3
« on: February 06, 2007, 09:45:12 AM »
I have given this topic a lot of thought over the last few days because the basic dilemma still seems too difficult for me to get over. I think I may have come to some sort of conclusion that makes sense however I am not sure how succinctly I can say it.
As a little pre-discussion before I begin my point. To me it has always made sense that given every possible decision by beings with agency or free will that the fundamental makeup of the world/universe would change for every possible method of making that decision. An example being that (to use the example from before) deciding to go to school or not would have different outcomes for to myself, my friends, family, peers and others based on how and to what extent I made my decision.
Given that preceding paragraph, (which I may be wrong or not able to explain as well as I wish I could) I can see God's omniscience as existing in one of two ways (there may be more, but these are the two that make most sense to me). The first way is the way that I have always assumed it would be where God has the capability to know what will happen for any possible decision that any person can make. Before a person makes a decision, especially one in which God was asked for guidance on, God can look at all the possibly ways the person may respond, know the resulting outcomes -- which would correspond to knowing the result of that decision for the rest of eternity, and then respond in such a way to yield the outcome he wants. In this version of God's omniscience I still have difficulty accepting free will as existing.
The second version of God I think removes this difficulty (at least for me). In this version, for each possible decision that any person could make, again especially ones in which prayer was done and the individuals are waiting for an answer from God (even no answer seems to be a form of answer), God can only answer in one way because that is the "perfect" way. The only way in which God knew he was going to answer from the beginning of time, the only possible way. In this version, God can not look at all the possible paths that a person's decision may take because they don't truly exist since God gives the ideal answer and knows the way you will take. In this version the argument that although God knows what we will do, we are still the ones deciding it makes much more sense to me. I don't think that this version of God takes away from his omniscience or majesty, it is just the way that seems to make logical sense to resolve this problem.
I guess the questions I have then are this:
First, does this make sense at all and second is this version of God's omniscience more akin to the accepted version?
As I was typing this I came to a third version which is that although God may have a say in the outcome of our prayers to him, because of his ability to modify his answer to get a result, it is not the result that matters but the degree in which God had to give his answer to yield the determined answer?