Cris said:
People exist within a chronological sequence. Unless you can time travel then you have no choice.
It may be true that we can only
live serially, but we're perfectly capable of parallel thinking. I said you seem to imagine everything serially, as we would experience it; by that I don't mean we can
live otherwise, only that God's perspective wouldn't be so limited, and that's what we're trying to imagine.
You are merely describing localized scenarios where you have enough information to make informed choices. This is irrelevant to the argument.
It's relevant because our perspective, limited though it is, can give us insight into what it would be like to see many such localized scenarios simultaneously. The best we can manage is to extend these localized scenarios into general scenarios, and without all the data we're bound to leave some gaps and come to unwarranted conclusions.
But omniscience isn’t about knowing all possibilities it is about knowing which possibility actually occurs. Simply knowing all possibilities is no better than saying you don’t [know] which one will occur.
And knowing which ones will occur doesn't change the time or circumstances of their occurence - what we call "the present". Where for God the present is the most unified (and omniscience implies everything is unified), for us it is the most diverse, where we have the most "freedom".
It's like drawing many strings through the eye of a needle: the passage of the strings through the needle is what we experience as time, their convergence is what is actualized (what actually occurs in our experience), and the various strings is what we might call possibiities or alternatives. That God sees all the alternatives and individual threads, as well is where they converge in one particular individual's life, doesn't change the fact that there are many strings among which we can choose before they actually pass through the needle - before they become what God has observed and we will experience.
So the issue remains – if he knows with certainty what will occur long before you’ve even considered the issue or before you even existed, then your ultimate action will have been predetermined.
As far as it is foreknown. It can't have been predetermined by God any more than our present
feels determined for us. God observes all of time like we observe a moment. It is still left for us to choose and experience what God has observed, and
that's what makes us responsible beings.
My premise is that we
exist for God to observe - not that God is essentially observing Himself, and
we're somehow an objective third party.
But it does. Your perceived free actions now become a pre-programmed sequence because that sequence is known perfectly long beforehand and at the moment of the alleged creation.
You still equate knowledge with programming. You assume it's logical to collapse the two definitions, but I insist they must remain separate. They denote separate concepts. The premise that God has anything to
observe implies that there is an free agent outside of His will. Otherwise "observation" would have no meaning.
It is defined as all-knowing, i.e. all, past, present and future events. If it is true then it has logical repercussions such as the paradox we are discussing.
But a paradox is not yet a contradiction, and a contradiction could only exist if you insist on the assumptions you make. It would be resolved if you revise them, even if the paradox remains.
It is not merely a philosophical perspective but religious doctrine. It is either true or it isn’t.
From a philosophical perspective it might seem like religious doctrine, but from a religious perspective the philosophical perspective lacks crucial information. It is simply a human attempt to cast "knowledge" into an ideal form. The philosophical perspective merely removes time from the equation, while the religious perspective may do the same but cannot contradict revelation (in the same way that scientific perspectives may not contradict observation, regardless of what philosophy predicted).
As a philosopher, you might create a grand definition of omniscience and attach it to an equally philosophical deity. As a believer, the definition of omniscience must conform to a reality. As a philosopher, you might be able to imagine something you deem grander and more impressive than the reality you actually believe in, but as a believer, the reality we believe in is far grander and impressive than any we can observe or imagine.
And that is where you are so wrong, and is the key point. It very much does make him less of a god if he is not omniscient. And if he is omniscient then we are no better than pre-programmed automatons.
Less of a god than
what, exactly? The religious understanding of God's omniscience might not particularly impress you, but that doesn't mean God is any less than He could be thought of philosophically.
You might reason that if your imagination is greater than God, He might not be so great, but that's simply an assumption about a figment of your imagination. In the end, what is actual is of far greater significance than what has been imagined.
If you want to insist that your god is omniscient and not a monster and we have free will then he simply can’t exist.
That's a peculiar deduction. Your belief that God is a monster comes from the terrible state of creation, which you assume will continue. That's only logical because you
don't believe in God; in what He does and will do in spite of the way things are. Without God, things must be as they seem, and if you want to deduce God from things as they seem, you will end up with a distorted view of God. You will have made God an extention of a broken world. But you won't consider that God didn't create a broken world, that although He could foresee the effects of sin He also knew it would not diminish His justice, mercy and love for us, or our ability to value these things. It's only without faith that God must seem diminished, because only then can the world itself be thought to be a direct reflection of God's attitude towards us.
It's because God is omniscient and not a monster
and we have free will that things are the way they are: An abused creation, suffering from godlessness and injustice, but with the unmitigated possibility of restoration and reception of love. That's why we can still
perceive the difference between an ideal world and a perversion, why you can believe so strongly in the eminence of moral judgement that you can expect even God to answer to it. Without God as the target for your moral outrage, you would be forced to accept the state of things as morally neutral, a karmic eventuality of cause and effect.
What God has foreseen has not yet been completed - we still have to pass through the eye of the needle - and it would be premature to judge His character by what you now experience and would deduce from it. The Christian God starts and ends in paradise, and inbetween allows us freedom regulated by laws of love, righteousness and grace. He's greater than circumstances - not detemined by them. And because of that, neither are we.
