Don Camp On How His God Has Foreknowledge. It's Because His God is Imaginary!

I've challenged this unrepentant believer to read my magnum opus. He is, and he's commenting on it. He thinks of himself as equal to the task of answering my doubts and others here. Can he? He's reading my chapter on prophecy, where I ask how his god has the required foreknowledge to predict the future of human free willed agents with certainty. I examine four different models and Camp defends one. Here's Camp:
Theological. God decrees everything that happens, he can know the future of every human action, since humans don't have the freedom to do otherwise. "Such a theology creates atheists. It, more than anything else, is what motivates me to attempt to demolish the Christian faith." - Loftus

God is outside time. If God is outside of time he would have no problems predicting future human actions since human actions are not actually in the future. God would merely be seeing the present from his perspective. “We have on hand no acceptable concept of atemporal causation, i.e., of what it is for a timeless cause to produce a temporal effect.” - Davis. “If God is truly timeless,” Hasker says, “so that temporal determinations of ‘before’ and ‘after’ do not apply to him, then how can God act in time, as Scriptures say that he does? - Hasker

The Inferential View. On this view, God figures out from the range of options which choices we will make. "If the history of an empire or nation is already part of the divine plan, how can God hold the leaders, and indeed the peoples themselves, accountable for their actions?" then their thoughts and actions are so preordained as to render them devoid of free will. - Callahan. "How, for instance, can anyone living in the year 2000, God or otherwise, innately know what someone will do on January 1, 2050? So the bottom line for me is that if there is no known mechanism or reason given for how a God in time can foreknow future truly free human actions, then I have reasons to reject that God can foreknow such actions." - Loftus

The Innate View. On this view, God has innate comprehensive knowledge of the future. He just “sees it” because he is omniscient. But this isn't an explanation at all.

Don - Of the four options the idea that God is outside time is the most logicaland the most biblical. But the proposal needs to be more refined than John expresses it. Specifically, God is outside our time. Stephen Hawking has proposed the idea of imaginary time.

Simplified, imaginary time includes within it the space, time and matter universe we experience. Imaginary time has no beginning and no end, while our time/space universe has both a beginning an end. We might visualize our time as a line on which events in space and time occur. Imaginary time would then be a sphere within which all events happen, including the beginning and end of our universe.

Hawking was searching for an explanation of the beginning and end of our universe, and perhaps other universes, that did not require a Creator. But his idea opens the possibility that imaginary time is simply what theologians call eternity.

In imaginary/eternal time the objections Davis and Hasker - and John - raise are not an issue. We may not know how a being or a force in imaginary time may cause events in our universe, but we at least have a hypothesis based on mathematics that allows it.

Related to John's piece on the impossibility of God's foreknowledge, imaginary/eternal time and a being within imaginary time provides adequate explanation for God knowing our future. And it also is an explanation that avoids the difficulties of determinism. Put simply, God's knowledge does not preclude our freedom.
I'm not completely able to compare Hawking's views with Camp's so I'll let that to others, and ask Camp to clarify exactly why he thinks his view is the same as Hawking's, who did not believe in a creator! I swear, the way Christians quote from non-believers as if they agree with each other is nauseating. I suspect Hawking's imaginary view of time is precisely the reason why Hawking thinks there is no creator! That being said, if there was ever a clearer statement that believers have an imaginary god then Camp just said it! An imaginary god lives in imaginary time, and by extension (E=mc2) an imaginary place.

Leaving aside Camp's assertions here are some counter-arguments.

Hi Don, thanks for reading. Keep on doing so to the end of my book.

If God is outside of time then how did he create the first moment in time, and when? The decision to create would produce the effect since there could be no time in the future he could initiate that decision. The decision would create. That means if he ever had a decision to create the universe would always exist, that's if its possible for a being outside time to create time at all.

Furthermore, even many evangelicals are convinced that a God outside of time could not act in time. There could be no miracles, answered prayers or an incarnate god. Many evangelicals are also convinced that if God is outside of time there could be no freedom of will for his creatures, hence no testing ground here on earth and no damnation.

Lastly, if your god is outside time it raises the problem of suffering to immense proportions, since every historical act is still amendable to revision. Why aren't you praying for them to be reversed? Your god is not affected by time, so your god can answer prayers retroactively. But here too he does nothing.

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