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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: The relativity of simultaneity.
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Cuh, fuh. After all these years.
We live in an eternalist, 4-dimensional, block time, ontologically time-sliced universe apparently. Because of the OP: there is no present; common sense does not apply. At all. In other words all of future (like past) eternity is real UNLESS the block is growing (a minority view among philosophers in which we do not know whether now is now (and the implications of that are?)).
So, God DOES know the future without necessarily making it happen above grounding its being.
And you buggers left me to work this out for myself.
Thanks for nothing!
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Eutychus
From the edge
# 3081
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Posted
Ah.
Can we reinstate Cyrus in Isaiah now?
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Let's remember that we are to build the Kingdom of God, not drive people away - pastor Frank Pomeroy
Posts: 17944 | From: 528491 | Registered: Jul 2002
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Boogie
Boogie on down!
# 13538
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Posted
Nah, I’d say there is an unfavourable planetary aspect just now - too many oppositions and quincunxes imho
Wait ‘till next month.
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Garden. Room. Walk
Posts: 13030 | From: Boogie Wonderland | Registered: Mar 2008
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Sioni Sais
Shipmate
# 5713
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Posted
1) We do indeed live in that 4-dimension universe
2) God doesn't. At the very least time doesn't exist for God, so while time is a line for us it is a singularity from God's point of view.
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"He isn't Doctor Who, he's The Doctor"
(Paul Sinha, BBC)
Posts: 24276 | From: Newport, Wales | Registered: Apr 2004
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quetzalcoatl
Shipmate
# 16740
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Posted
I often think that there is no future, and no past, but I also realize that this is contradicted by various stuff in relativity. Well, subjectively I have no future and no past, and that's the way I like it. See you tomorrow, what a laaf.
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I can't talk to you today; I talked to two people yesterday.
Posts: 9878 | From: UK | Registered: Oct 2011
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Doc Tor
Deepest Red
# 9748
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Posted
While you can start with "I think therefore I am", that isn't meant to be the finishing point. Certain brain disorders mean that some people live in a perpetual now - but those who perforce have to care for them know (or at least act on the premise) that there is both a past, which you have influenced, and a future, which you can influence.
I have a half-drunk mug of tea on my desk. It could be (as some creationists claim) part of God's divine plan that I was created a second ago along with a half-drunk mug of tea and my desk, together with the memories of putting the kettle on.
But that, I'd argue is a pathology, and an extraordinarily unhelpful one at that. And while I'm as prone as anyone my age to walk into a room and wonder what the hell I was going there for, that we can plan - I am going to go to this room and pick up that item which I remember leaving there - indicates that we have a good grasp on what both the past and the future are, and can use it to inform our decisions in the now.
As to whether God, being outside of time's arrow, sees the future as well as the past, as if it's an already finished book, and flicking through the pages one second at a time? Surely, that would be a constraint on God's omnipotence, the ultimate blind watchmaker, who sealed mine and your unchangeable fates at the beginning of time itself.
The universe is a work in progress, and mutable.
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Forward the New Republic
Posts: 9131 | From: Ultima Thule | Registered: Jul 2005
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Barnabas62
Host
# 9110
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Posted
It's a limited model, good for some things but not all.
An analogous statement. Quantum theory and the collapse of the wave function allow for both a multiverse and an indeterminate future in this universe.
Another model which is good for some things.
I don't know whether these models can be integrated, or indeed if there has been some partial success in doing that.
In considering our best understanding we seem to come across a paradox or two or three!
All models are imperfect representations of the Real Thing. I have no idea how the Mind of God fits into any of these current understandings.
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Who is it that you seek? How then shall we live? How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
Posts: 21397 | From: Norfolk UK | Registered: Feb 2005
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Tortuf
Ship's fisherman
# 3784
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
So, God DOES know the future without necessarily making it happen above grounding its being.
And you buggers left me to work this out for myself.
I do not know the mind of God, so I cannot answer that question directly. If you ask a process theologian they would probably say no. Asking me my answer is that God understands what we are so poor at understanding. God sees us in the context of all of the rest of creation as it is now. God also sees us in the context of all that has been.
