I would say that ‘foreknowledge’ is a word, a tensed word, that does not really apply to God since he is outside of (actually all through) time. More correctly it might be said that he dynamically relates? (@Relates ; - ) I am not saying I understand this wonderful (awe-full) mystery – I am only describing it.
If not active interference or actual control, what would compel me to do what God knew I’d do? I certainly wouldn’t be free to do anything other than what God knew I’d do. I would in fact have had no choice at all. Where is the breakdown in logic in saying I’d have to do what God knew I’d do? Would I be free to do something other than what He knew I’d do? If we go by logic, I don’t think I would be free at all.
If God knew my choice, then how could I have chosen anything other than what He knew I’d choose?
What exactly do you mean by God existing outside of time? Not that you are wrong, but scripture references would help me understand.
Those are past tense and timebound – God is not bound by time. Tensed language does not really apply to God (it is however the only thing we’ve got in English and many others).
@Christy: There are languages that are not as intrinsically time-based as English, aren’t there, or where tense is irrelevant?
The question becomes when did Judas decide to betray Jesus? Before or after Jesus said what he said? The answer is found a few verses back in the same chapter.
Matt 26:14-16,
14 Then one of the twelve, called Judas Iscariot, went unto the chief priests,
15 And said [unto them], What will ye give me, and I will deliver him unto you? And they covenanted with him for thirty pieces of silver.
16 And from that time he sought opportunity to betray him.
God revealed to Jesus that Judas had decided by his free will that he would betray him. Judas was not forced to betray Jesus because God “knew” he would. No foreknowledge found here.
The ‘forcing’ you read into God’s omnitemporallity doesn’t exist.
No foreknowledge is required because foreknowledge does not apply to God, it just looks like that to us who are constrained to sequential time.
Judas is just one case among plenty of others for which you will not find such a convenient explanation. God hardened the Pharaoh’s heart, right?
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I’ll grant you that Pharaoh’s heart is not quite as convenient as Judas. It requires getting into the heads of those who lived in the Ancient Near East. In the last 100 years or so we have made many discoveries of texts that help us get into their heads. I trust you could understand that their worldview was radically different than our own. We think one thing when we read about God hardening Pharaoh’s heart whereas they thought something quite different.
It does require a fair amount of background study, more than I can do here, but there’s plenty of info on the internet and elsewhere. Comparative Studies is the academic field you may want to investigate. You seem to be an intelligent and thoughtful individual. I think you’d really enjoy such a study.
Suffice it to say, God does not force people to go against His will. There is something else going on behind the scenes. I’ll leave it at that.
Well, if you read the passage, it says sometimes that pharaoh hardened his own heart (and later in the sequence of events that God hardened his heart). These are likely different ways of describing the same thing… that in response to displays of God’s power, Pharaoh turns away from God “hardens his own heart” by his own freewill. Nothing here compels one to think that God overrode Pharaoh’s free choices in real time.
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Hi Dale, and thanks also @rrobs for an interesting discussion on God and time. I’m not a physicist and my brain starts to hurt when thinking about God’s relationship to the space-time continuum… I’ll point out an interesting looking book (which I haven’t bought or read because it is so expensive), but which presents several views of God and time. The author argues that when interacting with his creation, God is indeed “in Time”. Here’s the cover blurb, F.Y.I. (author R.T. Mullins, “End of the Timeless God”.
The claim that God is timeless has been the majority view throughout church history. However, it is not obvious that divine timelessness is compatible with fundamental Christian doctrines such as creation and incarnation. Theologians have long been aware of the conflict between divine timelessness and Christian doctrine, and various solutions to these conflicts have been developed. In contemporary thought, it is widely agreed that new theories on the nature of time can further help solve these conflicts. Do these solutions actually solve the conflict? Can the Christian God be timeless? The End of the Timeless God sets forth a thorough investigation into the Christian understanding of God and the God-world relationship. It argues that the Christian God cannot be timeless.
Your brain ought to hurt when thinking about God’s relationship to the space-time continuum. Mine does too. My solution is to not ponder such things as that as well as how many angels can fit on the tip of a needle. Such ideas are man’s and have nothing to do with the scriptures. God had no interest in explaining angels on the tip of a pin nor a space-time continuum to Israel. There is nada, zip, zero, nil in the actual scriptures about angels on a pin or a space-time continuum.
Thanks, I agree that my faith doesn’t hinge on solving this question, and I don’t see much point in flogging a horse to death. Still, one’s faith and one’s practice as a Christian can be influenced by one’s concept of God, and of his character. The concept of libertarian free will seems to be essential to how I can conceptualize a loving God. So, it’s in that framework that I “like” to wrestle with some theological/philosophical questions about foreknowledge, determinism and free will. It still makes my brain hurt sometimes, though, and I’m sure it’s something I’ll never fully grasp on this side life.
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Reminds me of that hymn, “…we’ll understand it all by and by…” Until then I guess are brains will hurt from time to time. 
How God orchestrates his providential interventions into the lives of his children is an argument for his omnitemporality (not that it makes it any more understandable – it is still only describable and still a wonderful mystery).
If you reflect on all the necessary precursor events and multiple people involved1 and the decisions they have made (even speeding up a bit or slowing down sooner at a yellow light, for instance, or leaving the house a second later in the morning), I think it’s obvious that no one’s free will was violated. My favorite examples of course that do not involve me personally are Rich Stearns and Maggie Eriksson. Imagine all the individuals involved and the timing and placing of each of the myriad of precursor events leading up to the significant ‘final’ one to have it fall out exactly as it did. And these are whole sets of incidents, not just one-offs.
1 (They have to have been born, too, and their particular lives led to put them when and where they were to influence the particular outcome of God’s providence. ; - )
Since you’re in Canada, you may have streaming access to the NOVA episode noted above? If God is omnipresent, he is omnipresent in ‘spacetime slices’, would you not concur?
