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ftd, DrE is the one who proposed the idea of the film preview by God before He created. Her view of God's foreknowledge and your view of God's foreknowledge are very similar. Both of you affirm that before creation (before time?) God KNEW all that would transpire and then set it in motion.

I hadn't read her remarks on the subject.

I think other Calvinists like OPie and I and a few Arminians have offered some speculation at some length many months ago.

I think OPie and I pretty much advocated the idea that God exists outside the constraints of what we mere material creations call time. However, time itself is merely an aspect of God's creation and can hardly be described or imagined without reference to matter.

In this view, time is seen as a part of the construct of creation. And God is not subject to His own creation. He is entirely separate from any element of His creation and it all came forth at His will.

I think that God exists from all eternity, that before He created anything, there was nothing. Not even time. Because if there was no matter, there could hardly be time at least as we can define it. I think that God in some way exists throughout time simultaneously, an eternal Presence and Will, not subject to any physical laws of His universe, not even time. Clearly, this is an aspect of real eternity that we can scarcely conceive. It really does boggle the mind.

In viewing God in this way, Calvinists can readily offer compatible explanations for predestination and for man's free will. And all the rest of the Bible too.

The complexity just of following YOUR WRITINGS about the idea of "God and time" lends credence to the idea that unraveling the distinction between "God's determining and God's foreknowing" is nigh onto impossible. If the bible doesn't directly address it (and I cannot recall where it does), then it's wrong of me to call a calvinist a "heretic."

In viewing God in this way, Calvinists can readily offer compatible explanations for predestination and for man's free will. And all the rest of the Bible too.

The differences between the schools of thought, Calvinist, Arminian/Baptist, is not over knowledge per-se.

It is over which of God's attributes is the key one that moves God to act.

The Calvinist focus on Omnipotence and thus, Soverignity.

The Arminians/Baptist focus on love and justice.

The Calvinist state that an Omnipotent/Soverign God can do anything He wants, and 'fairness' is what God says it is (despite the revelation of it in the Bible), thus, we are moved back to a 'mystery' God.

The Arminians/Baptists state that God is love, and love demands a free response to be a true love.

That is what God wanted from mankind and that demanded that God give His creatures to freely love Him.

It would also not be just for God to predestinate some to heaven and some to hell on no objective critera since all deserve damnation.

Thus, knowledge is only the how of the formulaton of God's Plan, how He constructed it and knows what the is going to happen and controls events.

The why of the Plan is found in God's attributes and it is over them that the disagreement is rooted.