An issue was raised on another forum.
So that I won't misrepresent what was said I'll quote I'll present their quotes:

wow!! admirable words and actions! i have no doubt that i also need to be more diligent in this area!

Thanks, d. I'll comment further on what I perceive the principle difficulty to be.

The problem really involves what the future is like, but most people perceive the problem to be involving God's omniscience. So if someone says that God does not know which option will be chosen in the future, that is interpreted as meaning that God is not omniscient.

What I hear over and over is that the fact that God knows something will happen does not cause it to happen.

This is only half true. From the standpoint of causation, this is, of course, true. Say, for example, that I have a two-headed coin, and I know that when I flip it, it will come up heads. The fact that I know that the coin will turn up heads does not cause it to turn up heads -- the fact that it is two-headed does.

So, of course, the fact that God knows some thing will happen does not cause it to happen; there's always some other reason involved.

But this is scratching where it doesn't itch. The real question involves what the future is like. Is it a linear thing, where there's only one thing that can happen, or is it like the following:

. .
.. ..
... ...
..... ....
...... .....
....... .......

It's kind of hard to draw or describe this, but what the diagram is trying to represent is that a person has two choices, and from those two choices, other choices come up, and from there others, and so forth.

When God looks into the future, what does He see? Do He see this:

.
.
.
.
.
.
.

or something like the above? Your POV is suggesting He see's the latter (or, at a minimum, that He can discern this from the above pattern), but there are logical problems with this POV.

For example, consider the question of risk. Can there be risk with God if He is 100% certain of every outcome? Clearly not. To speak of God's risking His Son, given He was 100% certain Christ would be just fine, is nonsense.

Here's a statement from the SOP:



This says that heaven itself was "imperiled" for our redemption. Certainly if God was 100% certain that heaven was never under any danger whatsoever, it was in no sense imperiled. Conversely, that heaven was actually imperiled implies a future which is not fixed, but open, and that God foresaw the future in this way (seeing both the possibility of Christ's success and His failure.)

I'm rather uncomfortable in comparing God's knowledge with "inside traders information".

It's reducing God to the same level as humans -- calculating the risks, but not REALLY KNOWING, and going for what appears to be the winning way, yet not knowing for sure if it is.

For me God's love is far more brilliant BECAUSE HE KNEW!
He KNEW the end before He even created the first intellegent being.
He knew that if He created beings with the freedom of choice sin would develope.
He had choices:
1) create beings without free choice so that indeed everything was fixed and programed.
2) not create at all
3) create beings with free choice that could love and fellowship with Him "from the heart" because they wanted to, and weren't programmed to do so.

God choose the third EVEN THOUGH HE KNEW that giving freedom of choice would result in a rebellion.

Before God created any being, the PLAN of Christ standing as SURITY for created beings was put in place.

Before sin even raised it's head, Christ was "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world."

God KNEW from the beginning.
He knows the end from the beginning.

He wanted intelligent beings who could love and have a real relationship with Him, not robots, so He created, EVEN THOUGH HE KNEW there would be rebellion.
But He also KNOWS that throughout eternity sin will never again raise its ugly head, because all the redeemed and unfallen worlds are 100% convinced that God is good, righteous, just and loving.








But God does KNOW what specific moves will be made. Just because He allows free choice, doesn't mean He doesn't know.


The details are not fixed (in that no one is programmed to do anything) but God still knows every detail that will take place.

Prophecy is given BECAUSE God knows.

Daniel says of the prophetic dream in Daniel 2:45
"and the dream is certain, and the interpretation thereof sure."

God even knew Cyrus by name and exactly what he would do hundreds of years before Cyrus was born. See Is.44:28-45:3)






You stated it wasn't logical to believe God KNEW the outcome, yet there was still risk.
So basically it's reducing God's omniscience to agree with our logic.
Our finite minds can't fully comprehend, so we try to reduce things to make them logical.







What you just said makes no sense.
If God sees a non-determined future, He doesn't see the future.
He just sees Himself playing a chess game where the moves are in His favor, and things look good that He will win.

I'm very uncomfortable with your position.
Very uncomfortable -- I'll confess that right now.

It destroys trust in a God Who knows the end from the beginning. One Who can see the future -- not as an "non-determined future" but exactly as it will be. Thus we can depend upon His Prophetic Word as sure.

Your problem seems to be that you think "by knowing HOW people will act" God has "fixed" it so they don't have choices, but that is not the case.

O.K. let's put it this way.

You say God's knowledge would remove all risk.

But won't that be removing all emotional qualities from God? Won't that be saying God and Christ Themselves didn't actually have to go through the ordeal with all its pain and devasting sorrows.

KNOWING does not pre-program anyone's choice.
Even though God the Father and Christ Jesus KNEW what would be, what path they would follow, and how it would end, it didn't Pre-program THEM either.

At any point they could have said, "It's too much, it's not worth it" The emotions, pain, and rejected love God experiences must be TREMENDOUS.
Their KNOWING didn't "lock" them in.
They weren't forced to stick with the plan.


But GOD STILL KNEW THAT THEY WOULD.

God isn't locked in time and space like we are.



Don't let "logic" cause you to lose sight of God WHO KNOWS what will be a million years from now as if it were today.

