Gen 6:6 And Jehovah repented that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved to His heart.

Dan 4:25 And you shall be driven from men, and your dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field. And you shall be fed with grass like oxen. And you shall be wet with dew of the heavens; and seven times shall pass over you until you know that the Most High is Ruler in the kingdom of men, and He gives it to whomever He desires.

Surely you can see why this argument is flawed. If God knows the future perfectly, He not only knows that your shirt will be wet, He also knows that it will be wet because you will spill your drink on your shirt, and He knows what drink you will spill even though you havent yet written what you have in your glas. Furthermore, there is no way that you will not spill that drink on that shirt because if you do no spill it, then God would know something of the future that did not happen and that would make God wrong. And since we believe that God is not wrong, then if He knows that you will spill drink on your shirt, you surely will have a wet shirt in the appointed time wether you like it or not. The cause and effect is still there, true. Your shirt becomes wet because you spilled a glas of drink on it. But if the future is fully known, then this cause must happen becaues it is predicted so. That drink will spill just as surely as Cyrus was born to overthrow Babylon.

On the other hand, with an open future, God could still make prophecy. The difference is that instead of telling the prophets about the future that in Gods eyes has already happened, He tells the prophets about what He plans to do. And surely God would have no problem with causing a child to be named Cyrus, then causing that child to be trained in leadership and warefare tactics and finaly through him open the gates of Babylon to kill a drunken king? In my view, exact prophecy is exact for the reason that God makes things happen. One could say He creates that which He has predicted. There are prophecies which are as you say, quite to the point and no uncertainities in sight. But there are no lack of prophecies where God says, if you do this, then...

Thomas,

Then the view you are defending is much worse than the view we are defending. In the view that God knows the future beforehand, the fact that He knows the future in no way affects the free will of His creatures. But in the view you are defending the opposite is true. If God makes things happen, then He made Cyrus conquer Babylon, He made Judas betray Christ, He made Christ not sin. If He made all these things happen, this means that the individuals involved had no choice, because they were made to do what God had planned them to do.

Tom,

In the illustration was my future determined by God, by the weather, or by myself?

Rosangela,

Interesting points, I will have to think that through some more. I confess I havent thought through the prophecy part as thorroughly yet. As for the foreknowledge part, I will quote a post made in the BSDA forum that contains another way of explaining this besides the ones I and Tom have made here. Maybe it will be a little clearer then. I quote the summary here:

It doesn't matter (to any points I'm making).

I understand your point to be that the fact that God knows what choice we will make, does not impact our free will (our ability to make the choice we wish to make). This is, of course, true.

I think you may be getting sidetracked by the word "determined." Instead of determined let's try using "like a T.V. rerun" and see if that works better. Asking what determines the future isn't really a question that needs to be consider in relation to the points I've been making.

The point I've been making is that if the future is such that only one thing can happen (for whatever reason), then that's the only thing that can happen. If there's only one thing that can happen, we can't choose to do something different than that thing.

The fact that God knows what this thing is is irrelevant in terms of this point. Who determines this single-threaded future is irrelevant in terms of this point (although it should be obvious that we can't determine a future that is known before we exist).

Free will, under the future-is-like-a-TV-rerun scenario cannot be logically understood as the ability to do either of more than one mutually exclusive events, since only one event (the one we will choose) can happen. Free will must logically be defined as the ability to do what we choose to do, in order to be logically consistent with this view of the future.

This isn't quite accurate. God does not know *definitively* that portion of the future which is contingent on man's free choice. There is nothing that can happen which God has not foreseen. God foresees that a person can do either this or that, and knows what the consequence of each choice is. He knows the end from the beginning. However, until the choice is actually made, there isn't a definitive answer to the question of which choice will be made, since it hasn't been made yet. God knows the future as it actually is, which is comprised of a combination of certainties and possibilities.

Regarding prophecy, God knew of things that could happen, and prophesied them ahead of time. God's acting to make Cyrus a leader can hardly be charged against Him as a bad thing. Perhaps Cyrus was the best possible leader there could have been, the one most likely to be receptive to the Holy Spirit.

Also, the fact that God has prophesied something does not mean that it must happen. God Himself makes this point in Jeremiah 18:



Of course Nineveh is a prime example of this.

Israel was given ample opportunity to repent, more than ample, and had they repented, they would not have been conquered, and this was prophesied by God, just as what actually happened, where they did not repent and were conquered. Over and over Jeremiah told them what would happen if they repented.

Bro Tom,

Do you agree with the generalization that "On the other hand, with an open future, God could still make prophecy. The difference is that instead of telling the prophets about the future that in Gods eyes has already happened, He tells the prophets about what He plans to do. And surely God would have no problem with causing..."?

For example, when God said to Peter, "You will deny me three times," was that just a really good guess of what he thought Peter might do, or did He cause Peter to sin, or was it simply God knowing the facts so well that He could know for certain the effects of future causes on Peter, or something else?

This is *far* too simplistic. The future is comprised of many things, including:
a)Some things that are certain to occur
b)Some things that might occur
c)Some things that God might cause to happen




Of course He didn't cause Peter to sin. Do you really think that was a possibility?

God knew Peter's character. That was the main thing. He also knew what was about to happen. Certain elements of what would happen would depend upon the free will choice of sentient beings, but it certainly would not have been difficult to know that Peter would deny Christ. Again, God knew his character.

That was just there for completeness.



I completely agree that God's prophecy was certain because He knew Peter's character. Our characters determine our choices, and God's accurate knowledge of Peter's character allowed Him to make an accurate prediction of Peter's choices. Peter's character was the cause (at least, one of them) and his choice to deny Christ was the foreseen effect.

My view in this matter is that God's universe is not arbitrary. Effects are determined by their causes, not by chance.

If Peter's choice can be accurately predicted by God, does that mean that Peter did not have free will? Or does it mean that Peter was free to choose what he wanted to do, but God knew what he wanted to do (even more than he did)? After Christ gave the prophecy, was there a possibility that Peter was going to do something different?

The fact that Christ made the prophesy didn't change whether or not Peter could choose to differently than Christ predicted. In this scenario, it was simply a case that Christ knew Peter better than he knew himself. It sounds like we're on the same page on this.

I forgot what I was going to say. Hate it when that happens.

Moving on to something else... I don't believe in a deterministic universe. Chaos theory and quantum mechanics seems to make it clear that God loves spontaneity and randomness. They are in the very building blocks of things. I think it's a wonderful thing that God is able to create things, even things without free will, which fill Him, the creator, with joy, so that He could say that they were "very good." Of course, when being capable of exhibiting free will enter the picture, this is even more the case.