That is a bizarre inference!
God calls himself the I AM (so did Jesus). God is the eternal Now and Present tense. Jesus humbled himself when he became a man and voluntarily subjected himself to a variety of constraints, one of which was our universe’s timeline. God the Father and God the Holy Spirit? Not so much. God is not static. He dynamically fills everything everywhere and every when, including our time.
the timelesness of God is not a recent invention but has been discussed by Aquinas and Boethius and biblically he is at the beginning and the end albeit you might say that refers to our beginning and end.
So by your understanding God only knows the past and guesses the future with high accuracy. So he lives in the now is is very good at statistics and has existed from the beginning, not before it. Thus he is time constraint and had a beginning himself which means he is in need of a cause himself. To me that is illogical.
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Good point. If ”God has a future” and is not atemporal or omnitemporal, then that suggests he had a past and a beginning.
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thanks. I started wondering if I am a bit naive, never even having worried about this, so to some extend I am thankful to be challenged as it force me to think about those issues.
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My nephrectomy account, above, demonstrates we are not talking about our libertarian free will. God chose for me to get cancer and directed the mutations in my cells. Am I upset at him? Hardly. The timing of it and the accompanying co-instants were wonderful. He loves me, and he knows I am delighted with his displays of immanence, intervention and sovereignty over time and place, timing and placing, including the when and where of mutations in my DNA. It is not for nothing that I label myself as an ‘evolutionary providentialist.’ What did my choice have to do with it? Zip, zilch and nada. Am I an automaton? Hardly. I choose to praise him – my heart gives me no choice. 
I did not say from the “beginning to now”, I said from “infinity until now”. God has always existed and when He begot Jesus, that was the beginning spoken of in John 1:1. God is not guessing. He has an infinite dataset to rely on of His planning and forecasting. He can foresee every iteration and accurately assign probabilities.
Why do you think God is constrained to our timeline and time dimension, our present, our now? Could there not be other universes that have different ones, that run faster or slower or in even in another direction, so to speak? What is his relationship to their futures? Are their presents and futures necessarily synchronized with ours?
So God is okay with predestination to having cancer? I don’t know. I feel God choices certain people but not everyone. John 3:16 makes it clear. So I feel maybe that calls on people and the predestination part is when people accept or reject this call
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Dear Dale,
I believe that God reveals Himself through His creation and through the Word. There is little to no evidence of time travel or the multiverse in either places. There is evinced of the physical world and the spiritual world - two worlds. Jesus’ Kingdom is the latter and we are in the former. There is plenty of evidence of these two, but no others. I would suggest that time moves differently as suggested by 2 Peter 3:8.
Best Wishes, Shawn
Hi,
I formed some ideas of free will and predestination after I had read a book about the concept of time in quantum physics (by Rovelli) and another review-type book focusing on the debate about free will in philosophy. There is nothing novel in these ideas, some parts have already been lifted up in previous comments. It would still be nice to get some feedback.
First something about time and predestination:
Although time is understood as a directional chain of events, it is still tied to the material universe. The creator is not bound to the structure of His creation. Figuratively speaking, the artist can look at his creation from outside. This gives a possibility to see the whole at once, without being tied to the time within the creation. So, He can see the end at the beginning, and everything between. If needed, He can also modify something so that the path and the endpoint changes. From this viewpoint, I don’t see any fundamental conflict between the ideas of free will and that God knows our fate before we are born. If God modifies things during our life so that we end up being saved or get an answer to a prayer, it can be viewed as a dynamic relationship or as ‘predestination’, depending on the content one gives to the words. But much of what happens in our lives is probably caused by a combination of other external factors and our way of life. I assume that God does not manipulate every small detail in our lives.
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We believe in a personal God because persons can think one thought after another and make statements putting one word in front of another. They can make plans and carry them out. All are things which God does in the Bible and all of which uses time.
Having the ability to use time is not the same as being confined to time. And while you are so busy propping up your theology with thoughts of God being an “eternal now” incapable of time appealing to magic and mystery to explain away any logical inconsistencies, as a physicist I have already left the antiquated notion of absolute time far behind me and know that none of such rhetoric as you employ is necessary.
