Burgy wrote:
> I think God
> does NOT see the future --
at least not in detail -- but can and often is
> surprised by what we, his
created yet partially autonomous beings, choose
> as courses of action in
certain circumstances.
I like this as part of a plank of a theological
platform. For one thing, if God could
see the future in detail, why wouldn't he have inspired his prophets
to make
some of their messianic prophecies a bit clearer? Why do some of
Jesus'
prophecies seem not quite on target? And why is the Revelation
not interpretable in any detail?
There are two related principles I insist on, however:
1) God is
strongly goal-oriented and knows in fair detail what he wants his
final
outcome to be. History has a purpose and is headed
towards some fulfillment.
2) God has superb intuition about
how to achieve his goals, and he has the
ability to implement his
intuitions.
Any view of God that makes him something like a humongous
supercomputer does
not resonate with me at all. To me God is a
person with an extraordinarily good feel
for even the finest
details of the world who works to influence it mostly by
seat-of-the-pants intuition (if you can imagine seats of spiritual
pants).
All this stuff about God seeing past and future simultaneously,
that he's
omni-this and omni-that, is mostly pure philosophy sometimes
justified by
misusing devotional sentiments expressed in the Psalms, etc. Jim
Armstrong
in another post has done a good job of challenging these
platitudes. We
should all be aware by now of how little philosophy by
itself has been able
to deduce about the real world. Theology likewise
has no basis except to
the degree that it derives from actual experience of
God.
On the basis of such experience I believe there's justification for
saying God, like all spiritual persons, exists in some sense outside
space-time; but what the ramifications might be I have no idea.
I
don't believe that it means he sees all time at once.
Don