#841 “I Ain’t Dead Yet!”
June 25, 2023This is not a question about predestination or fatalism. It’s about how God experiences relationship to human souls posthumously. Given human free will, does God’s perspective of individual human destiny transition from foreknowledge to a sort of actualized experience when it “actually” happens? For example, God knows me in a total and perfect way. But, even if God has perfect foreknowledge of my eternal destiny in heaven, does He only actually “experience” my heavenly relationship to Him once it’s actualized in the “real” world, or does His foreknowledge already include this complete experience of my ultimate presence in His kingdom since His mind contains all propositions about the “real world”? Do you think this depends on which theory of time one subscribes to? It seems to me that foreknowing an experience is different from the actual experience, even if the foreknowledge is perfect. This seems to support a tensed theory of time I suppose.
Thank you!
Ian
United States
Dr. craig’s response
A
The answer to your question, it seems to me, Ian, depends upon your view of God’s relationship to time. If God is in time, as I believe, then clearly He cannot now be experiencing fellowship with me in heaven, since I have not yet died and gone there! He foreknows (I hope!) that I shall be there, but when I shuffle off this mortal coil, His foreknowledge will give way to present knowledge and experience. By means of His complete foreknowledge of the future, he knows in every detail the future-tense facts of my heavenly existence, but He cannot know “Bill Craig is now here with me.”
As you point out, my answer presupposes “a tensed theory of time,” according to which temporal becoming is an objective feature of reality and not just a subjective human experience. As Larry Norman profoundly put it, “I ain’t dead yet!”
- William Lane Craig