We have a hard time not seeing ourselves and our desires as central to the universe whereas God sees more and sees that more in the context of love.
We have a hard time even loving our family when they don't act the way we want. God loved me even when I hated myself. I pray to one day have even an infinitesimal bit of that love.
God, I believe may know the future, and does not have to know the future because the future is not fixed, it changes as events occur.
As to your second statement, you do have to work out God for yourself (with the help of God ) because knowing God in theory is not knowing God at all. It is merely knowing a construct you call God.
Posts: 6963 | From: The Venice of the South | Registered: Dec 2002
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quetzalcoatl
Shipmate
# 16740
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Posted
Yes, that's one of points of the Cloud of Unknowing, isn't it? Conceptions of God are barriers. As in many other mystics. If you see buddha on the road, kill him.
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I can't talk to you today; I talked to two people yesterday.
Posts: 9878 | From: UK | Registered: Oct 2011
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quetzalcoatl
Shipmate
# 16740
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Posted
Well, I would say that time and space are also conceptual frameworks, which are clearly essential. However, the mystics talk of transcending them, e.g. the nowness of the lilies of the field. However, I've just turned that into a concept! Low down dirty blues, eh?
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I can't talk to you today; I talked to two people yesterday.
Posts: 9878 | From: UK | Registered: Oct 2011
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Did the universe stutter just then?
Eutychus. No: I still don't believe that the future is real. And growing block time allows for that.
Sioni Sais (1) Yeah, space-time. (2) Yeaaaah. What's that mean? What can we say about an entity that has always... had thermodynamically orthodox entities within it?
q, Doc Tor, B62. Aye.
MOST profound T.
Boogie. I've known what a quincunx is for over 50 years. But only just what it was.
[ 01. February 2018, 13:24: Message edited by: Martin60 ]
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Boogie
Boogie on down!
# 13538
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Posted
I was spouting astrology, tongue in cheek - because I think all this is speculation. I’d much rather simply say ‘we don’t know’.
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Garden. Room. Walk
Posts: 13030 | From: Boogie Wonderland | Registered: Mar 2008
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Sioni Sais
Shipmate
# 5713
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
Sioni Sais (1) Yeah, space-time. (2) Yeaaaah. What's that mean? What can we say about an entity that has always... had thermodynamically orthodox entities within it?
God, unlike doesn't need dimensions, indeed He is beyond dimensions. No length, breadth or depth nor even a period in which a sequence of events takes place.
The universe may have thermodynamically orthodox entities within it but does it need to be thermodynamically orthodox of itself?
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"He isn't Doctor Who, he's The Doctor"
(Paul Sinha, BBC)
Posts: 24276 | From: Newport, Wales | Registered: Apr 2004
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Bishops Finger
Shipmate
# 5430
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Posted
Could some kindly Host please arrange for this thread to be translated into plain English?
I'm afraid it's all way over my poor head - I tend to agree with Boogie's wise words...'we don't know'.
IJ
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Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service. (Wilkie Collins)
Posts: 10151 | From: Behind The Wheel Again! | Registered: Jan 2004
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Sioni Sais:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
Sioni Sais (1) Yeah, space-time. (2) Yeaaaah. What's that mean? What can we say about an entity that has always... had thermodynamically orthodox entities within it?
God, unlike doesn't need dimensions, indeed He is beyond dimensions. No length, breadth or depth nor even a period in which a sequence of events takes place.
The universe may have thermodynamically orthodox entities within it but does it need to be thermodynamically orthodox of itself?
I know that God is not dimensional, not spatial, not temporal; He's greater than, meta- that. He is spirit. The universe is not supernatural in any way that can ever be determined since its beginning. I.e. not thermodynamically heterodox unlike whatever made it, among infinite from eternity.
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Felafool
Shipmate
# 270
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Posted
(Hesitating to jump into a pool which I know is far too deep for me.)
For God to know the future, in the eternal now, surely the future must yet have happened for him to know it?
