Thanks, cmkeller, you’re being very helpful. Those other threads were full of 1000 different views of the DP, while I’m kind of looking for the more “official” views.
I’m not done yet though. Pardon my ignorance, but what is the Midrash? I’ve heard of it, and know its pronunciation, but I’ve never had an explanation of it.
Also, doesn’t this explanation kind of dumb down the term omniscient? From what I can tell, this at least leaves room for one thing that the DP does not know: What we will choose. It seems to eliminate the paradox by changing the conditions.
Finally, do you happen to know if this stance is the same one held by the various Christian churches (or if that is too hard to pin down, the RCC)?
Well, in Orthodox Jewish belief, the Bible has two components: the Written Bible (i.e., the text of the twenty-four books of what the world calls “the Old Testament”), and the “Oral Bible,” which is explanations of the Written Bible, which was also told to Moses at Sinai, but was not, at the time, formally codified as text. This includes both details of laws mentioned briefly in the Written Bible as well as stories that are not told, or at least not told in their entirety, in the Written Bible. As time went on, succeeding generations began to develop more and more disagreements over certain aspects of the Oral Bible tradition, until, in the 2nd century CE, the Rabbis decided that if it were not recorded in writing, it would likely be lost to future generations. The collections of these writings are known as the Talmud, which mostly involves the legal rulings and the discussions associated with them, and the Midrash, which mostly involves the stories and moral lessons…although there’s quite a bit of overlap between the two collections (i.e., legal issues in the Midrash and story in the Talmud).
It clarifies what we mean when we use the term omniscient. It is not the religious believers who “changed” the conditions, rather, it is those who attached the word “omniscient,” with its imperfect description of our beliefs, who changed the understanding of G-d, and, while it’s probably the closest Latin-derived word that approximates it, it’s not a perfect, and misconceptions derived from this imperfection need to be clarified.
Afraid you’ll have to get a Christian to tell you that. It’s tough enough studying one religion in depth!
Well, I don’t know what to say cmkeller. It is rare indeed to get such complete explanations in a religious debate, but then I have found the Jewish beliefs to be far less contradictory than the Christian ones. Thank you.
So, with that explanation I can clearly see how there is no paradox. I can only wait and see if the Christian beliefs are the same. Once again, anyone out there?
You have a time machine. With it, you can go back and observe any time/place you wish. You cannot interfere, just observe.
You, therefore, decide to use it to go watch Ford’s theathre in Washington DC on April 14, 1865. There, you see a man walk into President Lincoln’s private box with a gun. You ** KNOW ** that JWB is going to shoot Lincoln. This is historical fact. Does that mean that JWB no longer has free will? Of course not.
The same case could be made with God * if * you posit that, as the Creator of time, He exists outside of it (as you would with your time machine).
Another question would be, how would the future show itself to a DP? Would it be a straight path, where he knows exactly what is going to happen before it happens, or would it be more of an expanding fan (a la Frank Herbert’s Dune series)? Would a DP actually know what choices we are going to make, even before we know we’ll have to make them, or would one simply know what choices we CAN make, and how those choices would affect the world and the choices others have to make?
Also, if a DP DID see the future in a straight line, I’d have to agree with zev_steinhardt. Just because He knows what choice we’re going to make in the end, it doesn’t mean that He is changing that choice in any way. Who cares if God (or whomever) knows exactly what’s going to happen next? If He didn’t, the same thing would still happen, correct? I don’t see how He knowing what’s going to happen means that we don’t have choice in what’s going to happen.
First, your scenario (travelling back in time) is an impossibility, therefore you can’t use it. A “thought experiment” must be possible at least in principle if you intend to use it to strengthen your argument.
Second, you have me travelling back in time. We’re talking about God here.
Third, you place a limitation on me by not giving me the power to interfere. God has no limits whatsoever.
Fourth, by your own admission, Booth kills Lincoln. It’s a historical fact. How then, can Booth change his mind? He cannot. He must kill Lincoln. It’s a historical fact.
You can twist and turn every which way, but you cannot escape the logic that God is limited if there is free will.
If God knows what I’m going to do before I know it (and if he’s omnipotent, He must) then I have no free will. I must do what God has foreseen. I have no choice in the matter. If God is omnipotent, then the future is a foregone conclusion. It’s a done thing.
First, what’s wrong with using a purely hypothetical situation to prove a point?
Second, (not that I’m meaning to compare you with God), but what’s the difference who does the observing. Since you can view any time/place in history, you are, in effect, omnicsient.
Third, you have a point. However, if I gave you the ability to interfere, but you chose not to (as God does) would that change anything? Not really.
Fourth,let me ask you this question: What if God does not exist? And what if we ** DO ** develop the technology to view the past? Does that mean none of us have free will because we now can view the past?
