Does omniscience require determonism?

I'm not going to sit through an hour of Leighton Flowers. Can you provide time stamps where an aswer is given?

 

One thing I object to is these types of videos where you are pretending to debate someone on an earlier video as if you were there with them brilliantly refuting them at the time the video was made. But with that aside, at the 24 minute mark, I think what MacArthur is trying to say is that you can't just look ahead in time so to speak, without real input into what is going to happen and truly know that an event will happen. Now, the input I believe can be nothing more than mere permission or merely to allow a future event to go on to completion but the fact is you have to at least have that much control or determinism if you want to call it that.

The reason is that the only other way to know the future is to observe forces or objects moving and acting and then if they are not erratic you can calculate a future event. Like predicting an eclipse for example. People can do that.

But I do have to admit that if you really think about it, you could make the case that since humans are erratic and so changeable then there is no way even to give permission for an event they might do because of their unpredictability. That seems to be where they go in the following 10 minutes, although I haven't listened to all the video.

Personally, I have never thought much about the predestination aspect simply because I think even if it's true all the choices made are still real and still matter and I do believe in God having foreknowledge in the simple definition without the gyrations they go into later in the video. And when you think of it, the only objection to foreknowledge that Calvinists have I thought at least was that election was not based on foreknowledge of faith in the individual. But in that case the objection is based on things other than whether foreknowledge is the same as a decree.

 

Election is based upon the purpose of God.

11 for the children being not yet born, neither having done anything good or bad, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works, but of him that calleth,
17 For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, For this very purpose did I raise thee up, that I might show in thee my power, and that my name might be published abroad in all the earth.
18 So then he hath mercy on whom he will, and whom he will be hardeneth. Ro 9

"not from the Jews only, but also from the Gentiles" - v 24

 

@37818 . 1 Peter 1:2 is not saying that election is based upon God's foreknowledge of who it is who will believe by their own autonomous decision according to their own free will. The verse is a good text for Calvinism because it has the elect being sanctified or separated out by the Spirit and sprinkled with the blood and they are passive in all that. The foreknowledge is because God is doing that, not because he is looking through a corridor of time and can perfectly see something he has no active involvement in.

The flaw in a foreknowledge that doesn't have some aspect of God's sovereign control over it is illustrated by that verse. Foreknowledge is either based on knowledge of some sure set of forces that are stable enough to predict the result, or, it is based on being sovereign over the result directly.

 

I agree and do not find Flowers' explanation satisfactory. I do agree that Calvin himself, and not a few Calvinists go way too far in meticulous determinism. And Flowers is right in that we all, if we're honest, end up appealing to "mystery".

 

It seems SOME measure of “determinism” (Divine Control) is required if God truly has “a Plan”. Knowing what will happen is useless if those events are outside of your control (like watching a movie for the third time does not make me the Director).