> You don’t seem to appreciate the philosophical question involved with foreknowledge of the future.

I actually do.

> There is a concept in philosophy that foreknowledge of the future defeats free will. It is the foreknowledge itself that defeats free will, and therefore, causes the future actions.

Yes, I'm aware of this argument, but I find it lacking. Omniscience is more governed by theology than philosophy. When we consider the attributes of God, we consider how the Bible describes and defines omniscience. When we say that God is omniscient, we are undeniably talking about all things that are proper objects of knowledge. For instance, God doesn't know what it's like to learn, he doesn't know what it's like not to know everything, he doesn't know what would happen if an unstoppable force met an immoveable wall. These are absurdities. By omniscience we mean that God knows himself and all other things, whether they are past, present, or future, and he knows them exhaustively and to both extents of eternity. Such knowledge cannot come about through reasoning, process, empiricism, induction or deduction, and it certainly doesn't embrace the absurd, the impossible, or the self-contradictory.

To complicate the problem of defining omniscience, it can't be established what knowledge really is and how it all works. What are the principal grounds of knowledge, and particularly of God's knowledge? Does he evaluate propositions? Does he perceive? What about intuitions, reasoning, logic, and creativity? We consider knowledge to be the result of neurobiological events, but what is it for God?

But let's continue on to the true issue at hand: Is an omniscient being capable of thought? Of course he is, because thoughts are more than just knowledge, and they are more than just evaluating propositions, and the Bible defines God's mind as...

[list][*] creating new information (Isa. 40-48)
[*] showing comprehension
[*] gaining new information (Gn. 22.12, but it's not new knowledge)
[*] He orders the cosmos (Gn. 1)
[*] He designs (viz., the plan for the temple)
[*] He deliberates (Hos. 11.8)
[*] He can reason with people (the whole book of Malachi; Gn. 18.17-33)
[*] He can change a course of action (Ex. 32; 1 Sam. 8-12)
[*] He remembers (all over the place)[/list]

None of these conditions negates His omniscience. Generation of thoughts is not a process that negates His omniscience. If God is going to be responsive to human free will, which the Bible indicates He is (Jer. 18.1-12, Jonah 3), then thought does not imply a change of divine characteristics. He is able to have omniscience and humans are simultaneously able to have free will. The two concepts are not mutually exclusive or universally negating.

Is God's omniscience propositional or non-propositional? Can God have beliefs (since beliefs can be true, and beliefs are different than knowledge)? Are God's beliefs occurrent or dispositional? As you can see, this can all get pretty deep pretty quickly. At root, a cognitive faculty is simply a particular ability to know something, and since God knows everything, his cognitive faculties are both complete and operational. Perhaps we can define God's omniscience as:

[list][*] Having knowledge of all true propositions and having no false beliefs
[*] Having knowledge that is not surpassed or surpassable.[/list]

You don’t seem to appreciate the philosophical question involved with foreknowledge of the future. It is a relatively foreign concept, since we don’t actually have knowledge of the future. You are left with your normal understanding of knowledge.

Science has given us great powers to predict a great many things. But it is only a prediction. You do not actually know the future. You are predicting, based on past observations, that the sun will come up tomorrow. That is a very important distinction.

There is a concept in philosophy that foreknowledge of the future defeats free will. It is the foreknowledge itself that defeats free will, and therefore, causes the future actions.

These are the things that come up when you believe in a myth that there is a omniscient god. You have to grapple with the consequences of perfect knowledge of the future — a thing that doesn’t really exist, thereby causing confusion.

I AM paying attention, and I'm not wrong. No matter what I know or how much I know, it does makes you do ANYTHING, and it can NEVER make you do anything. You are an independent agent, and my knowledge has no power over you. Even if I had complete, perfect, and omniscient knowledge, it has no power over you.

I know the sun will come up tomorrow. I'm not involved in that causation.

I know you're at a computer. I'm not involved in that causation.

I know if you want to continue to live you need to drink water sometime before several days pass. I'm not involved in that causation.

Knowledge cannot cause anything. Knowledge is a completely different entity than power.

>Yes, but the point is that knowledge is not causative.

This is wrong. You are not paying attention. Knowledge of the future IS CAUSATIVE. This is not a controversial point in philosophy.You are completely and catastrophically wrong about that.

> You are comparing the knowledge of the god you believe it, which is omniscient and omnipotent, to your guess that a child will not order a pickle.

Yes, but the point is that knowledge is not causative. That the issue of God and prayer are significant vs. a child and pickles being mundane is irrelevant. The idea is that knowledge can never be causative, so the fact that God knows something is not a causal mechanism for my behavior.

> God’s knowledge is something different.

The depth and level of God's knowledge is different, but the character of knowledge is not. Knowledge is different from predestination, which is a power of causality. The Bible speaks of predestination with regard to salvation but never with regard to anything else. The Bible doesn't teach determinism in life, or in prayer. Our lives are not planned, our behavior is not robotic, and our will is not a false reality.

> You say that’s not “prearranged,” but with god being omnipotent and omniscient, I don’t think you can say that.

I can say it, and it's meaningful. In the Bible, God's power is something He can turn off and on. He can choose to use it or not use it. He can use it more in one situation and less in another. If God's power were always on and always on "full power," life (and theology) would be extremely different than it is. He would just blow us away continually. But that is not the case, and so His omnipotence doesn't make anything prearranged.

