divine foreknowledge

Does God know the future?

• Yes
• God knows all the possbilities, but not what will happen
• God can see the broad strokes of the future, but not individual choice
• God can see all possible outcomes and their probabilities, but not "the future"

Vote in the poll

Interesting question, isn't it? A fellow I've been getting to know through church is a philosophy professor at the university where Natasha works; I'm told he's also one of the foremost proponents of open theism in the country.

His contention is that God knows all things that are knowable; however, since the future has not yet happened, God merely knows what may happen: how we may choose to act, how things may fall out, and that the cat potentially is alive but potentially is dead also. To argue that God knows how we will choose also is to argue that our future actions can be known because they already are written, and therefore there is no free will.

I find that this squares well with a lot of Scripture, where we encounter God as a participant in history, discovering new things as history proceeds. In Genesis, he wants to see what Adam will name the animals; in Isaiah (?) he expresses surprise at them, claiming that in their wickedness they have done things that had never occurred to him they would do. Moreover, we see God changing his mind not once but several times: sparing Israel when Moses asks for clemency, extending Hezekiah's life when he already had said he would die, and turning aside from destroying Nineveh when the people repent.

God remains able to intervene in history, through miracles, through his prophets, and what else, but that doesn't mean that he has predestined the twists and turns its current takes. Prophecies of future events also fit in with this: God can intervene to make his will come about, and he also can see the steady march of humanity toward certain inevitable conclusions. Look at places of oppression, and it's not a stretch to see upheaval and rebellion, or race riots, or other such actions; look at famine, and it's not hard to see mass migrations of refugees.

The Hebrew texts in particular depict God as learning things, and even changing his chosen course of action after hearing argument from prophets or seeing how people respond to the prophets' message. And certainly the Incarnation was a new experience for him, and the gospels make no bones about it that Jesus was no Buddha -- he grew wiser as he grew older and experienced more.

I think you could make the argument that we are partners in writing history with the Almighty. As its Author, he set the stage and created the initial characters, but that doesn't mean that he knows everything that the characters will do, or how many of the subplots will play out.

I won't say that Dean's converted me to open theism, especially since we've barely talked about it. (The extent of my philosophical discussions with him have been mostly tongue-in-cheek about the nature of nonexistence, and how the nonexistence of a purely fantastical creature like a unicorn differs qualitatively from the nonexistence of a child who wasn't conceived, or from the nonexistence of the unicorn specifically mentioned in "The Once and Future King.") But I do find that open theism sits well with my understanding of God, and mostly puts a name to something I already have believed.

moral value

A friend of mine asks, "What is the moral value of someone essentially good, who does evil actions, based on evil/corrupt/confused intentions, and yet have his actions actually be good, despite the intent? (And can you translate that?) I may develop this later into a more cogent essay, but in the meantime, I'm posting my response to him here, mostly so I can remember it and find it later.

Someone essentially good (i.e., loves children) who commits evil actions (broadcasts Barney and Elmo TV specials), based on evil/corrupt/confused intentions (plans to warp children into mindless zombies/hopes to make a fortune through licensing deals/things it might be educational), and yet his his actions actually be good (children develop an appreciation for fine music and literature)?

I would say the moral value of the person lies more in the intentions than in the actions or the results of those actions, since actions are not solely determinative of the effects, and they flow naturally from the intentions, or inward being. To paraphrase a line of Christ's, "Wash the inside of the cup, and then it will be clean." If what's on the inside is corrupt or evil, it will manifest itself on the exterior as well.

god and morality

In a discussion thread over at CHRefugee, a friend asked, "Do actions contain an inherent moral value if God is not part of the equation?" His question was precipitated by an often-amusing and thought-provoking comic strip called Tom the Dancing Bug.

My understanding is that we can have morality without any sort of religious underpinnings, but unless morality is based on the character of Deity, then it is wholly arbitrary and relative.

In the Judeo-Christian worldview, it's God himself who is the standard by which we measure whether things are good or not. It's not a matter of a divine police officer or heavenly lawmaker saying "Do this" and "Don't do that." Goodness is neither laid down by God nor something that he appeals to; it is a self-evident characteristic of his, so that all things can be measured against him. Where our hearts deviate from his, we call that evil, or sin; when we conform to his likeness, we call it good.

Remove God from the equation, and there still can be good and evil, but they're a far paler and less hardy substitute. Do we determine goodness by man? Men change; we are fickle and capricious and what is good to us one day may not seem good to us the next. Do we determine good by common consensus? That's what society has chosen to do, and as a result, every moral compass we have is thrown out of whack and every person is left to follow an individual guide, to go along with the shifting sands of morality the rest of us make in aggregate, or to try to redefine morality for our generation by pushing the envelope in whatever direction suits us.

Even if there arises a great person, and all of us flock to him or her for a generation, and define our morals on that person, sooner or later that person dies, and we are left either to elect a new standard to follow, or to reinterpret the morals left us by the departed leader.

So while morals have nothing to do with Christianity -- Christ's concern is with our salvation and with the love we show for one another, not for our behaviors -- I don't think you can divorce morality from God in such a manner.

tower of babel

Back when I was teaching English, I was looking for a way to integrate my lessons better with the gospel, to find a more holistic approach than the cheap tack-ons that most Christian schools use in the curricula.

