(January 3, 2014 at 9:44 pm)RDK Wrote: If God knows the future then every action taken by men is also foreknown. What is prophecy anyway but God's affirmation to us that everything which could be known to happen will happen.The future does not have to be predetermined for the biblical god to predict that certain things will happen. Since he is a powerful deity able to make people act as he wishes, he can direct circumstances as he pleases. So when the biblical god says "this will happen" the certainty of it is not that he looked ahead and read the next chapter. The certainty is from knowing that he can manipulate events to make sure that it will happen.
There, a simple explanation that allows for god to predict future events without being trapped by fate. Sure, it makes him manipulative and a bit creepy and brings up the question of why someone willing to meddle in people's affairs and take away their freedom on a whim would have required an elaborate plan to deal with the original sin. But those questions are easier to deal with that anything to do with the idea that the future is so static that it can be "read."
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
