Does God know my future? Do I really have free will?

[bogeydogg]

If you know something and you cannot possibly be wrong about the event you influence that event such that it can only be the way you know it to be. Otherwise you are not infallible. It is the absoluteness of the definition of infallibility that is the issue here so I do not agree with your assessment of me being challenged.

If you can tell me how this event can be different than you know it to be and yet not lose your infallibility I will admit I do not understand the definitions associated with this issue.

I think that there is a confusion which has been mentioned about the nature of prophecy. God specifically challenges the false gods to predict prophecy and cause it to be and when they cannot He proves they are no gods at all.

Prophecy is a special case. When God sovereignly declares that a thing will be, unless He issues a contingency such as repentance, He is compelled to cause such a thing to be. In this manner human free will is set aside for the sake of the sovereignty of God. However, in the case of prophesy God is declaring that He will interupt history and will Himself enter into it to bring certain changes about.

However, the mundane day to day doings of life are not subject to the divine puppet master because we do not make decisions randomly. We make decisions based upon our desires, our beings and our past experiences. In such a frame work we are very self-deterministic and as such limit our own free will to such an extent that we cause it to not exist in a truly random sense at all. Because I will not violate my own nature in my decision making I am the greatest hindrance to my free will. God’s perfect knowledge of my nature does not violate my decisions rather His allowing me to fail and repent and cooperate with His grace proves that I do have free will and His knowledge of my nature does not destroy this freedom but affirms it because He allows me to be as I will and still He gives me grace to be as He wills.

 

[michael_legna]

john doran:

michael_legna:

You can save all the emoticons too as if I am missing something obvious that everyone else sees. The paradox of free will and omniscience is well known among all the major philosophy studies and is considered unsolved, so I am not alone in this issue.

well, i’ll agree that the issues surrounding omniscience and free will are well known, but i have to disagree that they’re paradoxical, or that they’re unsolved.

Then you should publish your solution in a Philosophical journal, since there is no consensus among mainline philosophers that this is not a paradox
john doran:

they may be unsolved to everyone’s satisfaction, but that doesn’t make the available solutions any less successful - it just makes them contentious.

That which is contentious among those who can do formal mathematical logic is by definition unproven.
john doran:

for example, if one defines “omniscience” as “knowing every true proposition, and no false ones”, then whether or not the fact that if god knows p then p; god knows p; therefore p, is incompatible with f - “p is freely chosen” - depends on what proposition p stands for.

I think you are being a little free and loose with your symbols here since you are using “p” for both the event and the choice and for what God knows and the result of that knowledge and they should all be separate items in the formula.
john doran:

so. what if p represents “john freely chooses to go the movies”? obviously god’s foreknowledge of propositions of the form “X freely chooses y at time t” are not incompatible with free choices.

There is no obviously here. If you want claim a result and make a pretense of using sumbolic logic your should provide the actual proof.
john doran:

which means that one needs to know if there are such propositions as this before one can make claims about god’s omniscience. which, in turn, means that omniscience is irrelevant to the question of free choice.

no paradox, no problem.

I don’t think this conclusion is supported at all by your loose argument.
john doran:

michael_legna:

In fact I am willing to bet it is you who are in the minority with regard to this being a real problem or not.

maybe so, but so what?

My point was if I am in the minority one might justify the use of the emoticons expressing utter disbelief (it would still be impolite but it might at least be reasonable). However since the poster is in the minority it simply isn’t necessary and does nothing to promote the discussion to a fruitful conclusion.

 

[michael_legna]

davidv:

michael_legna:

But the fact that you know them infallibly ahead of time means I CANNOT choose any other way. It all goes back to your assumption (in the premise) being the same as your desired conclusion. This example is logically worse than the one you just abandon.

I still don’t understand how you have reached this conclusion. Just because something (knowledge) is temporally precedent, how does this necessitate that it is logically precedent(cause)?

If you know today that I will buy a specific car tomorrow
AND
You know it infallibly, such that you CANNOT be wrong

Then if I don’t buy that specific car you would be wrong

Since you CANNOT be wrong I have to buy that car.