This means for example that there is no need to ask what God as been doing for an infinite amount of time before the creation of the universe. That is thinking trapped in the notion of absolute time as something which God must be confined to. But there is no absolute time and God only uses time as He desires, so there is no time before whatever time God chooses to employ. This way God can do all the same things that we can do as a person and much much more.
So the truth is that those stuck with this timeless “eternal now” God are the ones who have confined God and made Him smaller, incapable of putting one thought before another or of carrying out plans as God does in the Bible. The “I am” does not mean God is any such thing but refers to God’s necessary non-contingent self-existent nature. It most certainly does not mean that God is incapable of doing the things that any human being can do because he cannot put one thing in front of another.
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Something about free will:
Our free will is strongly constrained by our past. If we walk along one path, we cannot make a decision to be on a separate path in the next second. In addition, much of our actions seems to be automated or semiautomated consequences of our previous actions or external input. Within a given moment, our freedom to choose seems to be limited to very few options. However, every decision affects the future. So, the free will can be viewed as a chain of small decisions that determine the direction of our path. In this sense, we can have free will to select whether we move towards God or away from Him.
One philosopher suggested something similar, but I cannot remember who it was or what label has been given to this hypothesis.
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Yes! Our free will is not a freedom to be or accomplish anything we choose. That is confusing free will with omnipotence. Free will is only the ability to choose among options we are aware of to guide whatever portion of our body and mind we have control over. There is nothing absolute or universal about free will. It can vary greatly with many different factors such as awareness of what is possible, and it can be affected by drugs, medical conditions, and even our own habits.
Thus I have explained above that it is one of the characteristics of sin (i.e. self-destructive habits) that it destroys free will and makes us very predictable. “Destroys” as in progressive erosion, not absolute exclusion. It is frequent experience of those with a substance abuse problem that their freedom of will slips farther and farther away as the habit takes more and more control of their body and mind.
This highly quantitative nature of free will is also why this is not and never has been a black and white, either-or magical attribute of mankind alone. Rather free will is a universal characteristic of all life and is its very essence. But clearly the free will in the simplest living organisms is extremely limited to point of insignificance compared to human beings.
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My free will allows me to choose to believe that Father was and is in providential control of all things, including evolution and the timing of my kidney cancer. He “planned” for those to play out the way they did. Precisely. Every molecule. My Father is that big. His thoughts are instantaneous, they don’t need to be “sequential” to be personal. The Bible, please recall, actually does use words like predestined and elected, chosen and ordained. Deny them to your own detriment.
Can we choose to believe in God? Or is that already choice the moment we are born? I mean why should a child be planned to get cancer? Sorry this is confusing at times.
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Dear Dale,
you forgot all about our free will in your last statement, and of course “judge not, lest ye be judged.”
Do you think it is to your advantage to deny things that God has said?
Dear Dale,
I believe that it is to your disadvantage to shame others for not believing what you do. That is the only point I was trying to make. Free will is God’s gift to everyone.
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There is no question that SOME things are predestined, elected, chosen, or ordained. The question is what things. There is NOTHING in the Bible that says EVERYTHING is predestined, elected, chosen, or ordained.
Yes, God predestines people for a role in His providence, elects people for tasks, chooses them for something He wants them to do, ordains all kinds of blessings and challenges. But do things always happen as God plans or desires? It is a demonstrable FACT in the Biblical narrative that this is not so! There are plans which go awry, people which fail their appointed tasks, desires of God which are unfulfilled, things which people do which disappoint God and grieve Him to the very core. Could God control absolutely everything? Easily! But is God such a shallow person that He must control everything? No. Is God incapable of making anything which He does not control? A God incapable of this looks too pathetic to me to be called God. Looks like a control freak to me and a creation of those obsessed with power and control, too convenient for those who use religion for the manipulation of others. Sorry… no offense… but that is what I think.
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