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Original question, posed on Facebook by a member of the group, Theology for the Thinking Believer:
It seems to me that if God is omniscient, then predestination must be woven into creation. If God knows everything (no exceptions), then he had to know what he was creating when he created, down to the most minuscule detail. And how could he create without creating what he wanted?
So, I believe we have volition; we can choose what we want for breakfast, for instance. But whatever we choose, as trivial as such decision is, is already known by God. So, if God intended Judas to betray Jesus, he would make a person that would do that not out of coercion, but out of the person’s nature. Judas would be created a man who wanted to betray Jesus by his own volition.
I know, it seems kind of contradictory, but how could you come to any other conclusion?
So, this is my question. Is God omniscient? I have always thought that was a fundamental attribute of God. I guess I still do. Do you?
That was a perceptive post and deserves a thoughtful response. The fact is, I’ve been thinking about that general subject of God’s sovereignty since I wrote Implications of God’s Omnipresence and Eternity in Space-Time two years ago, and my opinion has flipped as a result.
God’s absolute sovereignty is a given for me. I was convinced that God not only can, as He wishes, control every last molecular movement in His cosmos. Absolute sovereignty, though, only requires that He can, not that He must. To say that He must contradicts His sovereignty. Therefore, the question is, “Does He, or doesn’t He?” I’m looking at physics for a clue.
A stepwise approach to my thinking
I should warn you that what follows is speculative philosophy. I have no great thinker or book to guide me here, and I’ve never run across these ideas anywhere.
My preconceptions
- That the eternal, triune God is the creator of all that exists.
- That, as stated above, God is absolutely sovereign over all that exists.
- That God has the option to not exert His sovereignty in any particular instance.
- That the canonical Scriptures, as originally written, in their original languages, are inerrant and trustworthy, penned by human hands under divine inspiration.
- That inerrancy does not preclude normal human literary devices, including symbolic language, figures of speech, numeric approximation, paraphrasing, and poetic exaggeration.
- That Creation itself stands beside Scripture to declare God’s glory (Psalm 19:1–4b; Romans 1:19–20).
- That God endowed humanity with five senses with which to witness His majesty as revealed in both Scripture and Creation.
Creation
I’m a big-bang creationist. I’ve written several instalments of a series on the subject of creation so far and will probably add to that list.
I believe that God, for His own purposes, formulated a set of goals, determined how He would accomplish them, and then designed the physical laws that would make them happen, and happen with maximum elegance, for His glory. He set the process into motion, ex nihilo, by creating a compact embryo of unimaginably dense energy at a single point within the area now occupied by our universe. As designed, that embryo then began expanding and differentiating into an astoundingly complex array of particles, forces, and time itself that, on His schedule, eventually coalesced into what we see (and don’t see) today. If we extoll the wonder of a human embryo developing into a fully developed human adult, why not the same for our unparalleled universe?
At some time either before or after creating the cosmos, God also created the myriads of celestial beings who He tasked with its administration, just as He later tasked humanity with doing the same thing on earth.
Because God is sovereign over His creation, He transcends both space and time and is unbounded by them. He exists simultaneously in all of space and all of time, so He doesn’t have to “move” to take it all in. Consequently, what appears to us as having taken some 13.8 billion years to develop actually was instantaneous to Him.
Quantum spacetime
Physicists today can look at “large” (as well as utterly humongous) objects and, given enough knowledge about their nature, determine more or less “how they tick”, and from that make reasonably accurate predictions about their future behavior and extrapolate backwards to determine what they have done before we were watching.
Quantum Mechanics tells us, though, that the universe is, at its smallest scale, statistical in nature (because God chose to design it that way). That means that it is fundamentally impossible (again, by God’s design) to predict how a subatomic particle will move or even where it is in the future or to determine what it did in the past.
For example, we know that atoms consist, roughly, of protons and neutrons in a nucleus, with electrons “in orbit” around them. In the recent past, though we couldn’t see electrons, we pictured them as moving in orderly circular orbits. The reasoning was that once we’re able to determine where it is and how fast it is moving, predicting its motion will be simple math. See the schematic drawing of this “Bohr Model”, below.
Nope. It turns out that no matter how powerful or precise our measuring equipment becomes, it will never be possible to simultaneously measure both the position and speed of a particle. One of God’s physical laws, now called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, after German physicist Werner Heisenberg, utterly precludes that possibility! The best we can possibly do is consider a probability distribution to indicate a range of locations that it might be. The solid shapes in the schematic below represent the most likely position at which to find a given electron.
You can’t begin to imagine how spooky that is to scientists. And upsetting! It had long been believed that the universe is deterministic. That means that if you somehow know where every particle in the universe is, and every force acting on them, you can predict the future with absolute certainty. Instead of deterministic, we now know that the universe is probabilistic.
Even Albert Einstein resisted that truth for most of his life. He couldn’t bring himself to believe that “God plays dice with the universe.”
But that is precisely what God does!
Quantum Macrostructure
How does the quantum state of an electron (or any other very small particle) effect the overall universe? The quantum position and energy state of a particle determine many interactive effects.
For example, with respect to an electron, how it reacts with other particles including its own atomic nucleus, the atom’s charge distribution and how it bonds with other atoms to form ions and molecules, how molecules bond to form solids, liquids and gasses, and so on. The end result is that the net effect of the separate states of individual particles combine to define the structure of every object in the universe.
