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

[john_doran]

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.

ok, i’ll bite. here’s a formally valid proof:

either 1+1=3 or god’s foreknowlege does not preclude free choice;
1+1 does not equal 3;
therefore god’s foreknowledge does not preclude free choice.

see?

p or q;
~p;
q

i guess i win…

michael_legna:

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.

you should care. if what you need to prove is that there are no true propositions about free choice, then the argument is no longer about (god’s) omniscience: it’s about the existence of free choices. and if that’s what it’s about, then omniscience is no longer an issue.

michael_legna:

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

right. except that it is something i can freely choose to do, by definition.

look, if i cannot not freely choose to eat cornflakes, then, necessarily, i freely choose to eat cornflakes. which means that, a fortiori, i can make a free choice.

so where’s the problem?

michael_legna:

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.

not so: it’s not that we cannot change the choice once god knows that we’ll make a free choice - it’s that we can’t change that the choice is free.

but that doesn’t make the choice any less free.

 

[michael_legna]

john doran:

ok, i’ll bite. here’s a formally valid proof:

either 1+1=3 or god’s foreknowlege does not preclude free choice;
1+1 does not equal 3;
therefore god’s foreknowledge does not preclude free choice.

see?

p or q;
~p;
q

i guess i win…

Funny, not valid - but funny.
john doran:

you should care. if what you need to prove is that there are no true propositions about free choice, then the argument is no longer about (god’s) omniscience: it’s about the existence of free choices. and if that’s what it’s about, then omniscience is no longer an issue.

No, because you are once again assuming that there is no relationship between free choice and omniscience in order to prove that there is no relationship between the two. You keep coming up with these vague discussions of the issue and never even attempt to address all the arguments I have offered, so I don’t think there is much reason to continue rehashing the same ideas over and over again.
john doran:

not so: it’s not that we cannot change the choice once god knows that we’ll make a free choice - it’s that we can’t change that the choice is free.

but that doesn’t make the choice any less free.

That makes no sense at all, how does the existence of something not change something? That is a strange sense of causality.

In other words how does God knowing something not change that it is free choice?

How can you deny it’s not that we cannot change the choice once god knows that we’ll make a free choice? You really want to claim that once God knows the choice we make we can still change it? Doesn’t that make it possible for God to be wrong? These are of course rhetorical questions - since as I said there really is no point to continuing this when you continue to refuse to address my arguments and present completely nonsensical symbolic arguments.

It’s been interesting but I don’t think anyone is really listening anymore.

 

[bogeydogg]

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.

Good now we are getting somewhere.

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.

God does not make us sinners. God creates life and the power of sin corrupts it.

Let’s go to St. Augustine.

He said we have free will (Libero Arbitrio) but not liberty (Libertas). Why? Sin. St. Augustine declared in his rebuttal to Pelagius that our will was indeed free in the sense of our volition being free, that is that we can choose to eat cheeseburgers or salads or paint our houses green, red or blue witht intervention from God, but that everything we do is radically infected by the power of sin. Why? Human nature.

St. Augustine said that Adam’s will could be defined as;

1. Posse Pecarre - the ability to sin
2. Posse Non Pecarre - the ability to not sin.
3. Libertas

Adam, said St. Augustine, lived in a state of absolute moral freedom and, when he fell, he fell knowing full well the decision he was making with his eyes wide open to what he was doing in a fashion none of us will ever know or understand. Why?

The venerable Saint defined fallen man’s (your’s and mine) will as;

1. Posse Pecarre
2. Non Posse Non Pecarre - The inability to not sin

You will notice that he left out liberty. The reason why is because we are fallen. If a man’s will (volition) is free but his nature is such that he sees through a glass darkly (1 Cor. 13:12) then his volition is altered. Because of this alteration man’s will cannot truly be said to be free in a libertarian (all moral decisions are based upon a postion of moral neutrality) fashion but rather must be understood to be extant in a fallen fashion, and it is the fall which is the most important thing.

