Trump's Christian supporters are unchristian

[Tassman]

So, what you ate for breakfast yesterday is fixed in time and can never be changed. It is a frozen moment in the timeline of the universe. It was going to happen because it did happen.

No, the reverse is true. From the viewpoint of the omniscient deity It did happen because it was going to happen’.

But it doesn't change the fact that the REASON it happened was because you freely made it happen.

Nope. See above.

Whether God knew about your choice a million years ago, or me knowing about it today doesn't change the fact that you made a specific choice yesterday. It was inevitable.

Yes, it was inevitable what my “specific choice” would be. It was foreknown.

[oxmixmudd]

All of time, simply means all of time, Jim. Seeing all of time means that all of time is there to be seen.

Not necessarily. It depends on one's model of time. God can know or 'see' the future even if it doesn't 'exist' in any sense that we could ever discover or validate.

If you don't believe in "all of time" in that sense, then what exactly do you mean be all of time being observable?

We are talking about God. He can know all of the future even if it has no real physical existence yet. IOW, even if the physical reality is that time is open and many possible futures can exist, God can know what the reality will become. And I personally believe that He may well let us have some control over which future will exist. The one we choose. I do not believe this impacts infallibility in that He knows all the possible futures and has chosen to give us the capacity to determine which future exists. That is, in much the same way the Scripture speaks of God choosing to remember our sins no more, He can choose to allow us to have options - such as whether or not to follow Him. I don't know if that is what He does, but it doesn't really matter in terms of free will as I have discussed in previous posts. Free will only means at the moment we make a decision, the outcome has not be determined by some outside force. It doesn't mean our decisions can't be predicted, or isn't defined by who we are, what we are, and what we believe is right or wrong.

An unrealized state of time means that the state of time does not yet exist, Jim. If the future time is unrealized, then the future time is open, meaning that it does not yet exist. You're not making sense.

God can know what will be even if those things don't exist yet. Or God can choose not to know some things and allow us to define the course of things. Either way, He still knows all that can be known, and knows that in whatever He has chosen to leave unrealized, His plan for the universe, for us, is fulfilled.

Retrocausal would be seeing the future after the fact, Jim, not omnisciently.

"After the fact" isn't correct. Retrocausal means that an event in the future can influence the past. Technically that means that the future has the capacity to affect things BEFORE the fact.

You can't just say stuff, you have to make logical sense of it to yourself and others, if you mean for it to be a serious argument.

Actually, to a great extent I can 'just say stuff'. We are not talking about what we know about scientifically or what we know actually is. We are talking about what might be, speculating about how an eternal being that is outside time might interact with time. There are not a lot of restraints on that sort of thing. And I really can't help it if you have some sort of internal fear of free form speculation about what might be based in part on what we know is.


Jim