If the future is merely movement—an object moving in a space that is not itself—then, again, everything exits NOW, and now has no time limits that are anything other than theoretical…a quantification of movement, using a different set of values/reference from that of “distance”.  Movement is thus of infinite duration, in a sense, with nothing literal/visceral/tangible/physical before or after it.  Our existence IS, like God’s, except that in order for us to be, we must move.

So, in keeping with that understanding, I therefore submit that God cannot know perfectly what man will do, or choose to do, because it is a function of man’s creation; of man’s IS, which has been given to him to do by God, as a function of his ability to exist as an entity separate from God (which is proved by this fact that I know you won’t dispute:  you aren’t God; and if you’re not, you must be able to exist apart from God).  God can only know man’s choices the same time man knows them, and that “time” is  when man makes them.  If God knows man’s future choices before man makes them, and we accept that the choice is real, and there is nothing before God (because “before” and “after” mean nothing to an omnipresent One, by definition)then God must have created those choices, which must therefore mean that “choice” is not choice at all.  Choice is an illusion; a philosophical lie.

Obviously, I would deny this.  But it is not a matter of faith, it is a matter of common sense; of reason, of things we can easily observe by the senses God has given us to apprehend our reality.  Man, by his God-given ability to BE, is the author of his own reality; his own “future” and “past”, by virtue of his own movement through space (and, incidentally, I do not mean outer space; I mean the space within we all move and be in everyday life) under his own power; both physical and volitional.

But if we say that man moves under God’s power, which is precisely what we say if we declare the future known—and thus created by God—then man must be merely an extension of God; which means, according to the very metaphysical basis for the Trinity, man IS God.  And if man is God, then ALL our thoughts are God, and thus anyone can think and do anything, and no one is right and no one is wrong and no one is better than anyone else.  There is no morality, no real standard of TRUTH.  All is equally God, thus all is equally right and all is equally true.  There are no distinctions of any kind between man and Creation and God.  Thus, discussion is moot; debates are moot; ideas are moot; religion is moot; Jesus Christ and His sacrifice is moot; and even existence its very self is moot.  WE are pointless because WE don’t really exist.  However, if instead we recognize that Creation and man’s future is merely their ability to move through space under their own power, and that movement is implied and inexorable for ANY sort of action, be it physical or cognitive, when an object exists in a space separate from itself, and that man cognitively quantifies  this ability to move as “time”, which includes past, present, and future theoretical constructs, and thus time is created by man as a way to rule and subdue his environment and define his existence, then we realize that indeed man is free to choose and to act and to move, and that there is no future determined by God, because there is no actual future for God to “know”.  The future is merely theoretical, and thus God cannot perfectly know it. But again, conversely, if He knows it, then it is not theoretical, and man and creation IS determined.  And thus, we are not real.  Because we exist by contradiction; which equals a cancelling out of existence.

And so my question, which as of yet has not been answered is:  How does man have “his own” choice if God knows the future already?  (For those who continue to insist that God can know the future of man’s choices, and yet man still makes them).  For I have argued that if the future/not yet  “choice” is known by God, then it must be determined.  Because if it isn’t determined, then God can only guess at the choice.  He cannot know it for certain any better than you or I can know it.  And this effectively means that man could choose differently from what God knows.  Of course, the problem with that argument is obvious:  God can possess flawed knowledge.  But I don’t know a single Christian who would concede God is capable of false thinking, or of needing to make a guess.   And with good reason. Possessing flawed knowledge is impossible for God.  This is a metaphysical byproduct of his omnipotence (every attribute of God is a byproduct of His omnipotence, by the way…His ability to be and to create).

So, in light of God’s eternal state of “present”, or AM, what is it that He can truly know?

By “know”, I mean: knowing in man’s sense—my only frame of reference.  Knowing AS movement; knowing as non-literal images and language in my brain, based upon my ability to reason, my ability to abstract and theorize and thus hypothesize, and to function upon the subconscious understanding and assumption of the “future” solidarity of physical and natural laws, based upon what my senses have allowed me to habituate.  For there is no other way of knowing or apprehending than what my own frame of reference provides me.  All my understanding of knowing is a function of my ability to REASON—how I know that I know anything, including that I don’t know or can’t know something, etc..  And my reason is a function of its inexorable connection to my body; the biology of my brain.  And the biology of my brain is inexorably bound to the movement of a created thing in space.  In short, thinking is movement just like a falling apple is movement.

So, again, let me ask:  What can God truly know?  If God does not move, because by definition He is His own space, and needs nothing else in order to be, then His thoughts truly can be nothing like my thoughts.  And if His thoughts are fundamentally different from my thoughts as a byproduct of His alternate state of being at the both the physical and metaphysical levels, then his knowledge—what He knows and how He knows it—is going to be equally fundamentally different.  Again, if His thoughts are nothing like my thoughts, then what He knows and how He knows it can be nothing like what I know and how I know it.  If we are utterly existentially different, and I don’t mean necessarily morally different in this case (though we are), then God cannot know anything in the way that I know things.

