Lack of Divine Foresight

What do they believe? What do you think? Talk about religion as it exists today.
Secret Alias
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Lack of Divine Foresight

Post by Secret Alias »

How do we account for God not knowing that Adam and Eve would sin in the Garden? Either he didn't know or he wanted them to sin. Otherwise couldn't he have come up with a plan which prevented the Fall? Hard to get around the libertine reading of Genesis i.e. sinning was necessary. Or do we accept the Pentateuch was badly written where the authors ignored the consequences of their narrative.
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billd89
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The Doctrine of Free Will, Roman Catholic Interpretation

Post by billd89 »

You mean the Hellenistic Jewish explanation, I think.

I am focusing on the Judeo-Pythagorean, in which Heimarmene is still operative. For Gnostics: The Father is apart from Creation, the Demiurge takes the blame - then they turned him into a Cruel God.

In the Poimandres, the Design Flaw is the appearance of a dark chaos: coiling, serpentine, smoky, turmoil in the Eternal Boundless Field of Light. Later in that story, the original sin of Anthropos (Adam Qadmon) is Narcissism/Lust, not (Adam & Eve's) Hubis/Disobedience.

The Ignorant and Impious are doomed animals. Actualized men choose to be saved. Salvation (in various Hermetic iterations) involves willing: 'calling the god to you.' Then, if you shed your defective bits and pass through the Archons' gates (viz., the horos; see Discourse of 8th & 9th), you will rejoin the Race of the elect, the Angelic Host.

The Aletheian Anthropoi (A. A.) are the earthly equivalent, the Sons of God. They chose to be saved. Choice between Good and Evil is fundamental. Implicitly, you must recognize your Flawed Nature to start the process. It had to be this way.

Where does the Eden/Serpent bit of Genesis come from? The authors of the Pentateuch made authorial decisions. I'd like to read Sethian and Cainite versions from back then (200 BC).
Last edited by billd89 on Mon Oct 18, 2021 11:31 am, edited 1 time in total.
Secret Alias
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Re: Lack of Divine Foresight

Post by Secret Alias »

That's not a plausible explanation of what the author(s) of the Pentateuch meant. Like explaining Tony Montana in Scarface with algebra. Not worth considering. Next.
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billd89
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Against Egyptian Determinism?

Post by billd89 »

Interesting.
How can God persuade a free creature to love and to serve him without constraint? This call to choose life rather than death is also strongly attested in the Deuteronomic tradition and in the Wisdom literature. Far from representing a secondary concern, the issue of human free will and divine determinism is indeed one of the critical points in the biblical tradition.

robert j
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Re: Lack of Divine Foresight

Post by robert j »

Secret Alias wrote: Mon Oct 18, 2021 9:52 am How do we account for God not knowing that Adam and Eve would sin in the Garden? Either he didn't know or he wanted them to sin. Otherwise couldn't he have come up with a plan which prevented the Fall? Hard to get around the libertine reading of Genesis i.e. sinning was necessary. Or do we accept the Pentateuch was badly written where the authors ignored the consequences of their narrative.
Yeah, why would a perfect god create an imperfect world? Perhaps he/she was bored and wanted to be entertained by the inevitable foibles of his/her creations. But would a perfect being get bored?

But seriously, it’s seems just an ancient fable to account for the existence of humans with free will and that suffer pain and struggles and imperfections and death. That, along with a fable about a supreme creator-being to explain WTF we are all doing here --- where we came from.

The ancient didn’t have the knowledge to understand humans as star-stuff that thru billions of years of recombinations became self-aware creatures. Us as bits of the universe thinking about itself --- a self-aware universe.
Last edited by robert j on Mon Oct 18, 2021 1:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Secret Alias
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Re: Lack of Divine Foresight

Post by Secret Alias »

I'm trying to understand the story as a story not as a "fact."
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neilgodfrey
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Re: Lack of Divine Foresight

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Secret Alias
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Re: Lack of Divine Foresight

Post by Secret Alias »

In Genesis 2:16 - 17 there is at least a transgression of a commandment. Why was Cain's murder of his brother punished? How should Cain have known that murder was prohibited? The commandment only came with the Sinai theophany.
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GakuseiDon
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Re: Lack of Divine Foresight

Post by GakuseiDon »

Secret Alias wrote: Mon Oct 18, 2021 9:52 am How do we account for God not knowing that Adam and Eve would sin in the Garden? Either he didn't know or he wanted them to sin. Otherwise couldn't he have come up with a plan which prevented the Fall? Hard to get around the libertine reading of Genesis i.e. sinning was necessary. Or do we accept the Pentateuch was badly written where the authors ignored the consequences of their narrative.
Philo resolves those kinds of issues by viewing them through an allegorical lens. So anything like that must have an allegorical meaning. For example, in Allegorical Interpretation III:
http://www.earlyjewishwritings.com/text ... book4.html

"And Adam and his wife hid themselves from the face of the Lord God in the midst of the trees of the Paradise." A doctrine is introduced here which teaches us that the wicked man is inclined to run away...

And let us in the next place consider how any one is said to be concealed from God; but unless any one receives this as an allegorical saying it would be impossible to comprehend what is here stated. For God has completed everything and has penetrated every thing, and has left no one of all his works empty or deserted. What kind of place then can any one occupy in which God is not? ...

Again how could any man who is unable to conceal himself from the parts of the world, and from the whole world itself, be able to escape the notice of God? He never could do so. What then is the meaning of the expression, "they hid themselves?" The bad man thinks that God is in a certain place, not surrounding it, but being surrounded by it. On which account also he thinks that he can conceal himself from him, as if God were without any prevailing reason at a distance form that part of the world in which he has determined to lurk.

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Geocalyx
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Re: Lack of Divine Foresight

Post by Geocalyx »

Simple - he wanted them to sin.

How were Adam & Eve supposed to know it was good to obey God and not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil ... when they had not yet eaten from the tree, and were thus at that point still unable to tell good from evil?

It‘s a setup to get them under his thumb, nothing more. People are reading too much into it imo.
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