Posted on 02/05/2004 3:20:50 PM PST by xzins
I have numbered your statements for ease of reference.
As to [1], your implication is correct: I don't think there is conflict as long as God's thinking is sequential. It is important to ignore the 'length' of time between acts or decisions and just focus on whether one act or decision of God comes before another. It is the sequentiality, not the measurement of intervals that is important.
As to [2], you are right again. A determinist could well hold that God considered things sequentially before man was created and fleshed out His entire 'script' at that time and then implemented it. It is the confluence of (1) the sequentiality of God's actions and decisions combined with (2) the free agency of His created beings that causes the problem for determinists.
The sequentiality issue is (it seems to me) critical for the open theist construct because without it you can a conflict with God 'knowing' everything and yet man's free agency being truly 'free.'
Well, tell me how that works. Suppose God 'knows' that I'm going to say 'yes,' but then I change my mind and say, 'no.' Doesn't that leave us with the old determinist dodge, "Well, God knew he was going to change his mind, so he never really said 'yes'."
I am familiar with Mr. Wesley's explanation of God being outside 'history' and therefore can have (simple) foreknowledge. The problem is that it takes God outside of sequentiality. That's why open theism has some appeal.
Sounds like a start toward the 'counterfactuals' of Molinism. But your description, as far as it goes, is probably a better description of open theism.
Assume a universe of 100 'choices' (obviously, way too small, but just to put a number on it), all you have said thus far is that all possible outcomes of the free agency are "contained within God's knowledge." So, God knows that the one of those outcomes which will eventuate is somewhere within the universe of 100, but He cannot truly 'know' which one it is until the free agent makes his decision.
That's why I say that, with open theism, God would have probabilities attached to each possible outcome.
I haven't read any advocates of Molinism, but (as I understand it) Molinists posit "counterfactuals of freedom" which are really, not only all possible choices, but all possible choices in all possible universes. I am not sure whether they try to make the last leap from the highest probability outcome to true "foreknowledge" or not. Is that the source of your thesis? Do you know any more?
Well, even though our speculations sound a little irrelevant, these presuppositional concepts can have dramatic effects on the way we live the Christian life. Boyd makes the point that it dramatically affects, for example, our prayer life.
The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms." (Deut. 33:27)
Scripture declares that God is eternal. In theological categories, eternity is treated as an attribute of God's essential nature. Defining and describing this attribute is not an easy task. In fact, any definition will fall short, for the simple reason that we have no way to understand what it means to be uncreated or to have no beginning. This does not mean, however, that any derived understanding will necessarily be inaccurate, only incomplete. But this of course is true with all theology.In defining eternity as it relates to God's existence, a good starting point is to acknowledge His uncreatedness. That is to say, God is self-existing, with neither beginning nor end. There was no cause that brought forth God's existence, but rather creation owes its existence to God. That something was selfexistent is the proof of the cosmological argument. "If anything does now exist, then something must be self-existent because from nothing, nothing comes."
The idea that God has no beginning or end is unexplainable but nevertheless conceivable. But to stop here with our description of eternity would be unsatisfactory. The next step is to ascertain the relationship between eternity and time. Does eternity transcend time? Are eternity and time mutually inclusive or exclusive? These questions form the essence of our inquiry. How one answers here, will effect the way one views other qualities of God's nature, such as immutability, omniscience, and transcendence. In other words, one's concept of eternity becomes a theological watershed to which other theological implications must flow. It is at this juncture that theologians are divided on the concept of eternity. Some have postulated that God is timeless, while others contend that time is essential to His nature.
Eternity as Timelessness
Eternity as timelessness means that God transcends or dwells outside the dimensions of time. Past, present, and future lose their distinctiveness as they merge into one eternally fixed moment. There is no succession or duration for God. These characteristics apply to the created order, but not to the Creator. He enjoys the whole scope of knowledge, experience, events, and relations in one eternal moment. Yesterday is not past. Tomorrow is not future. Both are eternally present. It would seem that this view of eternity is favored because it anchors such doctrines as immutability, omniscience, and transcendence. Time or succession implies change. If God can have an experience now that He did not have a moment ago, it could be said that He has changed in some way, though not necessarily in His essential Being. Timelessness adds permanence and security, two qualities which bring hope in a world of constant change and uncertainty. If God lives above time, He would have a perfect account of all knowledge. Nothing could be future and contingent for Him because He already inhabits the future. Just as we have a certainty of knowledge at the present, God has a certainty of knowledge of all the future, because the future for God coexists with the present. And if God is a timeless Being it would make Him qualitatively different from man in that He would not be bound by the restraints of time. It would make Him unique and Divinely otherly. This is the doctrine of transcendence.
Many argue, such as Ronald Nash, that the doctrine of Divine timelessness is a Greek concept originating in the philosophy of Plato, maturing in the system of Neoplatonism, and finding passage into Christian thought by way of Augustine, who he considers to be a Christian Platonist. In addition to Augustine, it was later held by Anselm, Aquinas, and the Reformers.
