Fair enough; I suppose I’m thinking more of free choice than free will. Still, I question whether free will is meaningful without free choice, particularly when choice is being arbitrarily restricted by an omnipotent will. That setup seems significantly different to me than being prevented by non-willful laws of nature from, say, shooting death rays from my eyes.
I haven’t studied Augustine nearly well enough to know whether he answered that particular question, but I suppose one could argue that even if you don’t know right from wrong, you’re still making choices; Adam and Eve had the ability to sin or not to sin, even if they didn’t know what it meant to sin or not to sin.
Another question comes to mind: if God is omnipotent and Adam has free will, can God make Adam not want to commit suicide? If he can, doesn’t that mean that Adam doesn’t have free will? If he can’t, doesn’t that mean that God isn’t omnipotent?
I have an interesting thought. I read that death didn’t come into the world until sin happened; the eating of the fruit. So Adam couldn’t die before that, not possible. hmmmm
Einstein said, “God does not play dice”. I always wondered what he meant. It’s very profound. Did he believe that the universe was not just some cosmic throw of the dice? What is the relationship between God and chance?
I’ll avoid undue precision for understandings stake…
“God does not play dice” was Einstein’s response to Neils Bohr’s (and others’) arguments that nature is deeply and fundamentally random at the level of the atom (Bohr’s view has prevailed overwhelming now for three-quarters of a century). Einstein adamantly refused to accept such randomness for the rest of his life, fiercely defending the idea of strict determinism (and thus, the absense of free will, even for “God”).
I must emphasize that when Einstein used the word “God”, he merely meant it as a synonym for Nature. He wrote a letter explicitly proclaiming himself an atheist, but there has been disagreement about precisely what he meant ever after (and I don’t consider it groundless debate, even though I personally believe he meant he was a soft atheist and areligious).
If randomness and indeterminsim are the way of the Universe (and this view appears unassailable at present), then this would affect the definitions of the word “God” one would be allowed to use. In a sense, “chance” might arguably limit “God’s” power. But since another of “God’s” near-universal attributes is its transcendence, and, by definition, nothing transcendent can be limited by the laws of Nature or the beliefs and actions of the non-transcendent, it is by no means clear that “God” must be limited.
My own view is that the attribute “transcendence” is merely nonsense, and even if it weren’t, it would mean that “God” will be forever unknown and unknowable.