God's foreknowledge and free will
- Thread starter brocke
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No, I am questioning your definition of free will. No reasonable definition of free will would include the ability to instantiate a logical contradiction. I am curious why you think it would.
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I am free to choose whatever I wish, within reason. Whatever I choose, God knows. I don't see how this is mutually exclusive.
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Free will and foreknowledge are mutually exclusive. If you can't choose anything other than the course already known (in effect, choosing something god isn't expecting), then you are experiencing the appearance of free will. It appears to you that you are 'choosing', but the outcome is already known, therefore you have not made a choice at all. It feels like your choice, but it isn't.
Try it this way. I know that you will wear fall down and graze your knee on a particular day next year. I know this because I created you, and I created all the conditions in which this event would come about. It cannot not happen, because I already know it's happened/going to happen. Can you reach the very point of falling, then not fall?
If your answer is that whatever you alter your course to is also known, you must then consider that that is merely part of the plan, and you can no more deviate from that 'altered' course than you can the original course.
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If you think about it hard enough, you will realize that you are saying that, in order to have free will, we should be able to make X and not-X true at the same time. I have never seen any account of free will that requires the violation of the laws of logic (in this case, the law of noncontradiction.)
I am going to bed now and don't have the time at the moment for a long explanation, but think about what it means to "know" something (in the sense of knowing some fact.)
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- Apr 30, 2013
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The whole point of belief in God is believing that somebody is in charge and knows what's going on... right? I don't think omniscience can be dispensed with and still have Christian theism.
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Chany
Uncertain Absurdist
Blind post. I apologize if someone brought this up already.
If alternative possibilities (it is within a person's power to actually do either option A or B at time T2, not just hypothetical) are a necessary condition to having free will (a pretty basic and common assumption), then God's foreknowledge creates problems.
1. God knows all things and he is never wrong, per omniscience.
2. At T1, at the beginning of the universe, God knows that Chany will be given the choice between moving for a job or staying with his family. God knows that Chany will move for the job.
3. At T2, 2020, Chany is faced with the choice between moving for a job or staying with his family. Chany chooses to move for the job.
In this scenario, it would appear that I do not have free will. Why? Because one of the requirements for free will is that I have alternative possibilities. I have to have the power to access (or will to access, to be more specific) either the world in which I move for the job or the world in which I stay with my family. However, at T1, well before I made my decision at T2, God knows that what I will do at T2. Because God's knowledge is necessarily true and accurate, whatever propositional knowledge he has must be true, including about future events. We assume that knowledge of future events does not carry metaphysical weight because of our own human experiences. But these feelings do not apply to a being who, by definition, cannot be wrong; reality must conform to God's knowledge because God's knowledge must be true. When God knows the proposition, "At T2, Chany will decide to move for a job," the proposition is necessarily true; I must decide to move for a job at T2. But if I must decide to move for a job at T2, then I could not have done otherwise. I cannot access the world where I decide to stay with my family at T2 because, if I did, that would contradict God's knowledge, which is impossible. Because I cannot access multiple worlds, I do not have alternative possibilities. Because I do not have alternative possibilities, I do not have free will. Therefore, divine foreknowledge by an omniscient God is incompatible with free will.
Also, on a less robust and more intuitive level, it is hard to how one can defend against this objection to divine foreknowledge of free will without opening the floodgates to determinism. If God can somehow predict my actions so far in advanced with 100 percent certainty, it is hard to see how determinism is not true. It also hints at a B-Theory of Time view of the world, and, if anyone here is aware of William Lane Craig's work in even passing interest, they know the B-Theory of Time creates problems for the modern Kalaam Cosmological Argument.
If alternative possibilities (it is within a person's power to actually do either option A or B at time T2, not just hypothetical) are a necessary condition to having free will (a pretty basic and common assumption), then God's foreknowledge creates problems.
1. God knows all things and he is never wrong, per omniscience.
2. At T1, at the beginning of the universe, God knows that Chany will be given the choice between moving for a job or staying with his family. God knows that Chany will move for the job.
3. At T2, 2020, Chany is faced with the choice between moving for a job or staying with his family. Chany chooses to move for the job.
