What Does God Know About Tommorrow?
Areas to reflect on are
Does vs. Can
Nature of God…who is this guy? what is he? How does he do?
Knowledge…what constitutes knowledge? ==> Raises Causality and metaphysical questions of the epistemic realm
Temporal…God? in, out, about Time? Is time perception? a dimension? Or a realm made to poorly describe our experience?
What is Free Will?
So we got off on a lot of those tangents.
In the crowd were Kent Robson, Philosophy of Religion Prof. and Harrison Kleiner, Aesthetics and Metaphysics/Hegel Prof. An old friend of mine, Suzy, was there. I was there, and an interesting guy from my “Kant and his Successors” class was there. The panel consisted of 4 Mormon raised students and a Pseudo Mormon Prof. At the end of the argument Kleiner pointed out how all 4 of the students were actually Open Theists, no Closed theists, since he is a closed theist, and what that means is that He believes God must know all including the future, and that they are not even real Open Theists in that respect since their classical claim is that God must not know all including the future. This made it hard for me to throw my argument against the closed theists since none of them back that theory.
My comment was that if we had free will, did we lack free will at the point at which God became an active God, intervening in the lives of peoples Free Will. My example, and old acquaintance, Doug, said I took his, was the situation where God hardened the Pharaoh’s heart and the Pharaoh changed his course of action. At which point is he causally responsible for his actions when directly acted upon by God intervening with previously set dominoes of causality.
Though I made that comment, it wasn’t at the heart of the discussion, but they had already blithely accepted my view as false when the interesting guy, Benny, from my Kant class mentioned that Knowledge of the Future in no way affects the causation of that Future. This has been my view since the reading Aquinas years ago. I understand that lack of choice entails lack of freedom to choose….but that is not fully true. One is still free to choose one choice, it isn’t much of a choice, but if unaware of the removal of other choices, and believing he was making the choice, he could choose Gods said “path” infinite times until he dies, and as far as he ever knew, he had free will. Here we get into a bit of a semantic game. Free will is defined as The capacity to exercise choice. But, is Free Will the ability to do whatever one wants (the common view) or is it the existence of multiple options to choose from, and the option to choose from any of them (which maybe a more complete, possibly more accurate definition of the term).
The distinction that I believe was most ignored, but most pertinent, was that knowledge may not necessarily entail causation. Kleiner tried to explain this through the idea that while I am sitting in a room, another person enters the room. I know he is there (or have Wittgensteinian certainty of such), and I am perceiving him only because of his presence. This is quite contrary to the idea that I know he is there, therefore I caused him to be there (some might say the opposite is true, he is there, which caused me to know it - do we cause God to know what we will do because we will do it? Kleiner didn’t, and may have no intention of taking the idea this far). My explanation is that a card counter, (someone so able to count cards and has watched the cards long enough to know which every card is, and which order they are in, say “Rain Man” for instance) could be watching a card game from a casino security camera, and would know every card that was going to come up, or be “chosen"/ randomly picked by a player, in a card game where a a player may draw a card at random from the deck for the dealer to guess what he has chosen. The player doesn’t know that there is a Rain Man who knows what he will next choose out of all his options, though he may suspect this could happen. In fact, the Rain Man’s knowledge of what card the player will pick, whatever card he chooses, does in no way cause the card he picks to be such.
Now that story may be misleading because it suggests a parallel with A hidden God knowing what choices we may choose from, but still unaware of which we will choose. This is not the suggestion, the suggestion is merely that knowledge does not entail causation. In this way, I believe that Aquinas is merely (and yet so much more) working with a semantic game of what Free Will consists, and that even were there a God who knew all, even the future choices of man, this would not negate his freedom to choose.
As Donnie Darko said, “If God controls time, then all time is predecided…every living thing follows along set path, and if you could see your path or channel, then you could see into the future…[you’re not contradicting yourself] if you travel within God’s channel.”
Monotov and Darko discuss whether or not all time is predecided, or as I think is better put “accurately forseen” not by guess, but knowledge of all temporal realities of human existence. The idea here is simply responded with the fact that we don’t have this knowledge that is being attributed to God. Otherwise we could indeed stray from our destiny (God’s set path) as Monotov puts it, or we could not do other than God’s set path despite fore knowledge (thus Cassandra Complex), hence the restriction of free will. Because we don’t know what our path is, we can’t have the freedom of choice restricted from us. We still choose, we couldn’t choose otherwise than God’s set path, but since we can’t look at it, for all we know we could guess that God is choosing while we go, what our set path is, is based on what we choose…this is a limitation of man, not of man’s God, he can’t have that limitation if he is defined by the absence of such limit.
I’ll finish with the assertion that if Philosophical Mormons are Open Theists, and most conservative evangelical sects of Protestants are Closed Theists, does that make me a Closed Atheist? I would say yes because though I do not believe in a being who has Omniscience, what I have been taught this word refers to (and perhaps wrongly so), is knowledge of all things including temporal pathways in past, present, future, and perhaps outside of such. Again, one with knowledge of all this does not negate free will. I could however be wrong in the extent of God’s Omniscience, as knowledge entails a justification by a burden of proof. Time as we know it may not exist, in fact the whole idea may simply be absurd, though neccessary for the working of our minds. Yet, if it does not exist, God can not know it (which would not negate from the ability to know all…that is) God cannot “know” what is not, because while God may understand what we mean, the function of the verb to know cannot all it. Again, not a defect of Omniscience, but a defect of the understanding of the processes of the epistemic. So I guess I’m not really sure if that makes me a Closed Atheist in this regard, or some other made up title…what do you think?
Actually I am, but that doesnt matter! You have a hard choice to make here. Personally, I would like to visit New Zealand or Australia, but Costa Rica and the Domincan Republic sound so different, so exotic! Go figure. Good luck! Its like Sophia’s choice! LOL… I wish you well! Anyway. It’s always good to help, and you are pretty good at this! Bless ya!
