Perhaps, but the point is that if we’re building arguments based on a claim (that foreknowledge entails no free will), it is worth pointing out that that claim is very much disputed. And pointing out the importance of the distinction between foreknowledge and fatalism.
Yes indeed.
It’s been a funny thread, because I’ve defended two theological propositions: that there can be a heaven without it getting “boring”, and that omniscience is compatible with free choice.
…despite my overall view being that heaven, god and even free will are all largely nonsensical concepts. Ah well, maybe it’s the yuletide spirit
There is when you are the one who plotted out every last thing that happens on the tape. Freedom is a meaningless concept when your every thought and action was consciously designed by someone else long before you ever existed.
But if god interacts with the world by inspiring prophetic visions, the infinite possibilities collapse into one in the world where the prophesy is made. If he makes the correct prophecy in each world, possible, then there isn’t really free will in each world.
After all, if someone rolls a die, we know the possibilities, but that doesn’t make the throw not free, We’d wonder about that if we could call the roll every time.
In an infinite universe with every possible series of events, sometimes the visions would be accurate, sometimes misleading, and sometimes wouldn’t happen at all. We seem to inhabit a timeline where prophecies either don’t happen or are unreliable.
So, God does no better than I do in predicting a die roll. I’ll buy that - but then it isn’t much of a god.
If a gambler says he wins a bet on every horse race, but you discover he bets on every horse, you wouldn’t think he’s much of an expert on odds making, would you? The god who covers every possible bet isn’t much of a god either.
“So, your prediction of the rapture didn’t happen.”
“It happened in some universe, what’s your problem?”
This is my point. The idea that omniscience is even possible is absurd. A truly omniscient god would know everything that could happen in every possible world, right down to the level of every thought inside every person’s mind, and the probability density cloud of every electron. A truly omniscient god wouldn’t need to create anything; they would just need to know exactly how everything would behave if they existed. In effect, those are the same thing.
Knowing everything would also make such a god omnipotent; they would only need to imagine the results of any kind of divine intervention, and it would happen, right down to the quantum level. Omniscient = omnipotent.
The impossible attribute of a god is omnibenevolence. An omniscient god can imagine (or perhaps possess ‘atemporal memories’ of) all possible worlds and all imaginable worlds, including worlds full of suffering. Such an entity could not be omnibenevolent.
I like the concept of the universe being kind of a simulation in the mind of god. Playing on the old joke about jokes in jail, imagine a couple of gods talking. “42” one says. “Terrible universe,” says another, “I much prefer your 29.”
You should start giving lectures on your new theology. You could make a bundle.
I don’t believe in it, of course; in fact I’ve got half-a-dozen other imaginary theologies on file, some of them inspired by discussions on here. Call it a hobby.
A guy was sent to jail. One day he was in the exercise yard, and he heard the long term convicts talking. One would say “17,” and the rest would break into laughter. Another would say “65,” - more laughter.
“What’s going on?” he asked someone.
“They’ve been here so long that instead of repeating the jokes over and over, they give them numbers. The others know the joke they’re talking about.”
“Okay,” he said. He went up to the other cons, and said “23.” No reaction, no laughs.
First let me say that is hard to argue about what Christianity says because even the Bible is inconsistent in how it presents God, and centuries of scholarly analysis and debate stack on top of stories created to make individual points at different times to different audiences. So is almost like there are a many christianities as there are people.
But you are stepping into the territory I actually addressed. Part of the problem is that the philosophical terms and definitions are not clear because the nature of the concepts are either not something we can really grasp or else they are used inconsistently for processes and concepts we do understand.
That’s what I was trying to say about “free will” being an undefined and noncomprehensible term. If “free will” is just that people make unconstrained choices, that sets up one argument being had in other threads about our causal universe and Determinism. But it also runs afoul of the concept of all-knowing.
When you say that God may be atemporal and see time as a whole, you are creating a variety of different conflicts depending on the interpretation.
Consider, for one example, the book of Job. The text of the narrative states that Satan wanted to prove Job’s religiousness came from his good fortune, so he makes a series of increasing steps to a wager against god.
The lesson of the story is typically presented that Job remains faithful through the loss of his fortune, his family, and even his health, so good wins and restores Job’s health and fortune and gives him s new family.
Except the actual text has Job rant god when he finally shows up, and god gives tirade back about how Job doesn’t know anything and God knows everything so shut up and take it.
Problem 1 is the idea that god doesn’t know how the test will go so makes the bet with Satan. Not consistent with the all- knowing god that’s knows about every bird in the trees yada yada.
