Omniscience, Omnipotence, the Fall & Logical Contradictions.

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It is well established as a view. I am not saying it is well established as being true. There is a difference you are not getting here

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On the contrary, it's the distinction I made right at the start.

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That is exactly what I was saying. Dawkins argument, if it relies on limiting God acting only in ways which are permissable to our logic (and then finding him illogical) - is setting up a straw God to demolish. God, by definition, is not confined to operate within our logic and cannot therefore be demolished by our logic.

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So your argument essentially amounts to claiming that our ideas of Go contradict themselves but nevertheless we should not reject them just because they cannot possibley be true.

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Faith adds another dimension to single dimension reason

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IIRC someone - perhaps Mark Twain - said "Faith is beleving what you know aint'so" or something similar. It appears that you agree.The purpose of models is to explain and enlighten - your "3D model" serves the purpose of obfuscation. Too right I'm not interested in it - and you shouldn't be either. Not if you're intellectually honest.

"The well established view that is not necessarily true" we could call it. Similarly, the less well established view (one which open theism holds) that suggests an elapsing-time-eternity which permits things such as all-knowing = no free will. Similar in that it also is not necessarily true.Since no resolution is possble either way we can say that Omniscience must= no free will is going a tad too far. That's fine by me... No. My argument was: don't do a Sir Dickie unless you want to sell lots of books.

Just because we are limited from doing everything does not mean we are incapable of exercising free will within the limits of humanity.After all...we ourselves are not the authors of our eternal destiny.

No, I mean resotrting to the "well we could'nt possibly understand' argument, while continuing to talk as if you completely understand. Victory? where did I mention anyone's victory? I just pointed out that as long as you have the "well we couldn't possibly understand' line of argument available for (mis)use, the debate is totally pointless.. totally fruitless.. a waste of time. Because no matter what rationale, no matter what reasoning, no matter what evidence... you will remain willfully ignorant and handwave away any troublesome thoughts. I guess relatively speaking I haven't been here too long, but I am coming round to the futility of the discussion here, as long as responses like the one I quoted remain the mainstayEdited by Creavolution, : spelling

I never said that "omniscience = no free will". The question we were discussing was whether God could change His mind. If God is eternal and timeless then God never changes and is thus unable to change His mind. Such a change requires temporality.

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No. My argument was: don't do a Sir Dickie unless you want to sell lots of books.

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Your argument was that Dawkins was incorrect. And you failed to even make a coherent case because you got caught up in the self-contradictions of your theology. Looks like a point to "Sir Dickie".

If Was, Is and Will be are all available to an omniscient God and always have been then before during and after the fall all exist to him now equally as they always have done. Time is effectively meaningless.Unless we have a creationist version of the many worlds theory in which all free will possibilities are being played out.......(an intriguing if silly concept)How can there ever have been any point at which God did not know of the fall and therefore of any human choice?
Probably totally off topic but even if we accept the fall as perfectly acceptable why am I still paying the price for some apple munching idiot?Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

Iano, No, no, no, no, NO!The book was not written by the characters in it, the outcome of every "decision" you made/will make was known before the earth was created. God created a story that would unfold. If you have a "decision" to make, "a" or "b", for example, & you choose "b", you cannot ever possibly have chosen "a" because god knew in advance what you would do. Before you were born you were predestined to choose "b". By definition you are not presented with a choice at all.How can only being able to do one thing be considered a choice?I understand what you are saying, that you get to make a real decision, & god gets to know the result before the universe was created. But if that is the case then you still aren't making a decision when you come to make it, because it was predestined before you made it.From gods point of view all of the history of the universe unfolds exactly as he knew it would, before he created it. He knew the fall would happen, he knew he was going to destroy 99.99%** of all life on earth with a flood. What a bastard. He created a world in which he knew he was going to execute everything. What kind of sick puppy is your god, Iano?Mark

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There are 10 kinds of people in this world; those that understand binary, & those that don't

With the apple came a disease called death. This infection meant that his spirit died to God and his physical death became a certainty.Thus infected Adam passed on his genes to his offspring - including lil old you and me. You didn't ask for it but infected you are, sin you will, die you will. Just like a child born with Aids didn't do anything to get it - they still get it.Death - the infectious disease to beat them allEdited by iano, : No reason given.

That isn't my approach. Someone says "Gods omniscience means no free will". But they cannot escape the fact that such comments rely, at their root, on the presumption that God is limited to operating within the confines of our logic. By definition this cannot be the case. We are made like God. We are not God ourselves. So absolutes such as those statements are out.I don't know it all nor do I have to. In suggesting the age old idea of timeless existance for God I give a possible (not proven) way whereby he could know all choices that will ever be made before they are made (by observation) without determining that they be so.In posing an alternative I am attempting to prevent a door being shut to God. For if not shut then open it remains. If I can get the idea across that we have no business limiting God by our logic then I have done my work. A person can go read all about how much God knows and all about how much our will is made plain in the Bible without worrying their heads about Adam not having free will.Its an apologetic - not a proof. Apologetics is the business of preventing doors shutting/opening doors. I might not do it well but that is what I attempt. So we may conclude...

