The question really leads to two problems: How powerful is your God? And, if God can see the future, do we have free will?
If God can see the future, then my actions have been pre-determined and I’m just sitting here acting out His wishes. There is no free will since He already knows what I’m going to wear today.
If God cannot see the future, why? God was able to create the universe and everything in it, but His power stops at this one point.
I would think that by definition God has to be omniscient. Anything else is just an arbitrarily powerful entity.
I too have wondered what God’s existence (assuming for this thread that God in the Judeo-Christian sense does exist) means for free-will.
Maybe God can foresee all possible futures but leaves the decision making to us (I don’t know if that defeats omniscience or not).
Maybe your free-will choices (indeed all choices) were made at the beginning of time even though you weren’t around yet and God just knows what they are now without having a hand in affecting them.
Maybe just knowing what you are going to do before you do it does not actually deny free-will. In a sense you are destined to make the choices you do but they are all still your choices.
Maybe free-will does not exist and you are indeed destined to do whatever it is you’re going to do.
As you might be able to tell I am not sure myself.
Why does God knowing what you’re going to wear today determine your actions any more than your mother knowing what you wore yesterday would?
If you’re watching a re-run and you know how it’s going to end, does that mean the actors are just acting out your wishes?
Can something even be “in the future” to God? God doesn’t live at a particular point in time any more than God exists at a particular point in space. Which is hard to grasp, but then, modern physics (i.e. Einstein’s theory of relativity) says that time is weirder than we think.
It bears directly on free-will. You wake up today not knowing what you are going to wear and it comes down to a green shirt and a blue shirt. You settle on the blue shirt. You think you just made a free choice. However, if God is omniscient, then God knew since the beginning of time that you’d choose the blue shirt today. It doesn’t matter what you ‘think’ you chose…it was destined to happen no matter what since the beginning of time so you therefore did not really have a ‘choice’ in the matter.
None of this means you are acting out God’s wishes (necessarily). Maybe the ability to make choices all happened at the instant of Creation and God let it play whichever way it went. Now, however, the Univese really would be a re-run for God to watch. Nothing can change or be in doubt to God. It will all happen the same way just as if you watched The Matrix a hundred times.
As to your last bit I think it is quite possible (maybe even demanded) that God exist at all times simultaneously. That however does not change the pre-ordained/destined vs. free-will bit at all.
Please explain what free will ie, and what the difference between having it or not would make to anything.
I see people peddling this “God is outside of time/space” stuff without acknowledging that it presumes some pretty big questions without explanation or justification. We don’t know how time or space works, and if the concept of “outside” even makes sense to apply to either.
This thread assumes that there’s such a thing as “the future”. Myself, I don’t believe in it. I mean, I’m witnessing the present, and I have pretty conclusive evidence that there is a past, but future? Never seen it.
I would like to think that free-will allowed me to select what I’m wearing today. In the absence of free-will, I could get up at a prescribed time and put on my government issued cothing. There are choices that should have an impact on my life in the future. If I chose to quit my job today, I’d have no money tomorrow.
It would seem that an ant lacks free-will. It is born, and chemical signals in its brain tells it to * head striaght until an object is reached, if that object is food, return with food, else, turn right, and continue going staight.*.
Free will allows me to superceed any of the pre-recorded ideas built into my brain.
But then, what does my choice in clothing have to do with anything?
The example Scott Adams loves to use is stepping on a tack. You have grey matter in your spine with a very elementary contol structure. It knows that if you’re right foot steps on something sharp, it has to lift the right foot at the same time as it plants the left foot. It does all this without your brain or any higher functions. A pain signal is then sent to your brain AFTER you’ve lifted your foot, and it is believed that our brains percieve all this as “something was sharp so I chose to lift my foot,” but in reality, YOU had no free will. There are a variety of other functions that our lower brain controls without including us at a conscious level.
Beyond the Judeo-Christian God, are there any other thoughts? What’s the point in having a God that is not all powerful. Are there any Muslims out there with an opinion on this matter? My impression from Islamic liturature is that Allah is WAAAAAY more powerful that the Judeo-Christian God.
Then how can you tell if we have it or not in one state of reality vs. another?
That doesn’t fly. You inserted an extra “me” in there that’s “superceding” things. But the “me” is exactly what we are trying to discuss: how does “free will” impact IT?
Light from our sun takes about 8.5 minutes to reach us. Thus, if one looked at the sun in theory (not in practice) you can see 8.5 minutes into the past. Looking at some stars, you can see pretty far back in time. Thus, one would reason the opposite is also true, eh?
In your first paragraph, there is a mismatch between God knowing the future and mother knowing the past. A perfect match would be that both know the future.
