This debate has been continuing for thousands of years. Obviously it has never been resolved. We treat REASON as if it were god by insisting on using it to explain religious tenets which are essentially illogical, or paradoxical. Religion is virtually the opposite of reason. Attempts to explain religious ideas using “if…then” statements will only drive you crazy.
Responding to the OP, it could be that God (or DP as someone coined it) set up the world as he/she/it thought would be best (in essence brought about the physical laws) then set the Universe on its way and from that point on no longer interfered. So although we are subject to the original physical laws (we do not have so much freewill that we can flap our arms and fly to Venus whenever we choose) we otherwise have freewill. This also explains why DP doesn’t swoop in to rescue people from Earthquakes, sickness, etc. This is essentially the deist perspective.
Responding to the OP, it could be that God (or DP as someone coined it) set up the world as he/she/it thought would be best (in essence brought about the physical laws) then set the Universe on its way and from that point on no longer interfered. So although we are subject to the original physical laws (we do not have so much freewill that we can flap our arms and fly to Venus whenever we choose) we otherwise have freewill. This also explains why DP doesn’t swoop in to rescue people from Earthquakes, sickness, etc. This is essentially the deist perspective.
avalongod: Of course, what you describe is not omniscience. If at the point of creation god did not know what was going to happen as an effect of the creation act then there is a lack of omniscience on god’s part.
ticktock:
But since everyone has no choice but to do what they do, then why should they be punished for what they did? That makes no sense.
Are you saying you cannot change your mind about the matter? If you believe as you say you do, it should be obvious that the hard working should not be praised and the guilty not be punished.
If you come back and say that you can change your mind, but only because you received new input, how is that different than free will?
If it seems like everyone has free will in everything, why would you say they don’t? Is there any evidence of this, or is it just a WAG?
I agree with the paradox you bring up about God being omniscient, but if you look above, the Jewish standpoint is that He is not omniscient in the way we normally think. I think the paradox is successfully avoided by that stance.
PeeQueue
sigh
You have, then, some refutation to the reasoning I gave above?
Since this is on a new page, I thought I’d quote in full so that people don’t have to constantly “click back” to the post I am referring to.
Spiritus,
I must say, that is a well thought out piece of logic. I had to sit and think it through a few times before I got the full impact of it. However, there is one flaw I noticed in it. The flaw is as follows:
The omniscient being, in your example, lives in linear time. In other words, at 6:00 he can do something and then at 7:00 he can do something else. Even if the external environment he is relating to (the Bizzaro world – I ** love ** that name) is removed from his own spacetime continuum, time passes for himself at his own rate. Thus, for your omniscient being, act A comes before act B.
However, what if the omniscient being is outside of time altogether. Let us say for a moment, that God does not have a past, present or future. All that God has done, is doing and will do is occuring all at once for him (since God is outside of the constraints of time altogether). Therefore, God omniscience in Moses’ time does not restrict Him from acting today. To Him, it all happens at once.
The same would hold true for the Bizzaro people. Example: God tells Moses that Pharroh won’t let the Jews leave when he asks. Wait a minute, you say, there goes Pharroh’s free will! The answer is that God is not looking into the future (from His perspective) and telling us Pharroh will choose this. For God, Pharroh is choosing this right now, of his own free will. God is simply reporting back to Moses what Pharroh said/will say.
Now, I’m not saying that this is truly God’s nature (if I had ** that ** kind of insight, I wouldn’t be posting on a message board, I’d be contemplating a higher plane of existence, or something). But it certainly is possible.
Zev Steinhardt
This is mostly in response to Wally, and other posters, who feel that simply because an omniscient being knows everything that will happen, it follows that we never had a choice in the matter. Just because God knows what we will choose, it does not follow that we never got to choose.
Wally’s argument was that if anyone/anything knew for certain everything that would happen in the future, the knowing would take away all free will. Here is the problem with that: even without the omniscient being, we still run into the same problem taking away our free will. This is because only one future is going to come true. Of all the billions of futures that are possible for this world, only one is actually going to unfold. (Even if you argue that all other possible futures exist in parallel universes, you and I are only going to experience ONE of those futures.) So we now have the same problem we had with the omniscient being. Only one future is possible, therefore all our choices have been taken away! Obviously, this is not true. There is only one future, and yet we have free will. It’s not a paradox. Now, just because someone knows which one of those billions of possible futures are going to be the one that takes place, does that take away free will? I think not.
However, if God is both omniscient and omnipotent, does that take away all free will? This is a different question entirely, and an interesting one.
I can’t say that there’s an “official” Christian position, or even an official RCC position, but two come to mind.
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The phrase “God knows what I’m going to do before I do it” is mistaken. God’s knowledge is not in time, so it is an error to say that God knows something before some time. This is close to what PQ has been saying and hurts many people’s brains. Still, it’s pretty neat.
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The phrase “God knows everything” is slightly off. The phrase should be “God knows everything that it is possible to know”. Sounds like a trivial equivalence, but in this case future events are not considered part of the set of things “it is possible to know”. This explanation trashes the law of the excluded middle (as statements about the future no longer have well-defined truth-values) and makes talking about prophecy difficult.
