Omnipotence, omniscience, and predestination

**TheTrainee** · August 16, 2009, 05:49 AM

Concerning the Judeo-Christian God, can He be omnipotent without being omniscient, and if He is omniscient and omnipotent, how can there not be predestination? If He is aware of all things, including the future, then surely, if He is all powerful, He controls the future and then our lives must be predestined? What about free will? If He doesn't control every feature of the future then He is not omnipotent?

**Tuor** · August 16, 2009, 01:02 PM

Originally Posted by TheTrainee

Concerning the Judeo-Christian God, can He be omnipotent without being omniscient, and if He is omniscient and omnipotent, how can there not be predestination? If He is aware of all things, including the future, then surely, if He is all powerful, He controls the future and then our lives must be predestined? What about free will? If He doesn't control every feature of the future then He is not omnipotent?

That made my head swirl reading that.

I'm pretty sure that you don't need an answer from me though because you're already correct in arguing with yourself.

**VALIS** · August 16, 2009, 01:53 PM

Originally Posted by TheTrainee

Concerning the Judeo-Christian God, can He be omnipotent without being omniscient, and if He is omniscient and omnipotent, how can there not be predestination? If He is aware of all things, including the future, then surely, if He is all powerful, He controls the future and then our lives must be predestined? What about free will? If He doesn't control every feature of the future then He is not omnipotent?

This is a question arminians and papists must answer.

**chriscase** · August 17, 2009, 04:26 PM

If God is omnipotent, then it can grant any conceivable trait to anything, including "free will". Unless you can show that free will is, by definition, contradictory to the omnipotence of God. It wouldn't surprise me, since omni-* properties tend to be highly paradoxical. The big question is not so much whether the paradoxes exist, but what we conclude from them.

**basics** · August 18, 2009, 06:37 AM

chriscase,

This would be appropriate if there was such a thing as free-will. Men like to think there is but God's word never infers that man is free. Indeed seventeen times the word is used in all Scripture, sixteen about offerings and once about permission to go up to Jerusalem to make an offering. Otherwise the word is totally silent on that which man thinks he hears or reads.

But to elaborate a little Paul explains the extent to which his freedom goes as being one under Law and in bondage to sin. Whatever he knew to be the right thing to do he found that whatever he did do it was not that which he knew. Why? Because the sin in him was stronger than his will and without a Saviour to rectify that he would still be in bondage.

**chriscase** · August 18, 2009, 08:00 AM

Hi basics,
I'll leave that one to the biblical scholars, but isn't there some debate on this question within Christianity? IIRC wasn't this one of the big questions that protestants and catholics disagreed about during the Reformation? Grade school history was a while ago for me, but I seem to remember something about that.

In any case, I'm not sure this really addresses the OP. He seems to think he has found a paradox, but I'm not sure about that one either.

**Taiji** · August 18, 2009, 09:24 AM

I think freewill is an illusion but that it is also a practical model.

You can get a lot done while believing in freewill, particularly with regard to criminality.

I've heard that our freewill is more likely a chance to veto what 'feels natural to do' than any kind of a constructing of a new nature...

**~~Ummon~~** · August 18, 2009, 09:26 AM

Truth is that which works, said Gautama Buddha.

**Claudius Gothicus** · August 18, 2009, 02:02 PM

And with it comes one of the greatest contradictions ever in judeo-Christianity, we have freewill but then why does god know our every movement, therefore there's no freewill or there's no judeo-christian god.