Protestant theory of all knowing God

[ronhmason]

I recently heard a protestant preacher on a radio talk show say that God already knows who is going to Heaven and who is going to hell. What does the Catholic Church teach about that?

 

[SMHW]

I recently heard a protestant preacher on a radio talk show say that God already knows who is going to Heaven and who is going to hell. What does the Catholic Church teach about that?

The Catholic Church would agree since God’s knowledge transcends time.

What the Church also says (which may or may not be in conflict with what this particular preacher believes) is that God’s foreknowledge does not take away our free will.

 

[ronhmason]

I believe I’ve also heard, read or seen that God knows us before we’re even born. So, if that is true, then why would God create individuals knowing they’re going to hell when they die?

 

[jc4751]

I believe I’ve also heard, read or seen that God knows us before we’re even born. So, if that is true, then why would God create individuals knowing they’re going to hell when they die?

The difficulty in this question lays in the fact that we perceive time in only the moment that is presently occurring, like one frame of a movie. We can anticipate the future with imagination, or reconstruct the past with memory, but we simply exist at this one single individual point.

Now, the problem of causality has been brought up in arguments against Godly omniscience, which I think is fair, as it is a question which does not already get adequately addressed. The movie, Donnie Darko, for example, has this as a theme in the movie. In other words, if God knows everything, then God free will cannot exist, because God has processed information in the future state, meaning it has become immutable.

This falls apart once we step back and change our perception of God. If we instead go back to the example of a movie real, God sees all frames, where we see only one frame, but how we act in this present frame also changes the frames in the future, and God sees those changes reflected as the result of the actions we make now. So, instead of a movie real, perhaps God’s omniscience would be better described as an endless series of functions - he can see the end result, where we can only see what we’re putting into the function before us. (so, perhaps the snarky “turtles all the way down” comment made by Bertrand Russell was a little closer to the truth than he realized).

Likewise, I think the argument of “Can God create a mountain so big He cannot move it?” is also a silly attempt to redefine God in a mortal context - if God can or cannot create a mountain so big He cannot move it, if He chooses to, only if He chooses not to move it at that point in time. We want to put God in a box, make rules for Him to follow, then argue against his existence by assuming the box fits and the rules make sense. Given that we are talking about the Creator of all Things, who has existed forever, then we stumble a bit when we try to do that.