Monday, April 11, 2011

CC--Christianese: Omniscience (part 3 of 3)

--In realizing that God knows everything, there is an immediate question people have about whether God knows the future.
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Well, of course He does.
--And I don’t just meant to be flippant about it, but if everything that exists comes into being and is overseen directly by God and is in fact only a result of His mind, will, and enacting, then the notion that there even ever could be something come to pass which does not and would not have this nature from the beginning is silly.
--The past, the present, and the future all equally flow out from Him and are therefore contained in His mind (known by Him) before they ever manifest as we encounter them in time.
--This also explains why some notions of God’s knowledge of the future are a bit absurd, such as that “God looks ahead to see what is there and announces it now.”
--But this starts from the human acquisitive experience of knowledge. If God ever did look toward the future, He would only be looking at what He has already imagined and willed into existence, just like for anything in the present or the past.

--God no more “acquires” knowledge of the future than He does of the present or the past.
--Another way to think of this is to start by not assuming our notions of time even apply to God. He is beginning and end, the Creator of even time itself, as we noted in discussing what “eternal” means. Therefore, to imagine that time would somehow constrain God by preventing Him from knowing something about the future, a constraint which doesn’t even apply to God, is just silly.
--The reasons we don’t know the future are because we aren’t there yet (a limitation) and knowledge doesn’t flow from us (a difference in the nature of knowing).
--But since God already is there because the future flows from Him, both of these limits are silly.

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