I'm not concerned about personal freedom. I'm concerned about the participation of God. If God knows 100% what you're choices are going to be, why would he act? This includes simple events in life, to ultimate salvation.
Do you believe in the Essence vs Energies distinction and what that would imply in regards to this issue? Especially in regards to what you think God can and can not know?
Also, what are your beliefs about huperousia?
Don't forget what my friend wrote in his blog post:
quote:
"The way is not down, but up and so far “up” that we get off the spectrum entirely. If we combine the e/e distinction with the doctrine of huperousia there is another way out of the problem, or at least a plausible line of philosophical development for one. Part of the problem is change and error. Roughly, if God’s knowledge were to change, then it seems God in fact didn’t know and was in error. Given Divine perfection, this isn’t possible and not welcome either. But what if the kind of ”change” that entails substantial alteration via motion/activity is limited to things that “be?” If God is huperousia, or as Plato remarked concerning the Good, “on the other side of being” then the kind of problematic change envisioned is in principle precluded and cannot be attributed to God. Personal activities could be true of God without implying a defect or a loss of freedom in creatures whose acts God foreknows. (This has parallels to issues in Agent Causation.)
Second, the actualization of different truths across logically possible worlds would not entail accidental change in God either, since accidents inhere in substances that be. Whatever the thing it is, it isn’t substantial and it isn’t an accident, but something else, a specific kind of potency akin to the possessing of a power that is brought to act by the agent whose power it is."
You said:
If God knows 100% what you're choices are going to be, why would he act?
Why should this be a problem if God also 100%ly knows His reaction/interaction to our future actions?
When God was talking to Abram / Abraham about the city of Lot, didn't He know how many righteous people the city really had? Didn't He already know that the city was going to be destroyed anyway?
Yet, He took the time to dialog with Abram / Abraham anyway.
The Book will give you extra tools when thinking about this issue, for right now you seem to think that there is only one Classical Christian view. You want to think that most western scholars are looking at both East and West when talking about this issue when really they're not. They are mostly only talking about the west.
