Oh I know some people talk about spacetime slices. I just can’t logically see how they really resolve the age-old debate of freewill/ determinism/ and time, despite that fancy term. Chalk it up to my own intellectual limitations if you will, but meh-- to me a God in time is the only way I can logically make sense of a relational being committed to reacting to his creation in love/ freewill.
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I can see how a cause and effect lens can cause us to see grace operating by the same rules of cause and effect. It could argued conversely that grace is a denial of the principle of cause and effect since receiving God’s grace is not based on anything that we did necessarily.
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We know he is inscrutable and beyond fathoming, so I do not insist on my mind being able to ‘logically make sense’ of the how he does it, but I certainly do know that he does it and it is wonder full.
Think of a Perpetrator who has a very recognizable M.O. We as forensic examiners see the evidence and recognize the M.O. but do not understand how it was accomplished. The objective facts are still there and the cause and effect obvious, but the how in between them is still a mystery.
Some of us are more affected than others. 
(Maybe I’m one of them. ; - )
Autofill and autocorrect are my worst enemas.
Although we all must admit that we can never fathom God perfectly, I think theologians study and work on the basis that God has given us minds and intellectual abilities that make an effort to understand God fruitful (or else what would be point of theology? ). Just like scientists, we may never understand the natural world perfectly, but we undertake the work of science because we presume it gives us some true and useful insights. If we all threw up our hands and just said “its all a mystery impossible to comprehend” then what’s the point of thinking about evidence of anything at all?
So, if presented with rival pictures of God-- “models”, I’m going to choose the one that makes more logical sense to me–the one that coheres best with the way I see God interacting with people in history–through Jesus, and elsewhere recorded in scripture.
But I hold such models with humility…knowing that this isn’t a doctrine or piece of knowledge critical to one’s faith, and that getting one’s head around God and the metaphysics of time is a very complex field indeed.
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Thanks for pointing it out. Fixed.
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I think that both of those (whether sincerely held or misunderstood by those outside of Calvinism) come from a more modern misunderstanding of the phrase “Total Depravity”, at least partly stemming from shifts in word meaning over the last 350 years. As far as I can tell, the word has shifted from meaning “in all aspects” or “in all components” to “in every way” or “in completion”. The Westminster Confession explicitly states that the unregenerate can do good works because of common grace, but that such works are not sufficient for salvation.
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We cannot earn salvation, so this is irrelevant. Nothing anyone does earns salvation
Salvation means there is judgment.
If God had forgiven all sins then there is no judgement, therefore there is no need for salvation.
Did Jesus die to forgive all sins or not?
God’s grace means that there is forgiveness not judgement.
Richard
For clarity, it might be best to say that “the gears are the proximate cause of the ticking, but we are the ultimate observable (whether there is an unobservable agent causing the person to do it is a separate issue) cause of the ticking” or something to that effect, as there is a causality chain involved.
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Yes, that’s the point of the final clause there.
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However the Westminster confession still lays the burden of sin on the whole of humanity by default.
Richard
- “Le Chatelier’s principle predicts the effect of a change on system at dynamic equilibrium. Changing the conditions of a system at thermodynamic equilibrium (concentration, temperature, pressure, volume, etc.) causes the system to react in a way that counteracts the change and establishes a new equilibrium. While originally described for chemical reactions, Le Chatelier’s principle also applies to homeostasis in biology, economics, pharmacology, and other disciplines. Other names for Le Chatelier’s principle are Chatelier’s principle or the Equilibrium Law.”
- However, one might say that Paul first proposed the Equilibrium principal in Ephesians 2:8-10, where he wrote: " For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them."
- IMO, Grace is “the cause”; the “rescue” [i.e. “the Salvation”] is “the effect”. Grace saves when and where “Faith” is created and increases. No faith; no effect. But, as Paul says: our faith is “not of our selves” so that no one may boast. The absence of faith is a denial of God’s grace through Jesus.
- The date that some claim they “were saved” is nothing more than the date that the person “began” to understand. Salvation continues from that date on, … or it doesn’t.
Cool… perhaps I will look into that book.
I am very much a believer of a God outside the space-time structure of the universe. The Mormon god as an entity which is a part of the universe does not interest me. But being outside the space-time structure of the universe does not make God timeless. That is another way of making God something smaller and incapable of the things any human being can do and thus chained by human theology.
I believe in an ultimate infinite God who is and has everything and naturally that would include time. Not time over Him but time within Him. One who can use time as He chooses. The result is that asking what God was doing for an infinite time before creating the universe is nonsensical, but still a God who can do everything that we do and more.
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And I know even more about spacetime slices than Dale does, but I don’t think his argument holds any water either.
And I think it is unwise to equate a lack of ability/interest in math/physics with intellectual limitations. I know first hand that this is hogwash. I know people who are far smarter than I am who are not so good at math. People are not good at math just because they are smarter. They are just good at math – one skill among a very great many skills. Frankly I am far more impressed with the intelligence of those who use psychology to understand and predict people. People are so much more complicated than mathematical equations.
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I’m not sure I believe you had even heard of them before I introduced them to you via Brian Greene. Anyway, the concept is not that difficult. And you did not even believe God is omnipresent! The two combined entail God’s omnitemporallity.
That part you have correct.
You might just be right about that too, but it’s a real stretch.
That by itself proves my point… LOL as if you think spacetime slices is some esoteric new physics. It’s not. Its pretty basic and pretty old.
Pretty old, ca. 20 years? 
How?
So why is God’s omnitemporality such an apparent stretch for you? At least we agree that there is no such thing as absolute time.
ETA: Yes, the basic physics (we agree) is as old as relativity and big bang cosmology, but I would be interested in seeing anything older than Brian Greene’s analogy about angled slices through the spacetime loaf and what it says about time.
(You might revisit our conversation here and following, where it appears you try to limit God to Minkowski spacetime, God who is limited by neither space nor time.)
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