Is God Omniscient?

[Cross_+_Flame]

The bible makes it clear that God has predestined us. But the most important point is that none of us knows if we are called. Therefore, we are completely and totally responsible for our decisions. ;-)

Well, we are clearly gonna disagree on predestination, so that much is out on the table :D However, to this specifical point, foreknowledge does not mean predestination, as I mentioned above with omniscience does not have causal power. To be predestined *is* causality, and that notion of God I reject.

 

[reznwerks]

catch

I am not following you here, reznwerks. What do you mean? How could God be powerless to prevent it or how would He not know what it would be, if He designed the outcome? Thanks and God bless.

God can't do both. Either he knows the outcome of an event or he doesn't.If he does know it then he can't change it. If he were to be able to change it the knowledge he has now of the event is faulty. If he can change it then he can't know what he is going to do in the end which would mean he is not omnisicient.

 

[cj]

Prayer is a testimony of God's will, spoken through men on this earth.

I'm not sure I'd want to give it *that* much credence. If I pray for the death of my neighbor, I'm not sure I'd want to offer that up as a testimony of God working in my life.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you; please elaborate :

True prayer is in line with the will of God, it offers back to Him what He is; it is man reflecting the will of the heavens on earth.

Prayer that is simply words of vanity is nothing...... our Lord gave an example when He spoke of men who think they are most eloquent but are really nothing more than empty vessels.

Prayer must come from that which fills a vessel..... Christ Himself.

To better understand the offering of prayer one must come into the light of the matter of the incense altar found in the temple.... This altar was on one side located in the Holy Place and on the other side located in the Holy of Holies. In the Holy Place man enjoys Christ as the bread of life as signified as the showbread and Christ as the light of life signified as the lampstand. It is after this experience that we are ushered into the very presence of God, which is found in the Holy of Holies. And it is in the presence of God that we are able to pray one with God, meaning, we pray what is on His heart. This is true prayer.


In love,
cj

 

[cubedbee]

But if you give Bob a chance to eat an apple or an orange and you tell him the apple will make him sick but he doesn't believe you, which one do you think he will pick? All robots will pick the one that is most pleasing to them until they see that you were right after all. And many will continue eating the apple if the taste is more pleasing than the ill affects - even if the ill affects kill them. To them, nothing compares to the taste!

None of this changes the fact that if I created Bob from scratch, programmed every instruction in his electronic mind, then it is I, the creator of Bob, who has chosen the apple for him. Bob might think he is the one that gets to choose, but because I wrote his programming, which includes his illusion of freewill and his preference for apples, it is I who choose the apple for Bob. I could just as easily altered a couple lines of code to make Bob desire oranges, but I chose not to and instead chose to allow Bob to desire the apple, eat the apple, and get sick.

 

[Heidi]

And before I became a Christian, I thought I was not called. But my desire to come to God was important enough to me to want heaven. Those who have not been called resist God like the plague and are proud of it. God is the last thing they want, even knowing full well they could spend eternity in hell. Therefore, because God is all-loving, he grants everyone his wish. So what's the problem? :-?

 

[Drew]

As I said earlier, I think there is a problem with the idea that God knows the future but does not interfere with free will. Now I understand the appeal of this idea, I really do - there is nothing internally contradictory with the idea that God "sees" our future choices all made with free will. The supporter of this view will, quite naturally point to its internal consistency.

However, I think we need to think more deeply, we need to go beyond the admitted "surface-level" appeal and apparent soundness of this position and think more globally. Trust me, I totally understand that the idea seems ok. But we need to be more aggressive in our thinking and examine the implications. As I tried to argue earlier, if it can be said in any way God knows that Bob will eat an apple on 4 April 2006, this apple-eating event is permanently marked on the world's timeline. How can it be otherwise if this is what God knows? However, Bob and the rest of us are stuck in April 2005. To avoid making God's knowledge of April 2006 false, Bob has to be living and near an apple in April 2006. This limits his choices, plain and simple. So there is a problem.

Would any who disagree please resist the temptation to simply point out the rather obvious appeal of the idea that God can see our futures without causing them. I fully acknowledge the appeal of this idea. Instead, please find out what is wrong with my argument. Where is the flaw in my reasoning that our choices are indeed limited by God's knowledge of the future?

 

[Heidi]

But you miss the fact, Drew, that Bob does not know his choices are limited! Let me give you an example. In 1972 my husband and I moved up to Fargo, North Dakota. Now being from Chicago, for me, this felt like the end of the earth. But the bible said in Acts 17:26, "From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whoe earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live."

Even though I did not want to go to Faro North Dakota, God knew that if I had gone to any other place but ND, it would be much harder for me to come to him, and I may not have come to him at all because I'm such a worldly person by nature. But I didn't know God was drawing me. All I knew was that my husband got a job in ND and i wanted to follow him.

It is God who puts desires in our hearts if He is drawing us. But since none of us knows if he is drawing us, we are completely and totally responsible for our fate. All God wants is to make sure we hear his word wich opens up more options to us.

 

[Drew]

Hello Heidi:

I certainly have no disagreement with the claim that Bob does not know that his choices are limited. But how does this work against the substance of my argument? Whether or not Bob knows this, the fact that God knows his future takes away Bob's free will. Why? Imagine Bob where he is at this very moment. Let's say he is in his car on the way to his job in Hackensack, New Jersey. If God knows that he will go to the Hackensack McDonalds for dinner, his freedom to choose is indeed limited. He does not have the freedom to get in his car, drive to the airport and fly to LA for dinner.

To me this is pretty clear. The common sense notion of free will is that we each have some degree of freedom to choose - some aspect of our future that we get to control. Of course, no one would say we have complete freedom. We cannot do things that are beyond our capabilities - I cannot run a 4 minute mile even if I want to. But what does free will mean if we do not even have a smidgen of control over our future?

If God knows everything about my future - what my next thought will be, where I will eat lunch, when I will make a mistake and run a red light, etc. how can I say, from the perspective of being me at the instant that I write this post, that I have freedom of choice? Logical consistency demands that my life path follow the path that God knows I will follow.

So I may have the illusion of free will, but I have no free will in point of fact. Perhaps when you say that we have free will, you really mean we have the belief that we have free will. If so, I am with you.

However, I do not see how you can justify your claim that we are responsible for our actions. How can we be responsible if our free will is not real? Foreknowledge is predestination, as these terms are commonly understood.

Again I ask, what exactly is wrong with my argument? You have pointed out correctly that Bob does not know his choices are limited. But surely, this is beside the point. I may not know that my workmates have placed a "kick me" sign on my back, but that ignorance does not change the facts of the matter.

 

[hawkman]

God is omniscient in all the areas he needs to be .

I voted .