Not really. I mean, that's not what free will presupposes. Free will isn't about what God respects, but about our having options available.

You have argued that God's knowing that Judas would repent did not mean that Judas could not repent. If that's the case, then God's knowing these creatures would not sin would mean that they could sin, just like Judas could repent. What God did or did not do to any other creature has no bearing.

I actually agree with your affirmation here, that these creatures could not sin. You're right about that, but wrong about the reason, which has nothing to do with creatures that don't exist. They wouldn't have the option to sin not because God didn't create other creatures, but because it is impossible to do something that God is certain won't happen.



God's not creating creatures He knew would sin just ensures that those creatures won't sin. The creatures He did create could sin just as much as if the other creatures didn't exist. Otherwise you wind up with the abusrd situation that the creatures who do not sin are dependent upon the existence of creatures who do sin in order to have free will.



When you say, "to me," that means "as I perceive things." But your perception, our perception, of reality is imperfect. God's perception of reality is perfect. God perceives reality as it really is. Therefore if God perceives that there is one future, then, in reality, there is one future. If there is one future, we do not have libertarian free will. We can have the illusion of such, we can say "to me" I have more than one option, but in reality, we don't.



The train could never have been any earlier or any later given that the weather that happened was certain to happen.

The real question that needs to be resolved is what the future is like. Is it like a flower, or like a stem?



That your choices are known is not the salient point. That there is only one future is. If the future is linear, just like that past, like a stem in my analogy, rather than a flower, then there is nor more than one option for the future any more than there is more than one option for the past.



But there's more to the future than just the move you make. How much time you spend to make it is extremely important, as any tournament chess player knows. If you are going to make the same move no matter what, you'd be much better off making it right away, the sooner the better, to have more time left on your clock to think about the moves to come.



I don't know what the last sentence is referring to. When Waggoner taught that Christ could not fail, because he had perfect faith, Ellen White corrected him. She repeatedly emphasized the reality of Christ's being able to fail. She could have expressed this point no more clearly then saying that He took the risk of failure, that He risked all, and so on.

If you know something for certain something bad will not happen, you are not taking a risk that something bad will happen. This is so obvious, I don't know how this could not be seen. It would be like me having a 2-headed coin, and "risking" that tails will come up. It is for this reason that insider trading is illegal, because it eliminates risk. You cannot have perfect foreknowledge (EDF) and risk. It's impossible. These concepts are diametrically opposed.



You are misapplying the passage in Numbers (I assume that's the one you have in mind) if you are trying to apply it to this situation because it has nothing to do with this, which I addressed previously. This passage is speaking about God not being fickle.

Regarding the prophecies of success, in the light of Ellen White's revelations about risk, these prophecies were clearly conditional upon the risk Christ took not coming to pass as failure.

You haven't made any attempt to explain EW 126. It's pretty obvious that pleading for permission, having 3 meetings, struggling to make a decision, and finally allowing Christ to come does not portray the idea of the future you have in mind. How can you make sense of EW 126?



God did. He told Hezekiah to get his things in order because he was going to die.



No, that's not right. It's God's plan to do things He would not otherwise have done because we ask Him. Hezekiah asked God to extend his life, so He did. He added 15 years to Hezekiah's life. If God did not change His intentions, if God were not really planning to allow Hezekiah to die, then He did not add any years to Hezekiah's life.

I think you're not getting the real point of this, which is that God added years to Hezekiah's life. In order for the adding to be real, there *had* to be a change of intent on God's part. Otherwise there was no adding.



The risky thing was what would happen on earth, as Christ was in no danger in heaven. But Christ took the risk when He made the decision to come to earth. How could this possible not be the case? It's always true that you take a risk when you decide to do something that's risky. Can you think of a single exception to this?

Not only did He agree to be an exile of the heavenly courts, but He took the risk of failure and eternal loss. Not "met" but "took".



Correct. "Took," not "met".



He decided to leave when He was on earth? No, He decided to leave when He was in heaven. That's when He took the risk. He didn't decide to leave, and then take a risk at some future time. He took the risk when He decided to leave. To take a risk means to make a decision that involves risk.



Well, if your view of the future were true, there would be no peril, and no risk, because it would have been impossible for Christ to have failed, because no one can do something different than what God knows will happen. That's impossible. All you could say is that Christ, as a human being, felt as if He could fail, felt as if He were taking a risk.

Let's consider this part of the quote again:



How (from your perspective) could this possibly apply to God, given that God was 100% certain that Christ was under no danger?