Eternity as Endless Time
Eternity as endless time means that there is no beginning or end to the process of time. Time stretches infinitely into the past and will endure infinitely into the future. The present for God is the same as the present for us. God does things sequentially, whether thinking, acting, or relating. Past, present, and future are clearly distinguishable to God. The past is gone. The future is yet to be. All that exists for now is the present. This view is favored for its simplicity and dynamism. It is easy to comprehend and it makes sense. Since we have left the past, enjoy the present, and move on to the future, it seems natural to us that God experiences the same. It also presents a God who is active and personal. He is an agent who continually transmits His energy to sustain the universe. He acts in the present world with no philosophical difficulties of how He does it. Temporal location is not a problem for a God who experiences time. Relationship with man is real and intimate. In addition, it would seem that a case for endless time would be more easily ascertained from scripture than would that of timelessness.
Samuel Clarke and Jonathan Edwards both held to the idea that God's eternal existence was everlastingness rather than timelessness.
Upon consulting a number of theology books in the 19th and 20th century, I discovered that neither position on God's eternity was only held by a hand full, rather each position had many advocates. In addition, neither view was strictly a Calvinistic or an Arminian doctrine. Both systems have had advocates of each view.
I don't think it does. We as mortal beings and part of God's physical creation still inhabit time and God inhabits eternity. Thus the fact that we change our minds has no effect on God's foreknowledge since, if God recognizes that we changed our minds NOW (in time), then God recognized it in eternity (outside of time and hence both at NOW and in sequence AND at the foundation of the earth simultaneously.
Jeepers, I have sooo many objections to this article. You asked for specificity, so let me begin by saying that the author has subordinated God to the physical laws, in particular space/time and cause/effect. Science does not draw such limitations in the physical sense, so I find it very troubling that anyone would suggest such limitations on God in a spiritual sense.
The author said:
Time must be linear. Once God thinks a certain thought He cannot somehow go back in succession.
Has anyone here ever wondered why the term space/time is rarely broken into "space" v "time"? It’s because the two terms are interrelated. For an introduction with graphics: Postulates of Special Relativity and for more detail on this specific issue of transformation Lorentz Transformation
If Einstein’s Relativity (the geometry of space/time) were not true, we would not be able to do space exploration. The theory has held up repeatedly over these many years.
What all of this means in layspeak is that time is a dimension.
If you were to draw a line and try to describe a point on that line you would use a coordinate, a number x, relative to some point 0 on the line, e.g. –3, 4. If you were to draw another line perpendicular to that line, it would take two coordinates, an x for the first line and a y for the second.
Visualize the two lines laying on a plane, and draw another intersection line at a right angle and you’d need three coordinates. To describe a point is such an imaginary cube, you’d need x,y and z.
But our universe is moving, continually, so there is yet another coordinate for time, t.
Where anything is in the universe is specified by those four coordinates, x,y,z,t.
We must remember that the “world” we perceive is limited to three spatial dimensions and one of time. But there may indeed be many more spatial dimensions and there may also be extra time dimensions. These dimensions are expected to exist – just like Einstein’s space/time – because they mathematically resolve a multitude of observed phenomenon in the universe.
But the key question we ought to all be asking here is why our vision and our minds are limited to only four dimension? If there are many spatial and temporal dimensions, why this particular choice of coordinates?
This article, on the curse of dimensionality explains that if we could see in four dimensions we would be able to see the inside of a box without opening it. If our minds – our mental construct of reality – could deal with it, we could remove the content of the box.
IOW, we have been designed so that we can only “see darkly” even in a physical sense!
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these [is] charity. – I Corinthians 13:9-13
Not only that, but the one time dimension we actually can perceive with our vision and our mind is known to have a beginning. This is a mathematically unavoidable determination. Scientists no longer argue for a steady state universe, which they would prefer, because the fact of a beginning is a theological statement. It is after all the first words in the Scripture:
Finally, the author insists that time must be linear, that God must abide by the rules of cause and effect. Scientists truly would prefer that were the case, but there is no such requirement.
Specifically, if you were existing in an extra time dimension, time would be a plane not a line. It would explain how photons move faster than the speed of light (superluminal) which they do: Non-locality gets more real. The cause/effect relationship could be reversed to effect/cause. Past, present and future would be all equally accessible. Schrodinger’s cat would be both alive and dead (superposition) in the extra dimension though it would be only one or another by the choice of 4 coordinates (3 spatial, 1 time).
