Free will vs. Determinism

[eddydenton]

According to Catholic belief, God is almighy, all-powerful, all-knowing and omnipotent. He knows everything that has and ever will happen. He also has the power do anything and control anyone should He wish.

Catholicism also teaches that humans have free will. This is the reason why we are accountable for our actions in the eyes of God (and the law for that matter).

However these two principles cannot logically co-operate. If God is all-knowing then we cannot have totally free will because this would imply that our actions have already be determined in some sense in order for God to know them before we have willed it or decided it in our freedom to choose. If God is all-powerful such that He can stop our actions should He will, then we do not have absolute free will, it is ultimately overruled by God’s will.

Conversely, if we do in fact have free will. Then God cannot be all-powerful and all-knowing because if we have the freedom to choose with being overruled then God cannot be all-powerful. If our action are not determined by anything other than the free will of our minds then God cannot know before we do and thus He is not all-knowing.

He can still be omnipotent though. Bit of consolation for God.

 

[Wildgraywolf]

Apples and oranges…

A math teacher gives a problem to his students. Just because the teacher knows the solution, doesn’t influence the students ability to arrive at the correct or incorrect answer.

The author of a book knows how the story will turn out, but that doesn’t direct the readers ability to be surprised by an unexpected ending.

If our lives are predetermined and we have no free will to make choices then what’s the point of living? What’s the point of God creating anything?

 

[HandroZ]

Also, it may help to note this: God specifically LIMITS Himself, or say, His influence on us here on earth, to give us free will. Should He always act to prevent any instance of evil, we could not choose to perform a wrong action, however HE LETS US, not because He couldn’t stop us, but because he wants us to choose him ourselves, and not pick good as machines, because we have to.

 

[eddydenton]

The author of a book knows how the story will turn out, but that doesn’t direct the readers ability to be surprised by an unexpected ending.

It is curious that you would use the metaphor of a book to support your belief in free will. A book suggests that history and reality is predetermined and we are simply following its course, reading through it as though it were a script rather than creating reality with every passing moment. Sure we can be surprised by whatever happens, we haven’t read the book before. But we are nonetheless following God’s will and not our own.

Also, it may help to note this: God specifically LIMITS Himself, or say, His influence on us here on earth, to give us free will.

This argument could be used for God’s almightiness, but the dichotomy between free will and God’s knowledge of everything is irreconcilable. God cannot know our actions and our will before we do. Free will requires that we are the original source of the will. If our will is known before we will it then the original source of the will is elsewhere and we as humans are simply the vessels by which it is carried out.

 

[HandroZ]

Not true, and I’ll give two ways of thinking about it:

1. First of all there’s a view that there IS actually one way things turn out. We COULD have gone down the other paths, but since there was only one timeline, we picked one way to do things. It doesn’t mean we couldn’t have done another at all, nor that our choice was fated from the get-go. We did pick it, and the sum of all our choices together forms the one reality of which God sees. The book metaphor might lead you to think, oh, the author wrote it, so he made the decisions of the characters, even while they thought they were making the decisions themselves. BUT it’s as if the author simply thought up some characters, and then Himself read the story the independent characters wrote on their own. He’s the origin of the characters and the setting, but the story was made by the characters themselves, which is something that can’t happen for us with books, so that’s where the analogy fails. Knowledge of something before it happens doesn’t mean you force the hand of others. It simply means you know what they ended up picking.
2. The other explanation deals with Kairos. We are in Chronos, or in other words, Time. God is in Kairos, which is apart from time. In Kairos, everything always is, and continues to be, without start or end, it’s just, what is. Chronos is God’s good creation, our entire universe, where one act follows another in a sequence. Christ always was, but yet He was born on earth. Why? Because he entered earth at a specific point in time, so for us, he was born on a date, and Christ the man of history didn’t exist before then. But Christ existed ‘before’ then in Kairos. When God created Chronos, he limited his influence in it (free will, evil, suffering, etc) We have a beginning and an end, as our universe (Chronos) does. Now God is outside Chronos, right? Looking in on all of time as if it were a string, or curious object before Him, if the analogy works for you. So looking from Kairos into Chronos, he can see ALL of Chronos. He can see the beginning part, and He can see the end part of it. Why? Because He’s not bound by the same time limits we’re bound by, He’s just looking in on it. As events in our world progress, he can see them. He can see them right next to the events of the past, because it’s as if they were right next to each other happening at that very instance in another part of the Chronos string. So our God at this moment can see us, and our future selves. But it’s the same God, and the same ‘instance’ of God. Time is just laid out before Him, so looking at the ‘now’ piece, and looking at the ‘3000AD’ piece is all the same to Him.

