Following up on my brief post on omniscience, Allan has posted an article disputing that those verses prove God's foreknowledge. Since then I have posted an old article I have on predestination, which does include some verses that do point directly to God's foreknowledge.
Allan appears to be advocating Open Theism, a view that attempts to redefine God's omniscience so that he does not know future events. In a nutshell it claims that God knows all past and present events, and that he settles what he wants to in the future, but does not know the details of it, or those things that he has not chosen to settle.
I do not agree with this view, and will in due course write an article arguing against it (my article on predestination was primarily focused on refuting Arminianism), but first of all I want to make an observation about what Open Theism means for theories of time.
If Open Theism is true, then it means that God does not know everything about the future. This means that:
This can be argued formally as follows:
Allan appears to be advocating Open Theism, a view that attempts to redefine God's omniscience so that he does not know future events. In a nutshell it claims that God knows all past and present events, and that he settles what he wants to in the future, but does not know the details of it, or those things that he has not chosen to settle.
I do not agree with this view, and will in due course write an article arguing against it (my article on predestination was primarily focused on refuting Arminianism), but first of all I want to make an observation about what Open Theism means for theories of time.
If Open Theism is true, then it means that God does not know everything about the future. This means that:
- The dynamic theory of time must be true (as the future must be real which the static theory of time denies).
- God must be in time.
This can be argued formally as follows:
- If Open Theism is true, God's knowledge about the past, present, and future must be constantly changing as events come into being.
- If God's knowledge changes, then he must be in time.
- Therefore, God is in time.
- If Open Theism is true, there are future events that are not predetermined and so are not yet real.
- If the static theory of time is true, then there are no future events as there is no objective 'now'.
- Therefore, the static theory of time is not true.
Comments
You're right, to argue for open theism you must concur that God is bound by time. But then I think you could also argue that a essentially timeless God has chosen to be bound by time, given that he probably created it! Not that this is what I believe - your argument for his foreknowledge and predestination is quite compelling. Will have to give it more thought.Time is a funny thing - so difficult to comprehend how one could be beyond it. "Cause and effect" so dominates our way of thinking, our knowledge, our understanding of things.