Omnitemporal nature of God

Faith & Science Conversation
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41

???

Ask Paul. His use of the word Gentiles would suggest any person who does not understand the Passion and would therefor deem it illogical.

Perhaps you would lie to explain the passion in human logical terms without reference to God’s forgiveness and or the need for forgiveness. Being born to die prematurely would seem the height of illogic.

Richard

42

I do not disagree with you at all. Yes, God is light, and does not do evil. But by claiming God is omnipotent, the men of the church were able to do evil in God’s name. This is what the emperor Justian declared in 543 AD “If anyone says or thinks that the power of God is limited, and that he created as much as he was able to compass, let him be anathema.” History shows what was done by the Roman empire in the name of god.

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  • Paul’s claim that the crucified Christ appeared foolish to Gentiles is not a claim that the Crucifixion violates the laws of logic.
  • Strictly speaking, you are correct. You did not explicitly assert that logic and comprehension are interchangeable.
  • My criticism, however, was that you appeared to conflate them, not that you explicitly identified them.
  • You then say: “Somethings are incomprehensible because we cannot put ourselves in that position or, more often do not see the logic or reason to do so.” using logic to refer to a person’s ability to recognize the rationale behind something.
    • That is a legitimate colloquial use of the word, but it differs from the formal sense in which I was discussing logical possibility and impossibility.
  • Scientific reasoning involves empirical evidence, observation, hypothesis testing, and inference. Formal logic concerns the validity of inferences and the consistency of propositions. Faith may involve premises that cannot be established empirically. But reasoning from non-empirical premises is not the same as reasoning without logic or according to contradictory logical principles. For example:
    1. God exists.
    2. God raised Jesus from the dead.
    3. Therefore, at least one resurrection has occurred.
  • Whether someone accepts those premises is a separate question from whether the inference is valid.
  • Nice shift of attention from the philosophical issue to my manner of engaging with you.
    • Two distinct criticisms embedded in your remark.
      • First, you suspect that I fail to appreciate the reasoning underlying your posts.
      • Second, you suggest that I focus excessively on minor details and disagreements with my positions.
  • Neither criticism answers my question about whether logical contradictions might be true for God. More importantly, identifying a contradiction is not necessarily concentrating on minutiae. If an argument depends upon distinguishing logical impossibility from intellectual incomprehensibility, that distinction is fundamental to the argument.
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44

So you wish to delve into the philosophy of thought and reason and to whether thought has a logical basis. For that we would have to decide on a baseline for what is logic and what is not. If the action is preceded by the knowledge of an adverse or even painful result, one might deduce that the thought behind it was illogical. however there might be further knowledge or information that would reverse that deduction.

If you watch Star Trek you will find plenty of examples where logic is put to the test and what is deemed logical is not actually the logical conclusion.

In many ways the reason why our logic might not match God’s is just that He has more knowledge of the factors and even foreknowledge of all the conclusions which we do not.

Richard

Edit

I have every reason to be skeptical of your motivations when answering me. Your words and manner speak for themselves.

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45
  • And I have almost always had every reason to be skeptical of yours. So, back at’cha.
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  • That describes a difference in knowledge, not necessarily a difference in logic.
47

No, it’s like insisting that to repair a microwave you need to understand electrical currents – it means getting the basics right, right from the start.

48

Not according to my brother the mathematician (not that I can explain the math). But you don’t have to get that complex –

49

Choice? By definition, what God chooses is good.

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50

@ShawnTMurphy correct. Omniscience does contradict free will. If God is omniscient then he knows the future and anyone in the temporal plane wouldn’t be able to do anything other than what God knows about the future.

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51

God is eternal, neither began, is present, nor will end.

Spacetime doesn’t mean space = time. Why would you write time in spacetime then? :thinking:

52

Unless the future is (at least partly) open, and God knows the future exhaustively as it is–as containing counterfactuals (which may, or may not, obtain). That assumes a presentist (A-Theory) of time.

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That may describe your view but it does not make that view correct.

That will be you imposing your views onto me.

As a person who has made it clear that I do not take any notice of who said what in terms of status or authority I have no reason to indulge in ad hominem or personal attacks unless they are as a response to such. I will give as good as I get, but I do not start such things. So if I have poured coals on your self appointed status or authority it is because you have tried to assert it. (over me)

Aw shucks.

Richard

54

Nope – He just knows what we will freely choose (assuming that form of omniscience).

Does this assume that there is only one time axis, i.e. t, with no tau or teyt?

55

I know; Richard prefers to use words to mean what he wants them to, not what they actually do.

Or grammar, or vocabulary, or logic, or much common sense.

56

I’m not sure about Tau, but Mullins (in the paper I attached above) describes things like this: “Within the philosophy of time, there are various debates over the ontology of time, or over what moments of time exist. Some philosophers affirm a view called presentism, which says that only the present moment of time exists. On presentism, past moments of time no longer exist, and future moments of time do not yet exist. This can be contrasted with other views such
as the growing block and eternalism. On the growing block, past and present moments of time exist, but future moments do not exist. On eternalism, all moments of time exist.”

With an open future, there is no single, ‘settled’ timeline into the future for God to know, because future moments do not yet exist. Saying that “God knows the future” would be as logical as saying “God can create a married bachelor” in a presentist model of time. Rather, various timelines are possible, like branching possibilities at ‘decision nodes’. Which branch of a timeline becomes real (in the present moment) is contingent on the freewill choices of various actors (and a multitude of other factors including past history which constrains the range of present choices). An omniscient God at the moment of creation may know all ‘possible’ branches a timeline could take into the future but would not know which particular branch at the decision node is actualized until it happens (i.e., in the present moment). However, God is not caught off-guard in this model because he knows all possibilities of the branching tree. He has planned from the beginning of creation how he would react ‘in real time’ as other free-will actors make their choices (like a chess player countering the moves of other players), and He would have designed the parameters of the universe from the outset so that his will could always be realized within the scope of possibilities (branching timelines) that are allowable within the system.