The example with the macaroni and pizza, you can say that is simple.
But we can change it with the conversation between Jesus and Peter:
Jesus: Peter you will deny me three time
Peter: I don't want to deny you. Can I not deny you?
Jesus: O Peter, you know I cannot be wrong, if I told you that you will deny me tomorrow, you have to deny me.
I was actually thinking about Jonah and God telling him to tell the people of Nineveh that in 40 days it would be destroyed. The question is, is it wrong for God to change His mind, if indeed that is what He did? That's probably another discussion on it's own.
However, the way I understand middle knowledge is that it proceeds logically before actualizing the world. Since God chose to actualize this world based on the choices that each person would make He would know from His middle knowledge that in this world Peter would choose to deny Jesus and could therefore predict it before it happened. The choice wasn't determined, rather the world in which Peter would do so was determined.
So the fact that Peter wouldn't do otherwise is not because he wasn't free to do so, it was simply because the world was actualized according to the circumstances in which he would freely choose to do just what he did.
i understand exactly as you the middle knowledge.
god create this world based on the choices that each person would make He would know from His middle knowledge that in this world Peter would choose to deny Jesus and could therefore predict it before it happened.
I think that the problem is that we suppose that just god knows the future.
But what if i ask god about my future action, and with the knowledge in my mind, I choose to prove that god was wrong, and freely do otherwise.
Can I?
well,suppose I can not
I can not do otherwise even if I want to do so
I think that might be akin to wanting to fly like a bird without anything externally to aid you. God has given us free choice within certain limits. Obviously He's not going to let you, nor do I think He is even able to let you prove Him wrong, as He is by nature the perfect being.
That's not to say you don't have free choice, it's just that you don't have free choice to do anything you want. You are free to choose up to a certain point, but not beyond the boundaries that God has set for everyone.
So, you say that if I ask god and he says to me that I will do action A, from this moment I'm not free to do other action A1 or A2....
But then, I can ask god to count me my entire life, and from this moment I'm absolutely corseted to do every action that god told me that I will do, annihilating this way my freedom of action.
Now, think a bit.
The real issue is that god knows what I will do, not that I also know my future actions.
From the moment that you accept that god foreknows my actions, and that god is in time, you have to accept that I cannot do anything opposite to his knowledge.
Is different if god is not in time, and he from outside simply see our action and obviously foreknows our actin, actually just knows our actions.
The last point is, if I'm not free to proof that god is wrong about what I will eat sunday, macaroni or pizza, I'm not free at all.
Again, I agree with your statement "From the moment that you accept that god foreknows my actions, and that god is in time, you have to accept that I cannot do anything opposite to his knowledge." But in Middle Knowledge that doesn't seem to mean you couldn't have done something else. If you did it would simply have changed God's knowledge of what you were going to do. In other words, He would have known that that's what you were going to do.
My understanding of Middle Knowledge is simply that God knows what we will do in any given circumstance. That's all. There's no causal relationship. Just cause I know what someone will do in certain circumstances doesn't cause that person to choose what to do. I simply know the person well enough to "know" what that person in those circumstances will do. Applying that concept to Middle Knowledge seems to make sense of it, at least to me it does.
But let's back up here a little bit. For one thing God is under no obligation to tell us anything. If He thinks it will be beneficial to tell us something then He most likely will. However, if we're just out to prove Him wrong obviously He's not going to allow that to happen. He's just going to say, "Sorry, that's something you don't need to know." So even as a thought experiment it seems to me like an illogical proposition.
So it seems to me that what you're proposing is akin to having a square circle. We can't prove God wrong, otherwise He wouldn't be God. And if you say that we're not free at all because we're not allowed to do something that would enable us to prove God wrong, that seems like saying I can't make a square circle, and because I'm not free to do anything I want then I'm really not free at all. Doesn't sound like sound reasoning to me.
Of course we have freedom! That's evident from every day living. To deny that is to deny reality. We make free choices all of the time. But it seems to me that just because we can't do everything we want to doesn't mean we're not free at all. It's just that the freedom we do have is not unbridled freedom to do anything, including the logically impossible.
