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To: Boogieman
I am sorry but you are dancing around this one item...I am NOT SAYING THERE ARE NOT SEVERAL POSSIBLE CHOICES FROM WHERE WE STAND. I am saying in reality, there is only ONE OUTCOME which God sees as He views the future (in His unlimited Omniscience and Foreknowledge). And, it doesn't matter if you want to view Him sitting at the end of time looking backward. There is just one outcome that He either knows or doesn't know. If there is one outcome that He knows, that means it and only it will happen! Then irrespective of what it feels like to the "free agents", they are not free.

"No, it doesn’t. At any point in time, there are various possible futures. The fact that, at the end of time, you can look back and see that only one path was chosen, does not mean that those other possibilities could not have occurred. They could have, they just did not."

The question is, "Does God know of ONE SINGLE OUTCOME? or does HE have to wait and see what will happen because it has not happened yet in our real space-time reality?" That is, is God truly Omniscient with respect to the future or do you believe as the Open Theists believe that He cannot know what has not yet happened (because of the free agency of man)? Don't say, "Well, then He would know something different if something different was chosen." That is gibberish and akin to saying, "Well, tomorrow is jelly unless it is a bicycle." We cannot move forward without this being settled.

191 posted on 05/14/2015 5:02:00 PM PDT by Dutchboy88
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To: Dutchboy88; Boogieman
"According as he hath CHOSEN us in Him BEFORE THE FOUNDATION OF THE WORLD, that we should be holy and blameless before him in love;"(Eph. 1:4).

"That in the dispensation of the FULNESS OF TIMES he might gather together in one all things in Christ..."(Eph. 1:10)

"And to make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD hath been hid in God, who created all things by Jesus Christ:"(Eph. 3:9).

This tells me all I need to know about His Omniscience": He KNOWS. He knows it so well that before He even set the foundation of the world, He had ALREADY chosen us in Him.

192 posted on 05/14/2015 5:28:06 PM PDT by smvoice ("You will be suspected until you are cleared of all suspicion...."...)
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To: Dutchboy88

“I am saying in reality, there is only ONE OUTCOME which God sees as He views the future (in His unlimited Omniscience and Foreknowledge).”

What future? There is nothing “in the future”, from God’s perspective. That isn’t dancing, it’s a simple fact. You are mixing your frames of reference, talking about what God sees, but talking about it as if God were a man. That is a fundamentally flawed framework.

“And, it doesn’t matter if you want to view Him sitting at the end of time looking backward. There is just one outcome that He either knows or doesn’t know. If there is one outcome that He knows, that means it and only it will happen!”

No, it does matter how you view this, because we are not God. We are incapable of knowing exactly how God sees things, because we don’t have any experience or true conception of it. So, if we are trying to reason about those kinds of things, we have to be careful of our perceptions and basic assumptions about those perceptions betraying us, and biasing our thinking.

Basically, you can call it a form of confirmation bias, but one that is much more intrinsic than what we normally use that term for, because these are not ideological things that bias us, but fundamental aspects of our nature biasing us.

So you say, “God sees the future, and it will happen”, but God is not really sitting in the past, looking forward. I could just as well say “God sees the past as it already happened”. Neither one of those statements is actually accurate. Yet, we don’t have any terms that are available to our human brains to accurately describe the true picture. God is not in the past looking forward, or in the future looking back, but he is outside of time, looking in, and we have no idea what the implications of that are. So my mentioning of the alternate perspective (of God looking back) really is just to serve to illustrate how framing the question in our human terms can shape the conclusions you will draw. You’re doing it a certain way, and it causes you to think certain conclusions are inescapable, but since your description is not accurate, the conclusions you perceive cannot be taken for granted.

“The question is, “Does God know of ONE SINGLE OUTCOME? or does HE have to wait and see what will happen because it has not happened yet in our real space-time reality?””

Again, you are talking about God as if he is human. God doesn’t experience the passing of time. He doesn’t “wait” for anything. There is no “yet” for God. If half the words you are using in your question are meaningless in regards to the subject of the question, then what reliable conclusions can you draw from the answer?

Yes, we can say God knows what happened, what is happening, and what will happen. Yet, that assertion can’t support what you are trying to build upon it.

“Don’t say, “Well, then He would know something different if something different was chosen.” That is gibberish and akin to saying, “Well, tomorrow is jelly unless it is a bicycle.””

Your question is gibberish as it applies to God! So how can you expect anything other than a gibberish answer? Garbage in, garbage out.


193 posted on 05/14/2015 5:59:59 PM PDT by Boogieman
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