God would have known since God would have created humans whether directly or by means of creating the conditions for evolution. As long God is dealing with conditions of cause and effect, total knowledge is possible. When freedom enters the picture it no longer is.
Another possibility exists, depending on whether eternity means everlasting or outside of time? If it means outside or beyond time, God could know even an undetermined future over which God has relinquished control in deference to freedom. However, that kind of knowledge would be paradoxical, and hence beyond human logic. So up to now, I have been considering knowledge in terms of ordinary clock time.
This is where I disagree. If nature in all of its random chaotic wonder can be boiled down into simple terms of cause and effect, so much so that an avalanche can be foreseen with total knowledge, so can mental processes. Everything we do is based on cause and effect.
So to me, to say that nature can be seen with total knowledge because of cause and effect, but human behavior cannot, is to say that 1 =/= 1.
If randomness truly has no order, then it is as unknowable as absolute freedom. Much of what passes for randomness may have order of such complexity that it has not been identified. In that case, an omniscient mind would be able to identify it.
What if God knew yesterday that you would eat Wheaties for breakfast today, but when today comes around, you choose to eat Cheerios instead? See how easy we can discredit God’s foreknowledge.
Genesis chapter 2 is where you are looking for, NB.
Around verse 18ish range.
The assertion made is that Adam needed a companion, or helper, of some kind and that no created thing yet fit the bill and therefore one had to be made for him out of his likeness (human) to suit him.
Personally, the humorous part to me is more rather that the god presented in this account appears to consider everything else on the planet as a possible mate for man.
It’s an entertaining image to consider a god bringing all creatures to a man with an open question, “Well, how about this one?”
That’s not how I break it down though. I break down all of creation (in discussions like these, not personal beliefs) into a start and finish. All of creation is already created and destroyed, it’s as if god wrote a book. But we are all the characters in that book and we don’t know that it is already finished. But the god who wrote it knows how it started and knows how it ends, so that god knew that you were going to choose to eat Cheerios.
A lot of people say that removes freewill, that it was all dictated before hand. But I disagree. You have to think of it in terms that we don’t think of, which is a reasonable thing to do when considering the limitations of an eternal, invisible, all powerful being. We can’t think inside the box when it comes to things that exist outside of our box.
Which is interesting when you put in the direction of god not knowing that more humans were going to need to be made. That was the angle I was going in with Felix. If god knew that more humans were going to be needed, why not start with two to begin with? Or design the first one to not be lonely or one that requires help. It leaves a lot of implications that the Christian god is no where near being omniscient, something that seems to go against the general opinion from my experiences.
The old Hebraic (a term I use quite loosely here) cultural understanding of their god (regardless which group you select, or which of their gods is being examined) was no where near as infallible as our current western constructs.
Their god was definitely credited by them as knowing the true motives of man and having the ultimate judgement of man by consequence, and was the originating master of their life, but was not removed from being surprised or baffled by humans.
Despite that fact, their god was still credited with being far more wise and knowledgeable than any man or god; at least in scope.
Which is something that confuses me about the “you can’t be omniscient and still grant freewill” crowd. No credit is seemingly given.
I’m sure that everyone in this forum knows someone in their life who they have pegged when it comes to decisions that person will make. I’ve got a good friend who is an in the closet recluse (meaning he doesn’t know he is a recluse, not that he is so much so that he lives in the closet). The guy is very sociable, enjoys people and parties and company and the like. But he flakes out on gatherings constantly. And when something is planned you can see the signs coming from a mile away.
And when those signs drop, I know he isn’t showing up. He’ll say he wants to, he’ll say he’s gonna be there, up and down with promises and what have you. But I know he’s not showing. And the day of, poof, no where to be found. Did my knowing have some sort of impact on his decision to bail? Of course not. And even though phsycology has done a decent job of pinning down behaviors and the like there still lies this stigma about the co-existence of omniscience and free will.