If we are ever going to come to a non-hypocritical, non-redundant and consistent defense of God and our faith in Him and a proper, rational defense of His morality and authority, then we as Christians must cease to confine God to the existential nature of our human existence.  We must stop demanding that God function and exist as if our theoretical constructs-which are purely the human way of cognitively organizing our environment—are REAL places which God must submit Himself to.  We say “future” because that is how we organize the timing of our movement, a purely cognitive function, and then demand and expect that God must exist there, and must acknowledge it as being real.  We demand that God give us comfort by declaring REAL and ACTUAL all our hopes, dreams, cognitive concepts, and random thoughts.  We absolve ourselves of any moral or practical responsibility by declaring that our “future” is determined by God.  We cannot sin: it’s God’s fault, because HE makes OUR abstracts, real.  And so, we can always do whatever we want and yet never be held accountable.  Because it’s never actually us doing it.   It is us in our mind, but in reality, it’s all God.  Because we declare that whatever is only to us in our mind is REAL to God.  Oh, certainly we pat ourselves on the back for our humility because when we do something good or good fortune befalls us we “give all the glory” to God; as if God demands that He be given the credit for man’s own purely self-volitional actions or choices; or we assume that what is good to us is good to God (we praise God when our football team wins the Championship, giving Him all the “glory”, as if He gives a care who won a sports competition, which is probably the most irrelevant organized ceremony of mankind).   But we conveniently choose to ignore the logical extension of this belief:  If God gets all the credit for the good, because it’s not us (because taking credit for good choices and success in our lives is just so worldly; so arrogant; how dare we be so selfish), then He must also get the blame for all the evil we do and which befalls us.  And this leads Christianity into a sea of moral relativity in which we operate as though nothing really matters (and yet we are just SO shocked by the abuse in SGM…why, how in the world could this happen, we declare in our rank doctrinal denial of cause and effect); all of it is God, and so, just as easily as we give God the “glory”, we  absolve ourselves of our failings and wickedness.  If God is in control, then our sin is His sin.  And I submit that this, not the false humility of giving God all the glory, is what we really find attractive about determinism.

And we wonder why Christians are seen as backwards, bitter, and plain out of touch with reality.  The world rightly declares Christians cannot be trusted, because they are insane.

“Future”, “think”,  “decide”, “move”…the ideas and concepts behind these terms are limited to man and only to man.  The way that God thinks, decides, predicts, experiences “time”, and moves, etc., are not and cannot resemble anything like we experience them as created beings.  Simply because God can interact freely with man in man’s own existence and space does not confine God to the existential necessities of Creation, nor to man’s cognitive abstractions.  To say that if God interacts with man, then He must exist as man exists (I constantly hear Christians defend the idea that for God to ordain an event, He must control all the events that lead to it, as though the God who creates out of nothing must somehow submit Himself a timeline of man’s).  And that He must exist at the mercy of the same “rules” of being.  This is of course rational nonsense.  A God who creates everything and anything that is not Himself cannot need nor can He even use the “laws” of man’s existence because to do so constitutes an omnipotent, not to mention, logical redundancy.  And the omnipotent, by definition cannot be redundant, because redundancy is the twin brother of irrelevancy/meaningless-ness.  God can NEVER invoke irrelevancy into His being or purpose, His will or work.  It is categorically impossible for God to do anything that means nothing.    He can work in spite of the laws that govern the existence of man and Creation.  He can interrupt them.  He can circumvent them. He can create new ones on a whim.  He can even live according to them in a body of flesh, but He cannot possess them, or twist them…that is, distort the natural into something unnatural.  In short, the Creator cannot possess the created.   His omnipotence makes it redundant, thus, it is impossible, because it is meaningless.

So, again, what can God know?

The answer is:  nothing.  Or rather, He knows Himself.  And thus, by knowing Himself, He does not need to know anything, and that is why He knows nothing.  Knowing Himself, in a way, means He already knows everything…but that does not quite define the point exactly.  As the Creator, He does not NEED to know anything; because there is nothing that IS which God did not create.

But even that does not quite get to the heart of the matter.  Some would say that because He created everything, He knows it perfectly.  And I understand this logic, however, it still seems to miss the idea.  Yes, He is the Creator; but that doesn’t mean that He must know it, in that He must possess some kind of abstract, linguistically categorized theoretical images in a mind that is governed almost entirely by abstractions relegated so deeply into habit and conscience that they seem to be visceral.  More the heart of the matter—and hard to grasp, I know—is this: as the perfect One…perfect in being, knowing anything is irrelevant. It would not matter what He knew or did not know because everything He does, regardless of anything Creation IS or holds, is GOOD.  GOOD is God.  Good comes automatically.  He does not need forethought in order to react or declare perfectly, and perfectly good.  Knowledge, in the human sense, always regards to the integration, qualification, quantification of something that God has created to do and be and move in the way that it does.  Man acquires knowledge by learning or exposure, routine or practice or instinct, all of which are meaningless to a God who can and does create everything in all the Universe.  So, there is nothing for God to know because there is nothing for God to learn, to apprehend, to muse upon, to theoretically rationalize, organize, or mull over.  God IS, and an IS does not move in the sense that man and creation move.  Our knowledge comes by movement within our created space.  Since there is no space to God outside Himself, there is no way He can “learn”, thus no way He can “know”.  God can BE, and God can create.  These are the natural and perfect attributes of His omnipotence.

