God knows what will happen in the future, correct?

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Linusthe2nd said:
Catholics are not fatalists. quite the contrary, all Catholics are full of hope and optimism. Show me a Catholic who is fatalistic.

Linus2nd
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Then you don’t understand the very core consequence of your belief. God foresees your future. How you could possibly change it?
 
By itself, how does seeing what a person’s free will choices will be have any effect on those choices?
 
Bahman said:
Then you don’t understand the very core consequence of your belief. God foresees your future. How you could possibly change it?
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Think of God as an NFL official who is also a football commentator for ESPN. It is the end of the season, and the Super Bowl is over. God is giving a report on the season in review.

Since all the games have been played, God knows every score, every play, and the outcome of every down. He knows who caught the ball, and who failed to make a tackle. He can analyze every aspect, or watch it in slow motion. God has knowledge of everything that happened that season.

As an NFL official, God also constructed the rules of the game. He picked the people who would officiate, and used the “instant replay” when necessary to overturn a few bad decisions, in order to make sure that the rules that he set came out the way they were intended.

Now, that said, God did not actually interfere in any of the plays, nor did he play the game for the people. Each coach, and player could have made any decision they chose. In a given situation, a quarterback could have opted to run the ball, make a pass, take a knee, or, heaven forbid, even throw the game. God did not make any of these decisions. He granted the players free will to play however they desired. This, however, does not in any way impact the fact that God still knows what happened, since it’s the end of the season, nor does it change the fact that God provided the rules to the game.

Eternity is a difficult concept, and it works a bit like that. Imagine God sitting at the end of time looking back at everything that has happened and knowing the outcome. He was able to construct rules… a plan… but still give us free will. It is a daunting concept to wrap one’s mind around.
 
Bahman said:
Then you don’t understand the very core consequence of your belief. God foresees your future. How you could possibly change it?
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No, He does not “foresee” your future because nothing is future to Him. It cannot be stressed enough that God is not some kind of temporal being that has an oracle to predict the future. He is eternal (e-ternal, outside of time) and hence is present to every moment of creation’s existence. I still have yet to see somebody demonstrate how God being eternally present to my future free act does anything to destroy the free nature of said act. It would seem that the only reason why my act is a free one is precisely because God is eternally present to it sustaining it as a free act.
 
Rolltide said:
Think of God as an NFL official who is also a football commentator for ESPN. It is the end of the season, and the Super Bowl is over. God is giving a report on the season in review.

Since all the games have been played, God knows every score, every play, and the outcome of every down. He knows who caught the ball, and who failed to make a tackle. He can analyze every aspect, or watch it in slow motion. God has knowledge of everything that happened that season.

As an NFL official, God also constructed the rules of the game. He picked the people who would officiate, and used the “instant replay” when necessary to overturn a few bad decisions, in order to make sure that the rules that he set came out the way they were intended.

Now, that said, God did not actually interfere in any of the plays, nor did he play the game for the people. Each coach, and player could have made any decision they chose. In a given situation, a quarterback could have opted to run the ball, make a pass, take a knee, or, heaven forbid, even throw the game. God did not make any of these decisions. He granted the players free will to play however they desired. This, however, does not in any way impact the fact that God still knows what happened, since it’s the end of the season, nor does it change the fact that God provided the rules to the game.

Eternity is a difficult concept, and it works a bit like that. Imagine God sitting at the end of time looking back at everything that has happened and knowing the outcome. He was able to construct rules… a plan… but still give us free will. It is a daunting concept to wrap one’s mind around.
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Even I could know future if we follow your scenario.
 
balto said:
No, He does not “foresee” your future because nothing is future to Him. It cannot be stressed enough that God is not some kind of temporal being that has an oracle to predict the future. He is eternal (e-ternal, outside of time) and hence is present to every moment of creation’s existence. I still have yet to see somebody demonstrate how God being eternally present to my future free act does anything to destroy the free nature of said act. It would seem that the only reason why my act is a free one is precisely because God is eternally present to it sustaining it as a free act.
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I didn’t say that it would affect your decision but impose you to have a fate.
 
rstrats said:
By itself, how does seeing what a person’s free will choices will be have any effect on those choices?
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Excellent question! It doesn’t have the slightest effect - unless one is a magician. 😉
 
Bahman said:
Then you don’t understand the very core consequence of your belief. God foresees your future. How you could possibly change it?
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He does not interfere with our free will, God knows all from beginning to end. He does not change our journey to the end, He acknowledges our free will. Hard to understand because we do not have the mind of God.

God Bless:)
 
onenow1 said:
He does not interfere with our free will, God knows all from beginning to end. He does not change our journey to the end, He acknowledges our free will. Hard to understand because we do not have the mind of God.

God Bless:)
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Suppose your fate, what God sees, is to go to hell. Doesn’t that bother you?
 
Maxirad said:
I know He gave us humans free will.
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Here is the Baha’í perspective from Abdu’l-Baha:

Question.—If God has knowledge of an action which will be performed by someone, and it has been written on the Tablet of Fate, is it possible to resist it?

Answer.—The foreknowledge of a thing is not the cause of its realization…

The hidden secrets of the future were revealed to the Prophets, and They thus became acquainted with the future events which They announced. This knowledge and these prophecies were not the cause of the occurrences. For example, tonight everyone knows that after seven hours the sun will rise, but this general foreknowledge does not cause the rising and appearance of the sun.

Therefore, the knowledge of God in the realm of contingency does not produce the forms of the things. On the contrary, it is purified from the past, present and future. It is identical with the reality of the things; it is not the cause of their occurrence…

The mathematicians by astronomical calculations know that at a certain time an eclipse of the moon or the sun will occur. Surely this discovery does not cause the eclipse to take place. This is, of course, only an analogy and not an exact image. -Some Answered Questions, pp 138-139
 
Bahman said:
I didn’t say that it would affect your decision but impose you to have a fate.
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No, it doesn’t. Saying that the created world is all that there is does not impose logical necessity on anything if part of what occurs in the created world occurs freely. In order to argue that fatalism is true, you’d have to establish that this created world is logically necessary, which it quite obviously is not. There is nothing in creation that necessitates God’s will, hence no fatalism at God’s level. My choices are not necessitated since I do not desire particular goodness necessarily, hence no fatalism at my level either. Where is the fatalism coming in? The fact that I freely choose something in the future does not necessitate my will right now, unless you of course assume that nothing is free, in which case you have simply begged the question against the defender of free will and not refuted her position.
 
Bahman said:
You mean that you create your fate? How you could create something which is fixed at any moment?
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In order to make this argument, you would have to assume that the future is in some sense real right now, which is precisely what free will denies. That it is real at a later point does not mean it is real now. To say that there happens to be a fact of the matter that I perform an action in the future does not mean that my performing that action was logically necessary, either absolutely or suppositionally by an external agent. It only becomes necessary suppositionally assuming that I in fact choose to do it, which is an affirmation of free will.
 
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