Is there life before birth?

What brings this question to mind is the thread about prayer vs. the divine plan. Recent posts in that thread have strayed a bit into questions about how the freewill of man can be reconciled with an omniscient creator. Since this subject is off-topic to that thread, I would love to discuss it within its own thread.Might not god roll the dice before we are born, and we get to choose our fancy? That would imply a beforebirth similar to an afterlife, but after all, god is omnipotent, as well as omniscient. Or, can god even roll the dice, since he would already know the outcome? It is not a trivial question, since computer programmers are familiar with the difficulty in achieving true randomness from a machine that is designed for 'perfect predicability'.Of course, there is the problem of circular reasoning. Any randomness that god manages to achieve is destroyed by his fore-knowledge of those outcomes. So, is this one 'power' that eludes him? Or, can he at least achieve pseudo-randomness, and therefore claim pseudo-omniscience?Oh, and one more question. Does god have free-will? Or does his omniscience not include his own actions?This message has been edited by mogur, 05-15-2004 09:00 PM

Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

Interesting question, but if we assume that God is non-temporal, there's no difference between God knowing what he's going to do and God having done it. There's no difference for God between the knowing and the doing, between will and realization. He's kinda like Bruce Lee in that way.This message has been edited by crashfrog, 05-15-2004 09:52 PM

Fascinating answer, crashfrog. You have made me stretch for a response. But doesn't a non-temporal god have a problem in 'dealing' with temporal beings that have an arrow of time, and a cause-and-effect experience? Let me try to illustrate my point. Say I have a petri dish with a culture of bacteria to play with. Their lifetime is so short, compared to mine, that I 'verge' on (but not quite) appear non-temporal to them. Please allow me the latitude to assume that they possess 'human-like' intelligence and self-awareness. (This is just a thought experiment.) I would also appear almost omnipotent, due to my ability to devastatingly upset their environment, on the slightest whim. Their view of me would also verge on omniscient, especially if I communicated the fact that I created the environment that they currently enjoy, and that I am in control of their future.Here is where I finally make a point. If you now can imagine that I go beyond 'seemingly god-like', and I truely become non-temporal, omniscient, and omnipotent, then I no longer share even the arrow of time with my play-toys. So what? Well, even though we still share the same 3 spatial dimensions, there is no longer any correspondence in our temporal dimension. That would make my playtoys very uninteresting to me at the very least. I suspect that it also might make it impossible for me to even interact with them. Your mileage may vary.

No, because time isn't moving for him.It's like if you took each frame of Casablanca and stacked them on top of each other. At any point in the stack you can see an instant of the movie, you can go back and forth, you can even examine several instants at once. You're under no pressure because the instants themselves aren't doing anything.It might be difficult for him to understand cause and effect, because to him the arrow of time is just an arbitrary way of looking at instants. But then again we assume God is pretty smart so I imagine he deals. Yeah, to them you're temporal but eternal. It depends on what time is like. If there's only one future, then it's like looking at the stack of Casablanca stills - no matter what you do to the frame at the beginning of the movie, Bogart still doesn't get on that plane.On the other hand, if all possible futures exist, then it's like building the best possible Casablanca stack out of an enormous pile of possibilities. I guess that, to me, the creative potential could be pretty interesting.

I don't see how anything can function and make decisions outside of time...

---

My site The Atheist BibleMy New Debate Fourms!

I don't think God would be conscious in the way that you and I are, where we reflect on problems with internal monologue before coming to a decision and taking action.For God I imagine that observation, decision, will, and action are simultaneous. God is will made manifest. Maybe he has the ability to spawn a consciousness in order to deal on our level, but I doubt that's his day-to-day MO.

The problem is though, that in the Bible, God seems to plan, anticipate and react. A God who is outside of time logically cannot react. Also, there is a problem when you realize that for a God who is outside of time, no temporal marker can apply to him. Note this argument:God creates X.
X first exists at time, t.
Therefore God creates X at t.If the argument is valid, then it automatically rules out a timeless God, because it necessitates a God existing within time.

The problem for you, then, is that the Bible obviously isn't the word of God, or even the history of God, but rather, just some folks' thoughts about God and his relationship to the Isrealites. I don't necessarily see the relevance of the Bible to this discussion. Imagine if you will that you're sitting in front of a yardstick. You have long enough arms to reach any point on the yardstick, and since you have two arms, you can put pushpins in the yardstick at two places at once.Does the fact that you're outside the yardstick mean you can't put a pin at 6" and 24" simultaneously? Of course not. If you put the pins in simultaneously, does it mean you put them at the same place? Of course not.God interacts with time at every point in time at once. If he does something at Monday and at Wednesday, we see two events separated in time, but he sees two events simultaneously.

From the perspective of our physical world, the flow of time only comes to a grinding halt when an entity reaches the exact speed of light. Relativistic physics prescribes that a sub-luminal mass would indeed acquire infinite inertial mass at the speed of light, an obvious problem for our reality. While quantum mechanics and the 11 dimensions of string theory make me nostalgic for the comfort of deterministic relativity, I have no qualms about accepting all manner of new physical principles (but not magic) that would allow a better modeling of reality suited to our feeble awarenesses.Since we fall short of any concrete evidence relating to the supernatural, I do not hold my conjectures any higher than yours. But my egocentric perspective sees a rougher road than you do when we cross the border of a naked singularity, into a world of unkown physics. I personally would rather flip your still pictures in either direction of time, but why don't you go first, and I'll catch up later?

True, but I don't see why we need to make the assumptions that 1) time applies outside of our physical universe, or 2) God resides within the physical universe.Biologists usually don't reside within their Petri dishes. Why would God?We're just playing around with language, of course. That's generally what happens when you talk about God, because in my experience there's absolutely no difference between "theology" and "making shit up."

Oh, we aren't talking about the Biblical God then? I'm sorry. Just out of curiosity, how was I supposed to know that?A God who interacts with every point in time at once is not a God outside of time, but a temporally omnipresent God. An interesting third option that my argument does not address.

No offense, but presumably you would have known that by the fact that nobody in this thread mentioned the Bible until you did. Fine, however you want to put it, that's fine. It's the same thing as what I've been saying.

No, nobody mentioned the Bible, but they did mention God. Generally, a mention of God means the Judeo/Christian God outlined by the Bible. When one means that God, then the Bible is the source we have to know that God by.

quote:

---

Fine, however you want to put it, that's fine. It's the same thing as what I've been saying.

---

Yeah, it is what you have been saying, I apologize. Generally, there are two schools of thought as to God's relationship to time. A God who exists outside of time and a God who is everlastingly within time. It was not clear to me up to my first post that you were advocating a third alternative, the temporally omnipresent. It wasn't until after my first post that it became clear that you weren't arguing the Aquinas' classic model of a timeless God. Again, I apologize.

You are confusing validity with soundness with truth value. Remember that an argument can be valid and false.

---

The Laminator

​