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Omniscience is not incompatible with Adams free-willed choice - for want of being able to show that God is constrained to operating according to our logic

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Nor can it be helped that, by definition, a Christian is going to have more insight that a non-Christian into the workings of God. They have been made alive to God and his ways. They don't see it all (they see through a glass darkly) but they are not blind as bats either. They have the evidence whose currency operates in spiritual land: faith. It is not something can be proven in empirical land for its currency is not for that zone of reality. But it does explain why I presume to know more about God than you do. Not that I am smarter or anything - I can see s'all (if through a glass darkly).Lets face it: the dumbest sighted man in the world can see a lot more than the smartest blind man. I might well be the dumbest sighted man in the world.Edited by iano, : No reason given.Edited by iano, : No reason given.

Hi Mark,
The fall and the resulting judgement were inevitable. God could have started with the judgement or the post-judgement era, or as you point out, the post-fall era. God "bothered" with the creation (your pre-fall era I think) so that his Fatherhood and Creator role and Adam's and Eve's innocence and disobedience would be a part of human history, our history.Adam and Eve were created innocent and walked and talked with Father. By having the history of the fall we know that we are separated from Father by our own individual disobedience. As we know by having this history, Adam did not automatically fall just because Eve was disobedient. Interestingly, he did choose to be disobedient where Eve could rightly claim to have been deceived. Anyway, as children of Adam and Eve, we can each know that had we been Adam or Eve then we too would have individually fallen and thus been separated from Father. Thus we may understand why we are in the post-fall era.Looking forward then, those children who love Father naturally want to go back to live with him. We know that there is no single act or series of acts that we can perform that will undo our individual fall. So, we count on the at-one-ment which he provided to undo our individual fall. At the individual and inevitable judgement those who love Father will be redeemed and thus be able to live with him.I hope this post has addressed the question, Mark,
BAEP.S. We can discuss "Eve's will" once the question you have set out has been answered to your satisfaction.

BobAliceEve, It's not a part of our history, it's a myth. It is no more history than any other myth. So that argument fails at the first hurdle.If you are going to accept this myth then you have to accept other myths as history, too, many of which are mutually exclusive.Mark

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There are 10 kinds of people in this world; those that understand binary, & those that don't

Whether the story of Adam and Eve is a metaphore, or it actually happened the way it is written is irrelevent. The fall happened to show us what we already know in our hearts, that there is something more to life, than just this. Deep down inside we all desire to be in the garden of Eden, and to be with God. First three words of the bible, "in the begining". God was there before the begining, so He must not be bound time, and the way things happen for Him, are uncromprehensible to us. Just because we do not understand the mechanics of living in a universe not bound by time, does not mean that things cannot be stopped from happening, or that free-will does not exist.The possibility is that a being, such as God, who could just speak the universe into existance, might be smarter than us. But that does not put him our of reach from us, He created us to be with Him, and be His friend. We are lords of the earth.

It still seems particularly harsh to me to damn everyone who ever has lived, does live and will live on the basis of the actions of two idiots. Talk about stereotyping!!!
If we have freedom of choice what right does God have to assume I would have made that same choice on the basis of Adam and Eve???
If we do not have freedom of choice then it seems kinda harsh to punish anyone for doing what they are preprogrammed to do.
Either way this is not someone I want to hang out with.Imagine if I cursed you, your whole family both now and for all future generations + all your friends and their friends forever more - just because YOU disobeyed my wishes. I can't imagine you would think that particularly fair!And you want us to worship this vengeful lunatic?

We are not damned because of what Adam and Eve did, but because of what God did. Which stems from your desire to be in the garden with God. If we were not "damned," then we would not pocess this desire, or understand anything.What we perceive as bad, may actually be good.

Lets leave the writing aspect aside for a second.The decisions we make were known "before the creation of the world. I agree. They were known in a dimension called eternity. The dimension Jesus refered to when he said "Before Abraham was, I AM". Eternity envelops time (or time exists as a bubble in the sea of eternity) and is as much before the world began as after the world ends. The same dimension without beginning or end.If so, then God is looking from before and also from after. In other words, the world has already ended from Gods perspective. His knowing all the decisions that would be made arise out of all the decisions having been made already. His foreknowledge comes from his having seen it already happen. Not in a predictive sense but in the sense of looking back at history already made.If so, then his foreknowing interferes not in our being the ones who wrote (from his perspective) the story. Any story is possible - he just knows the one that is already written. This last sentence doesn't read correctly in time but we are trying to mix two dimensions as best we can.It all hinges on the nature of eternity. No time in it? Then it can be as I suggest it is.