How does God get his foreknowledge?

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
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I have heard some Christians suggest that God’s foreknowledge is a product of our actions and that God’s foreknowledge “floats” with our actions. For example, if God knows Jack is going to drink beer tonight and Jack decides to instead drink wine, then God’s foreknowledge would change with Jack changing his choice from beer to wine. This means that God acquires his knowledge through observation and not through prediction. But either way, he somehow acquires the knowledge. If he acquires it through observation, then prior to his observation, he wouldn’t have had that knowledge. If he acquires it through prediction, then if he had the knowledge at the time of the prediction, then it wouldn’t really be a prediction.

So it raises the question of how God gets his foreknowledge.

2

ohh so many answers, ok let me start.
god does not experience the illusion of time like we do, he/they exist at all times simultaneously, so thus he/they appear to know the future. that is probably the best answer.
second would be, in physics if you know the location and velocity of every partial, and the laws that govern them, and yes god does know these things, then you can predict there interaction to eternity.
The problem with the second answer is that free will does not follow these laws, so in reality since god is an incredibly powerful mind he can predict probabilities with great accuracy.

any questions?

3

If God knows everything, then his prediction wouldn’t really be a prediction but a statement of his knowledge. Therefore, I don’t see that he gets his foreknowledge through prediction.

How about observation? If God needed to observe everything to know it was going to occur, then what knowledge would he have had prior to making the observations? Therefore, it can’t be through observation.

Is it possible that the foreknowledge which God has isn’t really knowledge in the sense that humans understand knowledge?

4

Let’s say every day God sends you a note in a sealed envelope. You are instructed to not open the envelope until after you eat breakfast on the day marked on the envelope. In the envelope for each day, there is a note stating what you will eat for breakfast, as God’s foreknowledge is such that he knows what you will eat for breakfast. You select your breakfast, eat it and then open God’s note for that day. What he wrote is precisely what you ended up having for breakfast. This goes on for several weeks, and every day, God has stated precisely what you would end up eating for breakfast. Now let’s say one day you open the envelope PRIOR to eating your breakfast to see that God wrote ‘Cheerios’. You then choose Wheaties to eat. What does that do to God’s foreknowledge?

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My first explanation still holds, god sees every moment at the same time so to him its just knowledge,

for instance he would know you opened the last envelope, but he can’t/won’t force you to eat cheerios.

so at the beginning he will probably tell you, or more likely he won’t talk to you at all, because you broke your promise.
or in last envalope it will say you souldn’t of looked or something like that,
he can predict what you will do on your own but he can’t predict something that, the act of predicting changes.

6

So God knows everything, except for things that change because he knows it?

He sees every moment at the same time, except for those moments that he doesn’t see?

And he doesn’t talk to persons who break their “promise” to him, which he already knew they would do?

Ok… :confused:

7

No, its things that change because we know it, if you know the future you can change it.
so if god tells you what will happen you can work to change that and make it not happen, but if god doesn’t tell you everything will happen the way he see’s it. so in effect only god can change the future, and that is by telling us.

and he does see all moments in time, only because god never tells people exactly what will happen.

8

So, if God gives you some insider information, he doesn’t know if you’ll actually change things?

Or, by telling you, he knows the change is for sure?

Does he know in advance he’ll be telling you these things?

If so, then has anything really “changed”?

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If God tells you something is going to happen and you then do something in deviance of this, then it negates God’s foreknowledge.

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No, it doesn’t. Just because God tells you it would happen does nothing to indicate that God didn’t know it wouldn’t happen.

I’ll give you the short version of what I said in the other thread.

If God knows the person will choose something to eat that is opposed to what is in the envelope, and God also knows what the person will choose in relation to what God puts in the envelope, then the only variable is what God decides to put in the envelope, which God also knows.

11

The envelope scenario demonstrates that one of the following MUST be true:

  1. We don’t have free will
  2. God doesn’t really know what we will do
  3. God is incapable of writing a note and putting it in an envelope stating what cereal you will eat on a given day
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yes it does, freewill is a bitch like that, that’s why god doesn’t tell people the future. that is the future word for word he can hint at it but prophesy can be wrong

13

no he doesn’t know exactly what will happen, a lot of the time he just makes things worse by trying to help that is why god has not directly interfered with mankind for a long while

14

:laughing: That would explain a lot!!

So, I take it then that God didn’t know in advance that his “trying to help” would make things worse. (If he did, then he actively participated in creation of evil… which is ok, but believers tend not to go there.)

And if he were truly omniscient, that he ought to stick to being a simple aloofly deistic Being and not meddle in his creation once he created it?

Well, maybe he’ll do better next time around, having learned better how to be a God through the test-run we’re living through.

:question:

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Do you want me to copy/paste my response from the other thread to this thread, or do you just want to roll with me in the other thread as well?

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Copy & paste here. Let’s try to keep the discussion here.

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Show me one case where we could do something opposed to what God, “Knows,” we are going to do.

Your cereal example doesn’t work, it doesn’t prove God wrong. The simple answer is that God knows on that particular day the person will open the envelope before breakfast and deliberately eat something that is not in the envelope. Even if the person is not doing it for spite, it is still deliberate.