It occurred to me at one point that language is what makes us fundamentally stamped in God's image. John describes Christ as Logos, the divine Word with the power of creation and the authority to give reality form.

In other words, as with God, language isn't something we do, it's what we are. Because I'm primarily an English speaker, I have any number of preconceptions about love, God, faith, sin, the weather and time stamped into my mind. It's a tremendous exercise for me to break away from the definitions we have of those concepts in English and imagine them as they are presented in a non-English language.

We could take the word "god" for example. There's no real analog to that word in Hindi, so we substitute "Brahma" because that's the closest thing, but it's still a poor choice. In Hindi, "Brahma" is the sum of all things; God as an individual entity does not exist, but is found in and through all the world. Similarly, our concept of "sin" fails to find an adequate corresponding term in Hindi, where their term for "sin" refers to breaking the caste order.

Because I'm an English speaker, I also have a difficult time understanding why Spanish has estar and ser. Both infinitives translate as "to be," although with different applications. A Spanish speaker has no problem getting the difference, and can't understand why we use "to be" as a catch-all for both ser and estar.

It strikes me that what God was doing at the Tower of Babel essentially was breaking humanity up into different ethno-linguistic groups, each with a different way of relating to him so that we could learn from another to appreciate and worship him in new and different ways. It also had the effect of breaking up the spread of our sin, since ideas now must be translated from one language to the next and we cannot all rebel together as in the days of Nimrod.

Of course, it also makes it more difficult for us to understand one another, since the curse wasn't a one-time event, but something new that was levied on the human condition so that our languages always are changing and mutating, and even within our own language we lose some degree of discourse with the past as words like gandermooning disappear and other words, like let, take on completely different, if not opposite, meanings from what they once had.

the power of images

Interesting paper.

I agree with the points he's made -- and I hope some people in Hollywood read it. One of the chiefest strengths of the paper is on how the archetype is diminished once we have an image of it.

That is, I think, one of the chief failings of cinema in our age. It's not enough to let us imagine the horrible scene, we have to see it in gory detail, whether it be murder victims in movies like "Se7en," rape victims in "The General's Daughter" or what have you. The monster that we cannot see is much more terrifying than the one that we do; the crime scene that goes unshown can be far more unsettling than the one shown in full-color. Good directors understand this; more studios need to as well.

The balrog in Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" that Mallinson mentions is an excellent illustration of that. The echo of its approaching footsteps sets everybody on edge, but when it appears, it's like watching a video game.

Theologian Jacques Ellul wrote a fascinating book called "The Humiliation of the Word" -- I imagine its actual title is more like "L'Humiliation de le Parole," but I bought it in translation -- that examines the role of images in Scripture.

His essential thesis is that God proscribes images much for the same reason describes in the essay: It reduces the divine to the level of the profane, and strips it of its power. An old man with a long beard sitting on a chair in the clouds is nowhere near as awe-inspiring or unsettling as an encounter with the numinous; what's more, it decreases our dependence upon God to be with us in the now.

God's spoken word is what shaped the mountains and can shatter the foundations of the earth. Written down, while still True in the best sense of the word, it can become a snare to us because we get locked into the surface of it without understanding the full import of what it says. (Such as those Christians who refuse to have Christmas trees because they believe Jeremiah spoke against them.)

Take that degradation one step further -- print the verse under the picture of a Christmas tree -- and the meaning becomes even more fixed in the minds of those who see it, to the extent that it becomes increasingly difficult to read the verse or hear it and understand that Jeremiah was referring to idolatry, without at least thinking of Christmas trees.

faith and reason

I just took an interesting if slanted quiz intended to measure the internal consistency of a person's belief system, particularly where it pertains to the existence or nonexistence of God. I got to bite the bullet on the evolutionary question, but I do have to disagree with two of the tenets of this quiz (where it claims I took a hit):

1) I do not believe that it is a choice of God either arbitrarily defines good and evil OR God follows a moral code greater than himself. My understanding is that God himself is the basis for our delineations of good and evil; therefore, it is not logical to say that he could turn the standards of good and evil on their head.

The question as it was posed in the survey reminded me of the Aristotlean question about whether deeds were good because God declares them so or whether God declares actions good because they are. The latter suggests that there is a moral standard higher than God to which he can be held accountable; the former, that God is essentially capricious in his declarations.

The answer, I believe, is neither: God himself is the standard from which we derive our notions of morality. Since God is not a capricious being, I cannot picture him creating a world that does not follow his character.

Of course, it's probably a false dichotomy to say the moral laws are derived from God's character but the physical laws are not. The Bible even suggests that the two are intertwined, when God declares of the pagan peoples inhabiting Canaan before the Israelites arrive that "The land will vomit them out before you."

2) Some things, by their very definitions, are impossible. Saying that God is omnipotent and can do whatever he wants does not mean that he can make square circles or make 1+1=72, at least not without rewriting the entire universe and thereby rendering the current sense of the question moot. Thus the authors of the quiz are engaging in a bit of sophistry rather than logic.