You see in some ways I think we do not really disagree because I also do not believe in the absolute freedom of the will, however I am not disposed to sacrifice the divine attributes in the name of understanding this.

End of 1

 

[bogeydogg]

Part 2

It is the loss of liberty which causes us to become self-determined. We lack the ability to see the world as it is and this lacking colors everything we do. We cannot judge correctly any moral decision neither can we deal with our own sin because our nature is such that sin is a part of us and we cannot escape from it under our own steam. To use the old addage, we are not sinners because we sin; we sin because we are sinners. The first and foremost manifestation of this is that we deliberately (Rom 1) refuse to acknowledge God and worship Him as such, but it is not God which causes this. Even if He knows infallibly that we will do this, He does not will it to be so because if He did then He would absolutely have foreordained sin and thus would be author of it.

This is what Pelagius fundamentally failed to see. He thought that if God foreordained everything because of His perfect knowledge then God’s character would be hopelessly tarnished because then God’s sovereignty would be the ultimate cause for man’s sin. However, Augustine refuted this claim by pointing out that it was in fact in Adam that all men fell and because of his sin we inherit a darkened nature, not because God creates us with this nature, but because Adam, being the progentor of the race of men, passed on this nature to all of his children and thus it is that all men with earthly fathers are born sinners, period.

However, it is not God who makes us sinners because it was not God who caused Adam to fall. God specifically told Adam and Eve to not touch the tree or eat it’s fruit because in doing so (the Hebrew translates) dying you shall die. But Adam, being a truly free (libertas) being decided to deliberately disobey God and go his own way. Which you may notice is precisely what Paul says all of his offspring do even before they ever commit a sin. First they willingly refuse God and then they sin.

Even a perfect knowledge of the future, based upon a perfect knowledge of the hearts of men and all causal relationships, cannot cause C-A-U-S-E these events to take place because if causal power can be imputed to knowledge, perfect or otherwise, then there is no way of escaping the dilema of God’s ultimate authoring of sin.

However, the Bible insists that God has perfect knowledge, and we are in no position to go against the Bible neither are we in any position to declare a heterodox interpretation of some presupposed doctrine of God limiting Himself which is utter speculation with no Scriptural or traditional backing whatsoever, and it insists that men have free will and can defy the divine edicts of God even though God can work out history through this free will of men.

So unless you are willing to throw out Scripture and tradition or add to it you have no basis on which to defend your position, and yet you see a paradox which you have a hard time explaining and I understand that. So what about this…

End of Part 2

 

[bogeydogg]

Part 3

A) If God has perfect knowledge

B) If God has declared man’s will to be free

C) If man used his free will to sin

D) If because of one man sin entered and all are slaves to it

E) If in spite of an enslaved nature the will is still free

Then…

God’s perfect knowledge, coupled with His decision to create Man as He (God) is, a free moral agent, then God cannot be rationally said to have caused the fall. Even if God created the man knowing he would fall, one cannot postulate that this knowledge nessecarily would make God culpable in the fall.

Because of the fall all men are sinful and slaves to it and as such we of our own free will deliberately serve and (Isaiah) draw wickedness as if by a cord. We try to sin. We are slaves, yes, but willing ones, and God (again the Bible this time James) does not make us sin. Rather our darkened natures and foolish hearts compel us, by self-determination, to sin, and were it not for grace, none would be saved because (Romans) all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And; since Paul declares that all men decide for themselves in thier own will, again God does not cause this, to ignore God and thus our hearts become foolish, and the Bible declares (Psalms… twice actually) that the fool in his heart has said there is no God, then the ultimate folly of a fallen narture is fundamentally not sin but unbelief.

However, God reveals Himself in nature to be believed (Psalms, Proverbs and Romans) and we can deduce, rationally, from this that God’s will is that man would see and worship Him, and yet man deliberately defies this will and goes his own way in unbelief, thus does the darkened nature work against God’s manifest will.