In this scenario, it would appear that I do not have free will. Why? Because one of the requirements for free will is that I have alternative possibilities. I have to have the power to access (or will to access, to be more specific) either the world in which I move for the job or the world in which I stay with my family. However, at T1, well before I made my decision at T2, God knows that what I will do at T2. Because God's knowledge is necessarily true and accurate, whatever propositional knowledge he has must be true, including about future events. We assume that knowledge of future events does not carry metaphysical weight because of our own human experiences. But these feelings do not apply to a being who, by definition, cannot be wrong; reality must conform to God's knowledge because God's knowledge must be true. When God knows the proposition, "At T2, Chany will decide to move for a job," the proposition is necessarily true; I must decide to move for a job at T2. But if I must decide to move for a job at T2, then I could not have done otherwise. I cannot access the world where I decide to stay with my family at T2 because, if I did, that would contradict God's knowledge, which is impossible. Because I cannot access multiple worlds, I do not have alternative possibilities. Because I do not have alternative possibilities, I do not have free will. Therefore, divine foreknowledge by an omniscient God is incompatible with free will.
Also, on a less robust and more intuitive level, it is hard to how one can defend against this objection to divine foreknowledge of free will without opening the floodgates to determinism. If God can somehow predict my actions so far in advanced with 100 percent certainty, it is hard to see how determinism is not true. It also hints at a B-Theory of Time view of the world, and, if anyone here is aware of William Lane Craig's work in even passing interest, they know the B-Theory of Time creates problems for the modern Kalaam Cosmological Argument.
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Yes; the Augustinian view was that although God knows what we will decide, He doesn't force the decision. Augustine says that it's comparable to the past - we can't change the choices we've already made, but that doesn't mean they weren't free (this foreshadows a later attempt to escape the problem). Nelson Pike of UCA nails it by arguing that if God is everlasting and omniscient, He must have had divine foreknowledge of what we'll do, so it is not in our power to do otherwise (the link is an analysis of his argument). The only escape is to redefine the assumptions of God's existence or omniscience; for example, developing the retrospective Augustinian argument, one could say that God, rather than being 'everlasting' in time, is eternal, i.e. outside time, and so doesn't have foreknowledge, but sees our free choices as we make them. The problem with this idea is that implications of eternity as being 'outside time' are difficult to grasp, and that biblical scripture paints God as everlasting, interacting and responding with mankind in time. Reconciling these means adding another layer of mystery (lack of understanding) to the idea of God, which is philosophically, if not theologically, unsatisfying.
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While I may not express the problem too well, I do understand it. And there is really no way around it for the proponent of free will AND an Omni-everything god.
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Well put. And you're right .... the comparatively recent attempts by apologists to 'hide' god outside of time and space leads to a raft of problems. Though given the speed and ease with which so many foundations of faith have been dismantled in the past 50 years, I'm not surprised they've felt the need to push god so far into the remote distance that we can no longer see him.
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It strikes me that there's an awkward triangle between omniscience, determinism, and freewill, where freewill is the unwanted 'gooseberry'. I don't think even Frankfurt's hierarchical compatibilism can save that relationship...
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No, it's pretty much unsalvageable.
The problem for the theist is that if they relinquish the gooseberry, god's 'necessary goodness' collapses. But if they relinquish the Omni's, god shrinks to nothing more than a sort of floating, non-violent lesser warlord. It's interesting to consider which you'd relinquish, were you in a position to do so.
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Chany
Uncertain Absurdist
There is actually a really easy way to eliminate the paradox: argue that foreknowledge cannot account for free will. In other words, you can argue that it is logically impossible for God to have divine foreknowledge of the actions free creatures will take when they face alternative possibilities. Because it is logically impossible, it shouldn't create problems for the theist, as they already modified omnipotence to deal with logical impossibilities.
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It has the appearance of working, but doesn't. Like free will
Or, it will only 'work' if you make every effort to avoid thinking through the implications. The reason it won't work is .... 'Omni-everything', as always. The god planned everything that would ever happen, including all our 'decisions'.
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Chany
Uncertain Absurdist
What implications? The god of classical theism is under no obligation to plan any events. God could have simply created the world and left it go. If the definition I present of omniscience is true, then God could not actually plan a single course of the world so long as it has free agents in it. God could only create contingency plans for the decisions those agents could make.
I don't see how simply having omnipotence, omniscience (as I defined), omnibenevolence, and such concludes hard determinism is true.
I don't see how simply having omnipotence, omniscience (as I defined), omnibenevolence, and such concludes hard determinism is true.
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