Free Will.

Great Debates
61

“If God were perfectly moral …”
I’m not getting how having a moral code means any being has to care about anything except not violating that particular code. Is God moral? We know that the Bible claims He is Angry:
2 Kings 17:18
“So the LORD was very angry with Israel and removed them from his presence. Only the tribe of Judah was left …”

He’s also described as Jealous:
Deuteronomy 6:15
“For the LORD thy God is a jealous God among you lest the anger of the LORD thy God be kindled against thee, and destroy thee from off the face of the earth.”

I’m not convinced that God necessarily concerns himself with the day to day problems of seven billion humans. I think the point is, He could monitor all that at once, I just don’t see why he’d want to.

Regarding pain, why would God object to humans dealing with pain? Consider Job. True, God went back and restored his wealth and gave him some notable offspring, but He really ran the poor guy through the ringer. Apparently, God believes in “Tough love.” I don’t see where God wants to spare us mortals pain or suffering. He certainly caused quite a bit of it to the unlucky residents of Sodom and Gomorrah, or the entire population of the planet, minus Noah and his family.

How the heck does foreknowledge preclude free will? Can you explain why the future has to be a mystery? Look, a super-duper being sees what will happen, then does whatever He wants, also knowing what will happen. How is that not free will? It’s not about a surprise birthday party. Also, what do you think " …in His image" means? I gather it means “A spiritual being with eternal spiritual life.”

62

I don’t think the difficulty of the decision particularly changes the point. If I know tomorrow I’ll have a crisis of conscience but ultimately decide to return the money, then, tomorrow, I can still wrestle over the pros and cons and eventually come to the conclusion I knew I would. I don’t see the problem with that.

<possible hijack>
On the subject of free speech specifically, I’ve said many times before that in the US there’s this misconception that it means the right to say whatever you like in any circumstances. No country on earth has freedom of speech in this sense, all countries have many exceptions, including the US.
The only substantive difference is that in the US hate speech is protected, and usually the justification for that is just the misconception I mentioned.

63

The omniscience vs. free will paradox is trivial. As others have noted, fore-knowledge isn’t causation. The real question is whether those who cleave to determinism are ready to say folks who violate the law aren’t responsible for their actions. Consider a pedophile. Is he (or she) responsible? Cuz, quite frankly I see this as a paradigmatic case of someone who doesn’t choose his (or her) urges. Yet, it receives the greatest opprobrium society can bring to bear. So, is this determinism something you believe is important or just something you use to rag on religion? FWIW, I’m an atheist.

64

Well, what do you mean by pedophile? Someone who has the desire, or acts upon it? Of course I don’t find someone responsible for a desire that no-one would choose to have. They’re responsible for their actions though (in as far as anyone’s responsible for anything*).
Sometimes people often confuse the two things perhaps because they assume that someone with that desire will inevitably act upon it.

  • On the wider point of determinism versus Penology, it’s a very interesting subject and something society will have to wrestle with very soon. Our increasing knowledge of human neurology and genetics will be tested in the courts over the next few decades, and we will have to clearly define what we mean by responsibility.

My own opinion is that we should drop the idea of responsibility, along with any notion of punishment. That doesn’t mean we should have no justice system. It just means we only concern ourselves with rehabilitation, deterrence of crime and incarcerating those that present a continuing risk to the public. All these make sense even without any concept of free will (however it’s defined).

65

My view exactly.

66

Yeah, I know. A-wizard-did-it. Ain’t it fun to have a mythical being about which one can posit any nonsense and believe it?

But seriously, you haven’t thought it all the way through.

On the contrary, its just you trying to place restrictions on omnipotence and omniscience so their presence in a single being isn’t incompatible with free will.

You say if an omnipotent being designs children to have free will then they will have free will. OK, let’s go with that. What does free will mean? It must mean that the child can make a decision that is independent of the child’s design, right? If the child has been designed and built such that it will always take the cookie rather than the coal, then the child doesn’t have free will. So if that’s true then the being can’t also be truly omniscient because it can’t and doesn’t know whether the child will take the cookie or the coal.

Contrastingly, if the being is truly omniscient then it has to know whether the child has been built such that it will take the cookie (or the coal). If it has that knowledge (ie is omniscient) yet couldn’t have instead built the child so it would take the coal (or the cookie), then it’s not omnipotent.