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I don't care if the glass is half full or half empty - I ordered a cheeseburger.
Posts: 265 | Registered: May 2001
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Sioni Sais
Shipmate
# 5713
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Bishops Finger:
Could some kindly Host please arrange for this thread to be translated into plain English?
I'm afraid it's all way over my poor head - I tend to agree with Boogie's wise words...'we don't know'.
IJ
I agree with Boogie's wise words too: we don't know, for sure, but I am trying to find a accommodation between man's free-will and God knowing all from the beginning, ie predestination.
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"He isn't Doctor Who, he's The Doctor"
(Paul Sinha, BBC)
Posts: 24276 | From: Newport, Wales | Registered: Apr 2004
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lilBuddha
Shipmate
# 14333
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Sioni Sais:
but I am trying to find a accommodation between man's free-will and God knowing all from the beginning, ie predestination.
The problem is in the contradictions of the typical Christian definition of God.
All-powerful, all-knowing, creator of the universe.
Those three combined are inconsistent with free will and love. Well, perfect love, anyhow.
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I put on my rockin' shoes in the morning
Hallellou, hallellou
Posts: 17627 | From: the round earth's imagined corners | Registered: Dec 2008
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no prophet's flag is set so...
Proceed to see sea
# 15560
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Posted
Certain moments are structured in certain ways. I get a certain baroque feeling in some of this discussion. On the stage of life, the play is written with a particular plot, but there's considerable ad libbing, most of it actually. The director likes to give the actors their independence, and generally seems to be in the darkness beyond the lights such that the actors don't see him/her. Does the director direct? Not very much, despite the hopeful ideas of the actors.
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Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.
\_(ツ)_/
Posts: 11498 | From: Treaty 6 territory in the nonexistant Province of Buffalo, Canada ↄ⃝' | Registered: Mar 2010
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Unum Solum
Shipmate
# 18904
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Posted
Where resides now the risen Christ, with His risen body, who is also God?
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I will not say do not weep for not all tears are an evil. - Gandalf
Posts: 53 | From: Auckland, New Zealand | Registered: Jan 2018
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Tortuf
Ship's fisherman
# 3784
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Posted
Yeah. Go ahead and buy that copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
Posts: 6963 | From: The Venice of the South | Registered: Dec 2002
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Brenda Clough
Shipmate
# 18061
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Sioni Sais:
IJ
I agree with Boogie's wise words too: we don't know, for sure, but I am trying to find a accommodation between man's free-will and God knowing all from the beginning, ie predestination. [/QB][/QUOTE]
I can tell you how a non-God creator does it. Yes, when I write a novel I do know the entire book from the beginning to end. In me the characters live and move and have their being; if I put down the pen (or turn off the word processor) they literally do not exist. My power over them is absolute -- life and death, sickness and health, typhoons, murders, earthquakes, you name it. Nor is the work driven by the characters' happiness and well-being; my ways are not their ways. My goal is and must always be to write a good novel, and to this end I will sacrifice their peace, health and happiness without blinking.
However. These are not puppets I am manipulating here. A good character is alive on the page; you can't make them do -anything-. You can only make them do what is in character for them to do. Dorothy Sayers found that it was impossible to just have Harriet Vane fall into Peter Wimsey's arms at the end of Strong Poison. The characters simply refused to do it; she could force them to the altar only by having the entire novel drop dead at her feet.
If the creatures are made properly, they are alive, and they have free will. The creator wants them to be alive, to foster that free will. And therefore what I just wrote is not true. I do not know the book from beginning to end. I think I do, but as I write it, it changes as the characters seize hold of events and gallop off into the distance. They often surprise me. If it makes the end result a better book, I am totally on board with this.
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Science fiction and fantasy writer with a Patreon page
Posts: 6378 | From: Washington DC | Registered: Mar 2014
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lilBuddha
Shipmate
# 14333
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Posted
But you cannot write a book without determining what you characters will do, even ignore you don’t predetermine before beginning.
God, as traditionally set up, creates the set, the props and the actors. Then adds stage direction and writes in characters to influence the outcome.
