When I was a theist I believed that god could not predict the future insofar as the future was not pre-determined. But god could predict events in the future that he was planning to cause or to influence. So if god said "such and such nation will be destroyed by a massive tidal wave" it wasn't because he fast-forwarded the universe and saw it happen; it meant that he caused a tidal wave to hit that nation just when he said it would.
To me, the idea that omniscience involves knowing exactly how the future unfolds means that that events are pre-determined and even god cannot change them. Which means that he's stuck in some other god's universe or otherwise is restricted by some outside force or circumstance. In which case, nothing is anyone's fault. Does not compute.
To me, the idea that omniscience involves knowing exactly how the future unfolds means that that events are pre-determined and even god cannot change them. Which means that he's stuck in some other god's universe or otherwise is restricted by some outside force or circumstance. In which case, nothing is anyone's fault. Does not compute.
"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