Tom,
Tickets for yesterday had already been sold out, so I’ll be leaving today. I’ve tried to answer the main points of your post, although I’m tired of repeating myself, and I think there is no way we can solve our disagreements, and no point in going any further with this discussion.


I’ve repeated this too many times, so I’ll say it yet once and let the subject rest. No, the problem was not that God was certain it wouldn’t happen, but that He ensured it wouldn’t happen – He did something to make sure it wouldn’t happen. It’s completely different from just being certain that it wouldn’t happen because He foreknew the future.


Again, obviously we have to decide what we will choose before we actually choose it. Since God knows all our thoughts, He will always know what we will choose. And if we change our mind, He will know that too. An it makes no difference if God knew our decision 5 nanoseconds beforehand or 5 billion years beforehand. So I don’t see your argument as valid. You can try to confuse things by saying that the future has many elements, but I see the future, just like the past and the present, as made up of decisions, and each decision can be analyzed individually. So this is another point on which we won’t agree.


This doesn’t affect the fact that the train could have arrived later or earlier in relation to the time it left.


Yes, there is just one option – the option that I will choose, just like in the past – there is the option that I chose.


I refer to this passage, quoted in previous discussions:

“Ages before His incarnation, Christ distinctly chose His position. He foresaw His life of humiliation, His rejection and crucifixion, His victory over satanic agencies, His victory over death and the grave. He saw the world flooded with light and life, and heard the song of triumph sung by the millions rescued from the hold of Satan.” {1NL 41.7}


In the case of the three hebrews we have perfect foreknowledge and risk, something that can’t be contradicted.


I have explained it before many times. Making a decision and implementing it are two different things. It was very difficult for God, loving His Son as He loved, to implement the decision the Godhead had made ages before, to let His Son be separated from Him and suffer under the hands of Satan as He would have to suffer.


You are not being coherent. Why then do God at times says “No” to our requests? If it had been God’s purpose for Hezekiah to die at that moment, no amount of prayer would have availed. That was what happened with Moses at the borders of the promised land.


I’m not understanding your point. Do you take a risk when you decide to do a parachute jump or when you do the parachute jump? I would say, at the moment of the decision, that you decided to take the risk, and at the moment of the jump, that you took the risk. But even if you apply it to the decision, the moment you run the risk is the moment you do the risky (perilous) thing. Risk refers to peril. When there is peril, there is risk. That’s why the three Hebrews’s lives were at stake, even though God knew they wouldn’t die.


If we infer from the text that what a human parent feels is what God felt, I would say, again, as I have said above, that God trembled at the thought of letting His Son meet life’s peril, being tempted and tortured by Satan. What would you feel seeing your son suffer what Christ suffered in the desert, in Gethsemane, and on the cross? Was Christ’s suffering real or not?

Rosangela's post makes perfect sense to me.

The EGW quote, quoted by Rosangela, also says it very clearly.

Christ saw that He would be victorious, therefore, how do we make the risk of failure compatible with the fact that He saw He would be victorious? I think we need to place the two quotes together and look at them together in their own respective contexts to see if we can come up with an answer.

Daryl, many times Ellen White emphasized that the risk Christ took was real. When Waggoner said that Christ could not have failed because He had perfect faith, EGW corrected Him. She said that Christ took the risk of failure and eternal loss, that for our redemption, heaven itself was imperiled. That God permitted Christ to come at the risk of failure and eternal loss, comparing God's experience with a human father who trembles as his child faces life's peril.

If you look at EW 126, it's very clear that the idea of the future that MM and Rosangela are suggesting couldn't possibly be true. For your convenience, I'll reproduce it for you here:



Can you explain why 3 meetings would be necessary, why Jesus would have to plead for permission, if God knew from all eternity just exactly what was going to happen at this precise moment, and what He was going to do? If He knew He was going to give Jesus permission, and Jesus knew that too (being God), why was Jesus pleading for it?

Regarding that Christ foresaw Himself being victorious, this is very simple to understand. Provided Christ was successful, He foresaw what that result would look like.

However, both God and Christ *also* foresaw what His failure would look like too, and Ellen White has also written about that, saying, for example, that the stone never would have been removed from the tomb.

Rosangela, I'll respond later to the points that were made, but I think the major disconnect going on here is in not recognizing our difference as being ontological as opposed to epistemological. Both of us understand that God perfectly foreknows the future, in accordance with how the future really is. We just disagree as to what the future is.

You believe the future is a single thing, like the past or present. It's a single line that continues.

I believe that the future is not a single thing. It is fundamentally different from the past or present. God's foreknowledge of the future is qualitatively different than His knowledge of the past because the future itself is qualitatively different than the past.

