Finally getting back around to this thread; sorry for the delay.
Thank you very much for the compliments, by the way.
Not to uphold (much less to enable) derivative free will, but not in contradiction to it. Boethian omniscience and omnipresence could still involve determinism of all events, but it doesn’t have to determine all events in order to truly see the future.
I appeal to God’s self-sacrificial and truly libertarian free will, to enable and uphold creaturely and derivative free will; with proper distinctions between God’s rational action and a creature’s limitations in freedom of rational action.
The problem comes from introducing a past-tense into God’s present-tense. If God is currently experiencing 2004 and 2014 (with them not being “at the same time”, by the way), God is not presently seeing 2004 in hindsight from 2014. All the history that actually happens happens, and God sees it and is present for it: God is equally present and seeing my choices now as for the choices I will make and the choices I have made.
It doesn’t, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t argue that it does. On the contrary, I talk about short-chain random determinism with reference to quantum behavior: merely reactive behavior is still deterministic, even if it’s short-chain, and even if it’s randomly generated (or alternately even if the generation isn’t random so much as incalculable to us). But I don’t regard the self-sacrifice of God’s self-begotten action as being itself merely reactive behavior (though I think it does result in a merely reactive Nature in which we live and contribute our own actions).
Same here – though because people panic when I say that, I like to point out that I’m also a pan-ek-theist, all things from from God. The scriptures affirm both, sometimes together.
Pretty sure that would be the logical implication. By the same token, I have been warning my fellow apologists for years not to lean hard on arguments from the temporal beginning of Nature, because I strongly suspect sooner or later (and I’ve been seeing indications of this with increasing frequency) the scientists are going to realize they’ve been accidentally importing category errors into their calculations, the result being that they cannot in fact extrapolate back to a beginning-of-existence for Nature. Which will leave the philosophical naturalists (especially the naturalistic atheists) saying, “look, Nature has no beginning after all, therefore nothing produced it, nyah”. Ontological generation and distinction, though, is the key point, not whether natural time goes back to a point beyond which is nothing.
(Relatedly, the time-dilation effects which I fully expect scientists to incorporate eventually in their account of cosmic time, thus allowing for apparently ridiculous things like matter and energy expanding billions of times faster than the speed of light, will have the rather amusing side effect of invalidating current calculations of the age of the universe as being proportionately too long: the universe might be only 10 or 6 thousand ‘years’ old after all! That would be freaking hilarious. )
Complexity of influences and opportunities and impositions, doesn’t eliminate or replace rational action of choice between options. But accounting for complexity of a person’s situation, and other limitations, is why on the other hand I don’t like to call myself as proposing and defending “libertarian” free will: people expect I’m not taking such things into account.
Providentially (!?), the temp-file I opened to compose and save my replies for this thread, happened to contain comments I had written up but maybe never posted to a previous thread some months ago, concerning Boethian omniscience and time and free will!
So for convenience, in case I never got around to posting those, I’ll just follow on from there.
My reasons for believing Boethian omniscience to be true are related directly to certain rebuttal questions [asked in that other thread] about how it could even possibly work, so for convenience I’ll requote those:
Those are all fine questions, and I’ll even say they work fine as rebuttal questions when Boethian omniscience is presented apart from having a very specific place in a coherent developing metaphysical argument – which is how Lewis for example always presented it, and which is how I presented it upthread (both in the previous thread and in this one) in order to talk about it in a relatively quick fashion.
Consequently, to address those questions I’ll have to talk about how I infer in favor of Boethian omniscience, to provide a theological “setting” for how it connects in special ways to several other theological topics.
My following discussion is heavily summarized from chapters all across Section Three of Sword to the Heart, previously referenced.
0.) Various preliminary questions (covered in Section One btw) have to be addressed first, including but not limited to whether there is one or more than one foundationally self-existent level of reality. If yes (I answer yes, nicknaming it the Independent Fact or IF for short), then…
1.) Is the IF rationally active or not? (Obviously this requires a lot of discussion of what rationality means compared to non-rational behavior.) If not, then some kind of atheism is true. I inferred I ought to believe yes (in Section Two), so then…
2.) Is the IF statically self-existent (not depending on itself for existence), or actively self-existence (depending on itself for existence)? The former involves a contradiction in the idea of the IF being rationally active, since rational action would be only a secondary property of the ultimate reality; and also the former proposal introduces a schism between being logically caused and logically grounded.