This is an argument that I typically use, so let me preface this by agreeing with you. However, I am going to argue against this argument just for the hell of it, and this is the best I’ve got at the moment:

Again, with the time line. There is a difference between knowing what we are going to do and causing what we are going to do. God is not bound by our illusion of time, or concept of time depending on what you would call it in this case. In other words, God has been to the end of the line and back and has seen everything in-between. He had probably been to the end of the line and back and seen everything along the line before there was a line from our perspective.

So, what you have are the first events. Let’s separate some light from some darkness, let’s slap some animals on this bad boy, let’s take the seventh day off. He got the ball rolling on this whole timeline thing and then gradually relinquished control of the events over to us. At a certain point, we came to control all of the events and God does not influence them anymore.

The best way I can put this is: Imagine watching a movie and you watch it all the way through. After watching the movie you go back to the beginning and start it all over again. You have a perfect memory. Now, because you have already seen it, you have foreknowledge of everything that will happen in the movie, but that does not mean that you caused what goes on in the movie.

Again, it doesn’t. If it has to adapt, it would not actually be foreknowledge. That would be like taking a Roulette wheel and if I, “Know,” that Green 00 is going to come out on the next spin, but then a single 0 roulette wheel is brought out I have to change my prediction. Even if my new prediction is correct, I still did not have foreknowledge (prior to the new wheel being brought out) because I thought the wheel would have a Green 00.

The difference is, you can’t throw God a curveball like that, he already knows a single-zero wheel is coming out so would never say that the result is Green 00.

1.) I agree (if we assume the traditional Christian definition of God), but it would still be cool if you would counter my argument anyway just for fun.

2.) Assuming the traditional Christian definition of God, this is incorrect. Of course, the definition is sort of self-defining and from a logical standpoint, should not really count for anything. If we are to argue while viewing the Christian teachings in the most favorable light (the position I took for the purpose of this conversation) then this point is not even debatable. It is patently untrue.

Once again, I am taking the Christian Bible in the most favorable light just for these purposes and these purposes only. So, you may very well be right in this analysis, especially if there is not a God. Obviously, if God does not exist, he cannot possibly know because a non-existent entity is incapable of knowing anything.

3.) All you have done is worked a Catch-22 into your example, that’s it. If the person is going to deliberately eat something other than what is in the envelope, then you are saying what is in the envelope is, “Wrong.” What is in the envelope might be wrong, but the point is, God put it in there knowing it was wrong because he knew the person was going to open the envelope before breakfast and deliberately act in opposition.

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Pavlovianmodel146 wow just wow, that was great, its like you know the same crap I do only a little better.
and your arguments go with what I know to be true regarding both science and religion, I want to know where you learned this.
I only have one thing to add in regards to

we do have freewill in that god does not control us, but we are predictable if you present the same situation to the exact same person, and I mean same soul same time and no foreknowledge they will act the same way.

to take your movie example, we had freewill in the movie, god did not change things, we made our own choices the whole time.
if later god chooses to tell us something at any part of the movie, then he begins a new movie from that point on.
he still see’s all parts at all times and we are still free.

the only question is what happens to the original ending if god changes or intervenes at some point. are all the lives that exist there gone. and if that is so then god could change something in what we view as the “past” and unmake us, what would happen to our souls then?

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I appreciate your compliments! I’m not sure that I deserve them. As far as where I learn anything is concerned, I’m just kind of making s**t up as I go along here.

That’s mostly true. The only problem I have with the term, “Prediction,” is that the word itself assumes a possibility of error which we cannot have when discussing God, at least not for these purposes.

The problem here is that you are jumping from a God concept of time, to our concept of time. When you describe something as, “Ending,” then you are dealing with time terms that would apply only to us. God is eternal, there is no end. There may be an end to humanity at some point, but there would not be an end to God.

As far as how I think God would view time is concerned, think of him like some kind of security guard looking at monitors. Now, the security guard can take the same scene (let’s say ten seconds) and freeze it at half second interviews, slap these half second intervals up on his monitor and look at the whole thing all at once if it helps him determine something. The difference with God is that he can look at the whole thing all at once without any time breaks whatsoever. What I mean is that he can look at every single (insert smallest possible unit of time here) and see everything everywhere all at once.

I would say that God theoretically could change something that we view as the past and unmake us. If he decided to do that, nobody would have any memory of us ever having been there and would live their lives accordingly.

I can’t even speculate on souls other than to say what would happen to them is whatever he decides to do with them.

I have a question for anyone about free will, though. If we did not have free will, then what would the purpose of God giving us the ability to call our alleged existence of free will into question be? You can’t say that it would be so that we wouldn’t know that we didn’t have free will, because then free will would not even exist as a concept. Even if we didn’t have it, how would we ever know we didn’t have it if we don’t know what it is?

20

The test for freewill that comes to mind for me is, if god told you what was going to happen, (not in that he tells you what to do) would you still do it no-matter how much you don’t want to or can you change what you do.
If you have ever seen the movie “the time machine” then that would be a good example of either god or the laws of physic’s forcing us to eat cheerios.

if we can eat anything else we are free.