The problem with forknowledge

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Wesrock said:
God doesn’t know what “will be” in a respect that excludes His knowledge of what “is.” You’re thinking of God as an anthropomorphic outside observer, as if He’s a five-dimensional being who sees our perspective of time as a type of expanded, spatial dimension but who Himself still acts and knows and thinks in some higher dimension of time that He experiences from His perspective. This is not a “B-Theory” of time explanation.

You can’t allow God to have a perspective unaffected by time and then proceed to pull that perspective into a moment of time and critique it from there.
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I know all these things. I don’t understand how what you said could be a response to my objection: Something which is necessary cannot be contingent. You agree that the universe is contingent which means it could exist or not. This means that the universe is actual and not in the same time which is problematic. One solution which comes to mind is to claim that God can decide and create the universe (to turn potential into actual) which this is problematic again (I have two threads on this here and here). The only solution to this problem is to accept that God cannot decide, there is no act of creation and universe is necessary.
Wesrock said:
Edit: You are missing the distinction that Aquinas is making, too.
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What is that?
 
STT said:
The universe is contingent. Foreknowledge is the knowledge of creation (there is no foreknowledge if there is no creation and vice versa). Therefore Foreknowledge is contingent too.

This is problematic since it makes God contingent too.
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I think I see your question. If God is his own mind and his own thoughts, wouldn’t new knowledge change his essence?
 
I think the question is one of necessity and contingency. God loves mankind. Pope Benedict even wrote that God has eros for us. But His knowledge of us is not part of His necessary nature so it doesn’t change that nature. The knowledge in His mind of us is as if nothing because we are like nothing in our contingency. Does ANYONE agree with my analysis or am I way off. Otherwise, there is a problem here. God is His own thoughts. He choices to create and thus has those thoughts added to His ‘normal’ thoughts. Wouldn’t that change His nature
 
STT said:
The universe is contingent.
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I suspect that, unsurprisingly, your dilemma here might be based on how you understand the definition of these terms.

‘Contingent’, in a philosophical sense, merely means “not necessary.” That is, it’s something that does not have to exist, per se.

However, you seem to be using it to say something different – as if it means that it’s unknown by God.

That’s your hang-up right there, I think: by presuming that God doesn’t know certain things “until” they happen in the context of time, you’re attempting to place God in a quandry.

Yes, the universe is contingent. Yes, God knows it fully – “foreknows” it, from the perspective of within the space-time framework. Since God exists outside that framework, though, He’s not “surprised” by it, nor does He have to “wait” until things happen in order to know them.

In other words, the universe is never “unknown” or obscured from God, and God is not contingent.
 
It’s a challenging question. And there are others like it.

The universe is finite and contingent. Therefore, God has a relationship with a finite and contingent thing which transpires over temporal time. Therefore, God is contingent on a finite thing and temporal time. ?

God is simple and cannot be composed of parts. But God’s creation is contingent, finite and composed of changeable parts. How did this happen?

Man’s decisions occur freely, in temporal time. Man’s actions affect God. God communicates with man in temporal time.
How is this possible?
 
The knowledge belonging to God is not something “learned” by Him over time. His omniscience, omnipotence, and existence outside of the bounds of time means that:

1.) He does not gain knowledge (due to the lack of potentiality in Him)
2.) He knows all possible things, outcomes, times, etc… that are (See here)
3.) He knows all possible things, outcomes, times, etc… that are not (see here)
4.) He understands all things together (see here)
5.) His knowledge is not habitual (see here)
6.) His knowledge is not ratiocinative or discursive (see here)
7.) He does not come to understand by composing and dividing (see here)

You cannot understand this if you look at God as acting in a sequential fashion. God wills Himself into existence; not willed in the past, not will will in the future, but eternally, perpetually wills. It is an eternal, single act.

By this same eternal, single act of will, God wills both himself and other things (see here). The only thing willed out of necessity is God’s own being and goodness. (see here)
 
AveOTheotokos said:
The knowledge belonging to God is not something “learned” by Him over time. His omniscience, omnipotence, and existence outside of the bounds of time means that:

1.) He does not gain knowledge (due to the lack of potentiality in Him)
2.) He knows all possible things, outcomes, times, etc… that are (See here)
3.) He knows all possible things, outcomes, times, etc… that are not (see here)
4.) He understands all things together (see here)
5.) His knowledge is not habitual (see here)
6.) His knowledge is not ratiocinative or discursive (see here)
7.) He does not come to understand by composing and dividing (see here)

You cannot understand this if you look at God as acting in a sequential fashion. God wills Himself into existence; not willed in the past, not will will in the future, but eternally, perpetually wills. It is an eternal, single act.

By this same eternal, single act of will, God wills both himself and other things (see here). The only thing willed out of necessity is God’s own being and goodness. (see here)
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God does learn but not sequentially. He decided to create, so that the knowledge that He decided to create is ontologically known to Him after He knows His nature. The problem is that He is His own thoughts, so how does he not change with knowledge of the contingent. I provided an answer, your post did not
 
thinkandmull said:
God does learn but not sequentially. He decided to create, so that the knowledge that He decided to create is ontologically known to Him after He knows His nature. The problem is that He is His own thoughts, so how does he not change with knowledge of the contingent. I provided an answer, your post did not
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God does not learn. To learn requires gaining a knowledge of something that was previously unknown. Because God is not in time and knows all things already (things that are and things that are not), there is no potential for him to gain a new knowledge.

