tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8886567613905490071.post4933988888930281382..comments2023-08-01T20:14:02.890-04:00Comments on Thunder Sounds: The Failure of Middle KnowledgeSLWhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04260137021205685080noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8886567613905490071.post-4577072278271779422015-09-12T13:10:08.186-04:002015-09-12T13:10:08.186-04:00Hello bethyada, good to hear from you.
I am sayin...Hello bethyada, good to hear from you.<br /><br />I am saying that God cannot know our actions specifically, meticulously, psychically, before the worlds even came into being (which is the framework of Middle Knowledge) and have those same actions be free. If that is the case then I suggest that the author analogy holds, and what unfolds is determinism. Counterfactuals would have no substance on that approach other than being "discarded edits" of alternate scenarios pondered before settling on the actual plot. They do not truly represent creaturely freedom because they were instigated in the mind of God pre-existent to the mind of creatures that supposedly hatched them. We can't have the cart before the horse in matters of freedom. Freedom, in whatever measure it may be, is a measure of independent impetus.<br /><br />My views differ with Open Theism in that, among other things, I attribute no disability to God's omniscience, whether voluntary or involuntary. The apparent mutual exclusivity between freedom and foreknowledge can be resolved with timelessness rather than disability, as I see it. I am sympathetic to some of the Openness criticisms of the classical formulations of the attributes of God, however. <br /><br />God may know our thoughts before we think them, but if that knowledge is formative (as in Middle Knowledge) rather than (timelessly) observational, then in my mind, it betrays determinism rather freedom. I actually believe that something along the lines of your last couple of sentences does occur in God's governance of creation. God is perfectly insightful and we are perfectly transparent to him which means that he is not just left twiddling his thumbs waiting to see what we will do, but he does, nonetheless, "wait" (e.g. Genesis 22:12).SLWhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04260137021205685080noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8886567613905490071.post-59681808426880338222015-09-11T21:40:31.164-04:002015-09-11T21:40:31.164-04:00If God can know with certainty what a free choice ...<i>If God can know with certainty what a free choice will be before the chooser is even made, then there is no way that choice is free in the sense that it is instigated in freedom by the chooser. The biblical notion of freedom, as I see it, is that choice is derived independently of God. That choice cannot "happen" before it happens or the choice is illusory.</i><br /><br />So are you saying that God cannot know for certainty what our actions will be? How does your view differ from Open Theism (a question, not a slight).<br /><br />I am not certain middle knowledge reduces to determinism. If God were to know the various outcomes depending on what choices God made, yet the choices made by men were truly free, and God maximised the best outcome by his choices and actions (knowing how men would act). Is it possible that with sin in the mix, this is the best possible outcome?bethyadahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08990677679970591625noreply@blogger.com