I recognize that we are not going to agree on these points. We have different ideas as to what reality is.

However, there are certain logical inconsistencies that I see in your view, which I've been trying to bring to light. For example, if the future is fundamentally like the past, then we can no more change it that we can change the past. We cannot have libertarian free will for exactly the reason that Luther pointed out. "What God knows will happen, must necessarily happen, and therefore we do not have (libertarian) free will" was Luther's essential idea (I know this isn't word by word perfect, but this was his thought).

There are also philosophical and theological issues to consider. For example, why would God create a being He knew would cause sin to occur? Why not simply refrain from creating him? I don't see the logic in your assertion that God would not be respecting free will in so doing. Creatures who do not exist have not free will to be respected. The creatures that do exist have no less free will had God not created creatures that would sin than otherwise.

Also, if your idea is true, it means that free will is dependent upon the existence of sin.

Another objection is that, under your view, it was impossible for God to create a universe in which sin would not come into being, once He decided to create beings with free will.

Also there are logical impossibilities such as God's permitting His Son to come at the risk of failure and eternal loss while simultaneously knowing that there was no risk of failure or eternal loss, being 100% certain that Christ would not fail. Another one is that Christ could have come in the past while there is a certain date that He will come in the future.

All of these difficulties go away if we simply recognize that the future is as we perceive it to be; fundamentally different from the past, pregnant with possibilities, including risk.

Tom,

Have you ever considered that its a fault of logic that says if God knows what we will do then we have no option of doing anything else? What if its a fallacy considering the difference between the necessity of consequence and the necessity of the thing consequent. What if God's knowledge really is non causative? Looking at the Biblical data shouldnt we realize that the future is open as far as our free will is concerned and that has nothing to do with whether or not God knows the future(even though the Word affirms that He does). At the same time there is only one future with a linear history. I dont understand this concept of in all possible futures Peter denies Christ or in all possible futures we wont sin in the new earth. Doesnt the very meaning of all possible futures imply anything that a free will agent could possibly do? A Roman guard had the free will to walk by Peter and kill him before he had a chance to deny Christ. Or the fact that Psalms mentions the denial means there were countless possible senarios where Peter might not have even been born. This is a confusing topic for me and Im dont pretend to have answers Im just throwing out some questions as they come. They arent loaded.

Aaron

Thanks for your questions, Aaron. It's an interesting and important subject.

Before getting to your specific questions, I'd like to share what I think is the easiest way of conceptualizing the idea I'm trying to communicate.

Imagine that you were as smart as God, in terms of knowing everything about everybody and everything, and knowing all the laws of physics, with perfect abilities to visualize, and no limitations in your ability to consider multiple things at once, even trillions of things. However, you have no crystal-ball like powers to see the future. This is how I think God sees the future.

That is, the future to God, like us, is something which hasn't happened yet, and something that can come about in different ways. However, because God is so intelligent, with unlimited powers of visualization and keeping in mind trillions of possibilities, there is a great deal indeed that God knows about the future. In addition, God is all-powerful, so He can accomplish anything He wants to. When we combine all this, it's not difficult to comprehend how God could prophesy so accurately without needing a crystal-ball like power to be able to do so.

So let's consider the case of Peter. God, with no crystal ball, but knowing everything about Peter, would know that Peter would deny Christ. God, also with unlimited intelligence, would be able to foresee every possible future, knowing all the free will decisions His creatures might make. In the option of the soldier killing Peter, God, being all-powerful, would simply not allow that, and would, of course, foresee His own actions in so preventing.

The possible futures that God sees that I was referring to are the possible futures that could actually happen, because God would be allowing whatever it was He foresaw to happen, and because free agents would actually make (with some probability greater than 0) the choices He foresaw.

In the case of Peter, the reason He chose to deny Christ was due to a flaw in character, which, of course, God knew.



The real issue involved is an ontological one, not an epistemological one, which is another way of saying that it involves reality and not the perception of reality. That is, the problem is not that God's knowing something causes us to do something, but that God's knowing something implies something about reality, and if reality is the way that is implied *then* was do not have any options. To put it simply, if reality is that we only have one option, then we do not have more than one option. That is, if the future consists of only one thing, which is that which will happen, then we have no more options in the future than we do in the past or the present. In order for us to have more options in the future than in the past or present, the future must be fundamentally different than the past or the present. Not different in the sense that we can't see the future and don't know what will happen, but different in a more fundamental sense.

I don't want to say too much all at once, so I'll stop here and see if the above makes sense to you.