Is God Blind?

In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, David Hume asks the question regarding the nature of God, "Is he willing to prevent evil but not able? Then is he impotent? Then is he malevolent? Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?" Picking up on this train of argument one of the more prominent atheists of the 20th century, J.L. Mackie, wrote an article entitled, Evil and Omnipotence. In this work Mackie argues that the presence of evil in the world requires that God must either not be wholly good or all powerful. In this work he explains that many theologians attempt to redefine the words omnipotence (all powerful) or omni-benevolence (wholly good). Two of the examples he gives is that some theologians define omnipotence by either asserting God is as powerful as is possible or that the Bible does states that God is good, not wholly good.

Is it possible that these definitions of omnipotence and omni-benevolence that Mackie and most of us use are actually constructs formed out of the Enlightenment and Modernity? Perhaps the open theists are right and God only has knowledge of everything that has happened up to the present moment in time and therefore is not all powerful in the modernist sense, but is as powerful as possible given the conditions. Perhaps God is Blind. Perhaps there is magic (space and time) that even God, himself, is subject to.

God is Blind?

During the height of the "open theist" controversy that coincidentally coincided with the suspension of Clark Pinnock & John Sanders (open theists) from the Evangelical Theological Society, I had a conversation with a "gun shy" open theist who attempted to explain his "version" of open theism. This individual would be what I'd call a "conservative" open theist. He described a middle knowledge understanding of God's knowledge, which asserts that God knows not only every decision we will make, but every possible decision we could make and its potential outcome (leading to an infinite number of possible outcomes).

The difference this individual made was that he believed when we made those decisions God would "temporarily" cover his eyes so that he did not know the actual decision we would make. He asserted that there are certain "unavoidable" events that God has prophesied in Scripture would occur and despite what decisions we make, he would bring these events to pass.

Given the massive amount of decisions that are made each second of every day, in this perspective I have a hard time understanding how God would not be blind. If this be the case, then would God be able to bring these "unavoidable" events to pass , only knowing what has happened and not what is happening? He would be blindly acting based on an understanding of reality that only knows the past. Furthermore if in eternity, we remain free beings then it would seem that God would have to be blind in eternity as well.