Conditioning God’s knowledge to our action violates the timeless state of God’s knowledge. I mean I didn’t decide about the course of action which will take place tomorrow as I don’t know what I am facing to. How God could know about my decision now? I believe that one cannot fuse two qualities one being in state of timeless and another in state of time. Please tell me how God which is state of timeless could send a message at time T1 and another one at time T2 to a same person (or vise versa). How possibly we could interact with such a God?
Eternity means essentially “unconstrained” by time. That means God is not caught inside time as it unfolds. There is no duration for God. Our tomorrow and yesterday are present to him as today is present to us, but much more so.
There is only one way for us to interact with God - in the present, here and now. This is where our temporal reality touches the eternal NOW where we “work out our salvation” and are prepared for eternal life. If you think about it, the present is all there is. Yesterday and tomorrow are, for us, illusions. The only reality available to us is the present moment.
The “how” God acts is not within our capacity to understand since our limitations prevent us from knowing that.
Being baffled by what we do not understand is not uncommon. I am trying to learn CSS coding for displaying various aspects of web pages. When I first began it all seemed so completely beyond comprehension - just complete jibberish. As I work through it little pieces begin to fit and the overall picture is beginning to make more sense. I understand why it works because my mind is capable of taking in the logical structure of the codes used and what results from them. My mind is capable of “getting it” because the logical structure of CSS was developed by minds very much like mine. The capacity to understand is there because the content matches or fits my capacity.
I am not about to assume that the logical structure and capacity of God’s mind is similar to my own. I have no reason to think that it must be. On the other hand, it is entirely possible that God could simply make many things comprehensible to me that I presently do not “get,” but he would have to begin where I am at in order for me to “stay with him.” With some things, however, I may just have to “trust” him because these things may be forever beyond possibility of my understanding.
That fact makes some people uncomfortable because they have a presumption of some kind of right to omniscience, when, in fact, we are owed nothing by God. A realistic assessment of our state is that we did nothing to merit existence. We exist due to nothing that we have done. God has made it possible for me to exist “as me” when I do not even have an inkling of what that even means or how that could even be possible. Who or what am I? is the most sublime question, yet completely ignored by most people.
You asked why God couldn’t simply determine the outcome of a person’s choices without making the person. It is difficult to comprehend how God could determine what I would do without me. Even his “mental act” of working out what I would do in all relevant circumstances would look very much like “me” actually doing them. The “I” that chooses the outcomes would be presumed in God’s working out the details. Would it be possible for God to determine what “I” would do in all circumstances without ME actually being present? I doubt that very much.
In addition, I am not merely a conceptual entity. I am a dynamic agent that becomes what I am as a result of the “playing out” of my relationship with the natural world, other agents and God himself. God constantly and dynamically provides grace and inspiration to assist in “forming” what I will become. How could the outcome of such a process simply be determined without the actual process of formation? The presumption would be that if God is active, through grace, in forming each person then the process of formation would be an indelible aspect of the outcome. There could be no “final me” without the involvement of God in the process.
If God involves himself to such an extent, then, presumably, this is not something he could carry out as a conceptual exercise in lieu of actually creating me. His extensive involvement means he has a vested interest in me as the determiner of my destiny, a destiny that could not be determined without my actual involvement.