An omnipotent being can build an unpredictable child, but in a universe in which there can be an unpredictable child, there can be no omniscient beings. An omniscient being can know everything, but in a universe in which everything is known to that being, it can’t be possible to build a child that isn’t predictable.

It’s precisely analogous to the old joke about whether an omnipotent deity can build something so heavy it can’t lift it. The very idea is self evidently nonsense.

No it doesn’t: if he doesn’t know how it will all turn out he isn’t truly omniscient. You are adopting a limited definition of the term to avoid paradox, which is sensible, but does not adhere to the clear meaning of “truly omniscient”.

67

I think you may still be relying on the hidden assumption that God is within time, as we are. Do you see a contradiction between the child having free will and the deity knowing what the child will decide after the child has decided?

68

I disagree. Your definition restricts the omnipotent being to using his omnipotence to create an invariant predetermined future. Knowing the future does not require programming the universe to have a specific future, it only requires the ability to be omnipresent and see the future. The wizard can create the mechanism by which the universe unfolds over time subject to free will and randomness still knowing the outcome without programming that outcome into the mechanism. He could predestine the universe, but he doesn’t have to, and he’s not omnipotent if he’s required to.

69

Well, it contradicts certain religious beliefs. If God knows exactly what we are going to do, then he must also know exactly what he is going to do. His own actions on Judgement Day are pre-determined. “Jack: hell. Joe: heaven. Jill: hell. Buck: Okay, you tried, so purgatory…”

If God’s own actions are pre-determined, he does not have omnipotence. He can’t contradict what he knows he’s going to do. “Ah, screw it, to hell with the whole effing lot on youse!”

It all boils down to the inherent contradictions in the “omni” propositions. Drop those, and you’re back in business, but insist on them, and you can’t help constructing nonsensical paradoxes.

70

Thank you for saying this so simply!

Seems to me that believers love these kind of paradoxes because they illustrate how mysterious and magical God is. Instead of allowing the paradoxes to challenge and perhaps moderate their assumptions, believers get to enjoy themselves by creating fantastical escape hatches–for both God and themselves.

I don’t understand why Christians put so much emphasis on the “omniscience” of God. They believe God has angels. Why does an all-knowing entity need angels? If God exists outside of time, why do people pray? Why should we think that God cares for us if he’s that far removed from our day-to-day reality?

Oh, I know. Because the bible tells us so (in selected passages).

71

koans?

72

At least no one pretends that koans are logical. They are designed to illustrate how meaningless it is to try to make sense of the unknowable.

Whereas certain (many, dare I say) Christians aren’t content in admitting this about God. It’s like they are afraid that if God is only damn-near perfect rather than absolutely perfect, then Zeus, Baal, and/or Krishna can stage a coup and overthrow him.

73

I wonder if God has a sense of humor. I gather he does, since Jesus seems to have one:

Matthew 14:29

“Come on out, the water’s fine.”

If He does, He must laugh out loud.

“Some of these guys are pretty brilliant, Einstein, Da Vinci … but ‘Can I microwave a burrito so hot I can’t eat it?’ Wow. Well, they have other virtues, I guess.”

74

Free will conflicts with an omniscient God the same way that it conflicts with determinism (and also non-determinism). I believe that it exists on a different level of emergent phenomena and makes sense only on that level. My argument may not apply to the theological issue, since it assumes physicalism. But then, maybe it could be reworked to fit a theological framework.

[sidebar for definitions] A physicalist, who believes that the mind is a property of the brain and that the brain is a biological machine (as I do), is either a determinist (one who believes that things will work out the way they do based on initial conditions) or a non-determinist (one who believes that there are random elements at play). [Oddly, “determinism” and “non-determinism” don’t cover all the possibilities, using my definitions.]

Yet free will appears to exist from the subjective point of view. I can choose to raise my hand, or choose not to raise my hand.

There are some things that clearly exist only because of the existence of subjectivity. For example, qualia (the sensations we get from sensory input, such as “red”) clearly exist, even though there’s really no such thing (as “red”) in the objective world. This is carelessly phrased here, but it’s a very well thought-out concept. Free will is also something that only exists due to subjectivity. (It doesn’t even make any sense as a concept without it.)

