For the time being, I'm going to ignore the biblical quotes and just proceed with the two statements that I took from you, and in which you claim you can see no contradiction. Those statements were:You are correct. I don't see a "deep and insurmountable contradiction there". You will have to state your case more explicitly than just a mere assertion in order for me to know what, exactly, your objection is.
"4. IMMUTABLE: God is perfect in that He never changes nor can He change with respect to His being, attributes, purpose, or promises."
"Out of the council of His own free will - He chose to create that which exists, including time - according to His own good pleasure."
I would point out, first that if God's creation includes time (which you assert), then God must exist (somehow) outside of time. If that is the case, then it is impossible that all of time (as we temporal creatures know it) is immediately NOT known to God. That would include, of course, the creation, which includes in God's own immediate apprehension, the Fall, the sins of mankind requiring the destruction by the flood, the repopulation of the earth from the Ark, and of course the eventual end-times (again) as described in Revelation.
It also includes, just to be clear, the knowledge that most of those souls created by this god will be (or to one outside time, already are) condemned to eternal (or to one outside time, omnipresent) torture. Did not Christ himself say, in the Gospels, to those who didn't particularly like his preachments: "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of Hell?" But to a God outside of time, it is already known that they will not (or to God, do not), and that all this preaching is already moot -- everything being, to the God outside time, already (within time) decided!
Aside from all of that philosophical tortuousness, isn't the creative act "out of His own free will" already an admission that He cannot exist outside of time? And that He can change, in giving in to "His own good pleasure?" To create according to one's own good pleasure, after all, is to effect something that satisfies (that is, changes -- presumably for the better) an inwardly perceived need, is it not?
A further word on "His attributes," which you mention above, but do not describe -- what are they, exactly? As Anselm once proposed, does not God possess all perfections -- or to say it in our modern way, doesn't God possess the very best of all possible attributes, in the greatest degree? For example, courage, or continence. Surely God must be the epitome of courage, and must never be incontinent (give in to the whims of desire), mustn't He? God would be first and foremost among those able to show restraint, no?
Let's examine those two attributes, courage and continence. Sextus Empiricus said: "For a man, they say, is continent not when he abstains from an old woman with one foot in the grave, but when he has the power of enjoying Lais or Phyrne (two notorious Greek courtesans famed for their beauty) or some such charmer and then abstains." So, even if God is continent, it must mean that He has to struggle and is at least open to change for the worse! Otherwise, He cannot possess the attribute of continence. As Empiricus said, "if there are some things which are hard for God to abstain from and hard to endure, then there are some things which are able to change Him for the worse and cause Him vexation."
And lo and behold, we do note that God can be vexed -- the Bible itself tells us that this is so, on not a few occasions! And it even says, in its own words, that God changed: "for God repented that He had made man." In fact, twice the Bible says that God repented for something he had done in the past (Genesis 6:6-7 and 1 Samuel 15:11), and at least eleven times it says He repented or would repent of something He was about to do in the future (Exodus 32:12-14; 2 Samuel 24:16; 1 Chronicles 21:15; Psalm 106:45; Jeremiah 4:28; 18:8; 26:3, 13, 19; 42:10; Joel 2:13-14; Amos 7:3, 6; Jonah 3:9-10; 4:2).
I won't belabor the courage point quite as much, but it should be very clear that courage, to be an attribute possessed by God in the highest degree, absolutely implies that there is something that He has to be frightened of and that He is able to overcome that fear.
And is that "immutable?"
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