Free will only works if you remove the traditional elements of who and what god is.
Your book and np’s play mightn’t be new concepts, but they challenge much of the official party line.
God cannot create the universe, know what will happen and free-will still exist.
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I put on my rockin' shoes in the morning
Hallellou, hallellou
Posts: 17627 | From: the round earth's imagined corners | Registered: Dec 2008
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Jengie jon
Semper Reformanda
# 273
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Posted
Lilbuddha
Only true if you insist that God is tied to time in the same way as we are. If that is not the case then causality falls into all sorts of problems, least of which is the conflict between the human and divine will.
Jengie
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"To violate a persons ability to distinguish fact from fantasy is the epistemological equivalent of rape." Noretta Koertge
Back to my blog
Posts: 20894 | From: city of steel, butterflies and rainbows | Registered: May 2001
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lilBuddha
Shipmate
# 14333
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Jengie jon:
Lilbuddha
Only true if you insist that God is tied to time in the same way as we are. If that is not the case then causality falls into all sorts of problems, least of which is the conflict between the human and divine will.
If God is tied in time like we are, he wouldn’t know what will happen. It doesn’t remove responsibly by itself, but it lessens causality. If god isn’t tied in time, and created the universe, than how can it not be directly causal?
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I put on my rockin' shoes in the morning
Hallellou, hallellou
Posts: 17627 | From: the round earth's imagined corners | Registered: Dec 2008
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Brenda Clough
Shipmate
# 18061
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Posted
All I can say to you is that both things are true. I do in truth have total control of this book. And yet the characters have free will. Not only are both things factually and provably true, it is a good and desirable thing. Books are better this way.
I am by no means the only writer who reports this; Dorothy Sayers articulates it far better in The Mind of the Maker and J.R.R. Tolkien has said something not dissimilar.
It is true however that I am not in time the same way that the characters are in time. I can hop from one place to another within the text; they can't. I can go back in their history and give them a rich cousin, or a peg leg, and not only will it be true, it will -always have been- true within the reality of the work. Even if I don't tell the story sequentially, the characters usually experience events sequentially.
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Science fiction and fantasy writer with a Patreon page
Posts: 6378 | From: Washington DC | Registered: Mar 2014
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no prophet's flag is set so...
Proceed to see sea
# 15560
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Tortuf:
Yeah. Go ahead and buy that copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
Sophie's World is better.
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Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.
\_(ツ)_/
Posts: 11498 | From: Treaty 6 territory in the nonexistant Province of Buffalo, Canada ↄ⃝' | Registered: Mar 2010
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lilBuddha
Shipmate
# 14333
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
All I can say to you is that both things are true. I do in truth have total control of this book. And yet the characters have free will. Not only are both things factually and provably true, it is a good and desirable thing. Books are better this way.
I am by no means the only writer who reports this; Dorothy Sayers articulates it far better in The Mind of the Maker and J.R.R. Tolkien has said something not dissimilar.
It is true however that I am not in time the same way that the characters are in time. I can hop from one place to another within the text; they can't. I can go back in their history and give them a rich cousin, or a peg leg, and not only will it be true, it will -always have been- true within the reality of the work. Even if I don't tell the story sequentially, the characters usually experience events sequentially.
But it is still all from your own mind. That you do not consciously think of it this way doesn't change this.
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I put on my rockin' shoes in the morning
Hallellou, hallellou
Posts: 17627 | From: the round earth's imagined corners | Registered: Dec 2008
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Golden Key
Shipmate
# 1468
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Posted
Martin--
I'm guessing you watched all 3 "Matrix" movies; took the red and blue pills at the same time, with ayahuasca, pot brownies, and 200 year old whiskey; watched "Monty Python's Flying Circus" while having dinner with the Merovingians; and read Madeleine L'Engle's "Time Quartet" *after* all of that.
Mr. Ed, the TV talking horse, is saying you shouldn't do that.
Meanwhile, a stuffed penguin on top of your computer has just exploded.
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Blessed Gator, pray for us!