I end up with no choice in the situation.

Suppose it was you yourself who had both the choice to make and the power of omniscience. And it was you who had to make the choice between buying the car or not. Now lets say you wanted to know what you were going to do tomorrow. Simple since you are omniscient. You use your infallible knowledge to look into the future, and see what it is that you will do. And when you watch your future self, you see with absolute certainty, whether you buy the car or not.

But wait a minute. What if you decide to be stubborn and you wish to exercise your free will? So you decide to do the exact opposite of what you saw yesterday just to prove you have free will. You don’t buy that car just to prove you can.

Now what does that mean for your power of omniscience? If your knowledge is infallible, then you don’t have the free will to change your decision. But if you can change your decision, then your foreknowledge was wrong, and you are no longer omniscient.

 

[michael_legna]

bogeydogg:

It does not violate free will if one defines free will as the ability to make decisions apart direct from outside coersion.

It all depends on how you define coercion. If someone else knows infallibly what you will do, such that if you were to do something different you would violate their nature, and you cannot violate their nature, then you cannot make a different choice and therefore their inviolate nature has a coercive affect on your free will.

bogeydogg:

If however free will is defined as the ability to make a decision based entirely upon the actual moral merits of say ‘x’ and ‘y’ then no I don’t believe in that sort of free will because such an idea negates the notion of sin’s effecting our natures.

That is true before we are given grace to assist us in seek God, but after we have received grace we have to believe we have the free will to either cooperate with or resist that grace.

bogeydogg:

However, just because God has foreknowledge of our decision making based upon His own perfect knowledge of our means ways and motives does not mean that God actually compels us to make a decision for either ‘x’ or ‘y’ in which case our will, though effected by sin and experience, is free from outside pressure placed upon us by the foreknowledge of a sovereign God.

Yes, it does because if our decision would be contrary to God’s perfect knowledge that knowledge would no longer be perfect. That is impossible so our freedom to choose that choice is impossible. This is true regardless of whether that decision is within our nature or contrary to our nature. If you try to claim we can only act within our nature then there is no hope for anyone to repent of anything except to the extent of their personal nature, so there is no room for progression through and out of our sinful state. I don’t accept that and the RCC does not teach that.

 

[michael_legna]

bogeydogg:

Because I will not violate my own nature in my decision making I am the greatest hindrance to my free will. God’s perfect knowledge of my nature does not violate my decisions rather His allowing me to fail and repent and cooperate with His grace proves that I do have free will and His knowledge of my nature does not destroy this freedom but affirms it because He allows me to be as I will and still He gives me grace to be as He wills.

No, if He knows infallibly what our nature and desires will cause us to do then we must do them and if it is our desires and nature which determines what we do then His infallible knowledge affect what our desires and nature are. In fact since His omniscience applies not just to decisions and choices but to even things like nature and desires if He does not choose to self limit His knowledge our nature and desires must match what He knows them to be. So by your definition of free will it is limited in this way as well.

 

[john_doran]

Then you should publish your solution in a Philosophical journal, since there is no consensus among mainline philosophers that this is not a paradox

it doesn’t matter if i published it - there’d still be no consensus, at least if by “consensus” you mean “unanimous agreement”, or even majority agreement.

but, again, what has consensus got to do with it? the reasoning is good or it isn’t, irrespective of how many people (dis)believe it.

michael_legna:

That which is contentious among those who can do formal mathematical logic is by definition unproven.

sigh. no, it’s not, at least if you’re using “proven” accurately to denote the logical characteristics of the argument rather than its ability to compel belief.

michael_legna:

IThere is no obviously here. If you want claim a result and make a pretense of using sumbolic logic your should provide the actual proof.

proof of what, exactly? that p can stand for “john freely chooses to go to the movies”, or any other proposition of the form “X freely chooses y”?

if that’s what you want proven, then you’ve made my point for me: god’s omniscience has got nothing to do with free choice - what matters is whether or not there actually are true propositions about free choices…

see what i mean? the basic argument that god’s foreknowledge precludes fee choice is that if god knows something to be true before it happens, then nothing can be done to make that thing turn out false. which means that if god knows i go to the movies tomorrow, then there’s nothing i can do to make it false that i go to the movies tomorrow. but if i can’t not go to the movies, then my going to the movies can’t be something i freely choose to do.