If the second explanation is very mirky the way I wrote it, I apologize, but it is kinda complicated, and I’m assuming you’ve never even heard the word Kairos before either. If it helps to further explain, I’m sure you could look it up on New Advent or wikipedia or something.

Funny you should as this though. One of my professors actually presented this view or ‘problem’ in a lecture to my entire Univeristy class (Princeton Univ.) a few weeks ago but wouldn’t give his or any other response, so that we could theorize and debate this ourselves

 

[eddydenton]

Now God is outside Chronos, right? Looking in on all of time as if it were a string, or curious object before Him, if the analogy works for you. So looking from Kairos into Chronos, he can see ALL of Chronos. He can see the beginning part, and He can see the end part of it. Why? Because He’s not bound by the same time limits we’re bound by, He’s just looking in on it. As events in our world progress, he can see them. He can see them right next to the events of the past, because it’s as if they were right next to each other happening at that very instance in another part of the Chronos string. So our God at this moment can see us, and our future selves. But it’s the same God, and the same ‘instance’ of God. Time is just laid out before Him, so looking at the ‘now’ piece, and looking at the ‘3000AD’ piece is all the same to Him.

This is a good argument. I haven’t heard of the concept of Kairos before but I can imagine what you are talking about. Nonetheless, the same problem still applies even if God is observing history from this objective point of Kairos. Regardless of what position God observes from (indeed one could assume God does not need to literally observe, as if with His eyes), He could not see beyond the each moment of the “chronological present” in Chronos because each decision in each moment is being willed by humans as free agents. Using the example of the String, supposing God looked from Kairos at the 3000 AD piece. It would be blank because the freely-made decisions that would lead to that point have not yet been made. And if they have, it is not by free-willed humans.

The argument that God exists outside space-time does not work for free will because we as humans exists with space-time and if we are truly making decisions as free agents and thus creating the future, it can’t already exist.

 

[HandroZ]

Does the first argument not work for you though?

And the thing is the way you’ve represented Chronos. Chronos is all time. The future exists, right? It’s in Chronos. We have the perspective of the present. Those in 1000 AD had the perspective of their own present. Those in 3000 AD have their own perception of the present. All fit in Chronos, none is ‘more present’ than the next. God can see all of these at once, because so long as we make a decision at some point in time, it’s in Chronos. God’s outside time right? And for Him in Kairos, what is, is. He doesn’t need to “wait for us to make our decisions” to fill in the blank spots on the string, as he doesn’t ‘wait’ That’s a concept relating to time, which is only in Chronos. If we will eventually fill them, and he will “see them later on”, well, since He isn’t bound by time, seeing the actions in the future is equivalent to seeing them now. He waited for all eternity to see our decisions, but the God who waited all time and the God at the present moment are identical, it’s the same viewer, right now, and a thousand years in the future because so long as it’s true, or happens in Kairos, it’s there, always, without a beginning or end. We are the only ones that need to wait as we progress through time, yet even as our consciousness flows from one moment to the next, our past consciousness is still present just as it was in the past, taking the past as its ‘present’.
Againt, especially at the end of that paragraph, my descriptions were getting really mirky. I need to get better at this…

But still, what issue have you got with the other perspective? Could you explain this to me: how do you think knowing something will happen is equivalent to that thing having not occurred freely? For instance, you know someone’s personality. Say they’re your best friend, and you know them inside and out, and you’ve shared all your thoughts with each other. Their girlfriend breaks up with them. You know, because you know them so increadibly well, that they are going to go up to the girl in a few hours and try to get back together, blotch up the words, and embarass themselves. They do just that. You know not because they had no other choice but to do that, but because you know them, and you know they would tend to pick that choice. They can do anything, not just that. They could have a personality that would lead them to instead grab another girlfriend the next day, but if you know them, you know which is their personality, and what they’ll choose to do. They’re still choosing it, no doubt. And you, as just a friend looking on, are not fating them to do it, nor influencing them, nor forcing them. Isn’t that kinda similar?