The Nova site is asking me to register for a subscription which I’m not interested in doing. No idea what “space-time slices are” but I do think God is omnipresent. Open Theists would argue that when interacting with creation, God experiences “the future” as a realm of unfolding possibilities, so that is how God perceives things, i.e., he doesn’t control all details (or know all details) of what happens until it happens. But anyways, that interesting theological debate is getting off on a bit of a tangent from this thread.
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In order to address this, I would like to back up to the top level of thinking about how we can learn anything about God in today’s world. The first thing we need to know, or at least infer, is that God originated the message. Next we need to know whether what we think God intended to be said is accurately represented. Then we need to understand the context in which the message was given, including the audience, and what the audience understood or believed, in order to understand what God wanted to say to that audience. And, finally, and this is one huge leap, we can try to infer what God wants us to understand from this in our time, given our cultural, religious, scientific, medical, historical, spiritual, linguistic, philosophical, and any other context that influences how we understand written or spoken words. It is only in this last step that I see value in considering what we know about God’s universe from modern observations.
Now to your question: Modern physics has demonstrated that the time dimension we observe is not absolute time. That is, time is one dimension of the created universe that is to some degree interchangeable with the three space dimensions. What this means is that the observation of time is dependent on the state of motion of the observer. If, as I believe, God created the universe, then God created not just the matter and energy in the universe, but also, all the laws of physics by which the universe operates, including causality, and the dimensions of space and time as we experience them.
It might be easier to imagine viewing a three dimensional object from outside of that object. From outside the object, it is possible to look at the entire object, from above, from below, from right, from left.
Now imagine that one of those dimensions is time, as we experience it in this universe. What we experience is that we are travelling along in one particular direction within the created object, and at any point in time, we can observe the two dimensions of space perpendicular to our time axis. But an observer outside of the totality of the object can see all of the space, for all of the time that the object exists.
Yes, the idea of time as part of creation is difficult to grasp; some folks I’ve talked with have said this stuff really hurts their heads. But to me, it helps me understand some important things about God, that cannot be understood as well without thinking about this concept.
Just a few scriptural references: First, God called Himself “I AM”; this is completely consistent with the interpretation that God is not constrained by time. And directly related to this, Jesus said, “Before Abraham was, I am.” The straightforward interpretation of this, not trying to play any linguistic tricks to suggest that what He said wasn’t exactly what He meant, would be that Jesus was saying that, at the time He was talking with people in His earthly life (near 30AD), He also existed at that same time, before Abraham. This is 100% consistent with what Dale and I have been trying to tell you. Any other interpretation is a stretch. Just because the Jews 2000 years ago didn’t understand relativity, so couldn’t understand what Jesus said in the same way that we can understand it today doesn’t mean that we must believe that Jesus only meant what the Jews of His time could understand.
And then there are the several references to God viewing time differently from how humans view time (thousand years vice one night, e.g.) You know the references better than I do. The point is not what God expected people to understand at the time the scripture was written. The point that I am trying to make is that we can learn something about God by combining our knowledge of what He said to other people thousands of years ago with what we now know about His created universe, and what that tells us about God.
Now, understanding that God “right now” is observing the whole universe that He created from outside that universe, as well as from inside it, let’s discuss choices.
At this time, do you know what choice you made those many years ago when you chose Christianity? Does that mean that you didn’t have a choice to make at that time, because it did turn out this way? Since you can’t go back in time and change your choice, does this mean that you didn’t have a choice to make? What I am saying about God is that He did know what you had chosen, in exactly the same sense as you now know what you had chosen. This is the difference between “could have” and “did”!
After the choice is made, “could have” is an exercise in futility, unless it provides value in aiding future decisions. So what difference does it make now whether you “could have” made a different choice? None whatsoever. But at the time, did the choice you made have real consequences? Yes. That is what free will means to me, not that I can go back and make a different choice, because I don’t like the outcome of the choice I made, or even that I “could have” made a different choice. My choice, at the time I make it, does have real consequences. That is what free will means to me. Fortunately for me, God knows all the bad choices I will make, and He has made plans so that I will learn something from those bad choices, and from my occasional good choices, and, in Christ, He even forgives me when I make choices for the wrong reasons.
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That is consistent with a book I recently read with my daughter, The Exodus You Almost Passed Over, written by a Jewish rabbi. https://www.amazon.com/Exodus-You-Almost-Passed-Over/dp/0997347600
In it he states the word used for “hardened his heart” is more correctly translated as what we would say “stiffened his spine” or “gave him the courage to not give in and to follow his convictions” which to me makes a lot more sense. Pharoah did what he wanted to do, God just gave him the strength to not back down.
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Yes, that makes sense to me. Also one might think of an analogy of a parent with a stubborn and rebellious child (the child is choosing disobedience of its own free will). Then the parent asks the child to do something, and the child in angry response “hardens his heart” and refuses. You could say that in one sense, it was the parent asking the child to do something that triggered the rebellious response, in a proximate way “the parent hardening the childs heart”. But ultimately it was the child’s own choice that was responsible for the heart-hardening, and it was simply the parent’s request that more fully solidified/revealed what was already there.
That does make a lot of sense. I’ll get that book. Thanks for the suggestion.
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Humanity is time-bound and all languages can express things in terms of past, present, and future. Grammatically speaking, some languages have aspect-dominant verb systems (focusing on how an action extends over time) and some languages have tense-dominant verb systems (focusing on when on a timeline and action occurs), but that doesn’t mean that speakers of aspect-dominant languages are oblivious to timelines or incapable of describing events in chronological order, they just do so with linguistic tools other than the verb system like syntax and adverbs.
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