(Describing the result of the argument shortly: “But if privative aseity is true, then we have every reason from its proposed characteristic of ultimate non-behavior, much less an ultimate lack of action, to believe that nothing else exists other than Itself, and that unlike us the IF does nothing. Moreover, there can be no logical relation between propositions, no consequents to grounds. Put another way, if privative aseity is true, we have every reason to believe that we cannot possibly have any good reason to believe anything, including that privative aseity is true!”)
Anyway for various reasons (related to topics from Section Two), I conclude I ought to believe the IF actively self-exists (positive aseity) not statically self exists (privative aseity). If so, then…
3.) At this point the next logical topic would be whether the positive aseity of the IF (the active self-existence of God, i.e. eternally self-begetting and eternally self-begotten) means there are (at least) two distinct Persons of the one and only God Most High. Although I answer yes, and this discussion factors into other topics later, I’ll skip over it for the sake of non-trinitarians in the thread and move along to…
4.) Does anything not-God exist? If not, then some kind of naturalistic theism (aka pantheism) is true. If so, then some kind of supernaturalistic theism is true (for example, nominal deism, or one of the Big Three Theisms, along with some other possibilities like various non-trinitarian Christianities – and strictly speaking ortho-trin could be true and yet Jesus might not be the incarnation of the 2nd Person of God any more than Elijah or Moses was, or the angel sent to John by Jesus toward the end of RevJohn to give a more provocative example.) I infer I myself am not-God, so I answer yes, and so move to…
5.) Is the evident reality I (the not-God entity) exist within God or not-God? If so, then practical pantheism would be true (Nature is God) even though strictly speaking some kind of supernaturalistic theism would still be true (since I am not-God). At this stage the most I can infer is that Nature doesn’t tend to behave the way I would expect from a rationally active fundamental reality, so Nature isn’t likely to be God; so I put a decisive belief on that question to the side for a while and moved on to the next very big question:
6.) How can God effectively create something not-God? And especially, how can God effectively create a not-God person like me?
It should be obvious that there isn’t any point even asking those questions unless and until the other topics get this far. But answering those questions turns out to have a huge bearing on how God’s omniscience and omnipresence works (if this theology is true). So please bear with this exposition a little longer.
On the theology developed so far, there can be no overarching reality within which God and something not-God already exists; and a proposal that God and a not-God system both independently exist would not only involve them being unable to affect each other (although God could choose to voluntarily let the not-God reality affect Himself), but also would end up implying a shared overarching reality. So there is no use proposing some sort of void ‘outside’ God, into which He can create.
Therefore, God can only create not-God realities (distinct from God self-begetting God), by voluntarily choosing to cease generating Himself in some way, while still remaining eternally self-generating. The choice to do so is itself an action, but the action is a choice to not take some other action.
Whether that could make any sense in a more basic supernaturalistic theism I don’t know. But if at least binitarian theism is true, then such a creative self-sacrificial action wouldn’t be an utterly new thing within the self-consistent active self-generation of the Unity; because (on this theology) the 2nd Person of the Unity (God self-begotten, or analogically speaking ‘the Son’) must, as a Person, make a constant corollary choice whether or not to surrender to the Unity as the ‘Unity’ instead of trying to go ‘His own way’ or to do ‘His own thing’.
This leads to a number of interesting and (later) useful notions about what we may call the highest death and how not-God creatures would be expected to join with the 2nd Person in submission to God. But leaving aside the binitarian (and eventually trinitarian) details, the point is that any not-God system of reality can only exist by God’s eternal action of self-abdication.
That would include Nature if Nature (not just myself) is a not-God reality; and I’ll skip over a bunch of analysis here concluding that created persons like myself would need some kind of not-God spatio-temporal system in which to exist.
So now we’re up to God continually acting in a self-abdicating way (similar to but distinctly different from the self-abdicating action of God self-begotten if binitarian or trinitarian theism is true), to keep Nature in existence at all points of space-time. Somewhat similar to how a running electrical current continually generates a magnetic field at an infinite number of right angles to itself, or vice versa. (There are big differences, too, of course.)