Problem 2 is if god does know exactly how it will turn out, but Satan does not, so god allows the bet to teach Satan something.
Back to the atemporal argument. It is not clear what that even means. If god can see everything that ever has and will happen, then as I said he sees it as if it has already happened. That does not give much room for free agency in every decision.
Option 1 is that the universe is one whole item created all at once from start to finish, so god can see the outcome of every person’s every decision because it’s already recorded. Just like you can read a novel and know the characters have already made every choice even if you, the reader, haven’t seen the outcome already. That doesn’t leave room for free agency.
Option 2 is some sort of multiverse that allows any choice that could be made to be made in a different universe. That is even more problematic for the Christian theology because it runs smack dab into the predominant idea that god has some “master plan” and that all the bad things that happen are necessary to achieve that plan. It’s kinda hard to say god has a master plan that consists of anything that ever could happen happening.
The multiverse argument means that there are universes where Hitler was a jolly fine guy and a saint. There are universes where you are a monster that kills half the planet with glee. In the multiverse scenario, everybody has a universe where they get sent to hell for eternity. Sure, everybody is saved in at least one universe, but each possible universal instance is effectively a different person.
I guess that gets into that definitional problem I mentioned. What does it mean to know what choice will be made? Is it having a pretty good idea because you understand the person and their ideals and values or is it actually with certainty knowing the outcome? Human existence is such that knowing something entails those propositions you claim are additional.
Just like that character in a novel or movie, I can know with certainty what that character will do/ has done because I can look ahead or reread or rewatch the story. But that knowledge leaves me powerless to change the story.
Except god is supposed to be all- powerful. So he can use that information, he can tell you what choice you will make and you be powerless to change your choice. Because if he can’t tell you what your choice will be, he isn’t all- powerful. But if he can tell you, then you must be unable to change your choice. Or he will be stuck in some infinite progression loop of, “So you were going to do A, but I told you that so you wanted to choose B, except I told you you would do that too, so you changed your mind to C, but I foresaw that as well, but I didn’t tell you I saw that because I wanted you to do C and it worked.” In which case free will becomes meaningless.
I wanted to address a side but still on-topic question. Because free will seems expressly invalid, or at least limited, in a common but not-universal Christian Creed: belief.
It’s very common for some Christians to say if you do the Right Thing, for the Wrong Reason, it doesn’t matter. Or, on the flip side, if you truly believe, your actions will be forgiven.
So, if you do everything you’re commanded to do, but do it for a lacking reason, you lack of faith invalidates your free will of choosing to do good works.
And if you do endless horrors in the name of your true faith in god, despite choosing to do horrors freely, you can/will be forgiven.
That seems to be a common conception that largely negates the validity of free will and how you are punished/praised for exercising it.
Again, not all Christians, and I’m looking from the outside as a Jew by birth and training, where belief is nice but not required as long as one is obedient to the commandments (again, not all Jews, or not all to the same degree).
I was just making the distinction here, because a couple of posters in a row suggested that precognition precludes free will, when the reality is that it is more complex than that. When you get into the different ways of knowing the future and, importantly, what the knower can do with that information, there are various hypotheses. Indeed we’re basically just talking about flavors of Compatibilism, because Determinism tends to imply the possibility (in principle) of accurate prediction.
But once again: I’m not defending the concept of a god here. The kind of precognition an omnimax god has, who also happens to have created the whole universe including the sentient beings in it, doesn’t sit well at all with the concept of free will, let alone the two together being a “solution” for the problem of unnecessary suffering.
The bible is a collection of stories from different backgrounds compiled in a more-or-less haphazard way across several centuries by people with a vastly different background from ours; it’d be a miracle if it never contradicted itself. But while I’m even less competent to give any grounded opinion on biblical exegesis than on theological scholarship, it seems to me that this is largely a side issue: nothing about the argument so far compels one to accept biblical literalism. So we can just let those stories and allegories be stories and allegories, scoped to a time, place and audience quite remote from ours.
Again, the crucial point is that whether the universe is deterministic, and hence, free will impossible, doesn’t do anything to rebuff Plantinga’s argument. All it does is to show that the premises of a tri-omni god and the existence of evil are not inconsistent, whether there is free will or not.
It’s somewhat difficult here what to make of a phrase like ‘already happened’ in an atemporal context, and whether it would be in conflict with free will. To a being at the end of the universe, everything has ‘already happened’, but that fact is not in conflict with the possibility of free agency. Besides, there are obviously other possibilities for conceptualizing god’s knowledge. One would be that god’s timelessness is present-like: they experience everything as a simultaneous present, like a timeline rotated 90° and each moment stacked upon each other. Everything is as if it is actively happening to them, thus, they know every action occurring, but that doesn’t constrain those actions from being free anymore than you observing my choosing an apple rather than an orange means the choice can’t be free.
