Can God be surprised?

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Omnipotence = God can do what he wants to do.

If he wants to be surprised, he can be surprised.

He can also defy the laws of logic if he wants to; he just doesn’t for our sake.
 
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rayne89:
He didn’t lie. Do you see Adam and Eve walking around today?
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It may have been my imagination, but a couple years ago I thought I saw them on TV. It may have been for either a food products, a feminine hygiene product, or a breath mint, for example. I get all those mixed up. The commercials, that is. I train my children from a very young age that if they are watching TV and see something compelling on a commercial, they say, “dad, they’re trying to get some of our money.”

Alan
 
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cardenio:
Omnipotence = God can do what he wants to do.

If he wants to be surprised, he can be surprised.

He can also defy the laws of logic if he wants to; he just doesn’t for our sake.
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God cannot go against his own nature.

I do not believe God can defy logic - I belive it would be against his nature - it is because he is perfect that that he cannot do anything illogical.

For instance - God cannot tell a lie - because God is all good, and it would be against his nature
 
SPOILER - the following is the closing remarks of one of the greatest books ever written - Orthodoxy, G.K.Chesterton
And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.
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Sherlock:
Because of our fallen natures, we are prone to boredom and are not able to revel in the created world around us as much as we should. So, for humans, sure—surprises “make life more fun”, but only because we are not fully participating in the joy that God gives us. Surprises might be, if anything, something to jolt us into a better appreciation of what already exists. So, no, God cannot–and need not-----be “surprised”.
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Very profound statement, Sherlock!
 
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Sherlock:
Because of our fallen natures, we are prone to boredom and are not able to revel in the created world around us as much as we should. So, for humans, sure—surprises “make life more fun”, but only because we are not fully participating in the joy that God gives us. Surprises might be, if anything, something to jolt us into a better appreciation of what already exists. So, no, God cannot–and need not-----be “surprised”.
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Excellent post!
 
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Akanke:
Do you believe God is omniscient?
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Before becoming catholic a few years ago I used to attend an independent church in Rockford, Il that followed the teachings of a man named Gordon C Olson. They called the system of teaching Moral Government Theology. In it among other things they taught that God Knows everything that can be known. But he doesn’t know the moral choices that man may make in the future since they haven’t been made yet. In other words God can be surprised by some of the choices mankind may make. Somehow even when I went to this church and was hearing this it seemed to me that it all dragged God down to man’s level. I believe that as Isaiah says God’s ways are not our ways nor His thoughts our thoughts. And that it’s possible for God to see the End from the Beginning and being finite I’ll never understand it but thanks be to God I don’t have to! Glenn Lego
 
I don’t think the mind of God is not entirely knowable by humans, it is like an ant attempting to understand the mind of a human, if that. Surprises may make a humans life more entertaining or exciting but I don’t think God would have any need or desire for that as He is perfect. God is inside time to help us along our path, but God is also outside of time and knows all the past present and future as one whole picture, to put it more simply there is nothing God does not know, and so there is not likely to be surprises for Him.
 
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