How can you possibly say that, even with a perfect knowledge (I know I know again with the Bible) that God would do something which is against His own nature. Joh 8:49 Jesus answered, I have not a devil; but I honor my Father, and ye do dishonor me.
Joh 8:50 And I seek not mine own glory: there is one that seeketh and judgeth… So If we believe Jesus, and we should, then the one who judges (God) is the same who seeks after glory (God), and if we can say that God seeks after His own glory, after all He’s God he can besides who else would God glorify, then why would he deliberately set up a dilema by which all men would NOT seek to glorify Him and still hold men accountable for it?

That would make God irrational and God does not author confusion (once again the Bible 1 Corinthians this time).

However, if God really does give all men free will, and all men refuse to glorify God, and all sin and fall short of God’s glory, and God really really really doesn’t cause this (by hook of fore-ordination or crook of perfect knowledge) then God can hold all men accountable for thier sins and still Himself be righteous.

Whether or not God knows men will sin is irrelevent to the actual sinning of men because of fallen nature and the power of sin. To try to say that God has less than perfect knowledge or a self limited knowledge is to make God less than God and that’s idolatry. To declare that the only condition by which God can have perfect knowledge is if he authors sin is to align yourslef with heretics (Pelagius) and atheists (Richard Dawkins) and declare God to be evil (Arius) because He caused men to sin and unjust (Satan) because he has held the fallen responsible for the fall which He (says you) caused.

Does the pot say to the potter, why have you made me thus? No it does not. And yet, the pot being in dishonor is still responsible for it’s own actions because it has free will, and the knowledge of the nature of the pot has no bearing on this at all.

 

[john_doran]

Funny, not valid - but funny.

you’re kidding, right?

please show how it’s not valid.

michael_legna:

In other words how does God knowing something not change that it is free choice?

easy: god’s knowing “something” doesn’t change that it is a free choice when the “something” that he knows is that a free choice was made…

i’ll ask you again: if god knows all true propositions, and the proposition “john freely chooses to eat cornflakes tomorrow morning” is true, then how does god’s knowing that proposition change the nature of that proposition?

in other words, if god knows all true propositions, and, arguendo, the proposition “john freely chooses to eat cornflakes tomorrow” (let’s call it p) is true, then for ***your ***argument to go through (i.e. that god’s knowledge eliminates free choice), god’s knowing p would have to make p false.

can you explain how that works?

michael_legna:

How can you deny it’s not that we cannot change the choice once god knows that we’ll make a free choice? You really want to claim that once God knows the choice we make we can still change it? Doesn’t that make it possible for God to be wrong?

easy: if i had freely chosen to do something differently than i actually freely chose to do, then god would have known that i made that choice…

look, a choice is free if there is a possible world that is identical to the actual world up to the point of the choice, but differs as to the choice that is made. so. for a choice to be free in the actual world only requires that there is a possible world identical to the actual world except for the choice i make; which means that god’s knowing what happens in the actual world in no way affects what happens in any other possible world. which means that god’s knowledge of what happens in the actual world doesn’t impact the feedom of any particular choice.

michael_legna:

These are of course rhetorical questions - since as I said there really is no point to continuing this when you continue to refuse to address my arguments and present completely nonsensical symbolic arguments.

A) please point out the arguments i have failed to address;

B) how are my symbolic arguments “nonsensical”.

 

[Pax]

michael_legna,

I think you should look at God’s foreknowledge as if it were light simply illuminating an object. The object is what it is. The event is what is. The choice is what is. God’s foreknowledge is simply the illumination that displays the object, event, or choice. It is otherwise completely disconnected from defining or determining the choice or event.

Your arguments against the separation of foreknowledge and cause have not been logical proofs. They have been more along the lines of statements that contend that the two cannot be separated simply because they happen to coexist in perfect congruence. Try thinking more flexibly and creatively in terms of God’s foreknowledge.

The idea of illumination of an object, idea, event etc. is one way to do this. Another is to see the separation of knowledge and cause in terms of dimensionality. One is in time and one is outside of time. Dimensionality might also be understood in terms of parallelism as opposed to some linear relationship. Linear connections may tend to make things appear to be cause and effect when they are not.