He only has to be God.  He only has to be; to declare.  He may even be said to react, but even that is not based on something He did not know, but merely on His seeing.  Now, I understand that this is difficult to grasp…particularly if we ascribe to free will; if God doesn’t know until man chooses, then man is choosing before God can know what he chose.  But see, again, we fall into the trap of thinking that God and man operate on a timeline; that movement implies TIME;  it does not…movement is eternal being just like God’s static being is eternal, thus what God sees in His eternal present is man eternally doing, but doing is via movement, but that does NOT presuppose, again, that time is in fact more than a purely theoretical construct.  In other words, “time” is never how God sees.

Knowledge implies a an understanding which is separate from your being as a person…that is, understanding is something that is acquired, not innate (John Locke, “On Human Understanding”).  There is something ELSE, outside of you that you ascertain and apprehend.  The knowledge itself is separate from your emotional reaction to it, your application of it; it changes, grows, evolves, or is downright disproved.  As such, it can be seen that the knowledge itself is not YOU.  This  is never true for God.  Whatever God knows, IS God…because there can be nothing outside of God that can become God. All God knows is all of Himself.  Thus, again, how God interacts is, I submit, utterly reactive and declaratory.  God cannot learn anything.  Because there is no RELEVANCE to God learning anything.  He is omniscient.  He is perfect.  Nothing can be added  to God; thus, He cannot know anything else besides His own being.  It is enough.

Man moves; man prays and talks to God, brings God into his life and purposes and expressions and circumstances; man trusts God with his innermost issues and thoughts and fears, etc., etc., and God then is trusted to always react JUSTLY and perfectly and omnipotently because there is nothing that God can mistake; nothing that He must ponder or rationalize or learn or grasp; His interaction with you does not need to evolve, or change, or be removed.  It’s not that God already knows…I’ve already declared God cannot know any movement of His Creation before it moves, because its movement has been given to IT to perform.  We trust, love, believe and worship God because He, among other things, is perfect reaction and declaration to our lives; our prayers to Him are always rightly understood and applied by Him because He is perfect love, and perfect power (that is, the power of creation). 

God is a force that declares and reacts.  What is there outside of Him for Him to learn and thus know?  Nothing.  He is the source of knowledge; He is knowledge itself.  He cannot know, He can only be.  And He IS everything there is to know…and knowledge, then, is for man, not for God.  That is, God’s “knowing” is merely a function of His being.

This post is the first of two parts, dealing with the metaphysical boundaries of God’s knowledge as compared to man’s.  This kind of discussion cannot be limited to merely an analysis of the “cognition” of God, as it were; but also most take a deep look at both tangible and abstract realities of Him.  Time and space, for instance. 

Man’s existential reality and necessary attributes makes man’s knowledge and attaining of it fundamentally different than that of God’s.  Explaining these differences is the point of the proceeding two posts.  As usual, my posits will be challenging…that is, they will challenge our assumptions of and make distinctions between theoretical reality (abstract) and the visceral reality (tangible).  It is in finding the clear distinction between these two things, and understanding our assumptions and biases and where we almost constantly, instinctively and automatically blur of the lines between the two that we will be able to come to a truer knowledge of God, and how His omnipotence explicitly means that He cannot function like us, or think like us, or exist like us.  Once this is done, we can permanently and forever dismantle the false and tyrannical philosophical underpinnings of the neo-Reformed movement and its narcissistic father, the theology of John Calvin.  

Of course, I am under no illusions that this will happen anytime particularly soon. To assume so is to be obtuse.   But the fact is that someone must start somewhere.  We must begin to rethink and reinterpret some of the most basic understandings of our reality if we can ever, ever hope to undo a thousand years of non-Christian (actually…a better description would be non-Jewish) philosophical integration within our understanding of God, ourselves, and the Universe.  This of course will take a long, long time…not so much to explain, or even prove (if you’ll excuse the arrogant nature of THAT statement), but I hope that you and I, and those that we acknowledge and respect–our co-rebels of the Faith–can be that someone.

Part I

What Does God Really Know?  What CAN God Really Know?

Christians I think can agree that it is axiomatic that God is the Creator of everything that is not God.  By “create”, I mean–as a resolute and indefatigable freewill-ist—all things in Creation which act according to themselves…all of man and everything ; that is, God is not the decision-maker of man, or the controller of the laws of nature.  Instead, He is the Creator of man and the Author of man’s ability to Reason, and is the Creator of the natural world and universe which acts according to the law of itself, which is nature’s ability to be, also Authored by God.  God creates things to do this or that, and they do it (e.g. God commanded them how they should build the Tabernacle, and they did it (Exodus).  That is, God is not Creation FOR Creation…this would constitute a metaphysical impossibility. God cannot possess a created thing in order to do something He can better do alone; which is everything–by the very  definition of “omnipotence”.  And since the perfect purpose and objective of God is to exist–to BE Himself–He would not create Creation in order to possess it.  Obviously, He can better be Himself by Himself rather than by or through Creation.

So, let’s say that again:  Everything that is not God, God created.

I think we should all take a moment to let the profundity of that statement sink in a bit.

