[Avodah] "God who knows the future"

[Micha Berger]

On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 01:09:12PM -0400, David Riceman wrote:
> I happened accross a curious Ramban recently (Parshas Shlah, ed. Chavel,  
> p. 242):" God, who knows the future, commanded him to send one man from  
> each tribe of Israel, and that they be leaders, because God wanted all  
> of the aristocrats (gedolim) to share equally in this matter, so that  
> maybe they would remember and return to God (ulay yizkru v'yashuvu el  
> hashem)."

> But doesn't that last clause imply that God didn't know the future here?  

Speaking for myself, not answering about the Ramban's position, I see no
way one can logically say Hashem knows the future. Not as a statement
about Divine Knowledge, but because of using the word "future" WRT the
Creator.

http://www.aishdas.org/asp/2005/01/divine-timelessness.shtml

    ...
    G-d's timelessness seems to also pose problems with free will. How
    can I be free to choose when G-d already knows what my choice
    will be? Rabbi Aqiva seems to simply take it as a divine mystery,
    "hakol tzafui vehareshus nesunah -- all is foreseen, but freedom is
    granted." The Rambam, in Hilkhos Teshuvah, also describes it as a
    Divine Mystery. If we can't understand what it means that He knows
    something, where He and His Knowledge are one, and where learning
    (which is a process of change, and therefore of time) is not involved,
    how can we discuss mysteries about how that knowledge interacts our
    free will?

    The Or Samei'ach explains it slightly differently. Just as His
    Knowledge of the past does not change the nature of the present,
    so too His Knowledge of the future. Because to Him, past and future
    are the same.

    Rav Dessler writes that our perception of the flow of time is a
    product of eating of the tree of knowledge. With eating the fruit,
    man's free will became centered on a progression from desire to
    effort to fulfillment or frustration. This gives our concept of
    time a flow, a direction. Rav Dessler compares our perception of
    time to looking at a map through a piece of paper with a small hole
    in it. One can move the hole from city to city along the roads. But
    that progression is a product of how we're looking at the map, not
    the map itself. Adam saw "from one end of the world to the next",
    an expression also used of a baby's soul before birth. They see the
    map without the paper in front; all of time from one end to the other.

    Rav Dessler's metaphor is akin to Paul Davies' description of
    Einsteinian spacetime. In relativistic physics, the universe is a
    four dimensional sculpture. We think of it as a 3d movie, with time
    having a flow that the three spatial dimensions do not. But that's
    an illusion of our perception.

    From this perspective, the Or Samei'ach's answer is compelling. G-d
    is like an observer, looking at a sculpture. Yes, the observer could
    look at one point in the height of the sculpture while touching or
    moving a lower one. Just as G-d could Know the entirety of history
    while interacting with any one point in it.

    G-d doesn't know today what I will decide tomorrow, because G-d
    doesn't have a "today". G-d simply knows. The nearest way in which we
    can assign a point in time to His knowledge is when speaking of when
    His actions impact creation. And Hashem assures us, using Yishma'el
    as an example, that man is judged "ba'asher hu sham as he is there"
    not based on his future. Within time, the direction of causality
    is preserved.
    ...

> The naive reading of this passage is that the Ramban agrees, if you'll  
> pardon the anachronism, with the Ralbag, who says that God can't know  
> all the details of the future because that would deny human free will.

Someone asked me about the Ralbag. It's Milkhamos Hashem 3:3. He limits
Omniscience to knowing the outcome of every possible sequence of choices
people could make.

Of course, according to the Rambam's Negative Theology, "Omniscience"
really means that there is no limitation in G-d due to a lack of knowledge.

> Is there somewhere else where the Ramban makes his position clear?

I think he's clear here, as per the reisha of your paraphrase. The
Ramban's words: "VeHashem, hayodeia' asidos, tzivehu..." So it's not
a question of whether the Ramban believes Hashem can know the future,
but how to explain the seifa of the paragraph in that light.

The only way the Ramban could hold like the Ralbag is if "asidos", in the
plural, doesn't mean future events (and thus plural) but rather plural
possible futures. I don't know the Ramban's usage, but this would seem
a HUGE stretch to me.

Here's a way to read the Rambam at conflict with the Ralbag: Hashem
wanted ("ki chafeitz Hashem...") that the world be set up for whether
they repent ("ulai yizakhru veyashuvu") or not ("ve'im lo"). It fits
RnTK's reasoning -- that HQBH desires to act in a way that doesn't
require our later choosing one or the other. Even though He Knows the
choice. And this fits the Ramban's explicit statement that He knew at
the time which way things would actually turn out.

-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Zion will be redeemed through justice,
micha at aishdas.org        and her returnees, through righteousness.
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