I was reading this blog, and thought it raised some questions that would be interesting here, concerning whether God makes choices and deliberates over them. It also could morph into a question of does God answer prayer, for if he does not deliberate and make choices, what good is prayer?
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Maybe one can examine it relative to pre- vs. post-Hellenic influences. Abraham, Moses and much of Judaism occurred in the pre-Hellenic era. Much of (scholarly) Christianity was tied to post-Hellenic ways of thinking.
The god of the philosophers usually does not. Blaise Pascal said with some justification that the god of the philosophers is not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Yep. There have been a couple millennia of apologetics attempting to square the two, but the tension & apparent mismatch remains. (IMHO).
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The essay describes what is essentially an Open Theist view, although there are several nuances that fall under that umbrella. As an Open Theist myself, I do not think the future is fully settled, rather that God knows the future as it really is–as containing some counterfactuals that are truly unknowable until other free agents make (Libertarian) free choices. So, around such free events, I think God has “dynamic knowledge”, so yes, he chooses how he will act in real time, in a dynamic (relational) way to the unfolding of history.
Re: “deliberates”– Yes, but not in a sense that God is “puzzled” or “confused” or “anxious” about outcomes the way a deliberating human might be. God knows all past and present facts, and has the power and wisdom to respond to all unfolding possibilities so he is never taken “off guard” by events and in his wisdom chooses the way he will respond to the other “chess-players” in the game to ensure the best way forward.
Re prayer: Yes, I think God has chosen to partner with human free agents in the way he acts on Earth, giving us real “say-so” in what happens. Hence, for some actions, he relies on human “co-signers”, i.e., prayers, to determine what to do.
There seems to be mutually exclusive alternatives where the choice is not between good or bad.
For example, giving free will to humans comes with a real possibility that humans misuse this liberty and do evil things. Preventing all evil decisions would come with a lack of free will - we would be just living automatons. It appears that God has made a decision between the two possibilities. There we can assume some form of deliberation.
It may be misleading to compare the thinking and deliberation of God with the humans. One crucial difference is that we have limited information and capacity to calculate the consequences while God has both full information and full capacity to know the consequences. God can make His decisions immediately, without a need to use time to consider the potential benefits and disadvantages of the alternative choices.
I do believe that God often answers to prayers. How He makes the decisions to answer is an open question for me. God knows both the need and our prayer before we even face the need - He can decide to fulfill the need well before we pray. On the other hand, some answers seem to be tied to our prayers. What happens behind the scenes is something I do not know.
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Yup. As Tertullian lamented “What does Athens have to do with Jeruselam?
Personally, I land with Tertullian, thinking that Greek philosophy (and classical theism) obscures rather than explains the God of the scriptures.
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That would seem to devolve into some sort of Calvinism if my understanding of theology is correct. If God is all knowing he already knows what will happen in the future and has already planned accordingly. Are your prayers asking God to change the plan, or were your prayers already part of the future events and the plan?
At one time-- like driftwood meandering down a stream–I tinkered with the open view but now I see it as another form of God walking in the garden. My answer in the classical sense would be no, not like a human. This seems to be a question of immutability and divine simplicity. For me, God is pure act and the distinction between act and potency requires immutability and divine simplicity. If God had parts, those parts would be ontologically prior to God. This is nothing short of stripping God of his Divinity. Related here is whether or not essence and existence are the same for God. I prefer Feser’s view and note that Catholics are not free to accept a philosophical fad that more or less owes itself awareness today to a book written in 1994. Sure, it had a few proponents over the years but any recent surge in popularity tends to go back to this work.
I’d say the article in question doesn’t appreciate the analogical nature of the language we describe God with.
Vinnie
Just for the record, Open Theistic ideas are not just a “recent fad” based on a 1994 book. See Greg Boyd’s article about the view being articulated by theologians as early as the 4th century. In any case, I think ideas (including theological ones) should be evaluated on their own merits not on just whether they have been the majority view at certain periods of history.
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In my tradition and belief, the answer is yes. The same freedom of will applies also to God. Genesis 1:26
- Genesis 18:17–33
- Exodus 32:9–14
- 1 Samuel 15:10–11
- Jonah 3:10
- Jeremiah 18:7–10
- Isaiah 5:3–4
- Luke 22:42
Are all examples of God thinking things over and evaluating His choices.
In metaphysics such as these, where there are strong personal commitments toward a particular theological outcome or interpretation, I think we can see how such preferences may affect one’s evaluation about the merits of the various arguments. For example, Feser and Plantinga come to different positions about the coherence of God’s ‘simplicity’, but I feel the real difference relates to auxillary theological assumptions each brings about the nature of God. They didn’t start with the God of Philosophy and work downward, but instead include additional, different sets of theistic, Christian ideas & requirements at the start (Crudely, Catholic vs. Protestant in some cases). So, their area of work is not ‘pure’ metaphysics per se, but variants of Christian metaphysics and apologetics. Not everyone readily fits into one particular class or another in how they weight the value of various arguments but I feel there is definitely some correlation with the combination of metaphysics one finds convincing with the theological preferences one starts from. So, I can understand why many areas of philosophy is readily grouped with the humanities in academic settings.
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“Sure, it had a few proponents over the years.”
and continues to do so 
The philosophical/ theological debates are certainly complex. I’m currently taking a class in hermeneutics at Regent College in Vancouver–and it is clear that each person brings a worldview (derived from many sources) to the table when studying philosophy and theology that tends to influence one’s outlook. The question is (one of epistemology generally) whether one’s “personal preference” is the only (or deciding) factor determining one’s theology (is it all just subjective?). Open theism was a position I ran across later in life although I was raised in an Arminian (Mennonite) theological mileu which always held to libertarian free will. For me, aside from “personal preference”, Open Theism at the outset aligns more closely than classical theism with the scriptural text (which I hold to be a more authoritative revelation of God than Greek Platonism or the theologizing of later church fathers). It is true that once one tugs at one strand of classical theism like the “divine simplicity” and finds it to be logically incoherent, as does Plantinga, that other aspects of the classic God like “outside of time” and “impassible” are also prone to unravelling.