My references are at home, but IIRC these positions (or variants) were taken by Augustine, Ambrose and Aquinas, among other heavy hitters.
zev_steinhardt:
Please read my post(s) again. What you consider to be a flaw is actually the specific model which I was addressing. Free will is not lost due to God’s knowledge in the scenario you describe (case 3b in my post). It is lost in the instant God communicates that knowledge ot Moses. Moses, who is bound by linear time, now posesses infallible knowledge of Pharoah’s actions before they occur. Pharoah has no free will to act in any manner which contradicts that knowledge. Likewise, no other being on earth may act in a manner which would lead to a future other than that of which Moses has foreknowledge.
Dill:
You have entirely missed the point that foreknowledge reduces the multitude of possible futures to one before any choice is made. This means that no “choice” actually exists, the path is predetermined.
Spiritus,
That’s simply not true.
I think you need to make a distinction between informing someone the subject himself of the future or informing a third party.
** Informing a third party **
If I could view the future and tell you that tomorrow’s paper says that Orlando Hernandez pitched a perfect game tonight, does that mean that Orlando no longer has free will to leave the game in the sixth inning or intentionally walk a batter? What has changed for Orlando because I imparted some knowledge to you? Do you mean to tell me that because I told you this piece of information (or because I looked at tomorrow’s paper) Orlando all of a sudden lost his free will? The same holds true for Moses and Pharroh.
** Informing the subject himself **
In Genesis, God tells Abraham he will have a son and name him Isaac (Yitzchock, actually). Of course, Abraham does so. Now, the question arises… does Abraham have free will to name his son anything else (or even leave him unnamed)?
Of course, you can point to the story and say “Aha! He did name him what God said to. This * proves * he didn’t have free will.” Of course, this is countered by saying that he could have had free will and chose to follow what God said.
I will have to grant you, Spiritus, that in this case, Abraham’s free will could have been removed. I would have to think for a while for a refutation (which, being tired after a long day of work, I don’t have the required brain cells to do). However, in the former case, I would have to disagree with you. Just because some information was passed to a third party, that does not imply that free will was removed from anyone else.
Zev Steinhardt
PQ has asked on several occasions for Offical Christian Doctrine on this matter. Well I have been off the boards for a while so sorry it has taken me so long to give the Offical Christian Doctrine.
PQ and Others:
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Since there is not a particular place in the Bible where God explains this situation, there is not an Offical Christian Doctrine. We have some areas we may agree upon and others we may not.
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To a certain extent I tend to agree with what CMK has offered as the Jewish conceptualization of Free will and omniscience/omnipotence.
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This is not an area that most Christians I know really spend much time contemplating. That is, if you have free will fine, use it. If you do not have free will then there is not much you can do about it. It is really more to try to answer questions that I have considered it as much as I have.
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My personal view are not necessarily what any established Christian denomination or anyone else believes. So here goes.
What if God does exist (I believe he does), and let us say he knows all the possible paths you could take but does not choose to know which you do take. He knows what path or paths can get you to the best possible outcome for you, but does not choose to know if you reach that outcome. The best possible outcome for me is not necessarily the best possible outcome for you or Glitch or anyone else. If I make a choice that keeps me on that path then fine, I can still achieve the best possible outcome, but if I get off the path, then I am left with an outcome that is less than the best possible outcome for me. I continue to make my own decisions and exert my own free will but if I look to God for guidance he will show me the choice that will keep me on the path that arrives at the best possible outcome. He will not show me the entire path as I could not really understand it, He only shows me that which makes sense to show me at the current time.
I doubt this answers yours or Glitch’s or anyone else’s questions, but these are some of my views.
Jeffery
(The vast bulk of, as I perceived it, the “uneducated” posts here motivated me to post this without fully reading this thread. If my words have already been written, then I hope you will ignore them and forgive me.)
The question of free will has been dealt with in the realm of Christianity by a group of early Protestants called “Calvinists.” These children of epic, Lovecraftian madness held that since there are Biblical references to God’s knowing our choices before we make them, and God’s creating some of us to do good and creating some of us to do evil, man has no free will.
“So,” I reasoned to the Calvinists who once tried to convert me, “If a potter makes a jug, and this jug has a crack in it, you assert that, rather than blaming his lack of skill, the potter should blame the jug for its own imperfections, and” (to end the metaphor and return to religion) “damn it to an eternity in Hell.”
Speaking from a purely physical standpoint, human beings are biological machines with various logic gates that open and close to a preset rhythm. But speaking from a Christian standpoint (the standpoint of this thread), human beings carry God’s breath in them and thus have a soul which makes them capable of choosing good or evil, which is traditionally the importance of man in a Christian God’s cosmos–this God wants humans to choose him, since love and worship given by predetermination are of little value compared to the choice to love and worship. This is why such a God avoids interference in mortal lives–he does not want to “cheat” and skew their choices.