God also did not decide to create. There was not a point where God desired for there to not be creation, and then He changed his mind and decided to create. It is by a single act of eternal will that both Him and everything exists.

There is no contingency or change in God because He already knows everything.

I am sorry you feel that my post did not provide you with a sufficient answer. I provided numerous link with more expanded explanations from St. Thomas Aquinas. If you haven’t read the entire work (link here), I highly suggest it. If you have and still don’t understand, then I am afraid that there is little I can do to help you.
 
I don’t think you understand my argument. I don’t think Aquinas addressed it either. The fact that God knows everything at once is beside the point. His decision to create was not necessary and He knows His decision, although eternally. He doesn’t know what I will choose either until I choose it. All this is extra knowledge to what He knows naturally. He knows He created me because He choose to. That knowledge is added on. But if He IS His intellect and IS His ideas, it would seem His nature would change. Do you understand my argument now? The timeless element is not relevant. What ontologically comes in succession does
 
thinkandmull said:
I don’t think you understand my argument. I don’t think Aquinas addressed it either. The fact that God knows everything at once is beside the point. His decision to create was not necessary and He knows His decision, although eternally. He doesn’t know what I will choose either until I choose it. All this is extra knowledge to what He knows naturally. He knows He created me because He choose to. That knowledge is added on. But if He IS His intellect and IS His ideas, it would seem His nature would change. Do you understand my argument now? The timeless element is not relevant. What ontologically comes in succession does
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I understand your argument now, though your understanding of God’s knowledge is flawed here.

God DOES know your choices before you make them. He knows everything about you before you were even conceived.
 
thinkandmull said:
He doesn’t know what I will choose either until I choose it.
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Knows it …

All at once.

“To God, all moments of time are present in their immediacy.” (CCC 600)

All moments - all free choices are seen by God coming forth freshly as it were. God not so much “foresees” *** “sees”. All together. God sees my birth and my death, and the death of King Tutt …the fall of Rome and the Moon landing…

God is outside of Time.
 
STT said:
The universe is contingent. Foreknowledge is the knowledge of creation (there is no foreknowledge if there is no creation and vice versa). Therefore Foreknowledge is contingent too.

This is problematic since it makes God contingent too.
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I don’t see how it followers that knowing a contingent thing makes the knower contingent. That’s like saying knowing plants makes me a plant. As the Scholastics say, the known is in the knower in the mode of the knower.

Christi pax.
 
Wesrock said:
You’re mixing God’s knowledge with the universe. The universe is itself contingent.
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Ok then like why are you even addressing his question on knowledge then, if it’s not even an issue and they have no relation to each other?
 
AveOTheotokos said:
I understand your argument now, though your understanding of God’s knowledge is flawed here.

God DOES know your choices before you make them. He knows everything about you before you were even conceived.
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See you didn’t get my argument. God’s knows eternally, but He knows FROM what I do. So He has EXTRA knowledge based on what I do. He is his thoughts, so why don’t my choices change Him
 
thinkandmull said:
See you didn’t get my argument. God’s knows eternally, but He knows FROM what I do. So He has EXTRA knowledge based on what I do. He is his thoughts, so why don’t my choices change Him
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Because all of time exists as an eternal NOW to God, so the moment you have made a choice has existed eternally from His perspective. There was never a change because once you’ve made that choice, you’ve made it, and from God’s perspective you’ve already made all the choices you’re ever going to make. (You are also in the process of making each of them, and have yet to make each of them. Trying to relate timelessness using chronological terms is… difficult)

There’s also the fact that God knows of all possible choices, so each potential outcome is already a part of God’s eternal knowledge, meaning that no matter what you chose, God is aware of it. However, this does not constitute extra knowledge because, as I said above, all of what we perceive as time has been eternally present to God, so all choices have been eternally accounted for. This does not negate causality because time only exists in the manner it does because of the cumulative choices of each individual. God experiences eternally what we can only experience sequentially.

You cannot consider God’s knowledge like human knowledge. The two things are as different as night and day. We use the term knowledge because it’s the only way our finite understanding can comprehend it, but it’s really not the same type of thing.
 
You are still missing the point. The fact that God sees everything else at once is accidental to the problem. Accidental, remember that. This is because there are ontological layers. God chooses to create us, we make choices. It doesn’t matter whether He sees it at once or not. That is accidental. The fact is that because of His non-necessary choice there is a new element in reality: my free will. NOW, ontologically, He possesses new knowledge, knowledge He would not have had if He had decided not to create. Since He IS His own thoughts, He changes with this new knowledge (which, accidentally, he has from eternity). I provided a counter to this argument of mine, but it seems nobody is getting the force of the argument yet. Its easy pezzy to me
 
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