God cannot sustain the creation because he cannot know what is the current time

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Vico said:
So you are excluding secondary causes then? That will not work for Christianity.

You can read Summa Theologica Pat I, Q22 here on providence: particularly Article 3. Whether God has immediate providence over everything?

newadvent.org/summa/1022.htm
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I am not excluding anything. I have two arguments, please read post #113, which explain the problem. You need to explain deeper to show that there is a problem in my argument or explain your position.
 
Bahman said:
I am not excluding anything. I have two arguments, please read post #113, which explain the problem. You need to explain deeper to show that there is a problem in my argument or explain your position.
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I read that.

You suppose that God cannot sustain the creation because he cannot know temporal events, however sustenance can be through secondary causes which do not require knowledge of current events, therefore God can sustain the creation even without knowing temporal events.
 
Bahman said:
I am not excluding anything. I have two arguments, please read post #113, which explain the problem. You need to explain deeper to show that there is a problem in my argument or explain your position.
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Regarding St. Thomas Aquinas, he held that for temporal things, only present things exist and that God knows immediately, all at once, in one single act, the past, the present, and the future.
 
Vico said:
I read that.

You suppose that God cannot sustain the creation because he cannot know temporal events, however sustenance can be through secondary causes which do not require knowledge of current events, therefore God can sustain the creation even without knowing temporal events.
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How God could sustain creation through the secondary causes? This as I explained requires the knowledge of current time.
 
Vico said:
Regarding St. Thomas Aquinas, he held that for temporal things, only present things exist and that God knows immediately, all at once, in one single act, the past, the present, and the future.
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He could not do that as I explained because the knowledge of past, present and future does change.
 
Bahman said:
How God could sustain creation through the secondary causes? This as I explained requires the knowledge of current time.
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Bahman:
He could not do that as I explained because the knowledge of past, present and future does change.
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One solution that Aquinas used to counter fatalism is the Boethian position that describes God’s cognitive grasp of temporal reality. It is that all temporal events are before God’s mind of at once, metaphorically, but Boethius clearly, it does not make sense to think of the whole temporal reality in a single temporal present, rather it is atemporal: a single complete grasp of all events in the entire span of time.
 
Bahman said:
Here there is the argument
  1. God -]needs to/-] knows the state of creation -]at now to/-] and sustains -]the/-] creation
  2. Current now is subject to change for beings existing in the sequence of time.
  3. God is changeless and sees all things in time – past, present and future, at once in eternity
    -] 4) From (2) and (3) we can deduce that God cannot know the current time since the knowledge of current time is subject to change
  4. From (1) and (4) we can deduce that God cannot sustain the creation/-]
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I believe the flaw in your many arguments is a failure to define and relate the terms – eternity and time.
 
Bahman said:
He could not do that as I explained because the knowledge of past, present and future does change.
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I think you should try using the B-theory of time. It asserts that the flow of time is illusory; objects exist tenselessly, and temporal relations between them are the relations called “before,” “after,” and “simultaneous” which means all objects and events are on the same ontological level regardless of thinking of them as past, future, or present. It means that the “flow of time” is a mental illusion. This works well with what St. Thomas Aquinas wrote.
 
Vico said:
One solution that Aquinas used to counter fatalism is the Boethian position that describes God’s cognitive grasp of temporal reality. It is that all temporal events are before God’s mind of at once, metaphorically, but Boethius clearly, it does not make sense to think of the whole temporal reality in a single temporal present, rather it is atemporal: a single complete grasp of all events in the entire span of time.
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God can have the knowledge of all temporal events at once but he cannot know what is the current time hence he cannot sustain creation.
 
o_mlly said:
I believe the flaw in your many arguments is a failure to define and relate the terms – eternity and time.
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There is no way that God in timeless perspective could know the current time hence he cannot sustain creation.
 
Vico said:
I think you should try using the B-theory of time. It asserts that the flow of time is illusory; objects exist tenselessly, and temporal relations between them are the relations called “before,” “after,” and “simultaneous” which means all objects and events are on the same ontological level regardless of thinking of them as past, future, or present. It means that the “flow of time” is a mental illusion. This works well with what St. Thomas Aquinas wrote.
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We can still argue against even if we accept that time is an illusion. This is illustrated in the first argument in post #113: : All states of creation are actual from God perspective. Only one of this state is actual in temporal perspective. The problem is that we cannot merge these two perspectives together and have a proper dynamic in creation.
 
Bahman said:
We can still argue against even if we accept that time is an illusion. This is illustrated in the first argument in post #113: : All states of creation are actual from God perspective. Only one of this state is actual in temporal perspective. The problem is that we cannot merge these two perspectives together and have a proper dynamic in creation.
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You posted “First argument: All states of creation are actual from God perspective. Only one of this state is actual in temporal perspective.”

Since the flow of time is illusory, there is no objective present. So the first argument does not apply to Theory B.
 
davidv said:
Only your knowledge of current time changes. God’s knowledge does not change.
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We are talking about the knowledge of current time which changes hence we can know the current time and God cannot.
 
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