Okay.  That’s probably good.  But…then again, maybe not.  For far too many of us do not grasp the gravity of this truth, even though we have been Christians a very long time.  The philosophical implications of such a statement do not seem to guide us to the interpretive places that we need to go in order to practice our faith within the bounds of necessary, existential reason.  This weakens, if not outright destroys, the Christian’s witness to the secular world, who understand enough what even young children do not deny:  that it is wise to accept what our senses tell us; for they are tools we use to apprehend our world).

There is nothing which exists that God did not first make.  In one sense He is the first cause.  Although, as an aside, I should say that I would dispute that assertion on one level: For I submit that God is the Creator of the ability of nature and man to be their OWN causes; to move according to themselves.  God has given them the ability to do what they do according to themselves apart from God.  For if you declare that God is the first (literal) cause, then He is akin to the first link in a chain, and it then is upon this link that the direction of the rest of the chain relies (which, incidentally, is a Jonathon Edwards argument for his Calvinism), and I would utterly dispute this, because this is nothing more than determinism, which must ALWAYS be false if we proclaim that God exists.  I would defend my idea that God is not in fact the first “cause” by explaining  that God needs only to create objects and space, and that once this is done, the ability to exist apart from God, of their own ability, is thus automatically implied.  In other words, ability to be and do and act apart from God doesn’t have to be created, per se, but it is implicit when God creates anything NOT Himself.  Since God cannot duplicate Himself, anything that exists that is NOT Him, must be able to exist on its own, by definition.  The fact that you are not God, for example, is the very proof that God is not in “direct control” of you, but that you must be able to exist on your own, apart from God.  And further, if God creates a you that thinks, then thinking, since it is NOT God, must be itself; and thinking that is itself is, by definition, YOU thinking.  YOU being conscious.  YOU being YOU.  Your thoughts must be YOUR thoughts, not God’s thoughts, because the thoughts and the thinking are not God.

At any rate, there is no thing and no law and no ability which He did not first “cause” (sticking with that term for the sake of clarity) and purposefully design to BE what it IS.  He has the ability to create by Himself, and out of NOTHING  (or, perhaps into nothing), because, by definition, it if is not part of God, it is literally Created from absolutely nothing at all.

This is a profound idea to behold.  And difficult to apprehend, because we really have no frame of reference by which to fathom “nothing”.  “Nothing” might be the most difficult of ALL concepts to grasp, because, by definition, there is nothing in the universe which we can compare nothing to.  Because the Universe, is, of course, a giant collection of somethings.  And if we are to speak of what might be outside of the Universe, well…there may be nothing outside the universe, but if we could see it, or imagine it, it would no longer be nothing; it would be something.  Even the very idea and concept of nothing is really and technically something.

See…kind of hard to grasp, huh?

Anyway…the truth of God’s creative power is profound to the point of affecting how we understand everything of ourselves; and affecting how we contrast what we are with what God is; which is, logically, cannot be according to the truths and laws of our existence.  The fact that He is NOT US on a fundamental, root and basic existential level, is almost as profound a truth as He is the Creator of everything.

As the Creator  of everything, and also as One who is everywhere at once–and everywhen at once–God Almighty is the preeminent IS.  His name is I AM.  There is no before or after with God, no future or past.  There is no right or wrong with God (for His morality is merely a function of Himself; whatever He does is GOOD, by virtue of HIM doing it…it is as simple as that; in a sense, God is a-moral), there is no up or down, or left or right, or backward or forward, for He is His own SPACE, with no boundaries, because He is not within anything.  His space is Him, with no direction, because He IS (I AM); He moves in Himself, which is to say that He does not move at all in the sense that man moves and exists within a space that is not himself.  There is nothing–literally and utterly nothing–that can exist beyond or outside of His omnipotence and omniscience; outside His very being.

For example, I maintain that He cannot know the “future”, because future is purely a theoretical/abstract construct of man needing to move in a space not himself.  As such, God cannot know man’s choices until man makes them, because all things happen “now”.  And since God is His own space, there is no “movement” to His existence whereby He must thus apply the abstract concept of “time”.  Man makes his choices and performs his actions “now”, and “now” is when God knows it.  Thus, any declaration of God as to what He “will (future) do”, is merely a nod to His ability to create, not the  implication that he needs to control/determine (and thus “know perfectly”) every “future” event leading up to His declared action.  In other words, God’s doing is always a function of his omnipotent power, and not the idea that He must somehow control or work within or submit Himself to the existential laws and truths which govern man’s reality.  Or, better said, He cannot control our reality to create an event in the “future”, He simply needs to create.  To BE omnipotent.  To declare something out of nothing. To say that God must control “the future” in order to bring about an act of His limits God to the confines of OUR existence.

This is indicative of a fundamental lack of proper acknowledgment of God’s power.  And yet, it forms the basis for many people’s understanding of God; and is the ROOT premise of all determinist theologies, especially Calvinism and neo-Reformism.

Again, at the risk of being repetitive, I maintain that God cannot know the future, because there is no “future” for God to know because there is no circumstance in the “future” that can exist without Him being their already.  There can be nothing beyond God, and thus, there can be no future to Him.  If there is a “future” (e.g. man’s future “choices” or “actions”) and He creates everything that is not Him, then, by definition, this “future” must have been created and determined by Him.

