it in words, God’s knowledge is determined by the part of us which is eternal and not in time (which I labeled “soul”). There is a logical priority here which is, admittedly, only vaguely imaginable - like the eternal footprint in the sand - but I think the image does convey a positive idea. Once this “non-temporal” interaction - this “imprintation” - occurs, God’s knowledge is “affected”. This is possible only by the power of his omnipotence and act of self-abnegation which allows us creatures to be “more than receptacles”. I’m sure you know that any theory of genuine free will must allow for God in some way to be affected by his creation; I simply say that affect-ing must occur outside of and logically before time. Once this knowledge is “obtained” by God (this would be where he “learns” the counterfactuals of freedom), God can then “reveal” the soul (to him and to itself), in time, by giving it consciousness, etc, and perfecting it in whatever way he sees fit. His seeing its eternal nature, which has somehow “responded” to him outside of time, allows him to know how it would respond, were he to put it in time A under influences B. What God gains in eternity by looking at the soul is something that allows him to know how such a soul would look “unraveled”, as it were, in time. Perhaps the pictorial best explains it, however.
This idea is based off Lewis in the Great Divorce and his chess piece analogy. You will notice there that he has an “eternal nature” standing outside the board (which is time), and the board itself is that nature “dileneated” in time. This idea, combined with what he says in Letters to Malcolm about there being a “two-way traffic” of causation between creator and created presents the possibility of our eternal souls “causing” God’s knowledge of free counterfactuals outside of time and “before” we have been put in time. Finally, we “come to know ourselves” in time, as our consciousness of our own choices comes to us moment by moment (Screwtape.) As he indicates in the Great Divorce, our eternal souls can be viewed as making a sort of “single” choice or giving a “single” expression by eternally exercising our freedom in a certain way. This expression can be “broken up” in time.
I’m not convinced Lewis actually pictured or encountered the grounding objection, but synthesizing his views allows us to see a possible solution.
Thomas Flint called this view a kind of combination of open theism in eternity and determinism in time. That is a helpful way of thinking, I believe, so long as one remembers it doesn’t exactly capture it."
Nice to have your view Chris I found it very interesting.
From what I understand, it’s very similar to my current view, but with the introduction of ‘open theism’ within eternity (which God then responds to in his eternal determinism, which then plays out in time). My current view does not have this self-determining aspect to the soul - the diversity and characteristics that exist which God responds to, are themselves determined by God (meaning, yes God is responsible in a certain sense for sin within us). The introduction of this eternal limited self-determining ‘open theism’, which influences but by no means negates God’s determinism, can fit quite well with Scripture and universalism. I’ll have to think about it a bit more. My initial gut instinct (obviously a very reliable guide LOL) is that Scripture and logical coherence favour absolute determinism more than this hybrid… But I’m intrigued.
Interesting critique of Boethian timelessness from a pure foreknowledge perspective. I’m not sure its enough to totally discredit it, but I’d like to hear a defence of the idea’s coherence in the face of this challenge. Any form of determinism (with or without eternal self-determinism) easily solves the problem - because it naturally assumes that God has a logical progression that He then expresses in temporal consciousness. God doesn’t have a bunch of space-time slices that mash into an unintelligible shape, but rather arrange themselves to form a beautiful 4D image. The arrangement (logical / temporal progression) is an essential part of God’s determinism.
I think the concept of God’s ‘responsibility’ for evil, is an important thing to grapple with. Why is it that Christians feel they have to get God off the hook for being intimately involved in creating what we call ‘evil’? I have yet to hear a reason that sticks under scrutiny. Would be keen to hear your thoughts.
Is God on the hook? I have yet to hear a reason to think so, that sticks under scrutiny.
If He is on the hook, responsible for evil, then I can think of a greater God.
That is, if we are using the words ‘responsible’ and ‘evil’ and ‘greater’ and ‘God’ univocally.
The weakest rebuttal to the statement that “I do not believe that God is responsible for evil” would be: “I cannot think of any way in which He CANNOT be responsible for Evil”. As if our inability to think a thing binds God. Of course, that cuts both ways, which I think shows the paucity of our philosophy rather than saying something meaningful about God.
As has been said somewhere, or should have been : we put Descartes before the horse.
Hi Jason, thanks for your reply. Personally I don’t see a difference between whether God sees the past or we see the past. My point is is that if there is any existence of a past then that history is fixed, as well as the involvement of a hypertemporal God. God cannot see all of history at the same time and still claim that it can be changed. If he sees the “last event” then the previous events which **caused or created the last event **must have a real existence. If God wanted to change history, then it would be impossible for him to change it because it has already happened, especially with Him being hypertemporal. He could as you mentioned, have “created” and be involved with other parallel realities, however those realities are fixed also, because he would be aware of the last event of those too. Also, it is unlikely that God would create one reality and THEN decide that He wants a different one. That would be adding a past tense to Gods hypertemporalism. All existing realities must have existed from the moment God became “present” which has been for all time (IMO). If there is no past with God then there cannot be any change. Because God cannot see a result and then change his mind, because that result has already happened by God being present at the last event.
In the end I am not sure how multiverses can allow freewill. It just extends the same problems. God would be either picking one and destroying the others or letting them all exist. If God only picks the outcomes he wants and destroys all the realities where I choose something different from what he wants, then how is that freewill? If God allows all these multi realities to exist then how or why on earth would I choose any different? If there was the same or parallel me in alternative realities ultimately choosing different paths then I want to know what made me choose a different path? was it randomness? was it a change of circumstances?
It comes back to the same issue - Freewill can’t be explained.
- but if we do that, we can’t really say anything true about God UNLESS we accept the revelation He has given us in the scriptures, in nature and most of all, by His Son. In that light, we can see light.
Thanks for your ongoing input. Sorry if we’ve hijacked your post a little, Dan.
The scriptures affirm both, sometimes together.
Ontological generation and distinction, though, is the key point, not whether natural time goes back to a point beyond which is nothing.
That implies distinctions in reality and then the question is how those distinctions relate to each other.
- I do appreciate people who are obviously working hard to make sense of a topsy-turvy world and how it relates to God. Please continue.