Open theology

[jaybee]

Dilemma:

I am truth

What I know to be true is true

I exist outside of time

I know that you will eat a homemade ham sandwich for lunch tomorrow at 12:06 PM

And it must be true

Therefore, based upon my knowledge, your freewill is now gone. You have no choice by to do what I know you will do. You cannot decide on a whim to go to lunch with coworkers when they ask if you want to go. You cannot sit at your desk and decide you will push lunch later to squeeze in a little more work. You cannot decide the night before that you want to make an egg salad sandwich instead.

My foreknowledge renders absolute freewill nonexistent.

You had but one chance to make the choice, once it was made you cannot change it.

[Josh]

But from the perspective of gods timelessness, there can be no foreknowledge, since there is no time. So from that perspective his knowledge and our free will are occurring always simultaneously- one isn't causing the other. But when god intersects with the "arrow of time" then depending on where he intersects he made have foreknowledge of our free will choices. The real problem is that our minds can't really understand timelessness. That's why it's best to simply take the paradox of scripture at face value: we have free will and god knows everything in his timelessness, though at certain instances in the timeline he doesn't necessarily.

I have a graphic I'd like to find to perhaps illustrate my point.... lemme look for it.

[Josh]

Scripture implies:

1. On the one hand, God knows the future before it happens, including people's free choices.

2. Yet, on the other, he can regret his choices, he can change his mind.

It's tempting to try and explain away one side of the equation, rather than letting them both exist as an unsolved paradox which we will probably only ever be able to hypothesize about.  If God had wanted to clearly articulate that one side was right and the other wrong, he could easily have done so, yet he doesn't.  Why?  Either because it's best we don't know, or because we cannot conceptualize the truth, or both.

[Josh]

This is the best one I can find.

Let's say God, in His timelessness (or timefulness, or whatever), is represented at the top of the figure by the G. The "arrow of time" is represented by the horizontal circle below, which we travel linearly, but God can access at any point (GU, GP, etc..) God can intersect different points of time while all the while still remaining timeless. From the vantage point of his intersection with our timeline, he can truthfully be said to change his mind or be surprised. But from the vantage point of G, his timelessness, there is nothing that is hidden from him, nothing that he doesn't know. He can choose to be surprised at certain time points, as we see in Scripture, or he can choose to reveal the future, as he does at other times.

That's my best way of trying to comprehend what ultimately I think is beyond our brains.

[christopher]

I understand the words you're saying, but when you put them all together like that, I have no idea what you're saying 

[Josh]

I'm sure over a beer you would understand it a whole lot better ?

[jaybee]

So, had some big changes in life, and I am out from under the no drinking rule... when are we going to get that beer that will help me understand?


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[Josh]

Um, wow.  The changes you refer to sound a bit ominous.  You guys available Wednesday or Friday evening?  

[jaybee]

Lol, nothing so ominous. Both days work for me.


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[Josh]

Wednesday at 6:00 pm at horsebrass? Chris can make it. Robin? Others?

[jaybee]

Sounds good to me.


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[Josh]

See you there!