"Hey, it was your syllogism.  I'm willing to let you decide how you want to define "being".  My only objection is when you want to impute the syllogism to me.  It doesn't reflect my argument in the OP"

All this is beside the point.  You said the definition I extracted out of you was 'thinking entity' when it was actually 'living thing.'

"I could buy off on that claim only if Christians were consistent in the way that they described their god.  But they aren't. "

You're right, and it really gets under my skin.  That being said, every Christian that posted on this thread was consistent and we can't help it if our beliefs are misrepresented.

 "In your case, you want to claim that God is atemporal in the abstract, but you still want to treat the Bible as an accurate description of his behavior.  The Bible describes God as a being that behaves temporally, just as we humans do. "

I see what you mean, but I haven't thought about it much.  It's a big issue and probably worthy of its own thread and someone else to talk about it with.

btw, I'd never used spell check before and I didn't know it only highlights one word at a time.
 

All this is beside the point.  You said the definition I extracted out of you was 'thinking entity' when it was actually 'living thing.'

Either one is fine with me.  If you assume that all living things are temporal and that God is a living thing, then God is temporal.  Before your started with the silly syllogisms, we were discussing whether any thinking being could have thoughts that did not involve the passage of time.  I have taken the position that thought is inherently a temporal process and that Christians normally take it to be that way when they talk about God.  The problem, as stated in the OP, is that omniscience leads to a paradox for Christian doctrine, because it is inherently incompatible with free will.  Christians here have been trying to escape the paradox by pretending that God could somehow think every thought at once.  That strikes me as utterly incomprehensible, but, even if he could manage to do it, us sequential beings would still lack a genuine choice of outcomes.  From the perspective of God's instantaneous knowledge, all outcomes would still be fixed in his knowledge.  Free will itself cannot be conceived of in a non-sequential way, and it is sequential beings who are alleged to have free will. That is, trying to imagine God as a timeless being doesn't solve the problem.

...every Christian that posted on this thread was consistent and we can't help it if our beliefs are misrepresented.

It is if you are the ones doing the misrepresenting.  My criticism is that you are inconsistent in the way you represent your beliefs, since you describe God as behaving in a sequential fashion except when you are forced to acknowledge the illogical corners that you have painted yourself into. 

"In your case, you want to claim that God is atemporal in the abstract, but you still want to treat the Bible as an accurate description of his behavior.  The Bible describes God as a being that behaves temporally, just as we humans do. "

I see what you mean, but I haven't thought about it much.  It's a big issue and probably worthy of its own thread and someone else to talk about it with.

I made the argument in the OP.  It is you and others who have tried to throw up a mental smokescreen around God's temporality in the hope that it could somehow rescue you from the argument.

"Either one is fine with me."

Me too, but you still misspoke.  You said the definition I extracted out of you was 'thinking entity' when it was really 'living thing'.

No, I did not misspeak.  When I gave you "thinking entity", it was because you kept badgering me to give you a definition.  Go back and read the post.  I offered the definition to help you get beyond what seemed to be a sticking point with you.

"It is if you are the ones doing the misrepresenting."

Well were really not.  Everyone on this thread agrees God is atemporal.  C.S. Lewis agrees.  Thomas Aquinas agrees.  William Lane Craig agrees.  You said scripture doesn't agree, and I just said that that is worthy of conversation but not with me.  SJ comes to mind.

Even I agree that you have all been CLAIMing that God is atemporal.  What I said was that your claim was not consistent with your linguistic usage when you weren't trying to get out from under the omniscience paradox.  Your claim seems to depend entirely on a need to reconcile the contradiction between belief in the possibility of an omniscient being and the requirement that humans genuinely have available more than one outcome in their choices.  Omniscience and free will are both fundamental to the Christian ideal of God, but they are not logically compatible ideas.

sigh* I said, 'You choose(a definition).  Which one do you mean?

Then you said

"5. a living thing: strange, exotic beings that live in the depths of the sea."

