If he doesn't know it already, he isn't omniscient...Mad wrote:He might not care. I can write a computer program and run it and watch how it runs when everything interacts together.StarshipTitanic wrote:Are you suggesting that God wasn't aware of how his river would mature?
Sure, I could step through and run all the calculations by hand and find out exactly what would happen. That doesn't mean I will when I can just run the program and watch it work.
God could very well do the same thing, except on a far, far grander scale. Sure, He could find out everything, but that doesn't mean He will except for what He wants or needs to know.
An all knowing god and free will
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StarshipTitanic
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"Man's unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always astounded me...God has not been proven not to exist, therefore he must exist." -- Academician Prokhor Zakharov
"Hal grabs life by the balls and doesn't let you do that [to] hal."
"I hereby declare myself master of the known world."
"Hal grabs life by the balls and doesn't let you do that [to] hal."
"I hereby declare myself master of the known world."
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Mad
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Being omniscient would mean knowing everything right now. How would that apply to automatically knowing everything in the future?StarshipTitanic wrote:If he doesn't know it already, he isn't omniscient...
I can display a data dump and know the entire state of a running computer program for a given time. That doesn't mean I'll automatically know what state the process will look like in the future.
Later...
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Darth Wong
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It would depend on how you define omniscience, I suppose. You define it as k knowing everything in the past and present, while others obviously define it as everything period, which would presumably include the future.Mad wrote:Being omniscient would mean knowing everything right now. How would that apply to automatically knowing everything in the future?StarshipTitanic wrote:If he doesn't know it already, he isn't omniscient...
No, but God is generally described as knowing the future, even to the point that his apostles can supposedly predict events which will happen thousands of years later (hence his followers insist that their predictions will come true any day now ... any day ... still waiting ... almost there ...I can display a data dump and know the entire state of a running computer program for a given time. That doesn't mean I'll automatically know what state the process will look like in the future.
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"you guys are fascinated with the use of those "rules of logic" to the extent that you don't really want to discussus anything."- GC
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The Dark
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Ah, but is it possible to know that which does not exist? Logically, the answer is no, for that which does not exist is not real, and the unreal is unknown and unknowable. Thus, God does not know the future, as the future does not exist until it becomes the present. Therefore, while God may predict the most likely course of action, knowing us a Creator, the future itself is not known nor knowable. While a prediction may be 99.99% accurate, nothing is completely predictable (unless God acts on some sub-quantum level), and thus free will would seem to exist. What purpose would there be to creating humanity as mere puppets on a string, which is what we are if there is a God and no free will?
BattleTech for SilCoreStanley Hauerwas wrote:[W]hy is it that no one is angry at the inequality of income in this country? I mean, the inequality of income is unbelievable. Unbelievable. Why isn’t that ever an issue of politics? Because you don’t live in a democracy. You live in a plutocracy. Money rules.