Reply #7: I don't blame you for being confused, since... [View All]

your questions have been dividing believers for centuries. Some early Gnostics took your idea and came up with something akin to predestination, which eventially became doctrine with Calvin and others. Catholics, Orthodox, and most Protestants don't go that way and think predestination is heretical, or at least just plain wrong.

Although there are some Biblical claims that God is omniscient, that doean't necessarily mean omniscient as we might think it to be-- since none of us really know the nature of God, we don't really know what God does or doesn't know. We also don't know how godlike understandings of time and space may differ from ours.

In the simplest terms, a fortuneteller may know that something will probably happen, but does not cause that thing to happen. In the same way, God may know of future events, but knows what we will do to cause those events and does nothing to affect the outcome. In the end, it is our decisions that affect things, not what God may or may not know about them.

Now, it's easy to come up with Heisenberg, Schroedinger's cat and other such stuff to argue that simply knowing about the future affects it in some way. That may or may not be true with God, but we still have to act as if it was our own will that is decisive or we just get ourselves into a morass of circular thinking. The angels dancing on the head of a pin stuff that's fun but really just exercise. Christian zen.

It's also easy to look at a few Gospel passages and start asking pointed questions. Christ prophecying that Peter would deny him and the whole Judas thing seem to indicate that God is controlling, not just knowing. Were these self-fulfilling prohecies? Could be, but we don't really know if Christ actually said these things or the early writers just stuck them in there to make another point.