| timmah said: I'll try this one more time. Determinism comes from the word determine, which suggests that God would have actively laid out paths for each individual person. I'm saying he does not do this. That requires an active role of almost 'pulling the strings' on a bunch of puppets, that's not what I'm suggesting. I'm theorizing that, if we were to say God knows the end from the beginning, yet free will exists, this would, by definition, imply a different definition and observation of time from what we know (as knowing future events as we define them without planning them would logically require a non-fixed perspective of time), that's why I used the time traveler analogy and the frozen river analogy. It's simply a way to attempt to understand and theorize a perspective outside our understanding and perspective of time. The idea of time is everything in discussing predetermination vs. pre-knowledge. You keep saying they're the same, I'm saying they're different as one is active, one is passive observation. The discussion of what this theorized passive observation could be, how it could take place, and what its impications would be is what I'm addressing. You might agree with me that in the time traveler analogy I gave, that would not have eliminated free will or choice, and I'm saying that's how a God outside of time could theoretically see things, thereby seeming to have knowledge of things that have not yet happened from our perspective, though from his perspective, we actively made that choice in our future, a future which he could theoretically view at any time for the sake of this discussion. One could also theorize that God could possibly use this theorized knowledge of the future to influence our present, thereby changing our future. One could then argue that if he did this, it would eliminate free will, therefore God would not directly interfere. Keep in mind, I'm not a firm believer in the statements above, nor is it a core part of my faith, I'm merely posing them as an interesting discussion. I don't claim to know everything about God. |
Yes, God has determined the paths of individuals if he is omniscient so it is indeed deterministic. To suggest he hasn't is to suggest he is not omniscient.