Moreover, if you could stretch your mind outside of space/time altogether (regardless of dimensions) here’s how things would look:
A mathematical structure is an abstract, immutable entity existing outside of space and time. If history were a movie, the structure would correspond not to a single frame of it but to the entire videotape. Consider, for example, a world made up of pointlike particles moving around in three-dimensional space. In four-dimensional spacetime--the bird perspective--these particle trajectories resemble a tangle of spaghetti. If the frog sees a particle moving with constant velocity, the bird sees a straight strand of uncooked spaghetti. If the frog sees a pair of orbiting particles, the bird sees two spaghetti strands intertwined like a double helix. To the frog, the world is described by Newton's laws of motion and gravitation. To the bird, it is described by the geometry of the pasta--a mathematical structure. The frog itself is merely a thick bundle of pasta, whose highly complex intertwining corresponds to a cluster of particles that store and process information. Our universe is far more complicated than this example, and scientists do not yet know to what, if any, mathematical structure it corresponds.
IMHO, this is the mechanism of our free will. It’s not that we can accomplish anything as corporeal existents. It is the soul of man which God breathed into Adam (neshama) which makes us different from ordinary wildlife.
BTW, the Tegmark article is not at all theological. He is looking at multi-verse from a mathematician’s point of view in a materialistic science article. But the very nature of math is significant:
The view [Platonism] as pointed out earlier is this: Mathematics exists. It transcends the human creative process, and is out there to be discovered. Pi as the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is just as true and real here on Earth as it is on the other side of the galaxy. Hence the book's title Pi in the Sky. This is why it is thought that mathematics is the universal language of intelligent creatures everywhere....
Barrow goes on to discuss Platonic views in detail. The most interesting idea is what Platonist mathematics has to say about Artificial Intelligence (it does not think it is really possible). The final conclusion of Platonism is one of near mysticism. Barrow writes:
If that is the case, the determinist model has some serious problems. In that I believe that my God is a God of order rather than disorder and that time is from eternity to eternity, God operates within time. Since the history of the world is measured in time as it relates to the birth of Christ, at least since his birth, I don't see how a reasonable person could conclude otherwise.
If swarm Calvinism relies on God operating outside of time, they have a lot more problems than even I thought. It's amazing the contortions they must go through to justify their theology
This also seems rather ironic in that they claim because God predestined some events, that God must have predestined all events. Yet as it relates to time, it is obvious that the history of man is sequential/within time, but they must insist that God operates outside of time because without that assumption, their theology must fail.
I am open to the possibility that I might not understand something about this within/outside of time business, but if I am even in the neighborhood, the determinists are making a huge leap of faith.
For several years I have been convinced that reality for us is a Space, Time, Energy, Mass box since it did not have these aspects, we could not perceive it. This does not mean the "box" is the total essence of REALITY, for REALITY exists beyond what we are able to perceive.
A distinction must be made relative to the "box" and REALITY or you end up with in pantheism. While REALITY is within the "box," the "box" is not REALITY since REALITY transcends the "box." Thus panentheism vs. pantheism.
"To be is to be free, to be choosing, and to be enjoying (slightly or greatly, positively or negatively) the process of selecting from among competing influences. To be doing this is to be alive. To be doing it with the complexity of performing these tasks self-consciously, rationally, purposefully is to be doing it as a person. To have perfect awareness of all this, perfect memory, love, and preservation of it, and to be giving perfect guidance to the others who are involved in the process is to be the only perfect person, God.
"Santiago Sia [in his God in Process Thought, Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1985] summarizes Hartshorne's panentheism:
"Panentheism . . . holds that God includes the world. But it sets itself apart from pantheism in that it does not maintain that God and the world are identical. . . . Hartshorne explains that God is a whole whose whole-properties are distinct from the properties of the constituents. While this is true of every whole, it is more so of God as the supreme whole. . . . The part is distinguishable from the whole although within it. The power of the parts is something suffered by the whole, not enacted by it. The whole has properties too which are not shared by the parts. Similarly, God as whole possesses attributes which are not shared by his creatures. . . . We perpetually create content not only in ourselves but also in God. And this gives significance to our presence in this world." (http://websyte.com/alan/pan.htm)
In that I believe that my God is a God of order rather than disorder and that time is from eternity to eternity, God operates within time. Since the history of the world is measured in time as it relates to the birth of Christ, at least since his birth, I don't see how a reasonable person could conclude otherwise.
You are operating from the assumption that God has to act numerous times, in sequence, in order to interact with His Creation. That is like begging the question.
If we, rather, imagine God to be the Master and Creator of time, He can easiily act "once" (for lack of a better word) to fulfill all of His interaction with the created world. We will experience these interactions sequentially as we move through time. But God, who is not limited to time, and can see and know all things and all times, can simply act from eternity in a single action. Why would one assume that God acted, and then waited to see what happened, and then acted again, and waited again, etc.? This means God has to wait, and if God has to wait, then He is not perfect unto Himself. He is unfulfilled while He is idling waiting for our next action.
If we see a lot of land being cleared, then in subsequent weeks, the lot being levelled, then a basement is dug, and filled. Then a wood frame is erected, and walls and electricals are put into place. Finally, a roof and siding are put on, and the landscaping is done.
We see this play out over several weeks, or months. Yet, we recognize that someone has decided to build a house. Not that a sequence of events had been decided upon sequentially.
SD
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