IMHO, free will exists but only in the subjective frame of reference.

This may feel like a cop-out to some; I confess it’s a little bit like saying “You don’t have free will, you just think you do.” However, (1) it accords well with the ethical viewpoint, which is that we have to act as though we think we have free will, otherwise we’re doomed to fatalism, and (2) THINKING you have free will and ACTING as though you do to some extent proves the point that you do.

This second point is a complicated one, which puts me in mind of the “strange loops” discussed by Hofstadter in “Gödel Escher and Bach”. To put it clumsily, the brain creates the mind but the mind affects the brain, and there isn’t a clear boundary between the two. This isn’t a Cartesian dualism. It’s more like “emergentism”, to coin a silly word. The mind is an emergent property of the brain, just as chemistry is an emergent property of physics. While the physics sets the stage for chemistry, it doesn’t make sense to discuss every question of chemistry as one of physics, even if it can be reduced to that (with distracting complexity). It doesn’t make sense to say “Chemistry doesn’t exist.” Nor does it make sense to say “The mind doesn’t exist” even if the mind’s existence is totally dependent on the physical machinery that creates it.

But the subjectivity that the brain creates is a startlingly different thing that the substrate that created it – even more startlingly different than chemistry from physics! – and we shouldn’t be surprised if it leads to discussions that make little sense on the physical substrate level.

For many questions, reductionism is a great approach. For others, not so much. I think free will is a case of the latter.

75

Well, I disagree. He did what was Right, which is what he would always choose, of his own free will! Note that according to most Christian theology, God is not only omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent, God is also unchanging. It All Is As It Should Be.

Yeah, bingo. They may or may not be nonsense, but I can’t make much sense of them. I could try to accept them on faith and work from there, but why would I?

A lot of things we learn from physics don’t make sense, either, but I accept them on faith and work from there. That’s me as a layman, or as most scientists do when thinking outside their fields. Of course, our “faith” is tentative: if the scientists say “Wait! We goofed, it’s really xxxx!” we adjust accordingly. Meanwhile, countless scientists are continuously challenging the orthodoxy, as they explore it.

76

As a vital and energetic being, I find that tenet disturbing. The only things that never change…are dead. Heck, even the mountains change, as do the stars.

(I think the Bible is actually a documentary of God’s ability to change: he tries one thing, which doesn’t work. He ponders on it for a thousand years, then tries something else. The Revelation suggests that it isn’t going to work either, but hints that God will try something else yet again.)

(The Bible is actually the account of God’s slow accommodation to agriculture. He curses Adam to eat bread, and rejects Cain’s offering of grain. But, later, not only does Jesus provide bread, Jesus actually becomes bread. God changed his mind…in a really big way!)

(Don’t worry too much about this; I’m only being half-serious.) :wink:

Actually, their ability to change their minds is a big part of why I trust them. I have admiration for a system of knowledge that is able to say, “Oops! I was wrong!”

I don’t have a whole lot of admiration for the Catholic Church…but I do respect their ability to confess their errors. They admit they blew it with Galileo, and they admit that they blew it with their opposition to evolution. This means their system of belief has some room for error-correction, and without that, no approach to The Truth can possibly be viable.

77

I’ll give you this - but once he knows the future which he didn’t design, can he change it?

A big problem here is in the definition of free will, and the problem is equivalent with or without God being involved. Is it free will when someone cannot even theoretically know ahead of time how it will turn out? In the God case, the consequences of a decision and the factors causing it (even if God did it) are invisible to the decider. In the non-God case, perhaps a decision is predetermined if you know all the inputs and internal states going into making the decision. You can’t do either of these things.

Decisions under these circumstances might not be technically free will decisions, but they are indistinguishable from true free will.

78

Does God himself have free will? If he knows there will be an earthquake tomorrow, does he have the ability to change his mind and not cause it?

79

Omnimax God sits outside of time, so your question is nonsensical. (Whew!) I suppose he could have cast his diorama without the earthquake, but then he also could have re-cast it with it. I agree with Trinopus that the Old Testament doesn’t have an omnimax feel to it.

80

I don’t see a contradiction here. He can know something will happen and still have the ability to make it otherwise. What’s the problem?