Originally posted by: My New Hero, Clete
Actually Don, if you don't mind, we can truncate things by quite a lot by simply stepping back and resetting this discussion and focusing on a single issue at a time. I will forgive your calling the God of open theism an ignoramus and would ask that you forgive my temper and we can continue without the hostility.
I would like to focus our attention on what seems to me to be the central point of disagreement between the two of us. That point being my belief that God's foreknowledge is a sufficient condition of a closed future and therefore mutually exclusive of volition.
For those who may be reading this exchange but have not read the entire thread, allow me to repost the syllogism that I presented in post 24...
- Freedom of choice means I have the ability to choose to do or to do otherwise.
- Love must be chosen.
- Therefore if I have no freedom of choice I cannot love.
- If the future is closed I cannot do other than what the closed future has in store for me to do, I cannot do otherwise.
- Therefore if the future is closed I have no freedom of choice.
- Therefore if the future is closed I cannot love.
- The inability to love is antithetical to everything Christianity is about.
- Therefore the future cannot be closed if Christianity is true at all.
- Christianity must be true because of the rational impossibility of the contrary (I will not establish this point).
- Therefore the future is open.
Now, you've said that my fourth point, which I have highlighted, is an unsupported assumption but again I must insist that it cannot be. I either have the ability to do or to do otherwise or I do not have that ability. If the events of the future, including my actions are settled (i.e. if the future is closed) then I can do, but I cannot do otherwise. If I could do otherwise then at least part of the events of the future, namely my actions, are not settled and thus the future is not closed but open.
Now how can that be wrong? I'm not trying to be difficult here, I'm simply using the words based on what they seem to mean. It cannot be wrong, it isn't wrong. Actually I don't even think that this is where are disagreement is. It seems more likely to me that our real disagreement is not about what is meant by a "closed future", that much seem obvious enough. But rather I think our disagreement is about whether or not God's foreknowledge has the effect of closing the future; about whether or not God's foreknowledge destroys my ability to do otherwise.
If this is not correct please clarify where you think our disagreement is and perhaps we can make further progress but if it is correct then I would like for you to answer a question for me if you don't mind.
If God knows that a police officer will stop you for speeding in a school zone in exactly one hour and twenty minutes from now, do you have the ability to avoid getting into a car for the next two hours?
If you cannot avoid getting into the car, can you avoid driving the car for two hours?
Can you avoid driving through school zones just for those two hours?
Can you avoid speeding for two hours?
Can you avoid speeding through school zones for two hours?
Or isn't it true that if God knows that you will be stopped for speeding in one hour and twenty minutes that you have no ability whatsoever to do anything contrary to His knowledge?
Okay, that was more than one question. Let's boil it down to this....
If God knows what you will do, can you do otherwise?
Feel free to elaborate all you like but I would love it if you could at least have a 'yes' or a
'no' answer somewhere in your response.
Resting in Him,
Clete