Incidentally, someone said that an omniscient God cannot have free will, since he would have foreknowledge of his choices and would thus be bound by them. This is not ultimately true; God, as an Omnipotent being, is not bound by time thus and exists outside of it, so all of his decisions are made as he wishes instead of being controlled by his foreknowledge (there is no “foreknowledge” for one existing outside of time, only “knowledge”). An un-omnipotent being who is still bound by time is still not entirely devoid of free will–he has free will in that instant when prescience comes to him. One could say that, instead of eating his cookies as they are given to him with every meal, he eats them all at once. But after that one moment, they are gone.
Zev: The problem with your baseball analogy is the same as somebody’s earlier time traveller analogy. It ignores God’s creation power. God is not simply omniscient. God is also the prime cause of every occurance in the universe since he was the one who set the ball in motion with foreknowledge of everything that would happen, unless he choose not to know. But if he choose not to know, this is the same as not having omniscience.
Harkenbane: Oh, please come and save all of us ‘uneducated’ folk. sigh Looks like I am going to have to pull out the old holding oneself on a pedestal speech again soon.
Jeff: As with Zev, if God chooses not to see the ultimate outcome then this is not omniscience since the ultimate outcome is knowable (i.e. it is in the set of knowable things).
Doh! I meant if he chooses not to see “if we reach” the ultimate outcome.
Spiritus:
No, I did not miss the point of your argument. I fully understand it. I think that you are missing my point, though. Regardless of any being’s foreknowledge, only one future is going to actually come to pass. Therefore our outcomes are just as predetermined without any foreknowledge as if an omniscient being did have foreknowledge of everything. Therefore the idea that foreknowledge restricts free will is incorrect. Zev’s baseball example was a good one. Does our current knowledge of past events restrict the free will of people in the past? No? Foreknowledge is no different.
Spiritus:
I can’t really refute your argument, but it assumes more of free will than I was originally thinking of it as. I think it gains the Jewish faith a solid grounds for argument for their case. Whether the Bizarros have free will or not boils down to how you define that term - in your scenario, they can choose, but you have set up a scenario such that the choice they make is the one you want.
Do they have free will? As I said, I think it can be argued either way depending on what satisfies the criteria for free will. I myself seem to be flip flopping back and forth over the line blush I’ll try not to do that, although it goes against my nature as a devil’s advocate. 
Jeffery:
Thanks for addressing my question regarding official doctrine. I think the fact that there is no “official” doctrine is a failing, IMHO. Without acknowledging the fact that God cannot be omniscient in the truest sense of the word for free will to exist, the paradox most definitely remains. The path explanation doesn’t work, because God always knows what path you will take, unless he is not truly omniscient.
Harkenbane:
Without a doctrine that has been agreed upon by your church, your explanation becomes merely one man’s opinion of how God behaves. Oh, and haven’t you heard? The meek shall inherit the earth.
Tominator2:
Did you find those points in some religious writings? If so, it would indeed seem that the Catholic Church has leanings towards the Jewish explanation.
PeeQueue
It’s ineffable, inn’t? That’s why it’s called “An Ineffable Plan.” You just can’t, er, eff’ it. 
Zev:
You are not appreciating teh true consequences of omniscience. The information is not a “prediction” which may or may not come true. It is infallible. Therefore, once I posess the infallible knowledge that Orlando Hernandez will pitch a perfect game tonight that outcome may not be changed in any way. No batter may choose to swing at eh correct instant to hit a home run. Orlando may not choose to carelessly walk in front of a bus. The manager may not choose to pull him in the 8th for the league’s best closer. No being that could possibly change the outcome of my foreknowledge has the freedom to do so. Period. If any such change were possible, then we would not be dealing with omniscience we would be dealing with fortune telling.
Harkenbane:
For now, I will restrict myself to:
“Decision” makes sense only in a continuum subject to change: i.e. a flow of time. Certainly you can posit a being whose flow of time is separate from our own. That being may be omniscient with respect to our universe without impacting its free will to act in its own continuum. However, if that being is omniscient with respect to its own existence, then it has no free will.
Had you read this thread before responding, it is possible that I would not have had to clarify this for you.
dill:
As gently as possible, please allow me to suggest that you do not fully understand my position. You are correct, though the terminology is not ideal, that only one future will come to pass (perhaps – there are always the many worlds interpretations to deal with). That fact has no bearing on free will, however. Just as the fact that there is only one past chain of events has no bearing on free will. Yes, only one future will come about. That does not in and of itself mean that that future is predestined. In a universe allowing free will, the future is never set; it is open to a myriad of possibilities. Only when decisions are made in the present does the path, as it becomes the past, become set. Predestined means that the future is set before the choice is made. That the future does not consist of an unforlmed field of possibilities, but rather is as set and immutable as the past.
Predestination sets the future. Choice sets the past. They are not identical.
**
That is exactly my point. The whole reason that you believe that a being’s foreknowledge restricts free will is because that foreknowledge limits your possible futures down to one, correct? I have just demonstrated, and you have agreed, that your future is already limited to just one possibility.
Let’s try it this way:
Just because I know what you will choose, that does not mean you did not choose, and that’s what it all comes down to.
OK, now I understand why you do not accept the basbeall scenario. However, my whole argument is attempting to show that predestination does not “set” the future. Knowing is not the same as controlling.