He knows the day and hour that Christ will come again.
Even though we're told "Christ could have come ere this" God still knew He wouldn't come ere this.

God offers us choices that if we follow would greatly bless us, even though he knows we won't take them. He keeps offering till hopefully we do.

future knowledge only effects risk if your basing decisions on that knowledge. A God that respects all choices of His beings wouldnt do that. Also I have knowledge that my mother is terminal and has been for a few years because the cancer has moved to her bones. So I know she is going to die and what will do it. That doesnt mean when it happens that I wont have emotion because I already knew how it would play out.

Perhaps time to move beyond alopathy/medicine - which has given up? - to places like www.cancure.org, which use natural alternatives. Sorry to hear about your mother.

I agree, Dedication, that God knows the future like you suggest. My original interjection wasn't about God's divine actions while knowing the future - which is the whole of the Bible story, afterall! - but the risk of the Son of God becoming a man.

God with us, Immanuel, lived on the human level and thus followed his Father by faith. The risk of losing the great controversy wasn't really the greatest risk should Jesus have sinned - though, as a cosmic loss it may well have been! Should Jesus have sinned, EGW wrote, he'd have lost his divinity, which is personal and not cosmic. How would that loss, from that action, have affected the Godhead? That's why this is a serious problem - and left as unanswerable/unnecessary hypothesis - for the trinitarian position of the church, today.

SDA trinitarianism may just be able to escape the disaster of Christ sinning that would befall Nicene orthodoxy: both would cease to defend a trinity as God, but Nicea's definitions would destroy the substance of God and not just one "person" of the trinity. There's no bodies or persons, in whose physical image we are created, in the Nicene dogma, just 3 centres of consciousness. SDA trinitarianism differs, allowing bodies, in fact for all three! Thus our church's trinitarian belief would still have two bodies, but no trinity, for its definition of God. How they maintain monotheism may also be in trouble, then...: it hangs on the common purpose of working out salvation. Check the chapter in SDABC Vol. 12, last page.

Under our non-trinitarian past, the nature of God would not have imploded, had Christ sinned, as since God's Son would have lost his divine nature - begotten of God as he is, but the Father would remain God, just unrevealed to mortal eyes. The Spirit is different to them, not having a body. That hypothesis may have needed a second salvation plan - including a second begotten Son, but that's not touching on how it would affect the great controversy after a failure on the first attempt...I'm merely pointing out that God's nature itself, the Godhead, would be safe, should one not be trinitarian.

I wasn't making this comparison. I was merely explaining how the concept of risk involves knowledge of outcomes.



The issue I'm speaking of has to do with the nature of the future itself, not about God's knowledge. It's the substance of what's known that the salient point, not how well the thing is known. Please grasp that point!

It's your conception of the future I'm disagreeing with. I don't disagree with the idea that God perfectly knows the future. But what is that future like? Is it determined or open?

By the way, believing what God has revealed to us about Himself in no way "reduces" Him. He has revealed to us through His prophet that He took as risk in sending His Son. Christ came at the "risk of failure and eternal loss." If I believe what He's saying, that shouldn't be construed as "reducing" Him, I don't think.



I think this is a rather insidious accusation. It implies that sin is inevitable to the act of creation. Either that or God deliberately chose to create beings that would sin when He could have chosen to create being who wouldn't. Neither of these options portrays God in a very favorable manner.

You didn't deal with my question regarding heaven being imperiled. We are told both that heaven was imperiled, and that risk was entailed in sending Christ. Neither of these ideas is compatible with the idea of a fixed future.



It looks like you missed the point. You basically asked me how we could be sure things will play out as God said if the details are not fixed, so I explained how. Also the logical contradiction is an ontological one, not as epistemological one, as you are framing things. That is, the issue involves the way the future actually is (ontological) not God's perception of it (epistemological).

God's knowledge is perfect. He knows the future such as it is.



This isn't the reason *God* gives for it!



God gives us prophecy so that we will trust that He is able to do what He says. This is the reason He gives for it.

Given God's foreknowledge is perfect (I assert this), surely God is able to foresee what He Himself will bring to pass.



You are suggesting a logical contradiction which has to do with two assertions being mutually exclusive. It has nothing to do with God. Risk entails uncertainty. It's a logical contradiction to simultaneously assert that a thing both has no uncertainty and that it does have certainty.



Only if the future is determined. The whole point is that the future is not determined. If it were determined before it happened, then it wouldn't be determined by us. Do you see the problem with this?



No, this isn't the issue. The issue is a logical one, involving the ontological reality of the future. It's not an epistemological one involving God.

What removes risk is uncertainty. Risk, by definition, entails uncertainty. If you remove all uncertainty, you remove all risk.



No, it's the other way around! If things were as you are asserting, *that* would remove emotional qualities from God. Why? Because, in your view, there's no uncertainty, so any emotion tied to uncertainty or risk is removed.



If things were as you are suggesting, it would. It's wouldn't make sense to assert that God experiences this pain in any real-time sense if it's simply the playing out of a reality which was fixed eons before it happened.



Again, the issue is ontological, not epistemological.



Same point.



Not really. If God wasn't going to go through with the plan, He would have foreseen that, and not even started it, of course.



This is true, of course. But the logical issue doesn't involve God's knowledge, but the nature of the future. It's not epistemological.