Then  couple posts later you said:

"The soundness derives from the fact that God is a "being"--i.e. "thinking entity" if you accept the definition that you extracted from me a couple of posts ago."

when the definition you really chose was 'living thing', not 'thinking entity'.

Man, you really don't check your facts.  Here is the passage where I gave my definition:

You still don't get it.  You are asking the wrong question.  You can look up any meaning for the word "being" in a dictionary and use it there.  For the purposes of this discussion, we can take "being" to mean "thinking entity", if you helps you to move beyond your sticking point.

Check out the link.  You will notice that your dictionary senses came in the post immediately following that post. 

"Even I agree that you have all been CLAIMing that God is atemporal."

Well if the majority of christian intellectuals and apologists claim that he is, and the scriptures claim he is as well, (again something that obviously needs to be addressed and by someone more informed than myself)  then the christian God is atemporal if he exists.

Where have you gotten your information about what the "majority of christian intellectuals and apologists claim" on this subject?  Do you know of some survey?  Can you cite any passage from the Bible to back up this claim?  If not, then stop making things up.

For your first 'argument' to work, you've got to demonstrate that the christian God is temporal.  An atemporal being is immune to the 'argument'.

Where did you get this idea?  According to the argument in the OP, someone only has to be omniscient for free will to be canceled out.  It doesn't say anything about atemporality.  That strikes me as a red herring, not to mention that it just isn't the way Christians describe their god most of the time.  God has to be like us in order for people to find him useful.

So when you endorse a syllogism whose first premise is 'all thinking entities are temporal', for the purpose of proving the christian God is temporal, expect that christians will challenge you to demonstrate the first premise with more than a statement that thinking takes time, which is just the first premise just reworded.

No, there is a significant difference between what I said and the claim that all beings are temporal.  What triggered this whole discussion was your preposterous claim that that syllogism was an example of circular reasoning.  By now, I trust that you have learned that you made another one of your goofs.

We are in agreement that humans can only make sense of reality through their own senses.  Our thinking about reality is limited by our experiences of reality.

Exactly.

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It is therefore understandable that we would invent gods that think, behave, and perceive in just the way that we do.

Then, wouldn't this statement be equally valid as, "It is therefore understandable that we would describe God to think, behave, and perceive in just the way that we do?"

Exactly so.

Good.  The only difference between my statement and yours is our perception of reality.  Your perception does not include God so you say

For the record, let me say that I do not claim that God is timeless.  I claim that it is logically possible for God to be timeless and such a state of affairs is consistent with free will.  The open theism position is another possibility with its own set of assumptions about the nature of God and time.  First, let's turn to the defense of timelessness:

God cannot be justified either mathematically or scientifically.

The limit of 1 / infinity is 0.  That mathematical expression suggests that a being of infinite speed may be able to act in no time at all.

No, it doesn't.  Time is relative, and it all depends on what perspective you take--that of the moving object or that of the stationary object.  It does not even suggest that a being can travel at an infinite rate of speed.  Infinity itself can only be understood by analogy with experiences such as counting (see Lakoff and Nunez Where Mathematics Comes From):

Much of WMCF deals with the important concepts of infinity and of limit processes, seeking to explain how finite humans living in a finite world could eventually conceive of the actual infinite. Thus much of WMCF is, in effect, a study of the epistemological foundations of the calculus. Lakoff and N

God's omniscience can be reconciled with Him not knowing the future if the future is something intrinsically unknowable.  Under that view of time, it would be impossible to use a time-machine to travel to the future -- there being no future to travel to.  God could make good guesses about the future, just as humans do (probably far better than humans) and He could of course decide in advance that certain things will happen and so know the future to that degree.  God is still omniscient under this view because He knows everything there is to know.

I have to say the standard of prophecy being an objective means of determining that the one prophecying is indeed from God undercuts this notion. One can not hold any authority to them if they are all simply "good guesses" even if they are all 100% proven true. I don't see any notion on how the book of Revelation can be considered "guess work" in it's details. But then I find the proclamation of "God cannot be justified either mathematically or scientifically" to be telling in it's inherent flaw to begin with that goes back to the Flatliners analogy: the flaw of putting rules and standards on those where such rules and standards inherently don't apply.