 

[eddydenton]

And the thing is the way you’ve represented Chronos. Chronos is all time. The future exists, right?

I guess in a way I am arguing that no, the future does not exist. At least not in reality. It only exists as a concept to help understand the order of time: past, present and future. The future does not not exist until we reach it, in which case it becomes the present. Time is the the past and present, the future is the potential for time. It is a concept created by the human mind and applied, I would argue incorrectly, to theology, history and morality. The idea of Chronos and Kairos is founded on the idea that the future is something already in existence rather than a potentiality.

You know, because you know them so increadibly well, that they are going to go up to the girl in a few hours and try to get back together, blotch up the words, and embarass themselves. They do just that. You know not because they had no other choice but to do that, but because you know them, and you know they would tend to pick that choice. They can do anything, not just that. They could have a personality that would lead them to instead grab another girlfriend the next day, but if you know them, you know which is their personality, and what they’ll choose to do. They’re still choosing it, no doubt. And you, as just a friend looking on, are not fating them to do it, nor influencing them, nor forcing them. Isn’t that kinda similar?

All these things you claim to “know” are no more than assumptions based on past experience. But this is not a basis for knowledge. In your experience this is the most likely scenario but its not a definite account of the future. You say they tend to pick that choice but that is not enough to say you know what choices they will make. How many time have your closest friends surprised to about things you thought you had them figured out on? How many times have you surprised yourself about thing you never thought you would do or say? Now, I realise we are talking about God here who, if He is all-knowing, evidently has an infinitely better understanding of us and our nature, but still God can make no more than a VERY well informed guess, or even an infinitely well informed guess, as to what we’ll do. This is still not enough to be called knowledge (referring to Kant and others for the epistemological status of knowledge).

 

[Wildgraywolf]

It is curious that you would use the metaphor of a book to support your belief in free will. A book suggests that history and reality is predetermined and we are simply following its course, reading through it as though it were a script rather than creating reality with every passing moment.

Not in the least… The characters in the book can’t read the book. They’re not alive even if the story is about true life events of real people. We have the choice to read or not or what we are going to read. I also used the metaphor of a teacher any thoughts on that one?

Sure we can be surprised by whatever happens, we haven’t read the book before. But we are nonetheless following God’s will and not our own.

How can we be surprised if by your thinking everything is predetermined? Indeed how can we even claim to be alive if everything is predetermined?

We can choose to read or not; we can choose to follow God or not. The bible is full of stories where God says to humans; do this, do that… bad things will happen if you don’t or good things will happen if you do. Clearly God desires us to freely choose.

What’s the point of living or of creation if:

history and reality is predetermined and we are simply following its course, reading through it as though it were a script rather than creating reality with every passing moment.

Can history and reality actually exist in this kind of environment?

This argument could be used for God’s almightiness, but the dichotomy between free will and God’s knowledge of everything is irreconcilable. God cannot know our actions and our will before we do.

Apples and oranges… You’re confusing God’s nature and trying to give it a temporal quality. We exist in a linear, temporal reality God doesn’t.

Free will requires that we are the original source of the will. If our will is known before we will it then the original source of the will is elsewhere and we as humans are simply the vessels by which it is carried out.

No, free will is an ability to do or not to do, to say or not to say.

 

[Padilla7921]

All these things you claim to “know” are no more than assumptions based on past experience. But this is not a basis for knowledge.

You are correct, an assumption based on past experience is not knowledge. Knowledge is understanding an objective truth. So, if you make an assumption or educated guess based on the past, you don’t really know anything, you are just making an educated (or, in some cases, uneducated) inference.

Now, I realise we are talking about God here who, if He is all-knowing, evidently has an infinitely better understanding of us and our nature, but still God can make no more than a VERY well informed guess, or even an infinitely well informed guess, as to what we’ll do. This is still not enough to be called knowledge (referring to Kant and others for the epistemological status of knowledge).

How can God make no more than an informed guess? He sees everything at once. Past, present, future, they are all nonexistent in God’s eyes. Because of the way He sees everything, He knows everything. It is enough to be called knowledge because He understands things as fact.

As for your reference to Kant and other epistemologists, you keep confusing true knowledge with the ideas of perception, assumption, and inference.