If the future is not real to us, then it also cannot be real to God.  Something is either theoretical or it is physical.  If the future is purely theoretical, that is, a product of man’s mind, then the future doesn’t really exist, because man is thinking NOW.  And wherever YOU are, THAT is where God is.  Wherever Creation is, that is where God is; not behind, nor ahead in “time”, because time is nothing to God. Meaning it is a concept of man’s ability to create abstract cognitive constructs as a means of quantifying attributes of his existence, and as such, it is utterly irrelevant to God; inapplicable by him…unusable.  An abstract concept, by definition, is not real…well, it is not real in the visceral sense, purely in the theoretical sense…and God, being God, being all time and in all places can never operate by the un-reality of the non-visceral.  He needs NO abstract truths to quantify His existence; to rule and subdue, because HE is God.  He is the very apogee of reality.  HE is His OWN measure of Himself. He cannot think or act theoretically.  Everything God thinks and does is utterly REAL in the visceral, tangible, actual sense.  It IS God.  All that exists is the following:  God, and whatever is NOT God.  Theories are a function of man; they are not God.  Thus, there is nothing theoretical which can be ascribed to God.  And this includes time, which includes the future.  So, yes, I submit that God cannot know the future.

In other words, man cannot create a tangible REALITY by the power of his mind, a real place—that is, the “future”—which then God, by his omnipotence, is obligated to know.  This is a supreme arrogance of man, actually; man becomes the Creator, and God is thus obligated to man’s creation.  Now, He can certainly know of the abstract concept, as a function of man, but He cannot know a real future, or a real past, because, again they are not, in a visceral sense, real.  There is no REAL future to know; there is only man’s conceptualization of “time” to know.  But this conceptualization is not a tangible reality where God can BE.  Man realizes the future when it becomes present, and never before.  It is the same for God.  It is impossible for a perfect, omnipotent Being to know something that isn’t there.  If it doesn’t exist, it is metaphysically redundant that God can know it, having not created it, nor BEING it.  So, wherever and whenever the created thing goes, that is where God is, and no further…insofar as Creation is concerned (God of course can be in Himself, where there is NOT Creation, by definition).  There is no created thing…no event or circumstance, choice or situation, volition or desire, act or movement that can go before God.  As such, God has no future.  And as such, WE have no future. We have movement, implicit in our existence in space, and the future is an abstract quantification of this movement.  It is not a real place; and thus, God cannot be there to KNOW it.    

Nothing is real until it comes to pass; until it is REAL; until it exists in the visceral.  No act is an act before the MOVEMENT occurs.  And further, to say the “future” is real for God to perfectly know is to say that something that does not exist NOW to man or God, actually exists later.  How can this be?  It is impossible…an utter contradiction in terms.  How can the “later” be real NOW?  It is, again, impossible. It is complete nonsense.  It is man attempting to create something out of nothing, and then arrogantly demand God acknowledge man’s theoretical, mental construct as an ACTUAL place and thing.  Again, impossible.  

How can man declare something to exist out of nothing like God does?  Does man possess the same creative power as God.  No…the fact is that the only thing man can create is movement, and the only thing that nature can do is move. And again, no act is an act before the movement occurs.  Movement from one location to another is the function of our existence; past and future is a measurement of motion, nothing more.  The “future” can be a prediction of “might”, or “could be”, or even “will be based on what we have observed in the “past”” (a natural law), but that doesn’t make it literally so before it is literally so.  An act that comes as a result of a cause is simply the outcome of a movement in the “now”, and the result is in the “now”.  Everything in Creation does what it does now.  Not then, not later…all reality is the function of now.  Existence IS.  Again, all time is, is movement.

The object in Creation does not exist through its “own future acts”.  That thinking is completely antithetical to the idea of any freewill or real choice…meaning, to believe this way is to be a determinist, whether you think you are or not.  Think of it this way:  If the future is acts of objects which are real before they exist, then the object merely moves through time, moving through it like cars on a roller coaster, having NO say in how or what they do in any sense, doing what it MUST have been determined by God to do.  There is no other way to explain it.  To concede a real, non-abstract, non-theoretical future, you concede determinism, which means you are not you, but merely an extension of God.

And what is an extension of God?

An extension of God is God.  And what we say when we declare that God knows the future is that WE are God.

Is this really what we would consider “sound doctrine”? Is this anywhere hinted at in our faith? In our scriptures?

I doubt it.

End part I

Once again, thanks to Lydia for her excellent insights, questions and comments, which supply me with an indefatigable supply of metaphysical material for this blog!

This is a reply to her comment on the previous post.  Thanks, Lydia!

Hi Lydia,
I want to clarify something.  I am not denying the functional reality of a past and future, both of which can be proven by events in the “present” (whatever that is…present seems to me to be of infinite existence with zero “duration” (that is, proper time), however, we know a present must exist because because “to be” is a static term; in other words “to be” implies eternal “now”, I think.  Anyway; the present is where the visceral creates reality…where things happen, I suppose).  So, I am not saying that the future and past aren’t real to man.  Man’s existence implies a past and future, even though, strictly speaking, “past” and “future” are abstract truths.  They cannot be experienced directly.  All of man’s functional reality occurs in the “now”, I submit (I have a lot on this subject; will post later).  Past and future are always outside of man; they are a function of HOW he is able to exist.