but what i’m saying is that it’s equally possible to describe god’s knowledge of human action in terms of free choices. such that, if what god knows is that i freely choose to go to the movies tomorrow, then what is entailed is that there is nothing i can do to changee the fact that my choice to go to the movies tomorrow is free.

which means that if god’s omniscience is knowledge of all true propositions (and no false ones), then the only way to make god’s foreknowledge entail that there are no free choices **is if one can demonstrate that there are no true propositions about free choices **(because if there are true propositions about free choices, then god knows them). but if one wants to do that, then one is going to have to make an argument about free choice in and of itself, and not in relation to god’s knowledge.

is that any more clear?

if not, then please do more than just say that you don’t think my conclusion follows from the argument - show how it doesn’t follow.

 

[bogeydogg]

I have a difficult time understanding your insistence that we must impute direct causal affectation to knowledge. Knowledge apart from coersion is just that, knowledge. If I know a truth, such as matter will automatically move to the lowest spot in the space time continuum provided it is within a gravity well, and my son drops an apple and it falls to the floor, my understanding of what causes the apple to fall does not force the apple to do so.

I realize of course that you will say that my knowledge is imperfect and therefore my example is null, but I think you are equivocating on what “knowledge” means. Just because I don’t have an “infallable” knowledge of the exact machinations of gravity does not mean that I cannot posses “infallible” knowledge that if my son drops an apple that it will fall to the floor. However, my knowledge that it will fall has no bearing on its falling. In other words my knowledge does not in and of itself compel the apple to fall.

At this point one might say that if I know my son will drop the apple, and then I force him to drop it, then I will be the cause of its falling, but that isn’t so. Whether or not I compel my son to drop an apple has nothing to do with why it falls. In fact the decision to drop or not to drop is secondary to the fall itself. Gravity is acting on the apple at all times, it is only being defeated by my son holding onto it, but when he lets it go that action of letting it go cannot be attributed as the actual cause of its fall because gravity was acting on the apple all the time and therefore it is gravity which causes the fall. But, my knowledge of these facts has absolutely nothing to do with gravity.

Now, at this point, one may argue that gravity is an impersonal force and has no will one way or the other, but my point is that knowledge is either causal or it is not, and since knowledge has no effect on impersonal forces, then I think its illogical to assert that it does on personal ones as well because the lack of affectation shows that knowledge has no power within its own being and consequently cannot have causal power attributed to it.

 

[bogeydogg]

No, if He knows infallibly what our nature and desires will cause us to do then we must do them and if it is our desires and nature which determines what we do then His infallible knowledge affect what our desires and nature are. In fact since His omniscience applies not just to decisions and choices but to even things like nature and desires if He does not choose to self limit His knowledge our nature and desires must match what He knows them to be. So by your definition of free will it is limited in this way as well.

Do you define free will as the ability to make an actual random decision?

 

[bogeydogg]

No, if He knows infallibly what our nature and desires will cause us to do then we must do them and if it is our desires and nature which determines what we do then His infallible knowledge affect what our desires and nature are. In fact since His omniscience applies not just to decisions and choices but to even things like nature and desires if He does not choose to self limit His knowledge our nature and desires must match what He knows them to be. So by your definition of free will it is limited in this way as well.

Also, you cannot attribute causality to God’s knowledge of my nature and desire because my nature is sinful and my desire is evil and God does not author sin neither does He tempt us to evil.

 

[bogeydogg]

That is true before we are given grace to assist us in seek God, but after we have received grace we have to believe we have the free will to either cooperate with or resist that grace.

I have a problem with changing the specifics of the argument to now exclude unsaved people. You have never qualified your objections concerning free will to include only those who are saved so why do you do so now?