--"Oh bat bladders, do you have to bring common sense into this?" (Dragon, "Jane & the Dragon")
--"Oh, Peace Train, save this country!" (Yusuf/Cat Stevens, "Peace Train")
Posts: 18601 | From: Chilling out in an undisclosed, sincere pumpkin patch. | Registered: Oct 2001
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
All true GK, all true. But so is it that the dominant view in philosophy is block time and therefore that the future is real and that can have NOTHING to do with predestination. Because it has no dependency on God (apart from as a ground of being). If God did not exist reality would still be this way. Fixed. And indeterminate (until the spotlight of now moves and collapses). For the material world. Of which His kingdom is not.
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Unum Solum
Shipmate
# 18904
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Posted
Why care about the future Martin? It doesn’t exist, we never get there, we never live the future. All we deal with is the pain of the present, and the present is ever coloured by the hurts of the past. The future if it exists is merely a projection of those past failures and the fear of repeating them over and over again.
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I will not say do not weep for not all tears are an evil. - Gandalf
Posts: 53 | From: Auckland, New Zealand | Registered: Jan 2018
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Boogie
Boogie on down!
# 13538
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Unum Solum:
... the present is ever coloured by the hurts of the past.
Only if you have a memory. What you can’t remember can’t hurt you.
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Garden. Room. Walk
Posts: 13030 | From: Boogie Wonderland | Registered: Mar 2008
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Unum Solum:
Why care about the future Martin? It doesn’t exist, we never get there, we never live the future. All we deal with is the pain of the present, and the present is ever coloured by the hurts of the past. The future if it exists is merely a projection of those past failures and the fear of repeating them over and over again.
All will be well Unum Solum, all will be well. Despite the future.
I just think that the philosophers haven't done enough work to overcome common sense. Just because of the relativity of simultaneity they proliferate entities a tad. All current indeterminate states that are determined in the future have been, somehow because there is no single present of events for each point in the universe. There is an infinity in its light cone for, of every observation point in the cone. The timing of events at other points detected at a point is unique to and real at that point.
Reality is very, VERY strange (quantum entanglement anyone?). With my lack of intelligence I cannot see why it HAS to include a real future where everything has been determined because of the fact of the relativity of simultaneity.
Although if the future is real, that actually lets God off the hook of predestination, it's nowt ter do wi' 'im. He can know without being responsible apart from being the ground of being.
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Golden Key
Shipmate
# 1468
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Tortuf:
Yeah. Go ahead and buy that copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
Back in the day, some people were upset that Jonathan (as a possible Jesus parallel) said he wasn't the son of the Great Gull, and that there wasn't any Great Gull.
So a Christian wrote "Benjamin Alexander Sheep", which basically fixed the supposedly anti-Christian things about JLS.
BTW, there's a strange film version of JLS. The one thing I love about it is the "Sanctus Kyrie" chant/song. Really good.
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Blessed Gator, pray for us!
--"Oh bat bladders, do you have to bring common sense into this?" (Dragon, "Jane & the Dragon")
--"Oh, Peace Train, save this country!" (Yusuf/Cat Stevens, "Peace Train")
Posts: 18601 | From: Chilling out in an undisclosed, sincere pumpkin patch. | Registered: Oct 2001
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Felafool
Shipmate
# 270
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Posted
Does God know what I am going to have for breakfast tomorrow? If I can be mundane, I offer a few ways to look at this.
1) Yes he knows because it's pre-determined. I am somehow bound to make the choice that God sees in the future. I have no free will.
2) Yes he knows because he knows my breakfast history and also the contents of my kitchen cupboard. God makes a calculated guess which I am likely to correspond with. I have free will but my freedom is qualified by a lot of different factors which a superior being may be able to accommodate.
3) No, God doesn't know because I am free to choose anything I like tomorrow. Even I don't know what I will have until I get to the cupboard.
