This is the fifth part of a series of responses by Calvinists’ to my article on SBCToday (September 2013). (([1] http://sbctoday.com/2013/09/13/is-libertarin-free-will-eternal/#comment-41520)) The full title of the article is “Can Man Endowed with Libertarian Free Will Live Righteously Forever in Heaven?” You may also search this site for the article. The blogger’s comments are emboldened, followed by my response.
You said, “So the First Cause cannot involve any change in His essential existence (the First Cause is God). He is immutable, and He cannot have a thought process because that would be a change in thought. A change in thought would be an effect and would require that the series of causes and effects continue back and God would not be the purely existing First Cause with perfect omniscience. He would be a changing (becoming being) with limited knowledge. Omniscience is a fully comprehensive true knowledge of all. It is simply known simultaneously. It is always consciously in the front of the mind of God.”
I believe that God is omniscient and immutable; thus, He does not have a thought process involving learning or change in His essence–ontology. He does know everything always whether about Himself, eternity, or time. He is neither caused nor self-caused but uncaused. I would argue that while He knows everything, always, He does distinguish between (and always has before time) the sequence of events in time and at what instance (eternally speaking) He would actualize creation. Further, that He was/is not limited to what He would actualize within the realm of possibilities for the Sovereign omniscient and omnipotent God. That is to say, He did not create what we know because it is what He had to create. I am not saying that you believe that; although, it does fit well with compatibilism and some do espouse this view.
You said, “This brings us to the knowledge of what eternity past is. It is the state that precedes time. Time began when God acted in His first act of creation. This was the first change (the change from non-action to action), the first effect. Before this first action there was no sequence (time). There was only the existence of pure, unchanging Being.”
I agree that eternity precedes time.
You said, So, if God is truly the pure, immutable, omniscient, eternal Being that we claim He is; eternity past is simply the state of God’s existence before time, and the phrases you use like “at any point in eternity” and “the unfolding of events at a subsequent instance in eternity” are based on a misunderstanding of eternity past.” It is God’s eternal knowledge that determined there would be time, sequence of events and what that sequence would be, but He is not, in any sense, informed by sequence.
??? My use of such terms was to affirm precisely what you said in your last sentence, and what I explicitly said in my statements. I said, “…eternal knowledge is neither determined nor enhanced by anything outside of God at any point in eternity or in the time and space continuum. This includes the unfolding of events at a subsequent instance in eternity. Nor is the chronology of events in time and space determining or increasing anything in God. While He distinguishes between the sequences of events, He is not informed by them.”
I use words like “point” or “instance” in the same sense as others use similar phrases, like Augustine’s use of “instant” or Charnoc’s “went before” and “God knows there will be a succession”, and as you use “precede” and “when”. You say that eternity is a state that “precedes time.” Now, unless I am missing something, “precede” is word denoting sequence and includes an “instance” that did not exist before–a sequence word again.
So yes, in eternity past there was only the eternal immutable God. Conceptually, in eternity past, He always had full knowledge and there was never a state in which God did not know everything. This state includes full knowledge of the concept of time, how and when He would initiate this (at what point He would change the state of affairs from potentiality to actuality, i.e. move from the state of affairs that “preceded creation), and the sequence of events of time. I am simply dealing with the reality that a change in the “state” or “state of affairs” is different in eternity past than in eternity future or “in the beginning God…”. It is not a change in God.
