On Sat, 19 Feb 2000 14:31:34 -0700 "John W. Burgeson"
<johnburgeson@juno.com> writes:
>
> My original point stands. Was God ever "surprised" by some of the
> actions
> of human beings as reported in the Old testament?
>
> A "no" answer seems very hard to support.
>
From: Dick Fischer <dfischer@mnsinc.com on Sat, 19 Feb 2000 14:46:54
-0500 (EST) wrote:
Knowing what has happened is entirely different from knowing future
events.
It is difficult to reason that God knows the future and He chooses to
stay
uninvolved in it. But how can He know it if He doesn't control it?
But if God can be "surprised" by future events, then "those He foreknew
were predestined" is a hard verse to reconcile with that point of view.
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A problem here seems to me to be the assumption that there is a future
with God as there is with us. But, if the Creator is outside of the
spatio-temporal universe he produced, then there is no past or future
with him. For him to be surprised assumes that there was a future which
was opaque to him, as it is to us. This places an unwarranted limitation
on his being. For us, there is a difference between knowing what has
happened and knowing what will happen, because we are in this
four-dimensional world.
How can one suggest that God knows the future but chooses to be
uninvoled? There is no moment in which he is not totally involved. Were
he not involved, there would be no universe. I think this is at least
part of the meaning of Colossians 1:17: "in him all things hold
together" (NIV). cf. Acts 17:28 and Hebrews 1:3.
How can God know without controlling everything? Let me suggest an
analogy, though it distorts the reality of the deity. In Abbott's noted
book, the Spacelander could see everything that went on in Flatland and
Lineland, though the king of Lineland was restricted to contacting the
adjacent points and the Flatlander could observe only a small part of his
world. We Spacelanders cannot construct a tesseract, though we may
produce a projection, somewhat as we project a cube onto a plane. Note
that all three of these worlds have a single time dimension, though
Abbott does not, as I recall, mention this fact. Now, if we imagine a
creature with two or three temporal dimensions, our single dimension
would be as open to it as Flatland and Lineland were to the Spacelander.
In this analogy, note that this solid-time creature does not control
events, but is directly aware of all of our time-line, as Spacelander was
aware of all of Lineland.
In the analogy, the Solidtimer could still have limited capacity, just as
the Spacelander could only focus on part of Flatland, even though it was
all open to him in principle. Also note that, in the analogy, I have
merely substituted one more complex kind of space-time for our
four-dimentsional one. In contrast, the Creator, being both infinite and
outside of all spatio-temporal restrictions, does not have these
limitations. His creatures can even have total freedom, though as a
matter of fact, there are limits to our freedom (Matthew 6:27, e.g.),
without his losing track of them.
Dave
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