4) God only knows because he lives in the 'eternal now' and sees what I choose (with free will) tomorrow. In this sense I still have a
free will choice to make. In the 'eternal now' God sees tomorrow's choice today, and thus knows. If I do not make a choice between cereal or toast, that choice does not exist in the eternal now. Thus God does not see that choice (in the future) and therefore does not know because it doesn't happen. (Although God does know that I will not make that choice)
Whether or not I have cereal or toast is unknowable until I make that choice. This allows for free-will, but has implications for a definition of omniscience. An 'omniscient' God has no knowledge of the unknowable (a whole other thread?)
There are probably other, better ways of looking at it. I think I'm at option 4 above, but still working it out.
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I don't care if the glass is half full or half empty - I ordered a cheeseburger.
Posts: 265 | Registered: May 2001
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Golden Key
Shipmate
# 1468
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
quote:
Originally posted by Tortuf:
Yeah. Go ahead and buy that copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
Sophie's World is better.
"The Never-ending Story" is another good one of that ilk--book and the first one or two movies. (Not the last movie.)
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Blessed Gator, pray for us!
--"Oh bat bladders, do you have to bring common sense into this?" (Dragon, "Jane & the Dragon")
--"Oh, Peace Train, save this country!" (Yusuf/Cat Stevens, "Peace Train")
Posts: 18601 | From: Chilling out in an undisclosed, sincere pumpkin patch. | Registered: Oct 2001
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quetzalcoatl
Shipmate
# 16740
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Posted
It would be interesting to translate some of these ideas into Tegmark's notion of the universe as a mathematical structure, with lots of sub-structures. However, I am not the man to do it!
Still don't understand what free will is; if it means something not determined, that is random, isn't it?
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I can't talk to you today; I talked to two people yesterday.
Posts: 9878 | From: UK | Registered: Oct 2011
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Tortuf
Ship's fisherman
# 3784
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
Still don't understand what free will is; if it means something not determined, that is random, isn't it?
A serious answer. I believe free will is just that . . . Free. God is the great allower, letting us do as we will. God lets us have free choice because God loves us and wants us to have the dignity of choice. There is precious little dignity in doing only as you are programmed, or are destined.
At the same time God is always reaching out to us with love. Always and not dependent on us believing, believing the right way, or going to the right church.
Accepting that love does not mean we are always going to behave well, or even pause to seek guidance. It means we have more reason to do so.
So, the future is not fixed as far as our behavior. It is always fixed about the love God has for us.
Sometimes we just have to fall hard upon our asses to see yhat love as our egos demand so much more of us than God. I had to anyway.
Posts: 6963 | From: The Venice of the South | Registered: Dec 2002
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Unum Solum
Shipmate
# 18904
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Tortuf:
At the same time God is always reaching out to us with love. Always and not dependent on us believing, believing the right way, or going to the right church.
And this day, this now, how does that change anything? If God does not exist, if this is all there is, would I notice/experience anything different?
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I will not say do not weep for not all tears are an evil. - Gandalf
Posts: 53 | From: Auckland, New Zealand | Registered: Jan 2018
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Doc Tor:
I have a half-drunk mug of tea on my desk. It could be (as some creationists claim) part of God's divine plan that I was created a second ago along with a half-drunk mug of tea and my desk, together with the memories of putting the kettle on.
(In a Newtonian universe) It's a perfectly acceptable secular metaphysical position to be non-realist about the future or past and future. You have to find some way to interpret statements about past and future as statements about the present, analogous to all forms of philosophical non-realism or quasi-realism. But it doesn't require a deity.
I don't think it's a tenable position in an Einsteinian universe. And there would possibly problems about explaining whether the present moment has duration or not.
quote:
As to whether God, being outside of time's arrow, sees the future as well as the past, as if it's an already finished book, and flicking through the pages one second at a time? Surely, that would be a constraint on God's omnipotence, the ultimate blind watchmaker, who sealed mine and your unchangeable fates at the beginning of time itself.
It is my opinion, defensible as far as I can see, that the apparent objections here only arise because we have no verb tense for things that 'happen' outside of time. As such, attempts to talk about the relationship between God creating the universe or knowing about events on the one hand and the causal antecedents of those events on the other fall foul of the fact that our words for the God/eternity side convey tensed information that is misleading.