Yes, it does because if our decision would be contrary to God’s perfect knowledge that knowledge would no longer be perfect. That is impossible so our freedom to choose that choice is impossible. This is true regardless of whether that decision is within our nature or contrary to our nature. If you try to claim we can only act within our nature then there is no hope for anyone to repent of anything except to the extent of their personal nature, so there is no room for progression through and out of our sinful state. I don’t accept that and the RCC does not teach that.

Unless of course God gives us a new nature, which Ezekiel says He does, and that even in that new natue we still struggle with the old nature, which Romans says we do.

We will never be free of sin or the old nature until we are perfected as He is perfect in His righteousness apart from our current wretched state. Because of this, while we may not wish it to be so, we will continue in a predictable self-driven way until we are free from this mortal coil and in His presence.

 

[Benadam]

No, if He knows infallibly what our nature and desires will cause us to do then we must do them and if it is our desires and nature which determines what we do then His infallible knowledge affect what our desires and nature are. In fact since His omniscience applies not just to decisions and choices but to even things like nature and desires if He does not choose to self limit His knowledge our nature and desires must match what He knows them to be. So by your definition of free will it is limited in this way as well.

Your argument requires that the pot can be the maker of the potter. It requires the support of an impossibility. Possibilities are required to support arguments.

We cannot will to act as he has not foreseen is true.

but your arguments to support that it removes our will to determine our own destiny, so far, inherently require the acceptance of false statements like:

‘God will be fallible if we can choose to act as He has not foreseen.’

and

if He does not choose to self limit His knowledge our nature and desires must match what He knows them to be.

your argument requires that the pot can be the maker of the potter. Impossibilities make an argument false not true.

 

[bogeydogg]

That is true before we are given grace to assist us in seek God, but after we have received grace we have to believe we have the free will to either cooperate with or resist that grace.

Also don’t forget that in Romans 1 Paul blatantly says that all men are guilty not firstly because they sin but because they deliberately choose to ignore the things of God which are manifest in Creation. If your assertion that God’s knowledge determines our nature and then by extention our desires and wills then this decision to ignore God, according to your logic, is because God has willed men to ignore Him and refuse to worship Him for which man is guilty in which case, inescapably, God has authored the sin of idolatry.

Your assertion cannot be true if you are a Christian.

 

[cynic]

It’s not simply God’s knowledge, he is not just an all knowing observer. He is the creator, and therefore everything the created goes on to think and feel is ultimately by his design.

 

[davidv]

If you know today that I will buy a specific car tomorrow
AND
You know it infallibly, such that you CANNOT be wrong

Then if I don’t buy that specific car you would be wrong

Since you CANNOT be wrong I have to buy that car.

I end up with no choice in the situation.

Suppose it was you yourself who had both the choice to make and the power of omniscience. And it was you who had to make the choice between buying the car or not. Now lets say you wanted to know what you were going to do tomorrow. Simple since you are omniscient. You use your infallible knowledge to look into the future, and see what it is that you will do. And when you watch your future self, you see with absolute certainty, whether you buy the car or not.

But wait a minute. What if you decide to be stubborn and you wish to exercise your free will? So you decide to do the exact opposite of what you saw yesterday just to prove you have free will. You don’t buy that car just to prove you can.

Now what does that mean for your power of omniscience? If your knowledge is infallible, then you don’t have the free will to change your decision. But if you can change your decision, then your foreknowledge was wrong, and you are no longer omniscient.

I still do not see how “knowledge” = “cause”, which is the unproven premise in the proposition. Just because I knew what choice you were going to make does not make that knowledge the cause of the choice.

 

[michael_legna]

Part 1 of 2
john doran:

it doesn’t matter if i published it - there’d still be no consensus, at least if by “consensus” you mean “unanimous agreement”, or even majority agreement.

Yes there would be consensus depending of course on what you mean by the problem not being unsolved…

I ask this because you said - “… i have to disagree that they’re paradoxical, or that they’re unsolved.”

If you were implying that they are solved and by that you meant a true proof existed, and this was not just an idle claim on your part. (A proof being a mathematical logic representation of the argument which can be proven as fully as any standard mathematical theorem.) If however you did not mean a true mathematical logical proof is available then the best we have to go on is the consensus of the experts in the area and they agree it is a unresolved paradox.
john doran:

but, again, what has consensus got to do with it? the reasoning is good or it isn’t, irrespective of how many people (dis)believe it.