"But let's back up here a little bit. For one thing God is under no obligation to tell us anything. If He thinks it will be beneficial to tell us something then He most likely will. However, if we're just out to prove Him wrong obviously He's not going to allow that to happen. He's just going to say, "Sorry, that's something you don't need to know." So even as a thought experiment it seems to me like an illogical proposition."
Is not good enough your argument
The premise is that I also can know my future actions
How? asking god to tell me
And god being in time, can tell me
Is not enough you to say that god doesn't want to tell me
You have to prove that it is impossible that god tells me about my future actions
Secondly, you have to prove also that it is impossible that a free being proves that god is wrong about something that implies he's one free actions.
Or, you have to prove that even if the being has to fulfill the predicted, he is still free.
The problem with the middle knowledge is that doesn't foresees the situation that I described:
-the free being can know his future action (from god)
-the freedom of the being imply the ability, freedom to do otherwise
-since he cannot do otherwise, he is not a free being
And in order to be truth, the middle knowledge has to be true in any given situation.
about the squared circle:
It seems to me that the squared circle is to suppose that god can know what decision will take a free being in the future.
Do not forget, my point is:
-it is logically imposible to know the future action of a free being.
-so god cannot be wrong about our future actions because he doesn't knows our future actions.
-this imply that god is not omniscient?
-no, because to be omniscient do not imply to know something that is logically imposible to know
Those are good points. I see what you're saying. Well, I don't have an in depth understanding of Middle Knowledge so I'm not sure how to answer. Here's a few things to possibly consider.
Jesus: Peter you will deny me three time
Peter: I don't want to deny you. Can I not deny you?
Jesus: Even though you don't want to deny me, that's what you will not because you can't do otherwise but because you won't. The reason I can tell you is I know what you will do in any situation and in that situation that's what you will do.
Peter didn't want to deny Him, but he did. Did he have a choice? Yes. It wasn't because he couldn't have done otherwise, but despite his desire not to he just didn't have the courage to act in accordance with what he desired. And Jesus knew that would be the case.
This could quite possibly be the case in any event that God tells us about our future actions. That despite our every intention to do the opposite God knows that we will do just what He says we will because He knows exactly how things will play out ahead of time, and we don't. Middle Knowledge isn't about whether we can do differently, but whether we would do differently. And whether or not we would ever do differently in such a case as you are suggesting is not something we can know with certainty.
Another possible problem is that God has set the world up for events to naturally unfold in a certain order. However, He still has the option to intervene in supernatural ways that would alter those events. In the event of Him giving us information about our future actions that would be such a case that would alter the originally intended structure of events.
So, what can God actually tell us in such a case if He Himself is in time? At that point in time when we first ask Him, can He tell us before He tells us what we will do--what we will do that would entail what we will do after He tells us what we will do? Or is He bound to tell us only what we will do at the moment He tells us even though He knows once He tells us it will add a new factor via a supernatural event that could change the outcome? If so, which for Him to be truthful it would seem like it, what we do after He tells us might be different because of the new supernatural event that has been interjected after He told us, namely Him telling us what we will do.
Let me put it another way. Seems like if God is in time, and He were to tell us, He has to tell us what our future actions will be at the point in time He tells us. Since after He tells us we have "new" information via a supernatural event that we didn't have at the time God told us what we would do, that would mean that the situation is no longer the same as it was at the moment God told us what we were going to do.
Even though the information was correct at the time it was told, it was no longer be correct after God told it. So was He wrong? Arguably not. Because, as far as I can tell, He has to tell the truth of the way things are at that point in time that He tells it even though He knows that once He tells us it may no longer be the case. If He were to tell us differently at that point in time before He told us it wouldn't be true.
In that case I don't see that God telling us something that ends up happening differently as being wrong. It's just that He couldn't tell us at that point in time what we would do once He told us what we were going to do because the supernatural event of Him telling us hadn't happened yet.
Like I said, I'm not very well versed in Middle Knowledge, or even philosophy for that matter, but these are just some possible counters that in my limited knowledge I've been able to come up with.