Think of it like the well-known hypothetical “butterfly effect”: A butterfly in South America flaps its wings, setting in motion barely perceptible currents in the air around it. Those currents effect the air around them, and so on, until the end result is a category 5 hurricane in the North Atlantic.
That is the way God designed the universe, and it means that He intended for it to develop spontaneously to produce in the end something that He engineered in the beginning. But with a measure of chance deliberately built in!
Predicting the future
Because the “fine grain” of the universe is statistical, it is only roughly predictable, even by God. I think that was His intention! For one thing, it better illustrates the elegance of what He made. For another, since He is the only truly transcendent being, He is the only being who knows the future. It can’t be predicted; but God doesn’t have to predict it because He can see it!
A little nudge
Implicit in this scenario is an assumption that the development of the universe can’t happen exactly the way God scripted it. Galaxies collide, stars explode or get sucked into black holes, planets get wasted by asteroids, solar winds, and so on.
God is not surprised by any of the myriads of celestial “accidents” that are constantly happening. Most don’t concern Him because they are part of the design and have purpose built into them. If He sees something coming up that He doesn’t want, or if He wants something to happen that isn’t, a mere flick of His pinky sets everything back on course. Or a detachment of angels is sent to handle it.
Our unique solar system
Astronomers used to assume, and some still do, that there are billions of solar systems just like ours in the cosmos. If that’s the case, then “surely there are millions of civilizations out there.” Well, even if science had a clue how non-life can evolve into life (call me a skeptic…), I’m afraid I have bad news.
It turns out that almost all stars have orbiting planets, and to date we have discovered and remotely “explored” over 5,000, but sad to say, not a single one is anything like good old earth, and it’s a stretch to think that any of them could possibly support any kind of life form as advanced as a virus. It looks like our own life-friendly system is far, far from typical.
My guess is that about 4.5 billion years ago, God picked out a young G-type Main Sequence star in the Milky Way Galaxy and molded its accretion disk to His own specifications, placing a rocky planet of suitable mass with a liquid iron core (to provide a protective magnetosphere) at a perfect spot in the planetary “Goldilocks Zone“. When the time was right, He seeded that planet with life, once again to His own specs.
Procreation
The Psalms, of course, are inspired Scripture, and they tell us a huge amount about God, but I don’t think they are necessarily a reliable source of doctrine, because, by nature, ancient Hebrew poetry is flowery and often exaggerated. They are, in fact, songs. Songs of worship are designed to lavishly praise, and even to flatter.
We know that God is imminently invested in each of us individually. Sparrows, too, and by implication all of earth’s fauna. When the psalmist says, “You formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13), or when we acknowledge God as “our creator”, does that mean that each child is an original act of creation?
Personally, I don’t think so. God devised the plan. He created the ancestors. I’m certain that He adjusts the genetics from time to time. But procreation is a well-understood biological process. Human procreation is very similar to that in any other mammal. We understand conception, cell division, DNA and genetic inheritance.
If we say that each child is a unique creation, then we’re acknowledging that God is blessing or cursing each child at conception and early gestation, individually. If that’s what He does, then so be it, and I know He has the potter’s right and a good reason for His choices. He can’t be arbitrary or unfair. Still, this plan doesn’t ring true for me. I don’t think that a consistent hermeneutic requires that a song, even an inspired song by a godly man, be theologically meaningful in any deep sense.
If I’m wrong, I’m wrong, and I’m not suggesting that God never intervenes. In fact, I’m certain that He does. When it suits His plan.
Freewill
We’ve arrived!
Quantum theory is not only spooky, but also counterintuitive, and intellectually it seems sloppy and poorly designed. Why would God choose to do things this way?!
Well, for one thing, it assures that only God knows the future! Of course, He has the option of passing that information along to others when He so desires. Which is how prophecy works.
But the key answer, I think, is that quantum uncertainty is what makes freewill work! Not being a neuroscientist, I’m not qualified to work out the mechanism, but it seems to me that by taking deterministic biophysics off the table, God is saying, “Okay, I’m not programming you, you’re free to configure your own path through life.”
Foreknowledge and predestination
Romans 8:29 (ESV)
[29] For those whom he foreknew (προγινώσκω, proginóskó) he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.
Teachers who hold to the view that everything is determined by God in advance often interpret proginóskó as “fore-ordained“, as in, “decided in advance.” How does that differ from “predestined“? By dictionary definition, it really doesn’t differ, but the way I’ve heard John MacArthur Jr. explain it is that after God decides something in advance (foreknowledge), He then prepares (predestination) them to actually do it. For example, if He decides to make you a Christian, He sends a soul-winner. Much like He decided to save Jonah, so He “prepared a great fish.”
That makes some logical sense. I accept the Jonah account as is. But I was always bothered by the fact that I could never find any justification for interpreting proginóskó as anything other than plain old passive foreknowledge. Searching for it briefly tonight in several common English translations, every one of them renders it as foreknowledge: in this verse and in Acts 26:5; Romans 11:2; 1 Peter 1:20; and 2 Peter 3:17.
So, I have flipped back to where I was as a much younger man. Based on something that God knew about me from His view across time and space, He drew me to Himself when I was a child of about 8, and then He set about imparting my spiritual gift(s) and guiding my education and experience towards a goal He set for me.
Next in series: Exploring the Garden of Eden
The Back of My Mind 