If it’s any consolation to you, I can, in theory, mathematically predict every possible choice you’ll make in your entire life with 100% certainty.

 

[Lisa44]

If God is all-knowing then we cannot have totally free will because this would imply that our actions have already be determined in some sense in order for God to know them before we have willed it or decided it in our freedom to choose. QUOTE]

Hi Eddy,
I struggle with this also.

 

[Psychotheosophy]

… you keep confusing true knowledge with the ideas of perception, assumption, and inference.

Exactly,

To view one piece of time
Apart from its preceding piece
Implies a succession of time
And so this is a temporal viewpoint

Is it a viewpoint outside of time?
Obviously not

 

[HandroZ]

Okay, what I sought to get at was this through that example. We as humans make lets say, educated guesses. There’s a decision they will make, and how they will act. In a mathematical sense, let’s think of that as a function or a curve. You can make your guess about how they’ll act. That’s like an approximation, a function you come up with to try to match the one you need to approximate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Numerical_integration_illustration,_h=1.png The more you know, the better guess you can make that will predict what they will do. Perfect complete knowledge of them as a person will allow you to perfectly know them. Perfect knowledge of everything, of all the world, will allow you to perfectly know everything, all through time. Again, it’s just one way of looking at this scenario though.

As for Chronos, what makes you think your consciousness observing the present time is the present? From that perspective all of time is like a dimension. An observer could move back and forth like they could down a wall of a gallery. It’s not that you are fated or have not choice to make the present happen. It’s that you’ve been given the choice, and the choice you did make when your mind came around to that instance of the ‘present’ (in the future) was what a person looking at the future would see.

Psychotherapy, I’m not quite sure what you were trying to say there. I used the idea that God ‘looks at a part of the string’ only to highlight that to explain the concept. I’m not claiming God looks at only a piece of the string at a time, because God is not bound by time, and therefore does not do something, ‘at a time’. By extension, He does not see the future when the future comes round only, He sees it now as well, because looking at it then and looking at us now is the same ‘instance’ to Him, He witnesses/ed/will witness us. That applies to all Kairos, for all Kairos just IS, and without the element of time, the future and past for God in Kairos are no different.

 

[Psychotheosophy]

Psychotherapy, I’m not quite sure what you were trying to say there. I used the idea that God ‘looks at a part of the string’ only to highlight that to explain the concept. I’m not claiming God looks at only a piece of the string at a time, because God is not bound by time, and therefore does not do something, ‘at a time’. By extension, He does not see the future when the future comes round only, He sees it now as well, because looking at it then and looking at us now is the same ‘instance’ to Him, He witnesses/ed/will witness us. That applies to all Kairos, for all Kairos just IS, and without the element of time, the future and past for God in Kairos are no different.

Actually, I think we agree…

It’s difficult to explain
God’s eternal viewpoint
with temporal explanations

 

[Psychotheosophy]

Psychotherapy, I’m not quite sure what you were trying to say there. I used the idea that God ‘looks at a part of the string’ only to highlight that to explain the concept. I’m not claiming God looks at only a piece of the string at a time, because God is not bound by time, and therefore does not do something, ‘at a time’. By extension, He does not see the future when the future comes round only, He sees it now as well, because looking at it then and looking at us now is the same ‘instance’ to Him, He witnesses/ed/will witness us. That applies to all Kairos, for all Kairos just IS, and without the element of time, the future and past for God in Kairos are no different.

I’m sorry,
All I could see was my own perspective
All I could see posted was “reason alone”
and in so doing
I devalued reason
and indirectly devalued your argument
please forgive me

 

[MindOverMatter]

I guess in a way I am arguing that no, the future does not exist.

If the future did not exist, then we would have never arrived at the present moment from the past. Out of nothing comes nothing. The future does exist; but it exists in the future.

In reality, the Universe is more like a static object with all moments in time already present as one eternal moment. The reason why we experience time is because we experience it from the 3rd dimension, which is only one aspect of the universe. From a Gods-eye-view of things, the universe naturally and necessarily emanates from Gods perfect attributes. E.g., we exist, because God loves, and he would have always have chosen this because that’s what love does. God is love, and all possible acts of love extend necessarily from Gods being. Also, the Universe extends necessarily from Gods creative attribute; because God is the creator; and all possible creations extend necessary from Gods Being. We must understand that, in God, there is no passing of time. The idea of the universe, the will to create it, and the creation itself, exist always at once in Gods perfection and as a result of perfection rather then a succession of time. Our Universe doesn’t just exist because of a beginning in time, but rather because of Gods eternal presence. It simply exists “hierarchally”; as in, the existence of our universe is a logical necessity of Gods eternal attributes, rather then as consequence of a causal sequence. And although from our perspective of things we see the universe as having a beginning, the Universe has always existed as an object of Gods eternal contemplation.