In relation to God, however, since He is His own space and is the entire sum of His existential reality, there can be no past or future to God because NOTHING is outside of God.  God is never separated by an abstract concept from His own reality.  God is God, the I AM; the fullness of His existence is perpetually and eternally visceral.  He IS, and thus He is always NOW.  So when we speak of God “knowing” the future, then, in light of the fact that God has NO future, what can be said about this?  He cannot know man’s future because man’s future is man’s future, not God’s future, because God does not require a future to exist, like man does.  So whatever reality man’s volition and choice creates as a “future” event is wholly man’s doing.  God intervening in man’s life is a function of His power of creation, not “controlling” events that lead to a point in an abstract theoretical future.
What events along the line of “time” did God have to control to create Creation in the first place?  The answer is: none.  He just made it.  There was no “when”, before Creation, because there is no “before” with God.  There is just NOW.  So why do we assume that God’s power–now that Creation exists–has to be as a function of knowing the future, or controlling or determining events that lead to another inexorable event that God is creating as a function of controlling other events (does that even make sense?)?  Why would the God who made the Earth out of ZERO now need to control events to lead to a future that he already knows? (Which means…er, it’s already real, no?  Since God KNOWS it, it must BE true, and so, how is God’s controlling events, which He knows, lead to another event which already exists, and that he ALREADY knows is real…how is that NOT the definition of redundancy?)

God can create anything anywhere, and He always creates NOW, because it is HE creating.  He does not create or control along a line of time (past/future) because THAT is not a function of His existential reality.  Control and knowledge of future and past are strictly functions of man.  God’s power and existential reality precludes the relevance of either “control” or “future knowledge”.

If God speaks to man as “knowing the future”, I submit it is to make Himself accessible and comprehensible to man; or, man is misunderstanding or misinterpreting what God is saying.

I do not mean this to be arrogant, and I’m not directing this at you, Lydia, but I defy anyone to explain to me how God can know a future of man that He did not already per-determine?  And if He did determine it, then how can we believe that man has any will of his own? 

This is why I vehemently disagree with people, even friends and like-minded anti-Calvinist Christians, who argue that the “paradox” of predestination/free-will is unsolvable, unknowable, and ultimately, what we simply have to live with. I especially see red when it is declared that it is an unimportant, tertiary, secondary, disputable matter in the grand debate with neo-Calvinist/Reformed despots. 

This could not be further from the truth!  If we concede that God KNOWS man’s future and that predestination is a reality of Christian doctrine and philosophy in any sense where God preordains in any way, then free will is a lie and the Calvinists are right.  Unless we can effectively argue for God’s metaphysical existential DIFFERENCE in such a way that “fore-knowledge” is LOGICALLY and understandably reconciled with the free volition of man–which MUST be true for man to even EXIST if we believe in God–then for all of our talk of sanctification, justification, the Cross, antinomianism, and whatever else we make the primary issue, we will ALWAYS lose to Reformed foundational suppositions.  Again,  IF God foreknows in a way where God declares the future real BEFORE it exists to MAN, then man is determined…he is not Himself, and can do nothing that is not ultimately directly controlled by God, including “obey” in sanctification and “choose” in salvation.  So, IF we concede that free-will/predestination is a paradox…that is, BOTH are true, then one half of the equation isn’t real.  God is either dead or man is dead.  You cannot have both predestination and free-will be true and have both man and God be real.  It is logically, metaphysically, and rationally impossible.  If we accept the “paradox” of free-will/predestination then Christianity is a religion founded upon a complete contradiction of all of reality, and it SHOULD be rejected because it CANNOT be true. It is the last refuge of the desperate or the spiritually/theologically insane…or both.

But…there is an answer.  The answer is in understanding that God is what He declares: I AM.

Not I WAS, or I WILL be…no, God says He is the “I AM”.  Or He says “was, is, and is to come”, which  means what?  Means NOW.  Means God IS an IS forever.  EVERYTHING is now to God, there is no future to know because the existential reality of God is always and only and ever NOW.  So the way God “foreknows” events is because they are NOW to Him.  In other words, the NOW of when they happen is when God knows them. So, God can only know future events and choices when they happen, or you make them because YOU make them; and you make them when to God?  NOW!  God doesn’t see your choices in the “future”; He sees them the only way He CAN see them, which is NOW.  Your choices are free until you make them, and once made, they are part of the NOW of your own total existence, from start to finish, because the choice and your making it is NOW.  

And here it is:  Since we CAN show metaphysically, rationally, logically, theologically, and philosophically that free-will/predestination is NOT paradoxical NOR contradictory but is merely a function of the existential reality of God versus man–and we CAN–then Reformed theology is DEAD.  It is dead now, and forever.  If it can be proven that man’s will MUST be free as a function of metaphysical logic, and that this not only corresponds with God’s eternal nature (His I AM existence) but is a RESULT of it, then Calvinism has no foundation whatsoever.  Any of its cornerstones, foundations, or pillars rest on a grave.

We can prove that determinism is a lie; and we can show that there is no way God can know the “future” until it IS, without He determining it.  Thus, we can show that Reformed theology is a lie.  Which it is.
The fact MUST BE that the future CANNOT exist until it is the present; and it cannot exist until Creation ACTS to manifest it because everything creation does is its own and is NOW to God, and this especially applies to man’s CHOICE.  The only way God can know man’s choices is after man makes them. Anything else is determinism.