I think that zev_steinhardt’s fourth point pretty well demolishes a lot of arguement here, if you look at it right. Assuming God does exist, and He sees all that will ever happen ahead of Him, He knows every choice that we will make. That doesn’t mean that we’ve made that choice already. We still have to make the choice. Just because He knows what the outcome will be, we will still be presented with the two different possible outcomes. As long as He doesn’t put a hand in to modify which choice we will make, we are still making that choice. He simply knows how it will come out. His knowing of this doesn’t remove our free will, no more than our developing a time machine and therefore knowing the future will remove our free will.
Also, what you are saying, all you supporters of the “no free will” arguement, is that if God didn’t exist or couldn’t see the future we would have a free will. But, assuming he does exist, and can see the future, this supposedly dissolves that free will. Nothing will happen differently, but somehow our free will disappears. I don’t see how that makes any sense.
zev’s fourth point demolishes nothing. Whether we develop a technology to view the past or not has absolutely nothing to do with the argument.
I’ll try this one more time.
The existence of an omnipotent being automatically takes away free will. God can see the future. It’s a done thing. There are not two choices. There is only one. The one that God has foreseen. The second choice does not exist because it cannot actualize. If it cannot come to pass then it is an impossibility. If it is an impossibility, where are there two choices?
Even I can understand this, so how complicated can it be?
If God exists and if God is all knowing, free will is an illussion. There is no logical way around it.
No, my point is still valid. Say, for a moment, there is no God (God forbid ). Therefore, even you would agree, we have free will. Right? Good.
Now, suppose that through some terrific technological breakthrough, you become omniscient. Does that mean we all then lose our free will because you know what are choices are going to be?
The point I’m making is that the existance of an omniscient being and the lack of free will are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Wrong. There is no free will anyway. Most physicists believe that the universe does not unfold. It just is. What appears to us as events taking place is an illussion. Everything has been determined. It’s like a roll of film. The plot won’t change.
Stephen Hawking, from his book Baby Universes:
“Is everything determined? Yes, but we can never know what is determined.”
My argument was academic. I tried to show that it is illogical to have free will in the presence of a knowing God. That I have not succeeded is only a measure of my inability to present an unassailable case.
There are others here who can do much better, but I suspect that they are not eager to go through this again. We had a long debate about this not too long ago.
But, WallyM7, you’re acting as though God seeing the future means that it has already happened. You have to bend your mind a little to think of it like this, but once you do, it makes sense. Just because He knows what’s going to happen, it doesn’t mean it’s already happened. If He lets you figure out what you want to do on your own, you are still exercising your own free will, it’s just that He already knows what you’re going to come up with when you’re finished.
I also don’t agree with the idea that the world just unfolds as if it was running under a script. How does that make sense? Wouldn’t time simply be an illusion then? Quite personally, that sounds like senseless BS to me. Time passes, doesn’t it? I don’t see how time could be motionless as we move along it, rather than us being motionless as it rolls past us.
matt, may I suggest that you read a basic physics book?
Time does not pass. We can’t even talk about time without talking about space. Does space pass? Einstein showed in 1905 that we must think in terms of spacetime.
Time is a coordinate, like longtitude. Each point in time is also a point in space. In what sense can time pass? At what rate? What is the speed of time? One second per second, one hour per hour? It’s meaningless.
What we perceive as the passage of time is different for everyone, depending on their motion. There is no Universal Time.
It may sound like BS to you, but I assure you, it is not.
If omnipotence is possible (something a human could not possibly fully understand), then couldn’t an omnipotent being grant us true free will and at the same time know how the future will unfold? If the omnipotent being cannot do this, then the being was never omnipotent in the first place.
If we’re talking about mere omnicience, that’s a different ball of wax. If omnicience (and not omnipotence) is possible, see WallyM7’s arguments. If the future is knowable, the future is set. If an omnicient being, knows which of three doors you will walk through, could you choose another door? If you could… if it was possible that you choose another door… said being would not have truly known which door you would choose, because that would mean that there was a chance that it would be wrong. If the being could be wrong, it would not be omnicient.
Well, I see some of my original posts are out of order, so maybe that explains some of the confusion. What was explained to me by cmkeller was what the Jewish point of view on this topic is, and with their reasoning it is clear (to me at least) that there is no paradox. They contend that the DP is not omniscient. Sure, they may use that word, but in a different sense than we normally think of it.
To their way of thinking, God created everything, including time, and is able to know everything by looking at events along a timeline. That is how he knows everything, except what we will choose to do. Sure he can look and see what we did choose, but when the timeline was created and we were put on it, we had the freedom to choose what we wanted.
So, the omniscient/free will paradox is no longer existant because God is not omniscient in the truest sense of the word (as I said, there is at least one thing he does/did not know - what we will choose). If their position was that he does/did know what we would choose before we made that choice, then He would truly be omniscient and the paradox would remain.
What I want to know is if the various Christian churches agree with this standpoint.