It is possible that for the same reason I'm misled about it.
But if God is outside time and creates the universe from outside time then although God might create the consequence of our decisions at the same eternal moment as we make our decisions (freely if there is free will), nevertheless the consequence is within time the temporal consequence of the freely made decision and not of God's creation directly.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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Galloping Granny
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# 13814
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Posted
It is so restful to be able simply to say "God is Love. God is here in this room with me."
GG
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The Kingdom of Heaven is spread upon the earth, and men do not see it. Gospel of Thomas, 113
Posts: 2629 | From: Matarangi | Registered: Jun 2008
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Gramps49
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# 16378
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Posted
Does God know what I am going to have for breakfast tomorrow?
Personally, I don't think God cares.
By the way, depending on which string theory you accept there are at least 10, probably up to 26 dimensions in the universe, of which we experience only four.
Posts: 2193 | From: Pullman WA | Registered: Apr 2011
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Martin60
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# 368
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Posted
Wish I found it so GG. Although I suspect as a mantra it would work, more so than the Jesus prayer.
Dafyd. I reach but cannot grasp. The more I look at what you say the more my baulking recedes. Not completely. But my hostility to your last paragraph has gone. I'm still intrigued by the necessity of block time by the ROS and am encouraged that a minority of minds immeasurably superior to mine are common sense champions of presentism.
How does presentism create a problem for RoS?
How do events
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A-B-C
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in the same 5 ticks of the clock at three different points necessitate block time and/or all events in God's single now?
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Felafool
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# 270
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Posted
quote:
I wrote: Does God know what I am going to have for breakfast tomorrow?
Gramps49 wrote: Personally, I don't think God cares.
I agree with you there, Gramps49. I was just trying to offer a simple example showing how free will and 'omniscience' might occur. I find it helpful, if others may not.
(I seem to remember encountering this in Greg Boyd's book 'A God of Contingency', or some similar title?)
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I don't care if the glass is half full or half empty - I ordered a cheeseburger.
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Gramps49
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# 16378
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Posted
Then we are in agreement Felafool.
This is like arguing how many angels can dance on a pinhead.
[ 04. February 2018, 03:26: Message edited by: Gramps49 ]
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Martin60
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# 368
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Posted
It's nothing like that for me as it is about the nature of reality. The majority secular philosophical view is block time; eternalist. This would allow God to be prophetic without being the fundamentalist God the interventionist Killer. However it proliferates entities a tad: Every Planck tick of the eternal future of every one of the growing infinity of universes. Presentism would mean that either God is interventionist Killer, bringing about that which He foresees, which does not yet exist in the unhappened future and wouldn't without His intervention to a puppeteering degree or that OT 'prophecy' necessitating intervention (some doesn't) is pious fraud.
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Golden Key
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# 1468
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Posted
Martin--
Ah. ISTM, then, that this isn't so much about time, per se, but what that shows about God--and whether that allows God to intervene negatively, positively, or just stop by for some tuna casserole.
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Blessed Gator, pray for us!
--"Oh bat bladders, do you have to bring common sense into this?" (Dragon, "Jane & the Dragon")
--"Oh, Peace Train, save this country!" (Yusuf/Cat Stevens, "Peace Train")
Posts: 18601 | From: Chilling out in an undisclosed, sincere pumpkin patch. | Registered: Oct 2001
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Golden Key
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# 1468
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Gramps49:
This is like arguing how many angels can dance on a pinhead.
My reaction to that has always been "well, a lot--possibly infinite, especially if they stack themselves like acrobats. But...why would they *want* to?"
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Blessed Gator, pray for us!
--"Oh bat bladders, do you have to bring common sense into this?" (Dragon, "Jane & the Dragon")
--"Oh, Peace Train, save this country!" (Yusuf/Cat Stevens, "Peace Train")
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Martin60
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# 368
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Posted
Aye GK. He never intervenes except in Christ and by the Spirit. Positively.
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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