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Diploid said:
Thus, God can perceive something happening in time, react to it, and yet remain unchanged, for he perceives and reacts to the temporal event from the eternal now.

By the way, if you are one of those people whom seem to enjoy trying to find ways to make things work without the use of logic, this argument is not for you (or rather none are for you because arguments are based on the principal of logic!)

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Then , it must be logical for you to conclude that dan is not arguing with the poster. hahaha I came to that same conclusion.

I percieved him to be merely creating an illustration for understanding and further consideration purposes.

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shroomydan said:
The changeable vs. unchangeable paradox is the basis of my whole proof.

Your error lies in failing to understand what it means to be eternal.

Not only is the eternal being without a beginning or an end in time, his existence is larger than, and encompasses, the entirety of the space/time continuum. The eternal being possesses the complete fullness of his life in a single moment of infinite duration.

The past, the present, and the future are laid out before God like cards on a table. He sees all moments of time from his eternal now, and when he acts, he acts in the eternal now, yet the effects of his action are felt at different moments in time.

The eternal now is simultaneous with every moment in time. Imagine a bicycle wheel. Eternity is the hub and time is the rim. Every moment in time is simultaneous with eternity, in the same way that every position on the rim is connected to the hub by a spoke. While all of time is simultaneous with eternity, all moments in time remain separated from one another in the temporal realm, just as 45 degrees is distinct from 90 degrees on the wheel.

When God acts from eternity, his effects are felt in time in a chronological order, yet from the eternal perspective God remains unchanged.

Thus, God can perceive something happening in time, react to it, and yet remain unchanged, for he perceives and reacts to the temporal event from the eternal now.

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OK first off i said from the beggining that this is an argument i ran across on the internet. Thus it is not mine.

And now to respond to your responce. Let me describe what Dan is saying in lamen terms for those who dont understand poetry Since God is eternal (or we can just replace this with his omniscient property) he knows everything past, present, and future, or as Dan said, he is living in the eternal now, or within all 3 dimensions of time. If God knows everything past, present, and future, he then is aware of the change before it happens in our existence space-time and thus never really changes..............

Congratulations. You get my respect. I've only seen one other person crack this, a minister from Primeminestry.com (and beside me of course ). And yes yes, im guilty of saying no one had ever cracked it before. I'd like to speak with the originator of the argument to see what he has to say about the omniscience objection.

ShroomyDan.....The problem is that if we grant God omniscience in order to object to he previous argument, and this creates other problems such as the conflict between it and free will.

Here is the the problem in short.

Note: I am a lazy bastard and decided to copy and paste from a known webpage rather than writing it myself as i am very slow at that.


"Suppose it were known, by someone else, what you are going to choose to do tomorrow. Wouldn't that entail that tomorrow you must do what it was known in advance that you would do? In spite of your deliberating and planning, in the end, all is futile: you must choose exactly as it was earlier known that you would. The supposed exercise of your free will is ultimately an illusion. Historically, the tension between foreknowledge and the exercise of free will was addressed in a religious context. According to orthodox views in the West, God was claimed to be omniscient (and hence in possession of perfect foreknowledge) and yet God was supposed to have given humankind free will. Attempts to solve the apparent contradiction often involved attributing to God special properties, e.g. being 'outside' of time. However, the trouble with such solutions is that they are generally unsatisfactory on their own terms. Even more serious is the fact that they leave untouched the problem posed not by God's foreknowledge but that of any human being. Do human beings have foreknowledge? Certainly, of at least some events and behaviors. Thus we have a secular counterpart of the original problem. A human being's foreknowledge, exactly as would God's, of another's choices would seem to preclude the exercise of human free will. Various ways of trying to solve the problem ? e.g. by putting constraints on the truth-conditions for statements, or by 'tightening' the conditions necessary for knowledge ? are examined and shown not to work. Ultimately the alleged incompatibility of foreknowledge and free will is shown to rest on a subtle logical error. When the error, a modal fallacy, is recognized, and remedied, the problem evaporates."

Source: http://www.iep.utm.edu/f/foreknow.htm#section8