If some god built all of this from nothing, that god has got to be smart enough to know what those creations are going to turn into, what they in turn will create on their own, so on and so forth. So even though we can see the signals from family and friends on what kind of decisions they are going to make, it’s still far fetched to say that a supreme, ultimate, all powerful being cannot know what we’re going to do with our lives? It’s an interesting line to draw.
Technically Phyllo, there’s nothing in Genesis regarding sexual organs of the man or woman.
The only body part specifically mentioned is the adjustment to the count of ribs in man compared to the count in women, by proxy of the explanation of the woman’s creation (which, if you think about it, is an interesting note to be aware that the old Hebraic peoples were aware of the difference enough to discuss this difference at the core of the creation of their kind - this isn’t an external feature; this is something you have to open a person up, or have considerable topical understanding of a person, to notice).
Considering that the amount of ribs that the man had was previously more than the amount of ribs that he did after the creation of the woman, it is possible to conjecture any number of alterations may have been made after the man’s original creation.
I’m not making that assertion, but since the evidence that the god that made the man in the account readjusts the design once, it is possible to make an argument that other adjustments were also made.
But firstly, keep in mind this isn’t our cultures account of how everything got started.
Our culture hijacked it.
This is another culture’s account…a very old culture.
By comparison, this is a culture that also accounted for circumcision’s reason being a means of keeping the seal of the covenant between their god and their greatest ancestor, Abraham.
Our perspective is not the consideration of interest when trying to understand why something was written in these texts.
shrug
That’s really a matter of doctrine, honestly (philosophy or theology).
Some doctrines would make it impossible to hold both, while others present considerable room by consequence of both.
Your book analogy doesn’t hold up if you want to have free will. If the book is already written and a character exercises free will to do something contrary to what is written in the book, then it would negate the statements of the book. If the statements of the book cannot be negated, then the character doesn’t have free will to do something contrary to what is written in the book and is essentially a programmed robot - programmed to do what is written in the book.
Think of it this way. Let’s say God sends you a note every day in a sealed envelope. On the note it states what you’ll eat for breakfast on a given day. You are instructed to open the note for each day after you eat your breakfast on that day. For two months, you eat breakfast and then open the note. You observe that God correctly identified what you were going to eat for breakfast every day. Then one day you open the note for that day prior to eating breakfast and see that it says “Cheerios”. You choose to eat Wheaties that day. What does that do to God’s foreknowledge?
When the Bible was written, it was already politically incorrect to openly (or graphically) discuss sexual organs. That is why it merely says in Genesis 4:1, “Adam made love to his wife Eve”. You would think a basic book about the origin of man which goes into such great detail about how a rib was taken out of Adam’s side to create Eve would provide a little more depth about what “made love to his wife” consists of.
It doesn’t hold up because you’re only thinking of it in conventional terms. You’re still using time as a deciding mechanism. Like I said, you have to think outside of the box if you’re talking about that which created the box. Certain restrictions cannot apply. I only use the book as an analogy because it’s the easiest to understand.
Again, very conventional. I liked where you were going with it and I understand the line of thinking you are using. The real question is what you ate for breakfast each morning that was correctly foretold, did that impeed on your freewill to decide to eat it before you read the note?
BTW, what we are currently discussing is essentially the core of quantum physics. Look into it some if you haven’t, it’s extremely interesting and extremely confusing.
Technically speaking, existing woven throughout the entire dimension of time would cause any understandable sentience to become absolutely barren of any comprehension of what time is in relation to our understanding of it.
For instance, if a sentient mind was stretched from the center of our universe to the center of our solar system, the time that it would encompass simultaneously would ripple so massively that it would fail to have a point of reference as to which time specifically it resided in.
In one part, it would have a moment of time that was in the count of days, yet billions upon billions of years to the other part of itself in the same moment.
If you stretched a physical brain, somehow, across this expanse - for example, the simple matter of thinking would appear to one part of the brain to have occurred in seconds, and yet appear to take hundreds of millions of years to reach yet another part of the same brain.
Time cardinally falls apart as a cohesive concept when the scales shift beyond the ranges within the speed of light, and space and dimension exceed the speed of light with no effort at all.