It matters because the only sure way to test whether a piece of reasoning is good or not is by a mathematical logic analysis. Barring the ability to formulate the reasoning in that form the only thing we have to judge the soundness of reasoning is the consensus of the experts in logic. We certainly do not go to the masses on this as most humans have little of no reasoning skills.
john doran:

sigh. no, it’s not, at least if you’re using “proven” accurately to denote the logical characteristics of the argument rather than its ability to compel belief.

I am most definitely using proven to mean a sound, valid, logical argument - which of course must also have true premises. So my statement claiming that which is contentious among those who can do formal mathematical logic is by definition unproven is precisely the case.

If you cannot prove something in formal mathematical/symbolic logic then it is unproven. That is the only rigorous form of argument which is fully verifiable and testable to assure something is not missed. Other forms of logic and philosophical argument can result in proofs, but they are always able to then be formulated in symbolic form and thus checked. If they cannot be, no amount of thinking carefully and thoroughly replaces this mathematical check and so they remain considered unproven.
john doran:

michael_legna:

IThere is no obviously here. If you want claim a result and make a pretense of using sumbolic logic your should provide the actual proof.

proof of what, exactly? that p can stand for “john freely chooses to go to the movies”, or any other proposition of the form “X freely chooses y”?

I don’t care what you want to prove. My point was, which you seem to be trying to side step is that you should not use the term obviously unless you have a formal mathematical logic argument to present. You attempt to put symbols to the points without applying any operators to them is not a proof, so don’t use the word obviously. It just isn’t justified.
john doran:

see what i mean? the basic argument that god’s foreknowledge precludes fee choice is that if god knows something to be true before it happens, then nothing can be done to make that thing turn out false. which means that if god knows i go to the movies tomorrow, then there’s nothing i can do to make it false that i go to the movies tomorrow. but if i can’t not go to the movies, then my going to the movies can’t be something i freely choose to do.

Right, and if it is something you cannot freely choose to do then you have no free will !!!
john doran:

but what i’m saying is that it’s equally possible to describe god’s knowledge of human action in terms of free choices. such that, if what god knows is that i freely choose to go to the movies tomorrow, then what is entailed is that there is nothing i can do to changee the fact that my choice to go to the movies tomorrow is free.

No, unfortunately for you argument this is not a proper description of the other view. This is because we cannot be freely choosing if we are not able to change that choice right up to the very last instant, and the moment God knows what is it we are going to freely choose, that infallible knowledge removes the possibility that we will freely choose anything else. Our free will is removed at that moment. So the choice when it comes is not free.

End Part 1

 

[michael_legna]

Part 2 of 2
john doran:

which means that if god’s omniscience is knowledge of all true propositions (and no false ones), then the only way to make god’s foreknowledge entail that there are no free choices is if one can demonstrate that there are no true propositions about free choices

No, because if there were not true propositions about free choices God would not know them (by your definition - since He knows only true propositions) and that would mean the choice was indeed free. This it turns out is not a condition of loss of free will.

Your argument above is artificially limited to free choices and should be structure to account for all choices if it can, to avoid the built in premise that we can tell which choices are free and which are not.
john doran:

if not, then please do more than just say that you don’t think my conclusion follows from the argument - show how it doesn’t follow.

I think I did above, but my point in the previous post was that your argument was not formulated properly to claim what you did.

What I said was said in several pieces in response to your development -
michale_legna:

I think you are being a little free and loose with your symbols here since you are using “p” for both the event and the choice and for what God knows and the result of that knowledge and they should all be separate items in the formula.

There is no obviously here. If you want claim a result and make a pretense of using sumbolic logic your should provide the actual proof.

I don’t think this conclusion is supported at all by your loose argument.

It was not meant as a rebuttal of the content of your argument but of its loose form which was insufficient to draw any conclusion from let alone make that conclusion OBVIOUS as you claimed. Only a rigorous mathematical/symbolic logic argument would do that and just throwing symbols into a paragraph without applying operators does not accomplish such a proof.

