kx000
Valued Senior Member
I promise you God is counted as part of the universe. He was what made the universe into something from nothing. God particle.
Predestination and Free Will
- Thread starter Saint
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I promise you God is counted as part of the universe. He was what made the universe into something from nothing. God particle.
God who is outside History knows all History from the first moment to the last. If you are a believer in God then you must believe in Prophecy. The ability to see and foretell future events accurately before they happen. The Bible has many Prophecy's, So if you believe in God and believe in the Bible you must believe that God can see the future and through His Prophets tell people what will happen into the future. If you believe this then you must believe that God can know your choices before you even make them. Before you where even born.
All Praise The Ancient Of Days
Yes Judas had free will and did His will But it did not destroy Gods Plan but in fact God used His free will to fit into Gods plans. God can use the works of those that are against Him to fulfill his purpose. The Jews and the Romans that executed Jesus in an act to destroy and defeat Jesus only ended up playing an important role in Gods plan to provide the Atonement of the blood of Jesus for all who would believe.
All Praise The Ancient Of Days
I promise you God is not part of His creation.
He was what made the universe into something from nothing. God particle.
Yes God created the Universe from Nothing, well said.
So God who was something before the universe was created cannot be the Nothing you say God created the universe from.
All Praise The Ancient Of Days
Sarkus and Wynn,
All your questions and comments are relevant and deserve an answer, but it would be second hand hearing it from me, read Genesis chapters 1, 2 and 3, and the last five chapters of Matthew, from a genuine Bible like the New King James or the older one, to get an overview and introduction to the gospel. You can only read it two ways - read it ordinarily and you get nothing but a reason to dismiss it, or read it to be instructed - and watch what happens, you will experience a new beginning.
All your questions and comments are relevant and deserve an answer, but it would be second hand hearing it from me, read Genesis chapters 1, 2 and 3, and the last five chapters of Matthew, from a genuine Bible like the New King James or the older one, to get an overview and introduction to the gospel. You can only read it two ways - read it ordinarily and you get nothing but a reason to dismiss it, or read it to be instructed - and watch what happens, you will experience a new beginning.
RoccoR
Registered Senior Member
Gerhard Kemmerer,
Interesting!
I've actually attempted this; along with the idea of Bible Code.
Speaking from an intellectual standpoint, what do you consider the salient points of Genesis?
Most Respectfully,
R
Interesting!
(COMMENT)
I've actually attempted this; along with the idea of Bible Code.
Speaking from an intellectual standpoint, what do you consider the salient points of Genesis?
Most Respectfully,
R
My intellect is different if not questionable, as a child I could not read everyday books, except through headings and pictures. I went through school improvising, but for some reason I had no difficulty reading the KJV which I read through several times cover to cover. From that education I could read well by the age of 6, but found it hard to focus on any other material, hence the improvising to this day.
So I have a head full of the dynamic scenes of genesis, from creation to Egypt, and probably very little academic sense of its writings or codes.
I give the Bible no more credibility than I give you.
Whether you tell me something, or whether I read it in the Bible - it makes no difference to me.
Oh, I do know a thing or two about guilt-trips, and the KJV is very good at inducing them.
Bottomline - you're simply describing a self-fulfilling prophecy, a truism: If one reads the Bible with the intention to submit to it, one will submit to it, and see it as true.
Truisms don't prove anything.
As Wynn says, you are promoting nothing but the cycle of "Believe to believe" that many others promote, even if they don't realise it.
I have read those passages, many times in my past and again just now - and have not been instructed any more than I was then, no matter how much I want to be. It reads like any of the hundreds of books of fiction I have on my bookshelves... just less well written... and has nothing to support the claims it makes.
You might think I could accept it as true with nothing to give it credence, the same way I could accept ID, young earth theories, celestial teapots, and any other of the infinite unfalsifiable claims.
But I find that I can't. It would be like asking a fish to survive being battered, deep-fried and served to a Scotsman with a bag of chips.
I guess you did not read my better example of an object falling in gravity. Even if the object is "predestined" to fall does not imply that you, by simply knowing it would fall, had any hand in causing it to fall.
It is well-known in physics that observers moving at different speeds will view differing "slices" of spacetime, and that the timing of events as seen by one observer will not necessarily match the timing of those same events by another. This has been empirically verified. This does not imply that events are predetermined, only that the motion of the observer determines what he perceives to be the present. A photon that has traveled the entire width if the visible universe would hypothetically have the entire duration of that trip, as we would recon it, exist in its present (as anything approaches c its time is dilated towards zero).
?
I have not suggested that foreknowledge of an event would cause an event.
But if there is foreknowledge, this means that the event had to be predestined.
However, considering this -
I think that as far as God's foreknowledge is concerned, things are a bit different - that God's foreknowledge is categorically different than some other entity's foreknowledge.
This is because God, if we work with some fairly common definitions of "God," is the only entity that is the source of all other entities, and controls and maintains the whole Universe, being omnipresent and omni-involved. As the saying goes, "Not a blade of grass moves without God's will." Thus, a person cannot even think a single thought or perform the smallest action without God first making it possible.