{inhaaaaaaalllleeeeeee!!!}
And at long last now we’re at the theological setting for Boethian omniscience and omnipresence (and omnipotence – they’re all just about the same thing on this account).
On this theory, God is directly and intentionally acting to keep all points of space-time in existence with various properties and (via God’s voluntary self-abdicating self-sacrificing action) with their own not-God behavior. God is consequently omnipresent and omniscient concerning all points of created space-time at the most intimate possible levels. It isn’t like Nature is impenetrably not-God and so repels or makes it difficult or limits God’s ability to get accurate information about it: God omnipresently knows all the facts directly, as well as (by corollary) all hypothetical possibilities (which God may or may not act toward enactualizing in multiple natural systems, each of which contains a whole natural universe of whatever size.)
On this theory God isn’t determinately directing everything around, but still retains (and occasionally enacts) the ability to direct, create, and annihilate particles, injecting events into the not-God system, which the system naturalizes (so to speak) in reaction. Derivative rational spirits, brought into existence by a synthetic union of God and not-God Nature, have vastly much more limited capabilities of the same sort, even in the best circumstances (and those circumstances would be further limited by rebellion against God); and meanwhile God can see what we’re doing and what we’re thinking with our derivative freedom of introducing events into Nature which Nature of its own particular characteristics would not produce.
I’m not quite sure how to describe how the ontological relation of not-God nature with God solves this problem, but I know it does. It would be an incomprehensible smear to us, or to any created entity, but our relationship to a natural system (or any historical process within any natural system) is only slightly related to God’s relationship to Nature.
Similarly, even though as author of a story I can check in on any point of its invented space-time whenever I want, my relationship to the story is only faintly similar to the utter intimacy of God’s relationship to Nature (and to us rational creatures within Nature). So even though I’m ‘outside’ my story (and can introduce effects, including my own persona if I want, inside my story) in a faintly similar way with a couple of relevant parallels, I’d still be unable to know all events in my story simultaneously, even if I could be omnisciently aware of them somehow (which I cannot). If my relation to my story was the same as God’s relation to our Nature, that wouldn’t be a problem – but I’d have to be actively generating the reality of my story at all points of its reality in continuous continuity (so to speak). Which I can’t do (and can never do) because I’m only a creature.
Even so, I can be aware of a temporal sequence of events within my fictional story, despite my extremely limited ontological connection to it: e.g. first Portunista fights off Gemalfan, then she gets his notes, then studies his notes, then discovers the location of the Tower of Qarfax, then travels there, then invades it, then defeats its security systems, then fights off three other small armies trying to get the Tower, then packs up and marches to the city of Wye, etc. etc.
If my relationship to my story doesn’t increase, then my ability to know my story will begin to oversaturate from being unable to process the details; but the more my relationship to my story increases the more I can keep in mind about my story at-once. But my story and I are both creatures within an overarching reality (or actually within two overarching realities, Nature and God, the former itself dependent on the latter), so there are necessary limits about how far I can relate to my story.
On my account of theology, the existence of free will is the key distinction between a theistic and atheistic reality; therefore this is also the key distinction between a creation being a child of God (Who is the Father of spirits) and being a puppet, even if the puppet is set loose to ping-pong around doing various things like an earthworm.
Free will is also a decisively huge factor for morality on my theological account, although I haven’t gotten to that yet in my description above.
Consequently, free will is a huge factor for soteriology on my theological account. But I don’t think a creature’s free will to rebel counts as much as God’s free will to save rebels from rebellion, and that’s a big difference from the type of Arminian account where God is forced to quit because He’s beaten at last by evil. The type of Arminian account where God chooses of His own volition to quit even though He could feasibly continue until He wins, is a more properly theocentric soteriology than the anthrocentric version popularized (I’m sorry to say) by Lewis – but then (as Lewis very well knew) that other type of Arminianism, where God simply chooses to quit bringing about righteousness in creatures, denies trinitarian theism and the essential existence of God as an active love in other ways.
Um… I think I may have addressed, at least in passing, the other topics raised so far in the thread…? Except I haven’t gone on (in the description above) to talk about how morality relates conceptually to the self-begetting, self-begotten (and self-giving) God as the foundation of all reality; and how it relates to how we use our rational action capability to choose between options where those are presented to us.