That's the thing with online interactions eh? Words without tone, emotion or facial expression are subject to multiple interpretations.
It is....I hope you didn't think my "shortness" in answering to be snarky, that's all.
Certainly sounds trite and dismissive to me
Teehee.
I thought it might....and I was hoping you didn't interpret it that way.
I think that the thought originated with Peter and God:
That's an interesting thought. Frankly, I'm not entirely sure that it simply doesn't make any sense. I'm not sure that's possible. Maybe....
Not sure what you mean by "a-temporally" here. Perhaps you could re-word this.
a-temporally meaning simply "non-temporally"...as in, if God simply exists and operates completely outside of and utterly without regard to time whatsoever. That's possible, of course, and naturally, he isn't "subject" to time nor "constrained" to it by nature. But, I think that it is
possible that in relation to human events, God has stepped into or rather operated within time for the present. I wouldn't be dogmatic about of course.
It sounds to me like you're stating Boethius' philosophy/theology.
I think I disagree with him completely...I think I believe precisely the opposite:
From Stanford Encyclopedia:
6. Divine Prescience, Contingency and Eternity
In V.3, however, the character Boethius puts forward an argument, based on God's foreknowledge of future events, which threatens to show that even mental acts of willing are determined and so (as Boethius the author believed) unfree. He proposes the argument in two formulations:
7.If God sees all things and can in no way be mistaken, then there necessarily happens what he by providence will have foreseen will be.
8.If things are capable of turning out differently from how they have been foreseen, then there will no longer be firm foreknowledge of the future, but rather uncertain opinion.
Since it is accepted that God is omniscient, and that this implies that he knows what every future event—including mental events such as volitions—will be, (7) and (8) each seem to rule out any sort of freedom of the will requisite for attributing moral responsibility: a consequence the disastrous implications of which Boethius the character vividly describes.
Philosophy's answer to this difficulty is the most philosophically intricate and interesting section of the Consolation. It is one part of Boethius's work (perhaps the only one) which remains of interest in contemporary philosophy (of religion) and, for that reason, it has often been interpreted according to a framework provided by more recent thinking about the problem of divine prescience (see, for example, Leftow (1991), Zagzebski (1991)). The following is, rather, an attempt to present the discussion as it actually proceeds in the Consolation.
The first point which needs to be settled is what, precisely, is the problem which Boethius the character proposes? The reasoning behind (7) seems to be of the following form:
9.God knows every event, including all future ones.
10.When someone knows that an event will happen, then the event will happen.
11.(10) is true as a matter of necessity, because it is impossible to know that which is not the case.
12.If someone knows an event will happen, it will happen necessarily. (10, 11)
13.Every event, including future ones, happens necessarily. (9, 12)
The pattern behind (8) will be similar, but in reverse: from a negation of (13), the negation of (9) will be seen to follow. But, as it is easy to observe, (9–13) is a fallacious argument: (10) and (11) imply, not (12), but
14.Necessarily, if someone knows an event will happen, it will happen.
I disagree with Boethius. I think you do, but
I deny his premises.
from the same website which I link to here:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/boethius/ I agree with the reasons they pose as to why Boethius was wrong.
The fallacy, therefore, concerns the scope of the necessity operator. Boethius has mistakenly inferred the (narrow-scope) necessity of the consequent (‘the event will happen’), when he is entitled only to infer the (wide-scope) necessity of the whole conditional (‘if someone knows an event will happen, it will happen’). Boethius the character is clearly taken in by this fallacious argument, and there is no good reason to think that Boethius the author ever became aware of the fallacy (despite a passage later on which some modern commentators have interpreted in this sense). None the less, the discussion which follows does not, as the danger seems to be, address itself to a non-problem. Intuitively, Boethius sees that the threat which divine prescience poses to the contingency of future events arises not just from the claim that God's beliefs about the future constitute knowledge, but also from the fact that they are beliefs about the future. There is a real problem here, because if God knows now what I shall do tomorrow, then it seems that either what I shall do is already determined, or else that I shall have the power tomorrow to convert God's knowledge today into a false belief. Although his logical formulation does not capture this problem, the solution Boethius gives to Philosophy is clearly designed to tackle it
In short...I think Boethius was wrong because he felt that the necessity of an Omniscient being's fore-knowing something renders that thing necessary...it doesn't IMO. If something is true for an Omniscient being than necessarily that Omniscient being KNOWS it....but it doesn't render the event itself as necessary. The only
necessity, is that
if it occurs, or is to occur...than an Omniscient being knows it.