The problem for us with God knowing the future is that His knowledge cannot change. If there is genuine free will, then His knowledge of the future is not yet definite until we shall have acted in the future. In which case God is not all knowing.
In your second paragraph there is a mismatch between the play’s actors in the recorded medium and the subject viewing the play.
The play’s actors are already determined by the play as scripted by the playwright; the viewers’ desires are immaterial and irrelevant and non-determinative of the players’ actions in the play.
If the Christian God is omniscient, how could this be in the Bible? And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.
Why did he create man if he would know right before doing it that he would regret this in the future?
You are on top of a tall building, you can see around corners of streets where buildings are located. You see a car rushing towards a corner and from around the corner another one rushing to the same point of intersection of the corner angle. But their respective drivers don’t see what’s coming. And they are definitely going to impact into each other.
That is somewhat a kind of pre-knowledge on your part. I think that God’s omniscience is something similar to your view of the two impending head-on colliding vehicles.
So we don’t have free will? I think that insofar as we are concerned, we have to always be careful in approaching a blind corner.
Caution is the word in life, and trying to see ahead and avoid all kinds of disaster, troubles, and mistakes.
For me free will after one is born is not so much the problem; the more problematic is why we are born with all our imperfections and others just got born with all kinds of perfections, within and without: we are born with the genes we come with and into the circumstances we land into, all without so much as a by our leave.
I don’t believe in any gods, but I don’t see why one can’t believe in an omniscient being and free will at the same time. You can have free will and God can still predict what choices everyone will make before hand. I can sometimes predict when a person will smile and they still have free will. Why can’t one believe that an omniscient being will know in advance every decision everyone will make of thier own free will?
I think your ability to predict when a person will smile does weaken the argument for free will ever so slightly, since it implies that something known to you determines whether or not they will smile.
It sounds to me like you’re assuming that God is limited to a point in time, with some events before God and some behind. I’m trying to challenge that: to say that, for God, there is no difference between “the past” and “the future” and no sense using words like “until” or “already.” Thus, for God, there is no mismatch between knowing the future and knowing the past; and knowing that something will happen no more negates free will than knowing that something has happened. (So it’s misleading to talk about God predicting what you’ll do: God doesn’t foresee it, God sees it.)
There has never been any proof or even evidence that there is such a being as ‘God.’ So right away, that suggests problems for questions of this sort.
There IS however, ample proof that people have imagined various and sundry ‘Gods’ in their own minds. (see Bible, the)
So perhaps the question should be, “Can the so-called ‘Gods’ invented by humankind see the future?”
That’s pretty easy to answer because an imagined God can have any attributes that the imaginer endows him with. If you say that your particular ‘God’ can see the future, who is anyone to say you are wrong? After all, you created him.
I myself am troubled by free will and God’s omniscience. Would that we don’t know the metaphysical God, but just the God before the knowledge of metaphysics dawned upon the human mind.
For my own part, I just proceed on the basis of my free will and I try to make very careful choices in life, and keep an open mind in order to know as much options as possibly available. But then in most instances we don’t have the time and the luxury of prolonged study.
You see, I tell my kids that even though God knows everything, past present and future, so that everything is written in his records like in a CD disk; nonetheless what we have done can still be neutralized insofar as God’s records are concerned.
What I mean is this: when we do something wrong, it is recorded in the CD disk of God before during and after we did the act. But being humble and honest with ourselves we can amazingly add to his records by doing a retraction of the the act, what in religion they call repentance. However, when we die then we can no longer ever add anything to that book in order to neutralize or revise previous entries.
Hope this might be useful to you – in the defense of God’s omniscience and man’s free will.
Well explained, Boink. emack needn’t propose a notional omniscient God to examine the relationship between free will (or the illusion thereof) and time.
Time is merely an axis on which events exist, in the same way that space (ie. “everyday” space) is 3 axes along which objects exist. There is no such thing as “now”. For thermodynamic reasons, memory only works in one direction (ie. at any “now” on the axis, only the events “to its left” will exist in memory).
Just because one has no knowledge or memory of an event if it is “to the right” of one’s “now” does not mean it does not exist on the axis. Its existence and cause are all explained by the events to its left (which might include “free will” decisions) but time (or an entity which can view the entire axis at once) need not be involved at any particular “now”.
Regarding the God part of the question, I would suggest that this idea more seriously questions God’s “free will” rather than that of us poor thermodynamically constrained insects. He can view the entire axis and can therefore see when He interferes and the exact outcome of such interference, which would appear to render prayer meaningless save for its comforting value and put the idea of “sin” on very shaky grounds.
That is, if we are created with the capacity to disobey God and God can see when this happens over all time, I cannot see where any “fault” lies except solely and squarely with Him. After all, if a shoddily built TV gives an intermittent picture, one does not blame the television itself.