Since humans are not inherently harmful, you analogy fails. Humans can be incredibly self-giving. Why deny the world this attribute? Why are you ignoring the good?
If your creation above was given the ability to self-determine whether it would be harmful or not, why would you be personally responsible for the harm?
I never said he had to wait to know our decisions. He knows how we will freely choose before we choose.
True free will requires a deity who creates and then allows things to happen as they will. What is the purpose of omniscience if not to use it to create a particular order? A deity has no other use for this information that I can see.
I think you need to read my analogy again. It has not one thing to do with the “normal” human condition.
Do I really need to list all the powers ascribed to the Christian God? Infallible foreknowledge, preordination of all future events, all-powerful, omnipresent and so on.( All found in the Catholic Encyclopedia) With all this knowledge and power, to willfully create something that would cause harm to innocent portions of said creation is…well…let’s just say a human would be convicted of malicious intent in any court in the land.
Ah, I see the issue then. You think that there’s no good reason to think God is omniscient. His omniscience is a result of his timelessness. Since God is outside of time (being the creator of the universe–which is all space, matter, and time–he is not bound by them) he sees all things in what Augustine calls the “eternal now.” God sees the past, present, and future all at once. I also suggest Aquinas’s argument from motion as presented by Edward Feser as another way of seeing how God must have all the classical divine attributes including omniscience.
You are correct that I do not believe in God’s omniscience. The ability to see all at any given point in creation and still be the creator brings up a great many issues that have been wrestled over for centuries. We have hit on many of them and they inevitably lead into the area of predestination and its various forms.
Thank you. I’ve really enjoyed this argument as well. Hopefully I will bump into you more on the Philosophy Forum.
I agree with that definition. The problem is how to reconcile between free will and omniscience?
Of course there could be a conflict between his decision and his foreknowledge. For example, God foresees that he does X and he decide to do Y.
Nice, I’m glad we agree on that. I’m just going to repeat something I said in an earlier post:
Yes. I still see a problem. Suppose that God foresees that he does X but decide to do Y in a situation.
That could not happen because it would mean God is not omniscent. That knowledge does not depend upon real time.
That in fact could happen. What God decide to do has to always be aligned with his foreknowledge.
Then he would know that the subject does Y instead of X. Why do you think God could foresee wrongly? More importantly, how does this relate to free will?
You wrote: “God foresees that he does X but decide to do Y in a situation”. That means that X is not equal to Y. Now you are saying that Y is aligned with X. Which is it that you mean, have you changed your mind?
I didn’t say that God foresee wrongly, instead claiming that there exist a tension between what God see, X for example, and what he decide to do, Y for example. X and Y has to be equal always which is unlikely sine either God does not have free will or his foreseen is wrong.
I said it is possible that what God foresees is different from what he decide unless what he decide is always aligned with his foresee, which is very unlikely hence either God does not have free will or his foresee is wrong.
The tension is supposed to be between God’s free will and God’s knowledge.