The Puzzle of God by Peter Vardy

Author:Peter Vardy [Vardy, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, Religion, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781317455028
Google: xOI4CQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 816687
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1995-11-13T00:00:00+00:00

The everlasting omniscient God

Timeless God knows the past, the present and the future absolutely, as all time is present to Him. The position is different, however, with the everlasting God, who is in time. To the everlasting God, the future is future and the past is past. There is no problem with such a God knowing the past and the present completely. The difficulties arise with knowledge of the future.

There is no problem in claiming that the everlasting God can know future events which depend on the present situation in the universe. The everlasting God can know today that the sun will rise tomorrow, and He can know the date on which Haley’s Comet will return to the Solar System. This information is available to human beings as well, since celestial events behave according to known laws. Can everlasting God, however, know the future free actions of human beings?

There are two basic possibilities, which depend on the way we define human freedom:

1.

Genuine freedom

Genuine freedom (termed “liberty of indifference” by philosphers) is the freedom to act according to our own choices in ways that are not wholly determined by our genetic make-up or by our upbringing and background. Human beings do, on this basis, have a measure of genuine freedom which is not determined by their nature. Obviously, this freedom is restricted – I do not have the freedom to fly out of my window or to make myself invisible. Nevertheless, I do have freedom to make moral choices, and these choices are not entirely determined by my nature.

God cannot know the future free actions of human beings, as there is no truth there to be known. We are able to choose what to do with our lives, and God cannot know what choices will be made. Of course, God may be able to predict the future free choices of human beings with considerable accuracy, but to say that God knows the future necessarily means that He cannot be mistaken. If, therefore, men and women are free (in the way defined here), God’s omniscience cannot extend to knowledge of the future actions of human beings.

On this basis, the everlasting God can still be held to be omniscient. Such a God knows everything that it is logically possible to know. He thus knows all true propositions about the past and the present, but the future is simply not there to be known. It is, therefore, no limitation on God’s omniscience to deny Him knowledge of the future actions of human beings, since the future is open and full of many possibilities which will not be determined until human free choices have been made.

The problem with this attractive view is that God’s knowledge really is restricted by it. He would not have known in 1900 that the horrors of Auschwitz would take place; He would not have known in the 1950s that Eastern Europe would move away from Communism; He would not know now what the future holds, except to the extent that the future is outside human control.

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