To solve the contradiction between God’s omniscience and our free will and moral responsibility, some theists state:
(1) Since God is timeless,
(2) He doesn’t know my actions before I do them, because “before” or “after” only make sense in a temporal environment. Rather, His knowledge of our actions is TIMELESS.
(3) Thus the contradiction is solved
What’s your opinion on this?
Posted: October 29th 2010
Dave Hitt www
You’re asking the wrong question. Your argument assumes god exists, which is an unproven assumption.
First, prove there is such a creature. Until then, such arguments are meaningless.
Posted: November 6th 2010
Mike the Infidel www
God not being within time sort of makes prayer useless, doesn’t it? Or is this god somehow able to jump in and out of our timeline? And wouldn’t the fact that it can take sequential action mean that it would have to be in a timeline, if not our own?
The existence of a god that simply knows the entirety of our timeline would still mean that knowledge of what will happen in the future of our timeline exists somewhere. That doesn’t solve the contradiction at all.
Posted: November 5th 2010
Eric_PK
Discussions like this are mostly a waste of time. Theists are looking to feel better about their faith but even if you refute their argument they aren’t going to change their beliefs. And they go through a lot of mental gymnastics to try to get there:
This specific argument is a good example.
The argument attempts to redefine what the agreed-upon definition of the word “know” is, so that somehow god both knows what is going to happen and simultaneously doesn’t know what is going to happen. That makes little sense, but neither does the assertion that god is timeless or, for that matter, all the definitions of god that I’ve come across.
What it ignores is that this contorted definition conflicts with the assertion of omniscience.
One interesting question to ask such a theist?
Can god be surprised by a specific action that I take? If yes, then I do have free will but god is not omniscient. If no, then I do not have free well.
Posted: November 5th 2010
George Locke
The supposed timelessness of god’s knowledge of our actions is exactly the problem. Our choices exist within time, whereas god knows our choices outside of time. This doesn’t make any sense.
Posted: November 5th 2010
Steve Zara www
How can God be timeless and have knowledge? Knowledge only makes sense if it can be recalled, if it can be compared to experiences. You can’t recall something or have experiences if you are timeless, otherwise God would be like a pretty useless hard disk, on which nothing can be written and from which nothing can be read.
I think it’s best to just face the fact that God makes no sense at all, and abandon the idea.
Posted: November 5th 2010
brian thomson www
The first, obvious question to ask is: which god do you mean? There are many conceptions of theistic gods, some contradictory.
If his knowledge is timeless, then it doesn’t matter what you do. Believe, don’t believe; pray or not; take part in ceremonies such as baptism, marriages or funerals, or do as you feel; none of it matters to him. This god can not interact in any way with our temporal world.
Theists who indulge in such reasoning are trying to reason their god out of any significant existence, in effect – and I feel no obligation to engage with such nonsense on any level. This kind of reasoning reminds me of the “work” of Terry Eagleton, who writes along those lines e.g. this :
For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.
This, not some super-manufacturing, is what is traditionally meant by the claim that God is Creator. He is what sustains all things in being by his love; and this would still be the case even if the universe had no beginning. To say that he brought it into being ex nihilo is not a measure of how very clever he is, but to suggest that he did it out of love rather than need.
Posted: November 5th 2010
SmartLX www
According to that logic, God doesn’t know about anything before it happens, or afterwards for that matter. That rules out a god with any predicting power or even memory, and significantly it rules out the gods of most major religions. That’s how much you have to diminish the powers of a god to make this work.
Posted: November 5th 2010