This is the part we all have to live with. In my book as long as the two are indistinquishable then it defines what free will is. If somebody has a way to distinqush them the whole thing gets more complex.
Right, I don’t see the contradiction for omnipotent beings.
But then he didn’t truly know something would happen, because it didn’t. An omnipotent god can change things in accordance to what he sees he will do with his omniscience, but can’t change things that conflict with his omniscience.
But perhaps his omniscience is not of what is going to happen, but rather of a probability cloud of possible events. Is that omniscience? I don’t think so - or else we’d know in the same sense how a coin flip will turn out.
Omnimax gods are logically self-contradictory.
The only difference is if some entity knows what you are going to do versus no entity knowing what you are going to do. I could see where that would be an issue for some people. Since I don’t believe in any such entity, it doesn’t bother me.
Right.
Maybe they’re saying that if God took action A, then X would happen, if God took action B, then Y would happen, and if he took action C, then Z would happen. That’s omniscience in a way, but it’s not knowledge of the future, it’s more like God has access to LaPlace’s Demon.
If God has knowledge of the future, then he has no capacity to do anything about it.
Further, a God who’s outside of time has no capacity to change his mind, nor to take any actions at all. This God is the opposite of omnipotent.
I agree he does not have capacity to change his mind, but he can certainly take action. He knows the consequence of both his own inaction and his action and he knows what choice he will make.
This! Which I think of as Voyager’s Paradox, because I first learned it from you!
Foreknowledge of all events leads to absolute helplessness to change them.
One might say that God exercised his omnipotence only at the instant of creation, making all things and events in one big magical spasm. But like the “outside of time” argument, it doesn’t work well with ordinary common sense.
But, hey, if we can say “The Big Bang” caused time to begin, then they can say “God is outside of time.” The big difference is that there’s evidence for the Big Bang.
I see the problem of choice here. Let’s call him g0D, is ominscience robbing him of choices, or can he opt not to make all choices? Must he know all, or is that just an option for him? Must he know all of his own choices also? I don’t know, my own semiscience and semipotence are more than I can handle already.
Huh? He knows action A will occur because it will occur, and he believes it will occur, and his omniscience justifies that belief.
He knows what he is going to do. What’s the problem?
It suggests that he cannot do otherwise, which limits omnipotence.
This echoes another paradox, one which is very uncomfortable for Bible believers: “Can God do evil?” If not, then he is less than omnipotent. But if so, he is less than perfect.
This has led some apologists to suggest that whatever God does, no matter how vile it may seem to us, is “good” by definition. Thus, while we might see his sending the Great Flood to commit the worst act of genocide of all time as a bad thing, the “perfect by definition” idea would say, no, that was good, because God can only wreak good.
Grin! Theology always has that problem! What am I talking about God for, when I haven’t vacuumed the living room carpet, changed the sand in the cat box, or returned Mrs. Deakins’ blender which I borrowed a couple weeks ago?
Why are we focused on the perfect, when there are so many very simple things we could do to make the world better?
No because that omnimax God created the whole timeline at once. Controlling the whole timeline at once is even maxier.
God sets some particles and/or plasma in motion 13-odd billion years ago. He may or may not have interacted with some of the life forms (us) that resulted from that action. How does that equate to causing an earthquake. If I build a house, and a stone falls from the wall a hundred years later, even if I set the stone originally, it fell due to the laws of Physics, that is weathering and gravity. IF God creates the Laws of Physics (which appear to make some kind of sense), how is he responsible for the earthquake? Should he have made physical laws that can’t possible result in any frail humans being harmed or annoyed? Earthquakes happen, weather happens. Why would an omnipotent being be responsible for every event, rather than just for setting the machinery in motion?
Why should he care?
How does knowing the future imply inability to change one’s mind? So, God knows he will change His mind in 5 billion years. He knows he’ll change it twice, or He knows He won’t change it … that doesn’t bear on His ability, just his inclinations. Are you suggesting an eternal all-powerful being makes decisions much the way you do? That doesn’t sound right.
What he opts to do is not important. An omnipotent God can opt to let the sparrow fall or opt to save the sparrow, but can’t do both - but that is not a limitation on omnipotence because he can do either. A bi-omni God who knows what he is going to do cannot change it, because if he did it violates omniscience. You might as well say that you can flap your arms and fly but opt not to.
If he sees all the past and future he at least knows the impact of his choices on the universe. Good enough for our discussion.
We’re taking bi-omni god here. If you build a wall and know that in 100 years it will fall and kill someone, you are indeed liable. God knows earthquakes happen, and if he is omnipotent he can design a world where they don’t. If he is stuck obeying the laws of physics he created he isn’t omnipotent and not a subject of this discussion.