End Part 2

 

[michael_legna]

bogeydogg:

I have a difficult time understanding your insistence that we must impute direct causal affectation to knowledge. Knowledge apart from coersion is just that, knowledge.

Ah but infallible knowledge places a barrier of infinite potential between the choice not foreseen and our ability to choose it. Otherwise we might choose it and the infallible knowledge would have been wrong. That is a form of coercion.

bogeydogg:

I realize of course that you will say that my knowledge is imperfect and therefore my example is null, but I think you are equivocating on what “knowledge” means. Just because I don’t have an “infallable” knowledge of the exact machinations of gravity does not mean that I cannot posses “infallible” knowledge that if my son drops an apple that it will fall to the floor.

It has nothing to do with your understanding the machinations of gravity, because there are many other forces in play - a strong breeze could come up and lift the apple just as he lets go, every molecule could randomly just happen to vibrate all in the upward direction at the moment he lets go. Even knowing all these only serves to make your knowledge an educated guess. It does not make you knowledge infallible, the only way to make you knowledge more than an educated guess is to impose some barrier to the other possibilities occurring and then we are back to the coercion mentioned above.

 

[michael_legna]

bogeydogg:

Also, you cannot attribute causality to God’s knowledge of my nature and desire because my nature is sinful and my desire is evil and God does not author sin neither does He tempt us to evil.

You are wrong here for so many reasons. First I do not claim that God has an infallible foreknowledge of our desires and nature. I am arguing that if He did (as you claim) that would limit our free will.

Second, if you are right above then I would not be able to attribute any causality to God in the creation of our nature since our nature is indeed sinful and it is what we are born with because of the stain of original sin, which is how God makes each and everyone of us because of the fall. So yes, I can attribute causality to God, because the Church does. The good note to this is that God avoids being the author of sin by giving us grace by which to seek him and overcome our sinful nature. We still have to cooperate with that grace, but that requires we have a free will, and that I claim requires that God self limits so as not to know everything we do in an infallible manner.

 

[michael_legna]

bogeydogg:

michael_legna:

That is true before we are given grace to assist us in seek God, but after we have received grace we have to believe we have the free will to either cooperate with or resist that grace.

I have a problem with changing the specifics of the argument to now exclude unsaved people. You have never qualified your objections concerning free will to include only those who are saved so why do you do so now?

I don’t see myself excluding unsaved people from free will. I am not talking about the grace of salvation above. I am speaking about the grace needed by everyone merely to seek God - just as the RCC teaches. All people received this grace, those who go on to cooperate with it and those who don’t.
bogeydoog:

We will never be free of sin or the old nature until we are perfected as He is perfect in His righteousness apart from our current wretched state. Because of this, while we may not wish it to be so, we will continue in a predictable self-driven way until we are free from this mortal coil and in His presence.

Predictable yes, God can still know with relative certainty what we will do, because He is the greatest psychologist and/or sociologist. But if He knows in an absolute infallible manner what it is we will do there is an infinite barrier which comes up between all the choices He knows we won’t make and our free will.

 

[Benadam]

A story to refute the notion that foreknowledge removes free will.

Suppose God built a robot in the pattern of his own likeness and image. Each component whether gear, cog, rod, or whatever was built with the power to be what God built it for or be something else. If it will be what God wants it fulfills it’s purpose and the robot will be a perfect Godbot in the image and likeness of God.

After seven days God is finished and the robot is equiped with all it needs to be just like God Himself.

Now God already knew that some of the components would not want to be the robot and He knew many would. So He had ready a mirror to show the components what a wonderfull thing God had made of them. Then He said, those who still don’t want to be a part of my robot will be removed and placed in a bin and not be part of anything. Your Choice. Many decided that it was good after all to be a part of God’s wonderfull robot of Himself. But still many of the components just didn’t want to be a robot of God. So God removed them for the sake of the components that chose to be a Godbot, so they could be what God showed them they would be. God and His Godbot loved each other forever after.