Daily Archives: 20/08/2011

A Flatland analogy of God’s foresight

Flatland has often been used as an analogy for space-time. Flatlanders live in 2-dimensional space, like drawings on a page. Height, for them, is a difficult dimension for them to imagine, as time is for us. But they can move and act freely within their two-dimensional landscape. Imagine, then, a Flatland in which height is a real dimension through which Flatlanders move unconciously and inexorably, as we do through time. You could picture the “real” Flatland as a cylinder slowly sinking through the relativistic “area-height continuum”. In the Flatland scheme of things, a Flatlander is born at some point in height c`, at area coordinates ab. He moves feeely round … Continue reading

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More exploration of creation in Open Theism – 2

Let’s look now at whether God’s foreordination or foreknowledge actually does destroy human freewill, as Open Theology claims. • How unconstrained, in reality, is our freewill anyway? We are limited by physical laws, senses, intellect, strength, courage, education, finance, childhood conditioning, social position, external constraint, sickness, addiction, insanity, disability and death from exercising our wills freely. Yet are these ever cited as evidences against freewill? So we consider our wills free even though multiple constraints prevent many of our volitions becoming realised.

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More exploration of creation in Open Theism – 1

Open Theology’s propositions Open Theism’s axiomatic starting point is that of the libertarian view of free-will, that is that man is essentially, and unchangeably, free to choose all his actions independent of any external, or even internal, influence. This comes directly from its Arminian roots, though such a view developed gradually and was not clearly stated in the original Five Articles of the Remonstrants. This libertarian view is extended in evolutionary versions of OT to the extreme that the whole of creation must possess this kind of freedom, or God be a despot. After this emerge the following propositions:

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