If you know you are going to change your mind, you haven’t really changed it, have you?
Yes but children and the all the rest of us are a much more complicated form of machine, because we’re self-actuating. So is a pre-programmed robot. The question of free will gets interesting not from the standpoint of God, but from the standpoint of us being deterministic machines. If our reaction to any conceivable circumstance can be predicted by the precise neural state of our brains, and such circumstance can itself be predicted by a sufficiently detailed knowledge of the world around us (including the neural states of other beings), then everything is predetermined, so what does free will mean?
My pet theory on this is that though everything may indeed be predetermined on a quantum scale, the uncertainty principle says that, predetermined or not, it isn’t knowable. So though the future may be cast in stone, we can never know with arbitrary precision what that future is. Free will becomes a philosophical concept that is objectively not meaningful, and is subjectively true only because you believe it is.
The problem is that once he knows what he is going to do (at the beginning of creation) he no longer can change what he can do, and is thus not omnipotent.
We non Mods are free to write whatever we want to in our posts. We can claim that we have omni-writing. But once the edit window is gone we are no longer omni-writing, are we?
I don’t think liability hinges on telling the future. Furthermore, I can’t see any reason for God to care whether someone is killed by a wall or an earthquake. We humans die by the thousands every minute. That’s pretty insignificant on a supreme scale. More like being liable for a wall falling on ants.
Exactly how can that be predicted again? Has it ever been? Can anyone do the math besides God? If he knows what we’ll do , how does that hinder OUR free will?
The brain is a series of chemical reactions following the laws of physics. If free will exists, wouldn’t these rules have to be upended at some point? How would a chemical reaction decide what it can do without going outside its constraints? It makes about as much sense to me to say weather has free will. Which ancient peoples used to believe. So maybe some day we’ll stop anthropomorphizing people too.
The talk about God as a substitute for determinism is all well and good, but when you bring in Yahweh the first question that pops into my mind is: why? Why did he even bother with all this? Seems kinda pointless, especially if he’s supposed to be perfect. Guess not, since he needed us for…something. The other religions where humans are an accident or an after thought make more sense that way. Ones where we mostly serve as the god’s entertainment, or a means for getting back at the other gods.
I’m talking about determinism and the laws of physics. If you know precisely enough how a coin will be tossed, the air currents in the room, the dynamics of the surface it will land on, you can predict how it will fall within the uncertainties of your knowledge of those parameters. By the same token if you know all the details of someone’s neural state you should be able to predict his next thought. If the universe is deterministic then determining the future is by definition just a matter of information. Whether that information is actually available to us in sufficient detail and whether the necessary computing power can even theoretically exist are really interesting theoretical questions. Another interesting one is whether the universe is truly random at a quantum level or only appears that way to us, and I’m persuaded by previous conversations on that topic that the answer is “no”.
No, neural processes have not been fully modeled… yet. But every weather forecast is essentially a [very imperfect and incomplete] computer model predicting the future. There are lots of examples.
Yes, a sufficiently fast computer, if the problem is sufficiently bounded. Until recently one could have asked whether anyone other than God could “do the math” to model weather or climate, and until slightly less recently computers didn’t exist at all. Now we’re on the verge of quantum computers.
I’m trying to cast the discussion in scientific terms of determinism and information, not in religious terms.
Physics aside, “free will” has a single logical hole gaping in the middle of it. A hole so large that I am not sure whether there is any ledge or precipice upon which to perch “free will” around it.
There are fundamentally two engines of choice. I can apply due reason and calculation to a decision, reducing the choice to the most obvious option. Sometimes emotion plays a significant role, but in any case, the choice can be back-vectored to the influences that guided me to decide as I did, along with my understanding of what the likely outcome of my selection would be. Some of the factors leading to my choice may be effectively imperceptible, but that does not negate their existence any more than the physical imperceptibility of a tau neutrino negates its existence. This looks a lot like determinism.
If, at some point, no real cause for my choice can be demonstrated, if in the immense array of influences, the absence of a causal vector can clearly be shown (sometimes, one really does have to prove a negative), then my choice is based on a random influence. If that is genuinely the case, what difference does it make? If I decide on the roll of a die, I am not choosing but letting chance to it for me. That would clearly not be free will.
Given complex causality vs. randomness, I find it increasingly difficult to perceive what role “free will” could possibly play.
why did I post this?
Hence why I said, that, following the train of logic, “…free will becomes a philosophical concept that is objectively not meaningful, and is subjectively true only because you believe it is.”
I don’t know, but given a sufficiently detailed knowledge of your brain’s immediately prior neural network state, the Titan Cray XK7 might have been able to predict it! 