gods word says that its his will for none to perish
and thats true because god doesnt lie

and this shows that he didnt fix everything before time because he didnt get his will

/thread

If he is struggling with hot dog versus cheeseburger and decides to settle the issue by temporarily going forward an hour to see what he ate, it does.

The Marty McFly Paradox?

God doesn't lie, he deceives, which is sneaky, untrustworthy and hard to respect. It also means that you can't trust anything you hear second hand about him.

I'm not especially familiar with the problem you're talking about. The reason for this is that I am largely uninterested in logical disproofs of God. I think the best case scenario with those sorts of argument is that theists revise their concept of omnipotence (or w/e) rather than change their belief in god, and as such it seems less important to me that evidential-style arguments that seek to undermine the rationality of theism. That cuts both ways: I don't look to give to prove god is logically impossible and I also give no credit to arguments that god is logically possible. Logical possibility is the refuge of the charlatan imo. One should care about what is plausible.

edit: Not suggesting that atheist ought not make those sorts of arguments, just explaining why I don't.

If God’s mode of existence is eternal, he can’t know the future because in eternity there is no future [and past, before and after].

This implies God is bound by time and space.

While I'm not a theist, I think it is fairly easy to make "free will" and "omniscience" fit together.

Simply remove the element of time, intuitively best understood as "everything happening at once" (this isn't really correct, but it makes it easy to understand); thus merely assume that there is creation, choices and some god-figure knows all about it. Then explain time as an remnant of choice or some other kind of mystical hoodoo.

Now there is no past and no future. There is only stuff, and god knows his stuff.

From a transcendental god's point of view, there is no past or future. But this doesn't allow for free will because at the moment of creation, God has perfect knowledge of its creation's choices. You haven't really answered that, which is the core of the problem of free will and omniscience.

I suppose I have heard this explained before as a distinction between the metaphysical possibility of having chosen otherwise (or choosing otherwise), which constitutes metaphysical free will, and the knowledge of what is actually chosen, which is only possible from outside the system, which constitutes omniscience.

i.e the idea being that from inside the universe it is not possible to know in advance what choice will be made, but from outside of time God views everything "all at once", and from that perspective it is neither true to say that the decision was already made or that it is yet to be made, the decision simply exists.

I don't think this is totally incoherent. In a universe with libertarian free will, we would still understand the freedom to choose otherwise as only being open prior to the choice being made, and in hindsight one has no such freedom. Being a-temporal is analogous to looking back in that sense.

I see that zumby already posted the link to the stanford Foreknowledge and Free Will article which I just got around to googling for

pretty handy overview

There isn't really a "moment" in this scenario, so I don't think that objection holds.

If there is an objection to be held, it is ofcourse that we have no reason to suspect that something like this is true, nor do we know if it is even possible to have existence without time. And ofcourse lastly, but not least, it isn't even falsifiable.

It is a pink invisible bogeyman in the closet. Apologetics is, after all, fairly easy.

I'm not sure what scenario you think there isn't a moment in, since it's a figure of speech. From God's point of view, there is not-creation and creation. There's a transition between the two whether that is situated in time or not. So in that transition, however you define its beginning and end, God has an awareness of all possible futures if he is omniscient. If he does, there can be no free will.

Your objection is moot, because to even talk about what a transcendental god must or must not do or know, we assume his existence. We are not arguing whether he does or doesn't exist, but about what characteristics he has if he does exist. You didn't answer the question, which was whether you could have free will if God is omniscient. It's not an answer to say there's no way to know whether there is a god, because we are stipulating that there is.

Is it impossible to have an existence without time? That seems an anthropocentric view to me. A photon does not "experience" the passage of time. That you cannot know how the world is to God doesn't mean that it cannot be that way. You don't know how the world is to an electron either.

Of course it's not falsifiable. One problem I have with religious atheism is the insistence that the existence of God is decidable within science. But there are plenty of other questions that are not decidable within science and we don't feel like that automatically makes them untrue.

If you wrote a computer program that made decisions where you had no prior knowledge of what the program would choose given an input, even though it might be that you knew the bounds of what it could choose, you could claim the computer was free to choose.

However, if when you wrote the program, you knew what choices the computer was bound to make, you could not claim it was free to choose.

Your middle paragraph corresponds with my understanding of an omniscient god, which is like the programmer who already knows the decisions his program will make.

It seems to me that most of the thread is arguing from the "inside" point of view. Of course it seems to us that we make free choices, because we have no knowledge of the outcomes of our choices until we make them. But God has "always" known them, and when he created us, he created us with those choices already existent. It could hardly be otherwise for a transcendental god.

I don't read much theology so I'm ignorant of how this is explained away by Christians. When God was invented, his inventors had no idea that they had made a god whose attributes are incoherent. Perhaps they believe he chooses not to know the outcomes of his creation. Perhaps they are simply wrong that he is omniscient, and that he was able to create all of time and space at once but the operation of creation is not a process of painting in all the details. You can readily imagine a god who emanates the universe without regard to its form -- some people have believed this.

Erm, what "objection" is this? I don't think you have raised a point. If we remove time, you can't include time - that's how things work. If we were discussing possibilities, that would be something else - but we're in invisible unicorn land now. Without time, there is obviously no precognition.

I'm sure you feel this is an anthropo-something view. Good thing then, that noone held it. I don't know the personal life of photons, but if I ever get to talk with one - I'll let you know.

I don't know what this "religious atheism" is, some form of buddhism? Animalism? Spiritualism? I'm probably too ignorant to respond to this.

You possibly need to rethink what time is.

How long does he have?

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Defen...ineofGod14.mp3

Summary:

God's foreknowledge is not necessarily causal.

As long as he needs. Assuming he isn't God. Who would not be able to rethink anything because tameDs has disallowed the possibility of God's being able to do anything since he seems to think causation requires time.

it seems reasonable to think that "doing something" requires something that functions like time, at least logically, if not a "time" that is of the same nature as time in our specific universe. Or, if not, in any case I find myself to be almost incapable of conceptualizing things (at least, as soon as there is more than one, or as soon as there are any kind of dynamics) without space-like and time-like logical relationships

Since you didn't get the joke last time; I haven't made this infamous argument about "existence" and time, and nor have I made one about "causality" and time.

I wrote this:

It really shouldn't be necessary to write this post.

I'm kind of surprised to see you say so, since I understood you to be a believer in a transcendental god, but there are plenty of things that it's hard to conceptualise that may be so.

Don't scientists believe that the universe came into being, and time with it, without any process from one moment to the next? Since time is just one dimension of spacetime, I don't see how it could be otherwise and I don't really see the problem, if God is not bound by spacetime, in his being able to create time itself along with the rest of spacetime.

you are misunderstanding me because you're assuming that "Time" is a proper noun that refers only to our universe, but I was trying to be clear that even if God is "outside of time" as it functions in our cosmos, the kinds of abstract logical relationships between things that are "time-like" seem to be a pre-requisite for dynamics.

Maybe it would be clearer if we talked about space first. Mathematicians use all kinds of N-dimensional "spaces" to solve problems. We call them spaces because they function logically in a "spatial" way, without regard for whether or not the universe actually has however many dimensions. You can do the same with time-like relationships.

Okay, that's fair enough. I don't agree but now I see what you were saying.

I believe that from a transcendental god's point of view, there is no causation as such. The universe is spread out as one entity with four dimensions. Whether that means that from our point of view there must be a "time-like" dimension within which he creates that universe, I'm not so sure.

I take time to be simply a dimension of spacetime, which appears to us to order "events" but doesn't have to. It's simply a matter of perspective.