(July 19, 2019 at 1:46 am)Belaqua Wrote:(July 18, 2019 at 7:29 pm)mcc1789 Wrote: I haven't had many in person interactions with Christians on theology, so no probably not. So what? I haven't claimed to, and I'm unsure why that's relevant. However, it has been advocated by Christians from Boethius to C. S. Lewis, among others. In fact it's been a major pillar of how they strive to reconcile free will with God's foreknowledge (I don't think it works, but no matter). This seems like a slightly unusual definition of eternal (I'd call it "existing forever") but fine. I don't really want to get into another issue though (i.e. personal and eternal).
I was thinking on the bus ride home today how I could describe this...
@tackattack, I'm going to be tough on you and argue against your position here, at least insofar as it conforms with traditional Christian theology. I don't think that any of the big names would agree with you that God, as an eternal being, is eternally changing.
I agree with @mcc1789 here, that all the theologians (Boethius [and before] to Lewis) think of God as completely unchanging and unchangeable. I can't say when this was decided among Christians, exactly. I know that the clearest formulation I have read is in Plotinus, who was 3rd century AD. He was not Christian, but his ideas developed in parallel with Christian thinkers, and were certainly adopted and adapted into Christian thinking later on.
"Outside of time and space" is probably a misleading English formulation, because we tend to picture time and space as a sort of box, and we are in it and God isn't, in the way that the cats are in the house but the raccoons aren't. This is wrong.
To think of it better, I suppose we could start with the assertion that God is entirely simple. He has no parts and no divisions. There are elaborate arguments to demonstrate why this must be so, but we have to start sort of in the middle here.
Related to his simplicity, are the following points:
~ God is identical with his essence. He has no contingencies. Material things, on the other hand, are not identical with their essences, because their existence is always dependent on more fundamental forces (e.g. the laws of nature). Because they are dependent on other things, they can be changed.
~ God is entirely being, with no becoming. Change requires becoming.
~ God is entirely activation, with no potentiality. A being which changes always begins with the potential to change.
The above three points are different ways of stating the same thing.
This helps us understand the special ways in which God is said to be omnipotent and omniscient.
God's omnipotence doesn't mean that he can do anything. In fact he takes no action, because that requires change. Omnipotence here means that he causes all potencies in the world to move toward actualization.
God's omniscience doesn't mean that he knows everything. In fact it is false to say that God knows things. This is because knowledge requires duality -- there has to be a) a thing that knows and b) a thing that is known. People know things in this way. But theologians say that as the knower and the thing known draw closer together, they approach identity. As we "take in" or "digest" knowledge, it begins to merge with us. Perfect knowledge -- or more accurately, the state beyond knowing -- means perfect identity between knower and known. This is what they mean when they talk about God's omniscience. It means that whereas you and I remain distinct from the true things we know, God, being entirely simple, is identical with this truth.
Moving from ignorance to knowledge, or from fuzzy knowledge to clear knowledge, is a form of actualizing potential. And since God's omnipotence means entire actualization with no potential, it means that God's omnipotence and his omniscience are not only compatible, but different ways of saying the same thing.
As always, lots of Christians don't know about or agree with any of this, but it is the foundation of mainstream traditional Christian theology.
I'm at a loss to see how creation can occur with no act from God. Nor what actualization of potency means if the actualizer is "pure act". That seems like he has potential to act, which contradicts being "pure act" too. I think it also has to be pointed out that to my knowledge this is the classical theist view solely. Theistic personalism does not hold to many of these attributes.