In that sense, every action of any entity that is not God, is predestined/determined by God.
However, if we posit that God is good, omnibenevolent, then this predestination is not a problem.
Foreknowledge simply means that an event is regular enough or operates under well enough known rules to be anticipated. Just because you may be able to anticipate a certain reaction to a given stimuli does not mean that the stimuli is predestined. Only that, given the stimuli, the reaction can be anticipated.
So you wish to arbitrarily redefine "foreknowledge", ad hoc, as it applies to a god?
Most theists and atheists alike have a naive understanding of the logic necessary to the possible existence of any creator god. Such a god would not create using preexisting substances or materials, as that is construction, not creation (and leaves the source of any such material in question). A god would create wholly of its own essence (whatever that may be), which automatically makes the god omnipresent with any existence.
Any knowledge held by any existence is, by default, the knowledge of such a god.
There is no need to posit any motives to a god at all.
RoccoR
Registered Senior Member
et al,
The foreknowledge argument implies that there is a direct connection between the "Supreme Being" knowing - and that - foreknowledge has a causal effect and forces the event to happen. The SB cannot know an untruth (infallibly); so whatever the the SB knows about the future must necessarily come to pass (the timeline is set and not subject to change). It does not take into consideration a couple of issues:
This is a paradoxical and theologically fatalist argument for the pre-destine future. It totally discounts:
Set in these limiting factors, and under these assumptions, there will always be those that can argue the "Free-will Dilemma." It is a never-ending dialog.
Most Respectfully,
R
The foreknowledge argument implies that there is a direct connection between the "Supreme Being" knowing - and that - foreknowledge has a causal effect and forces the event to happen. The SB cannot know an untruth (infallibly); so whatever the the SB knows about the future must necessarily come to pass (the timeline is set and not subject to change). It does not take into consideration a couple of issues:
- It doesn't consider that entities, other than the SB, can (someday) know the future.
- Stephen Hawking: "Time Travel to the Future is Possible" http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblo...ng-time-travel-to-the-future-is-possible.html
- The Big Question: Is time travel possible, and is there any chance that it will ever take place? http://www.independent.co.uk/news/s...ance-that-it-will-ever-take-place-779761.html
- NOVA Traveling Through Time http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/traveling-through-time.html
- It doesn't take into consideration that foreknowledge instantaniously changes as past causal events change [Spooky action at a distance (in time)]
- It doesn't take into account the ability (or not) of the SB to have vision across the entire infinite timeline, while non-supernatural beings only perceive finite snapshots in time.
- It assumes that human logic is (at least) equivalent to SB logic; so whatever logic is applicable to humanity must necessarily apply to the SB. That the laws of the universe, as perceived by man, are the same laws that apply to the SB, the creator of the laws. That the SB's logic is limited by Human logic, and that the creator's abilities cannot transcend Human logic (the SB is not endowed with the three major "God Powers").
- The paradox assumes an existence of an SB (the argument becomes moot if no SB exists).
- That only an SB can know the future (travel in time), and that a man can never travel into the future, gain knowledge and return in time. Or that man can never travel to the past, with knowledge of future events.
This is a paradoxical and theologically fatalist argument for the pre-destine future. It totally discounts:
- Aristotelian Solutions
- Boethian Solutions
- Ockhamist Solutions
- Molinist Solutions
- Frankfurtian/Augustinian Solutions
Set in these limiting factors, and under these assumptions, there will always be those that can argue the "Free-will Dilemma." It is a never-ending dialog.
Most Respectfully,
R
There is certainly some debate about whether or not eternalism is indeed a consequence of relativity, or perhaps more relevantly, a consequence of a more complete theory of everything. But in any case, there is still the issue of a creation event necessarily including the creation of the distant future (if not the final state of the physical universe), if indeed the argument is that the future is just as real as the present. If this is the case, then the universe can only unfold in a manner that is perfectly consistent with that predefined end-point.
Omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence are not logically contradictory, so they do not require any mythical transcendent logic.
I like the fact that you know yourself and your boundaries, and I can see the sense in what you said about "believing to believe." That would not be reasonable.
I did not mean to put a guilt trip on you, that would be wrong. What I meant about being instructed, was knowing what is said on face value and experimenting or reasoning on whatever level, but not ever to be gullible, as you are not.
You do not seem to fully appreciate relativity. Any creator god would observe a slice of time that has no distant future, but that changes nothing about the future, as we perceive it. There are simply a very wide variety of possible time rates in which to view the same events. In our frame, a god only knows what is presently occurring, but in its own frame, such a god would perceive all of these events simultaneously. But all that may be meaningless to you unless you understand relativity fairly well.
Relativity does not necessitate any adoption of eternalism at all. The people who think it does are philosophers and laymen who are not fully cognizant of its consequences. It requires no "predefined end-point" whatsoever.