theastrophysicist

I am beginning to think that taking a class on the philosophy of religion is a mistake when my world view doesn’t contain Him. It is painfully obvious to me that there is no consensus on the nature of God among theistic philosophers; further, I believe that there is unlikely to be one, because of the authors I’ve read so far most cannot articulate their point across without throwing up smoke bombs of convoluted language, unclear assumptions, or vague definitions.

The readings I refer to here are about the incompatibility of omniscience and human free will by Pike, Hasker, Basinger and Stump & Kretzmann, and I will ignore fatalists who believe I am not freely writing this (this just seems absurd from an a posteriori point of view).

How is it possible that such a central problem to the theistic world-view cannot be adequately solved by centuries of thought? The crux of the problem seems to be the fact that God must have a special relationship with time: He is either outside of time or experiences it differently. If so, how are we to comprehend His relationship to our timeline?

It seems that the answer is that we cannot. It is simply a defensive argument against incompatibilists who argue that either God does not exist or is not omniscient (in the normal sense of knowing the future absolutely) or human beings have no free will.

I’m lazy and so I’d rather reject one of the first 2 options than come up with a vague argument for why the 3 propositions MIGHT be compatible, without saying clearly how.

As an aside, it seems that those compatibilists must accept non-local hidden variables in quantum theory (though I can hardly claim to understand what that entails).