To repeat and reiterate:  What is AFTER to God?  There is no “when” with God, so there is no after, or before.  There is only now.  If God declares that He knows what you “will” choose in the future it is because He sees it NOW; and if He sees it now, then YOU are MAKING it, even though, to you, you may have not made it yet.  But that does not mean that the choice is any less yours.

Now, please…I am not conceding the premise.  I am not simply creating another way of saying that God knows your choices before you make them.  I’m saying that YOU must FREELY make the choice “before” God can know it.  So, when you make a choice, THAT is WHEN God knows it, even though He may have declared it to you “before” (“Before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times.”)…but remember, there is no “before” with God, or “after” so when He reveals His knowledge to you about a choice of yours is irrelevant to God’s metaphysical “time”–for by definition, God can know NOW “whenever” He wants as far as you are concerned–and it does not mean He knows it BEFORE you make it; no, it is just that the WHEN is a function of your life, not His.  Again, when you make a choice, THAT is the only way God can know it without it being determinism.  But how His knowledge looks to you when He interacts with you may seem as though God “knows” the “future”.  But knowledge of the future is utterly impossible, and incompatible with God’s existential nature.

It is confusing, I know, but again…I defy anyone to do better.  Someone…anyone, please tell me how God can know man’s future before it exists unless He determined it.  And if He did, and we concede this, then man is determined and Calvinism is right.

“If you agree than an innocent child goes immediately to heaven for all eternity when they die, and you also agree with the commonly held position that only a minority of adults become Christians and make it to heaven, then, especially in an unbalanced mind, that could justify killing children. An ill individual could easily believe that they are actually doing a good thing, ensuring that those children receive a life of bliss at Jesus side that they might not otherwise have.

I am not trying to be cruel or insensitive, but if you are going to look for answers or possible reasons then no idea should be automatically excluded because it is unpleasant.”

The assumption of the preceding question is that since there is a real chance that a child might NOT accept Christ, then by murdering them you do good, because you eliminate the chance of non-acceptance and ensure their entry into heaven.

This may sound reasonable, but like the philosophical atrocity of Calvinism, it is only reasonable until you employ actual reason; and then, frankly, its truth is revealed; and the truth is that this is a false, and therefore bad assumption.

What exactly do we mean by chance?  What is chance, exactly?

Is chance real?  Or is chance merely a theoretical construct based retrospective analysis; looking at what actually was in order to determine what might be; a mathematical formula shown to predict with varying degrees of precision, depending on the formula and the situation in question?  I submit, yes…THAT.  The latter.  It is not real.

In the grand scheme of reality and existence, I submit that the entire idea of chance is untenable because it has ultimately a fatal flaw, and that is the fact that it deals with the hypothetical–it is not even a verifiable TRUTH, like a natural law, or some other repeatable event. In other words, when you say “chance shows”, and you point to evidence, you are really pointing to something else as the proof of the predicted outcome.  Chance, by definition, means only “possibly“.  And possibly does not equal causality…ever. Chance produces nothing.

Let me explain, lest you think I’m denying math.

I’m not denying math, but I do believe that the math of chance cannot, in fact, declare something that is not, an IS.  Chance does NOT cause, and it does not create reality.  It predicts.  Nothing more.  Chance is the mathematics of prediction, it is not the creator of the present before it is the present.  It is never the cause in the cause and effect relationship of abstract truths.  Thus, to use chance as the primary functional premise for…well, anything is not reasonable.  How much more unreasonable for murder.  How much MORE unreasonable for the murder of the morally innocent.

Again, literally and existentially speaking, chance is NOT in fact, real.  It IS merely theoretical—for nothing IS or has come to pass until it IS and has come to pass, by definition, and so invoking chance is always invoking the purely hypothetical, and is merely making assumptions and guesses (some more “scientific” than others, of course) about what does not yet exist at all—and as such, it should never be used as a foundation for the larceny of anything, but in particular, the human body.  In other words, the idea of murdering the morally innocent to save them from the chance of hell is akin to saying that you will steal a thing from someone to avoid the chance that they might have that thing stolen.  This thinking is patently absurd, but is precisely the argument we make when we argue that killing a child removes the chance that they might not go to heaven.  Chance isn’t in any way real (e.g. tangible; or even a “truth”)…and what you are actually doing by seeking to head off chance at the pass is merely creating a new circumstance which is based on nothing that can be verified as actually true.  Since chance is mere prediction, it doesn’t really exist, and so it cannot be used as a rationale for creating a new circumstance in order to avoid the circumstance which now has, by definition, NO chance of occurring.  Once the circumstance and/or context is changed, chance becomes irrelevant to the entire scenario from beginning to end.  And so it is impossible to invoke chance as the rationale for CHANGING the context.  Again…I stole the thing so that there is no chance the thing could be stolen.  In other words, acting upon “chance” means you remove the chance from the equation; and once that is done, chance is no longer an excuse for doing what it is you did.  You REMOVE chance, so that it no longer applies.  And what I’m saying is that when you do that, then murder is simply murder, removed from chance, making it merely what it is: a brutal, senseless act.  You cannot PROVE chance until you can see the outcome, and then it is no longer chance at all (more later on that); when the outcome is impossible because you changed the context, chance no longer applies.  And to invoke it as a rationale becomes redundant non-logic. Chance is irrelevant unless the circumstance is allowed to come to pass so that what happens can be seen so that chance can be quantified.  And then, once it is quantified, it is by definition, no longer chance.  So…chance CANNOT be PROOF that what you did was morally, legally, or logically JUST, ever, because it is a false idea at the core.  It has only the illusion of efficacy.

