Terry: As usual, you pose another provocative question. You sucked me in when I really don't have time to be on-line.
" Logic prohibits self-reference "
Yes, indeed it does. And your consideration tells me that it's not an easy subject. For example, you say: " IF you divulge the day and hour and location of the event IN ADVANCE you insure the event will NOT occur. " Reading your initial presentation as a whole, I would think that, given your example about Gitmo, it is more accurate to say : "IF you divulge the day and hour and location of an event IN ADVANCE you insure the specific event will NOT occur." Even that is not strictly accurate because what will happen to the event is dependent on who wants to know and what their intensions are. If the event was a Justin Beiber concert, the revelation of that would not prevent the event from occurring, unless the world came to its senses, as I have, and decided that they could give a rat's ass about Beiber's musical contribution to the world (Oh, baby, baby, baby). In that case, no one would show up and there would be no concert.
So, I don't see the self-reference in either of those examples because the knowledge about the event does not guarantee any specific outcome (such as if the bombing's time and place is revealed but could not be stopped anyway). There is no guaranteed outcome.
I think that what you posit may be more accurate in terms of "circular reasoning". I really don't know (technically) but it seems to me that circular reasoning is closely tied to self-reference. The famous statement by a liar: "This sentence is not true" connotes that the sentence must be true because the liar will always speak to the contrary. If the liar is telling a lie, then the opposite must be true. But if the sentence is true, then the liar is not lying and would not be a liar, making his sentence a lie. Therefore, self-reference in this case leads to a paradox.
So, take these examples into consideration: "This sentence contains five words" or "These words are not self-referent". The first sentence is self-referent but is not a paradox. Change the number "five" to some other number and now it becomes, not paradoxical, but false and still self-referent. Staying with your line of thought, one circular or self-referent statement that would fit your intent would be: "All things are possible to God (omnipotence). God cannot lie (or sin)." It is both paradoxical and self-referent.
Bringing the argument to its original premise, it would be fair to say that "knowing" does not guarantee an outcome. But suppose God has the omnipotence to effect any outcome she wants (to make it so), still, the outcome is a matter of choice to either prevent a happening or guarantee that it happens.
I don't know if it's still true. But back then when I was in college (late 1970s) it seemed to me that one goal of Physics was to infer (via several methods, including backward chaining) certain origins that could describe the properties of matter or causes. Using forward chaining instead, I envisioned that if all, I mean all, variables affecting an event could be taken into consideration, then an outcome could be accurately predicted. Imagine tossing a coin, knowing the exact force from the fingers, the temperature of the air, the wind velocity, the vector of the initial thrust, the inclination and hardness and texture of the surface it will fall upon (and trajectory based on the previous factors), you could conceivably "predict" if it will land heads or tails. Propaget that to ther things it would be conceivable to know the future. In a sense, it is the holy grail of Meteorology in order to "predict" if a tornado or hurricane will actually form.
Of course there isn't a mind large enough to take in all those variables from micro-second to micro-second, unless one decides that that mind is God. But some computers have a valiant effort to deal with some events, like reproducing in real time the wake of wind under a helicopter blade. That's a tough one.
I do understand your point regarding the inevitability of events set to motion: The bomb is set. Only the terrorist knows where and at what time the timer will set off. Unless there's some intervention, the bomb will detonate. But the knowledge by the interrogators of the time and place of the explosion does not guarantee that the event will not occur. On the other hand, it possible that even without intervention, the bomb would not have gone off because a rat chewed through some of the wires. It's like Occam's Razor.
" There are is no certainty to knowledge UNLESS and UNTIL what is being called "known" actually TAKE PLACE. " So, you redeem in a way by that statement. Still, we need to define what we call "knowledge" because there can be knowledge (that there are explosives in a place and time) but not that an event will inevitably happen given tenuous circumstances. Some event's are certain. Via the laws of Physics we can determine that the Earth will continually rotate on its axis to provide us day and night. That's as rock-solid as it gets. The guarantee that there exists very little to interfere with that makes a practically immutable certainty for us.
I would venture to think that a mind that can be omniscient to such a degree as is attributed to God either doesn't exist or doesn't really care about the sequence of events in the universe, doesn't care to the point of complete non-interference.
