If the Christian God is truly all knowing...

They say that the Aztecs thought this was the 5th sun, which is a bit weak and so needed all those human hearts to keep it going......

 

Nice! I love this! Rip 'em out!

Jeez the US government is trying so hard to kill off so many of us
they should just assemble the pyramid and file the sheep down the line

They sacrificed thousands a day sometimes

blast some yopo and get dragged to the top

 

"I have, I hold the key, to nothing
it's a small killing...
murder, murder's in the hands of motion
as it seems to be"

 

The answer is actually quite simple.

Yes, God is Omniscient, but only in the sense that he can know everything if he wants.

So as you mention, when God gave Mankind free will, the only way to do it is for God to choose not to know what an individual person would do and thus had no idea what Adam and Eve would do.

But you then make a giant leap to saying that God thus has no “Great Plan”, yet he can and does.

Just to illustrate; a man can design the plans for a house without knowing who will build it but it still gets built according to plan. So why can’t God have a plan for the earth and mankind without having to know what each individual will do at any one time and still have things turn out like he planned?

 

Because he is supposedly omniscient and knows the future.
The only answer is that God agrees to forget on some level what He knows in order for there to be free will or in fact, the creation.

 

I believe that is basicly what I just said, except I also showed with my Illustration that God can allow free will and have a "Great Plan" as well.

 

So God is omniscient, but he forgot what he knows, so we have freewill? For God to "choose not to know" then he knew in the first place, anyways, or else he would have no choice to make.

Not only is that a terribly humanized perspective of God, it also makes no sense.

 

Maybe it's only a small plan.

Either way, it seems God has to both know, because one of the conditons of being God is omniscience, and not know because that would preclude free will, at one and the same time. Hindus believe this is possible becasuse of something called yoga-maya. I don't think there's anything similar in Christianity.

 

It's a dificult problem. I wouldn't agree though that this makes no sense. If you say God is omniscient but humans have free will, as Christians do, then obviously some solution has to be found, as this presents a glaring contradiction. As I said before, it's a problem they failed to solve over the entire christain epoch.

 

I mean, there is only one kind of omniscience, the kind that is all knowing. There is no way around that. Either he knows all or he doesn't.

 

Yahweh is obviously not Omniscient, it is stupid to argue that he is. Why would he have wiped mankind out only to replace them with the same assholes? (noah's ark) God was totally in shock when he figured out that man was always going to be sinful.

In fact Yahweh was actually talked out of killing the Hebrews by Moses and repented of the evil which he thought to do... i underlined that one.

Yahweh is as fallable as any man in God form could be. He makes mistakes, he doesn't know everything and he chooses to fuck with free will. In exodus the only reason the Pharoah doesn't let moses go is because God "hardens his heart".

Proving Yahweh as fallable in any sense is no great acheivment. Understanding the book itself is.

 

OK - but the trouble is you see that I don't really follow Christianity, so my idea is probably 'out of bounds' to a lot of people here.

Sri Krishna says that He is omniscient, and knows past present and future. However, there is a developed philosophy to show how this can be so, and we still get some limited choice of our actions etc. Somewhat more thorough than Christian philosophy/theology which IMO is a bit primitive. Any intellectual merit it has is confined to a very few thinkers who in turn rely solely on the Greek pagans.

 

If you have a choice of infinite paths, but no matter which one you choose you always end up at the same place, do you still have free will?

The way I think of it, is that God must be universally conscious of all of his creation, down to the last proton, and down to the most elusive essence. Therefor, there can be no possibility or arrangement or decision that he isn't aware of/hasn't foreseen.

 

Why do we assume that God couldn't know everything but still need to allow things to happen? Maybe the future (which he knows) is dependent on his inaction. Have you people never seen a Brannon Braga Star Trek?

 

Krishna does just this through His Yoga-Maya.

Look at it like this - start with this question: from what did or does God construct the universe? Ie. where did matter come from?

According to the Vedic Shastra, God makes the universe out of Himself. From what else could He make it?
The part of Himself which becomes the stuff of creation becomes, by His own will, unconscious. Hence, matter, excepting when animated by the life force, is not actually conscious, let alone conscious that it is part of the essential being of God.
In a symbolic form, it is said that God then glanced at the universe that had been made, and in that glance became conscious, as you say, of every particle of existence, at all times throughout the life of the creation.
We too are fragmentary parts of God.
And we have the capacity to realize it.

 

Once God chooses to know something, what he knows is always true and right. If he chooses to know something in the future, it will happen.

Thus you can’t have both free will and a God that knows every thing.

So choose; you can either believe, as some do, that there is no God or that you are fated to do whatever you do and you have no choices to make.

But there is a third choice and that is that God is Omniscient, but only in the sense that he can know everything if he chooses to know it but has the ability not to know something if he so chooses. Thus when God made the Angels and Man, in order to allow them free will, God willingly gave up, not his ability to know everything, but his right to know everything.

This does not prevent God from knowing, right now, more than Mankind will ever know. Somehow just because God doesn’t know what you’re going to have for breakfast, so you can have free will, just doesn’t seem that big a deal.

As for the “Great Plan" that God has, yes, he knows how the future will turn out and what the future holds for Mankind but as for you, individually, it’s up to you to decide whether you want to be there or not, using your free will, a gift of God’s “forgetfulness”.

 

I'm sorry olderwaterbrother, but I find that I cannot believe you.

Personally, I think that is a very convoluted way of seeing things...

 

That's quite alright; I've never asked anyone to believe me.

As for what I said, to me it seems a whole lot less convoluted than say, evolution and people believe that.

Anyway, convoluted or not, it's one answer to the question that was posed.

Why, do you have a less convoluted answer?

 

yea, God is omniscient.

 

So then, you don't believe in free will and believe that your live is predestined and that what ever happens to you is fate that can't be changed?