Even more, chance is NOT, by definition, even theoretically applicable if we murder, because in murder we seen the utter removal of the life of the person beyond the moment of their death.  There is in fact zero chance that they could not choose Christ, or choose Him, or eat a hamburger, or read a book, or stand on their head, or cluck like a chicken.  Without LIFE, chance is moot.  So—to give another illustration— to declare that we will murder a child in order to avoid the chance that he or she will deny Christ is like saying I will paint the fence white so as to avoid the chance that I will paint it black.  If I paint it white, then there is no chance that I have painted it black.  And also,  if I painted it white then there is, retrospectively, ZERO chance that I could have painted it black.  Chance is, again, a mathematical illusion.  And the danger of using it as an empirical tool is clearly seen in this disturbing scenario.

Ahhhhh…yes, you see it now, don’t you.  What I talked about waaaaaaaay back in some long buried post.  Retroactive Inevitability of Choice (RIC).  And it is precisely this theory of mine that is relevant to this discussion, among others.  Chance, in actually, is a lie…a construct that means nothing ultimately.  There are cause and effect laws, and there are verifiable events and outcomes which have been observed.  But chance itself is really a fantastical construct.  Mathematics makes it seem much more literal and “real” than it is; but remember, the math relies solely on what has already been, and can be verified and observed.  The math is always retrospective; it never observes future events.  Why?  Because the future does not actually exist.  Chance itself can be a useful way to predict, but it is NOT itself causality.

In other words, going back to the fence illustration,  to use chance as a rationale for painting the fence white lacks any fundamental logic at all, because, once I painted it white, I could not have ever painted it black (but the mathematics of chance assume that I could; but I couldn’t, so chance, again, is merely an illusion…predictive, possibly, but never creating reality).  How do I know this?  Because I can clearly see that the fence is white. There is the proof, right before my paint splatter glasses, that chance is an illusion.  Choice is real, yes!  Choice is actual.  You CAN do this or that.  But once done, you could NEVER have done anything but what you CHOSE to do.  But you can never know what it is you inevitably chose to do until and after you chose to do it.

And again, the choice is in fact real. Because the choice is the cause.  The white fence is the effect.  The proof that the choice is real is seen in fact that the white fence exists.   It is a result of the cause, which was the choice. If the choice was not real the fence could not exist because the fence, being the effect, cannot exist by definition absent the cause…that is the law of cause and effect.  It is impossible for the effect to stand APART from the cause, by definition.  And incidentally this is the argument we make when we try to argue determinism via predestination.  We argue that all effects exist without causes, which is metaphysically and physically impossible.  The fact that there is an effect is proof of the choice that is the onus for the cause.   If we argue determinism, we argue effects without causes, which is impossible if we believe that we are predicting what will happen, because what will happen has not, by definition, happened yet.  How does it exist?  Because the cause generates it.  And if the cause generates it, then we must concede that the choice is real.  The choice to paint the fence black or white is real, and the white fence proves it.  The choice is real because it is the cause; if it is not the cause, it is an effect, and an effect cannot generate another effect (I know what some are thinking; let me say that the effect must become a subsequent cause…to argue this further is purely semantics and irrelevant).  So if the choice is not real then the fence is not white. But the white fence also proves that chance is a lie, ultimately.  Because it is white, there is no chance it could ever, ever have been black.

So more to the point, if the children are dead, there is NO chance of them doing anything, by definition; so what, exactly, are you avoiding the chance of?  If a child accepts Christ at some point in their life, then there is NO chance that they could not have not accepted Christ.  As far as you know, because you cannot observe and verify the veracity of your assumptions of “chance” for the person involved—because, among other reasons, the child’s life is terminated—every child you murder DID, in fact, choose Christ, and so you murdered for murder’s sake alone, and risked your own salvation (and I submit that you do forfeit it if you persist in your false assumption that violating God’s command is in fact “good”) by violating a direct command of God for no real altruistic good, no matter how you twisted the logic.  To say that you have murdered only children who have accepted Christ is ultimately just as reasonable as saying there is a “chance” that some were not in fact going to choose Christ.  Because you removed the context where the outcome could be seen, you cannot know anything real.  Murder, again is simply murder.  For literally no reason.  Unless the thing with which we are regarding chance is actually SEEN or NOT SEEN then chance is completely irrelevant (perhaps, mathematical precedence is something to be considered, but never regarding moral decisions…why? because chance is not in fact real, and thus it makes a very poor moral and metaphysical foundational assumption).  So, you are not murdering for chance at all.  You are murdering for murder’s sake, nothing more.

This is the metaphysical and moral truth.  And if you were to persist in the wickedness of murdering the innocent of God, your soul would be in very real mortal danger.  You would have sacrificed your own salvation for rebellion in the form of murder as a philosophy.

Is there anything more wicked?