Open theism

[Leslie]

An interesting article by Michael Valpy appeared in this morning's Globe and Mail (for those who don't know, the Globe is Canada's premier newspaper) about the concept of open theism. The online version requires subscription, so I can't link to it, but I'll give some key quotes:

"... God limited His own knowledge: He decided to create human beings capable of loving relationships, the necessary condition for which is free will."

"As for omniscience, Prof. Pinnock and other open-theists say God perfectly knows all that is to be known - except for what He has chosen not to know because He has given human beings free will. Thus the limits on His sovereignty are self-imposed, but His greatness is manifest in that He can cope with anything that turns up."

"There is, they say, ample evidence in the Bible that God from time to time has not known what's up, or what the outcome of His actions would be." Two examples they give are: 1) in Genesis, where God regrets having created humans; 2) in I Samuel 15, where God regrets having made Saul king over Israel.

There is a website about .

[gskern]

Hi Leslie:

Thanks for posting this; I'm a little surprised that nobody has responded to you sooner, but I do appreciate your raising the subject...

My brother turned me on to Open Theology about a year ago, and I dove into it and started reading some of the material. I've been a Clark Pinnock fan for years, and many of his peers in the "movement" are excellent, too...

I don't have much to say, right now, on this, but I do want to touch on two quick points:

1. Part of the core set of beliefs in Open Theology is the idea that there are things God has chosen NOT to know...

This is curious: How can God -- or anyone else -- purposely choose NOT to know something? Wouldn't He have to first KNOW what He is choosing NOT to know? Or do they mean that there is a "subset" of All Possible Knowledge which He has labeled for Himself, "Don't Go There"? The problem I have with saying that there is *anything* God does not know is that that subset of Knowledge could contain things that would prove contrary to His very nature, His very existence (imagine God being destroyed by a Greater Power that He did not know about... sounds weird, impossible, unthinkable...)

2. God sees things from a singularly unique and vastly superior Perspective than we do; we can only surmise, deduce, infer, and make assumptions based on what He is willing to show us ("us" being Humanity in general), but it's no great leap of Logic to believe that we are seeing only PARTS of the grand scheme of things... for us to assert that there are things God does not Know seems to me to be an extremely presumptuous call...

Even those passages in Scripture where He seems to change His mind, or has a change of heart, can only be seen from our limited human perspective... maybe (for whatever reason) He want to give us that "impression", like a father feigning ignorance of how to put a model together so that the son will figure it out and assume it was his own thinking that fixed it...

Pascal said that God gives us "the dignity of Causality", but not necessarily because He did not already know what the best course would have been... perhaps He, too, wants to let us "figure it out"...

One other thing along these lines:
If we can even begin to get our minds around the reality that God is outside of (what we know as) Space and Time, then it doesn't seem like such a big leap to also add that there is nothing that CAN be known that He does NOT know...

Just my two centavos.

[Steve]

I don't buy the argument that for free will to exist God has to limit his knowledge.

An example: It is currently early morning, and my kids are slowly starting to wake up because the school bus will be here in half an hour. If I were to tell them that they have a choice this morning, that if they don't want to go to school, I'll take them to Disney World, I can predict which choice they would make. Based on what I know about them, that they don't especially like school, and Disney World would sound like a lot more fun.

Now I won't conduct the experiment to prove if I am right. But here is the point. The fact that I can predict with certainty (OK it isn't complete logical/mathematical certainty, but just about) what they would choose, does that mean they wouldn't have free will if I gave them the choice?

Now God knows us much better than I know my kids, so He can predict with logical/mathematical certainty what I am going to decide to do. But I still have free will. God just knows what I am going to do because He knows me so completely.

[Vinicius]

[magpie]

[Steve]

[Vinicius]

[Leslie]

[gskern]

Leslie:
Fascinating post! Thanks very much for those excellent musings...

I'm sitting here pondering what you (and some of the others) have said; here are a couple of short thoughts:

Even if God WERE constrained by Time and Space as we understand them, is He ever surprised by anything we say or do? Surely He at least has the ability to predict, with absolute perfection, what we will choose to do, because He knows us so deeply and so profoundly...

If, then, He is never surprised by anything we say or do -- if 100% of the time He can accurately say to Himself, "Yup, I knew you were going to do that" -- then doesn't Free Will lose most of its effectiveness? If God created us to CHOOSE Him (Free Will submitting to the Ultimate Will), and yet He (with His perfect ability to predict) already KNOWS (intuitively, perhaps...to apply a silly word to HIM) what we're going to choose, then Free Will becomes a Charade, like creating a female hologram I might create who tells me constantly how handsome I am...

On the other hand, if He IS surprised by even one choice of ours, the implications are interesting...

[magpie]

[Genie]

[gskern]

The difficulty for us is that we (at least I) simply cannot conceive of a structure of Time that is outside of our common definitions of Past, Present, and Future: In the Past, this morning, I ate eggs; Presently, I am writing this sentence; in the Future, I shall have a beer (or 6) after work at a local pub... We (I) know of no other way to look at Time, and the sentence, "God is outside of Time and Space", while true perhaps, is just not something I can fathom...

Even the PRESENT is a quick series of Past / Present / Future: I just wrote the word "future" 2.3 seconds ago, in the past, and I shall put a period at the end of this sentence in one more second. (there, told ya).

We refer to that activity as, "I'm writing this sentence" in the PRESENT TENSE, but it could also be seen as the PAST and the FUTURE absolutely snapped together! There would be, then, NO "PRESENT" at all!!

Mind-boggling, eh?

[Stanley Anderson]

[magpie]

[robsia]