And since knowledge can never be causative, even complete and perfect knowledge, it doesn't make anything prearranged, either. If God is able to see all of history in the present tense (there is no such thing as past or future with Him), then His ability to see can be markedly different from causative power, where God would, say, cause an earthquake to bring a sector of the walls of Jericho down to allow the armies of Israel to enter the city at that place. Knowledge never causes an earthquake, only power does. But since power can be applied strategically and in measure, even God's power doesn't mandate any prearrangment.

I think you are making a distinction without a difference. You are comparing the knowledge of the god you believe it, which is omniscient and omnipotent, to your guess that a child will not order a pickle. You could, I assume, imagine a situation where the child does order a pickle. All the child would need to do is say, “I’ll have it with pickles.” You simply cannot be 100.000% sure the kid won’t get the pickles.

God’s knowledge is something different. He would have known you were going to type that response to me, and while it seemed to you like you chose to do it, it was predestined to happen, since god knew it would happen.

You say that’s not “prearranged,” but with god being omnipotent and omniscient, I don’t think you can say that. You are essentially saying both that god knows the future in every possibly detail, but that we are not predestined to that future. I don’t think you can say both.

Statistics are impossible with regard to prayer. It's like saying, "How many miles are there in a pound?" Prayer is not a scientific pursuit because there are too many parameters and unknowns to structure a reliable experiment, and therefore statistical analysis and reliability is out of reach. For instance, here are a few things you'd have to know to scientifically assess the effectiveness of prayer:

[list]1. We have to be able to isolate those events on Earth that are actions of God and those that aren't. If we can't create clean categories here, our data may be tainted.

2. We have to be able to guarantee that only certain people (and none others anywhere else in the world) are praying in a certain way for a certain outcome. Any stray prayers unknown to the researchers may skew the data. In addition, we would have to know that absolutely no one in the world was praying for those in the control group. One pray-er, again, may skew the data, and therefore any statistical conclusions. If we can't guarantee exactly who's praying with absolute certainty, then the data may be invalidated.

3. We have to establish objective criteria for what constitutes an answer to prayer and what doesn't. After all, in the Bible God at times uses very normal people and normal circumstances to answer prayer. If we can't define clearly what constitutes an answer to prayer, then the data is invalid. Also, sometimes God answers prayer not in the ways people prayed, but in other ways to answer their prayer by arriving at a different end by a different means, but still what they prayed for. We'd have to be able to define that. And sometimes God answers prayer partially. We have to be able to define that.[/list]

We cannot expect reliable and repeatable results suitable for scientific and statistical analysis. Prayer isn't like that. We can't expect to be the ones holding the cards and managing the output. Prayer isn't like that. We can't expect remarkably better results from a scientific and statistical viewpoint. Prayer isn't like that either.

We know that God answers prayer didactically, not empirically. Causation (of any kind) can't be measure empirically without fully isolating variables and replicating results. Revelation ( = being told by God) is the only way we know ANYTHING about what God is like or how God acts. Generally, when we affirm something as an "answer to prayer," this is not on the basis of an absence of physical/biological efficient causes, but on the belief that God works by means of those causes.

There is also the truth that the purpose of prayer is not to motivate God to do something. God does what God will do according to His wisdom, which is not ultimately contingent on anything that anyone else does. He can choose to respond to human input or choose to ignore it, depending on many conditions and complexities. This is a corollary of a divine attribute called Aseity. Christians who know their theology should already affirm this.

So if you were trying to produce a defeater for Christian theology, this isn't one. I would have given the same answer if you'd just asked, "How does prayer work?" As I hear it, your conception of "God answers prayer" is people who pray for things [would] get them at a rate better than random chance would predict (ah, statistics again). You KNOW that this is not how a Christian understands "God answers prayer." So now this is the question you need to ask: What use do you have for a God who will not give you things you ask him for?

If your answer turns out to be "none at all," than nothing I (or anything in Christianity) can say can help you. We do not serve God because we get things from him. God cures our sins and makes us like him, and that has nothing to do with answering our prayers (unless that is what we are praying for, which it should be, and note that these things can't be empirically measured). If the answer is anything else, however, this issue is really a technicality. Why do we pray if not to motivate God to action? Why does God not make his existence self-evident (in this case by answering prayers?) What is the significance of God hearing and acknowledging our prayers if he does not intend to respond? Theology can answer all of these (some more clearly than others), but these discussions are really only apprehensible after divine existence is established; you can't really debate the character and behavior of something that doesn't exist.

> The Bible is quite clear that God is responsive to prayer

Statistics respectfully disagree.

There's a vast difference between "prearranged" and knowledge of the future. Suppose for the sake of argument that I know you LOOOOOVE chocolate. Every time we go out, you order chocolate ice cream or chocolate dessert or whatever. So today when we go out, I know you're going to order chocolate. I know you; you always do. I haven't made you do it; I haven't prearranged it, but I know.

Suppose I know my child hates pickles, I mean hates. Suppose I know my child loves cookies. Now, when I see my child in a situation having to decide between the two, I know what he/she is going to choose. I know. But I haven't forced that or prearranged it. Knowledge isn't the same as "prearranged."

Now put that scenario into God, who sees all time as present; there is no such thing as "future." His knowledge is complete. His knowledge, also, is not causative (knowledge can never be causative for someone else). My knowledge of something never has power to cause something in someone else. Knowledge is not causative. God sees, but He hasn't prearranged. He doesn't make you make that decision. He knows you deep to the heart, soul, and mind. There is nothing about you prearranged, nothing set in stone, and yet He knows the "future."

> It's not all prearranged, set in stone, and "will do what He wants at the end."

Does this mean god does not know the future?