These are just a few suggestions for thinking outside of the box.

 

[Asuno]

Look, say a mother has a child who habitually sneaks cookies out of the cookie jar. She tells him no, don’t do that, scolds him, tells him he’ll get sick if he keeps eating them. But she “knows” her child, and she knows, as soon as she makes more and puts them in the cookie jar, that child will most likely get in it. But because she does love her child, she makes more cookies (for desert after supper, of course) and puts them in the cookie jar, once again warning him not to get in it until later. After she leaves and is gone for a bit, he goes over, gets into it, eats a dozen cookies, and gets sick. Is it the mother’s fault the child disobeyed and got sick? Is her fault that she decided to place some trust in her child, even though she had reason not to? Of course not. The child has a free will, and he made a bad choice, and all choices (good or bad) have consequences, results. It’s cause and effect, plain and simple.
God is like that, except His knowledge is perfect. Since He exists outside of time, He’s seen the whole “movie” from its beginning to its end. However, He loves us so much that He creates us anyway (because He knows we would prefer to exist than not) and respects our choices, good or bad. The real mystery is not if there is free will or not, but rather the extent of His love, that even knowing some of us will reject Him and choose–I repeat, CHOOSE–hell over heaven with Him, He will let us do just that.
We have the free will to choose anything we like, but we don’t have freedom from the consequences of those choices.

 

[agangbern]

If omniscient God knows before the game who the strong will be and who the weak will be, and thus the winners and losers, why did he play the game at all? Why did He create a bunch of weak, selfish people who aren’t going to love Him - people who are going to end up burning in the fires of Gehenna? Wouldn’t it be better for them never to have been born? Wouldn’t a compassionate, omniscient God not have created these people doomed for eternal suffering? Why would He do that?

ilovekittens expounded the topic as above. I have not read all the posts before me, so I am not sure whether I am simply repeating another’s view. It is possible that two or more of us accidentally have similar views.
The question is not whether or not the Lord God *willed for a purpose *that wickedness should happen on this earth. The question is, why did He ever allow to come to existence someone who He knew beforehand would use his free will only to go to hell?

Someone here suggested that the Lord God imposed limit unto his omniscience, that is, He willed that He did not know beforehand how the person would use his free will. I consider this suggestion not worthy of the Lord God.

My answer to the question would be this: God is Love. Being Love, He could not be NON-LOVE. The Lord God could not go against His very nature. And Love is simply procreative. He could not prevent it, otherwise He would be fighting against His own nature. His Love creates without measure, and everything that were created were good.

Unfortunately, Satan came into the picture. He sowed weeds among the wheat. And now both the wheat and the weeds are growing together.

 

[Pat_the_Cat]

God is not stuck (as we are) in linear time.
You cannot understand God if you try and understand Him in linear time. You cannot limit God to time and space and expect to understand things like omnipotence and omnipresence.
That’s like asking “What happens when an unstoppable force hits an immovable object”. It would be easy to conclude that one of them doesn’t exist, or cannot exist. But the truth is they can both exist; just not in the same sentence. You cannot have both of these things in the same sentence, otherwise one of them rules out the other and causes a paradox. The problem is in the question.

All the analogies in the world will fail in some way, because that is what they are; analogies.

 

[agangbern]

God is not stuck (as we are) in linear time.
You cannot understand God if you try and understand Him in linear time. You cannot limit God to time and space and expect to understand things like omnipotence and omnipresence.
That’s like asking “What happens when an unstoppable force hits an immovable object”. It would be easy to conclude that one of them doesn’t exist, or cannot exist. But the truth is they can both exist; just not in the same sentence. You cannot have both of these things in the same sentence, otherwise one of them rules out the other and causes a paradox. The problem is in the question.

All the analogies in the world will fail in some way, because that is what they are; analogies.

You are saying that the first question in this thread has nothing to do with the second question…right? If so, then I also agree with that.

 

[RedSoxFan]

This thread has been a big help to me. It’s old but I’m grateful for it still being here!