For the record, let me say that I do not claim that God is timeless.  I claim that it is logically possible for God to be timeless and such a state of affairs is consistent with free will...

Fair enough.  Do you believe that the "timeless" position negates the argument in the OP?  I don't see how it does, but I'm open to explanations.

The open theism position is another possibility with its own set of assumptions about the nature of God and time...

True, but it is immune to the argument in the OP, and Open Theism seems partially motivated by a desire to circumvent such arguments.

I took a look at the Wikipedia entry.  Looks like Lakoff and Nunez have their share of critics -- whether the criticisms impact the particular point you cite for them here, I cannot say at this point.

Quite so, but even God has his critics, doesn't he?    Lakoff and Nunez are open to challenge on a number of issues, but I think that their general approach to cognition--that all human knowledge is ultimately grounded in bodily experiences--is a reasonable assumption.  Lakoff has promoted this idea since the 1980s with lots of data on the use of metaphor and analogy in language.  It's quite an impressive body of work.

...The basic equation speed = distance / time does not suggest that a car can travel at a particular speed either.  But if a car travels at a certain speed then it will cover a certain distance in a certain amount of time.  Likewise, the limit equation does not address whether a being can travel at an infinite speed, BUT if a being CAN travel at an infinite speed, then the equation suggests such travel will take no time at all.

And your point is what?  If you are permitted to do division by zero, God exists? I will concede that God is as mathematically justified as Santa Claus.   

3. Infinity can only be understood by analogy.
 
You mean by humans.  That does not mean an infinite something-or-other cannot actually exist.  It certainly seems logically possible for there to be an infinite amount of space or an infinite amount of time.  Why not a being that "moves" at an infinite speed?

You are missing the point.  I'm not arguing that reality can be ultimately be made fully sensible in terms of human experiences.  I am pointing out that statements such as "God exists" can only be asserted if they make sense to human beings.  If the Christian God ultimately fails the comprehensibility test, then nothing that humans say about him can be taken seriously, including the properties that they attribute to God, e.g. that the God is somehow "supreme", "omnipotent", "omniscient", "good", or any other quality that can only be understood in terms of human sensibilities.  The minute one retreats into the ineffability defense, all statements concerning God become inherently meaningless.  There is no point in worshiping incomprehensibility, and, indeed, no one really does.  Ineffability only comes in handy as a defensive shield against reasonable discourse.  Christians, hypocritically, drop the ineffability defense at the first opportunity.  They show up in church, worship their god, thank him for imagined favors, and pray for more favorable consideration in the future.  The minute someone asks to make sense of such behavior, it is back to arguing division by zero.

For a timeless God, "will" would be a state.

Well, that is problematical, because "will" is a verb, and verbs cannot be used to denote states.  Adjectives can.  You can talk about a "God that is willful", but not "a God that is will".  The concept of "will" is inherently bound to causation, as is God, the "First Cause".  Semantically speaking, causation always describes a temporal relationship between two events.  In the case of agents, "will" only makes sense as a factor in the antecedent event of a causal relation.  I understand your statement here in a procrustean sense--that you must declare "will" a state, because that is the only way to make it fit your preconception.

On the open theism front:

God's omniscience can be reconciled with Him not knowing the future if the future is something intrinsically unknowable.  Under that view of time, it would be impossible to use a time-machine to travel to the future -- there being no future to travel to.  God could make good guesses about the future, just as humans do (probably far better than humans) and He could of course decide in advance that certain things will happen and so know the future to that degree.  God is still omniscient under this view because He knows everything there is to know.

I like the argument in that it does circumvent the argument in the OP.  I suppose that the problem is in getting most Christians to buy into it, because the traditional view is that omniscience includes knowledge of the future.  The whole point of the OP is that knowledge of the future precludes free will.  If God cannot know the future, then more than one choice is possible.  There may be other good reasons to reject belief in God, but the argument in the OP would not be one of them.