Sure, but only because it effectively posits a kind of ‘meta-time’ outside of the timeline of the universe, where the latter exists as a whole at a particular point, and god’s knowledge of it is posterior to that, while still somehow anterior to every action being taken. If god is atemporal, then it’s not as if everything is ‘already recorded’—i.e. their knowledge is not consequent to the universe playing out a certain way.
The multiverse scenario doesn’t really make much sense to me. If anything, I’d think that I’d have no free will there—since I don’t actually choose any alternative, but any option is equally realized.
“It’d be a miracle” is an ironic turn of phrase, given that, yes, among many of the most popular denominations of Christianity, a “divinely inspired” Bible is indeed asserted, and as I pointed out earlier, biblical literacy is extremely popular in the US.
Which is then part of the reason for the messy situation that @Irishman alluded to: How did judas die? Depends who you ask. Did plants come before humans? The same.
And most relevant to the topic: how can an omnimax God apparently not know things, not be able to do things, and claim to have traits that are elsewhere defined as evil? Pick your rationalization.
Would that it were so! (Of course I know what you mean, still I’m not sure of the degree of correlation between literacy and literalism here.)
Sure. Again, I’m not going to try and reconcile the bible with, well, anything. But as you’ve yourself done in this thread, I think it’s advisable to hew to the strongest possible version of arguments. And biblical literalism very much isn’t that.
The Bible is the source material for all of the concepts about the Christian God. If the source material is garbage, all conclusions drawn from it are invalid.
Everyone seems to have a different conception of God. We can’t reach logical agreement if we start from different premises.
We also need mutually coherent definitions. We can’t agree on logic if the words mean different things to different people.
So I looked up Plantinga’s argument to make sure I understand it.
Argument: A world with free creatures choosing good is more valuable than a world without free creatures; God could create such a world, even if some free creatures choose evil, making God’s existence compatible with evil.
Ok, but valuable to whom, and in what way? Valuable to us creatures, so that we can have the opportunity to deserve hell? Because Christian doctrine says none of us deserve heaven, it’s Jesus’s death on the cross and three days in hell that redeem us. But if there were no evil to freely choose, we would all deserve heaven.
Or valuable to God? How is it valuable to him to have creatures that can freely choose evil? And in order for them to be able to choose evil, the creator would have to create evil. So then that creator cannot be purely good if he can create evil and wants to create evil in order for humans to have the opportunity to burn in hell for eternity.
And another point, what good is free choice with incomplete information? How can you choose good of you don’t know that option exists? From the Cheerios belief, one must believe in Jesus and God to be saved, but then there are people who never get the opportunity to hear about Jesus or God, so they are doomed to hell because they freely chose evil. So now we have to invent some workaround for all those people and all the little babies that die a infants or else free will demands they be cast into hell for not choosing to believe in god.
Etc.
Or to flip Platinginga’s argument, if the three concepts create a mutual contradiction, adding a fourth nonsense concept does not make those three no longer contradict.
Or one could argue that God can be all three and evil can still exist because Santa Claus exists. Because the world is better if Santa Claus is real, and God could make Santa Claus, so Santa is real.
We’re back to arguing definitions and concepts. How can God answer prayers and heal the sick or whatever miracle if it’s all happening simultaneously? “Oh your child is dying let me cure her, but she’s also already dead because everything is happening at once, so if I cure her, then suddenly she is cured and dead, so now we have to create a multiverse, but then I don’t actually have to do anything because both will already happen, so I both did and didn’t answer your prayers, yay me!”
Plantinga’s argument makes no sense to me. If the world was made by an omnipotent and omniscient being, then if evil exists it does so for only one reason: because the creator wanted it and planned for it to happen. And I fail to see how that fits with an omnibenevolent god, or why Plantinga’s argument refutes that in any way.
Plantinga’s argument does not consider the problem of natural evil, and so fails that way. It also seems to treat free will as an absolute, either existing or not existing.
But we know that this isn’t correct, no matter what you think about free will. Some people are driven to do evil by mental aberrations. The person born with an IQ of 60 (translate that into intelligence however you wish) is probably not free to pursue a career in quantum physics.
Plus, would the world be less valuable if humans were born without the ability to commit mass murder? It would be hard to make an argument for that.