I believe you have a conundrum about freewill. First of all, freewill is a mystery that we can never hope to understand. The word “how”, necessarily reflects are experience and understanding of how things work in term’s of time and succession. We must take into account that being creatures of the third dimension, our understanding things in this way is unlikely to yield any answers. It would be better to ask “why”, which ultimately takes us to another dimension of understanding and being. You have freewill because it is a necessary extension of Love. Love makes it possible. How? I don’t know. It is true because it is impossible for it not to be so far as the ground of being is love.

Also, as far as God being all-knowing, it is impossible for God not to be. Allot of people have a flawed notion that God is some guy that’s out their somewhere. But this is a fallacy. In reality God is Existence. Existence transcends time and space, since time cannot be actual without existence; why existence needs nothing but itself to be. Existence is the primary and unifying principle of all things. This means that it is logically impossible that there is a time that existence does not know about or is yet to exist.

I can see where the conflict of freewill comes into it for you, but this is not just a problem for theologians and philosophers; it is also a problem for Scientists. For, they two agree that there is a fourth dimension where all of time is present. Also if all events are the result of cause and effect and chemical stimulus, then freewill ought not to be possible. Freewill from a scientific perspective is an inexplicable anomaly; unless you are the kind of determinist that doesn’t believe in freewill in the first place.

Peace.

 

[Michael_David]

Would of God sought another if Mary said no? But she didn’t.

Did John have free-will to baptize?

Could of Jesus been a carpenter His whole life?

How did Christ know the fisherman would follow Him?

How did Christ know one would betray Him? And which one it was?

How did Christ know Peter would deny Him 3 times… before the cock crows?

When He asked God to remove the cup… but came to say “Thy Will be done”… did Christ also have Free-Will?

Christ not only knew about His succession of events in time, but of many others… before they happened.

I do not think they were ‘educated’ guesses. They were known!

Could of Saul said he will not become Paul… even after the blinding event? Of all the people to blind, God choose Saul… why?

In the lives of the saints, what Will did they Freely choose?

And we too have Free-Will, to either choose His Will for us, or Not-His-Will for us. The choice is still ours…

 

[warpspeedpetey]

However these two principles cannot logically co-operate. If God is all-knowing then we cannot have totally free will because this would imply that our actions have already be determined in some sense in order for God to know them before we have willed it or decided it in our freedom to choose. If God is all-powerful such that He can stop our actions should He will, then we do not have absolute free will, it is ultimately overruled by God’s will.

Conversely, if we do in fact have free will. Then God cannot be all-powerful and all-knowing because if we have the freedom to choose with being overruled then God cannot be all-powerful. If our action are not determined by anything other than the free will of our minds then God cannot know before we do and thus He is not all-knowing.

He can still be omnipotent though. Bit of consolation for God.

the problem is in what we believe.

we believe that “nothing is impossible for Him”, that is the principle from which theologians discern those separate qualities that you mention.

though for ease of instruction of the faith we may teach these as separate functions within the Divine, too make understanding easier

they are inseparable as too his nature, one cannot be told apart from another,

one cannot point to one portion and say “this is his omniscience”, or to another portion and say “this is His omnipotence”

for this reason the entire idea that there might exist within G-d some logical contradiction or fallacy is false

because we believe, literally, that for Him, nothing is impossible.

i hope that helped to clear up the matter

 

[Quaestor]

“If the second explanation is very mirky the way I wrote it, I apologize, but it is kinda complicated, and I’m assuming you’ve never even heard the word Kairos before either. If it helps to further explain, I’m sure you could look it up on New Advent or wikipedia or something.”

Actually, the second is very easy to explain as your did, nothing murky about it. I have used that exact argument with an Atheist friend of mine, a Randroid. He claimed that an omniscient god would negate free will. My answer to him was exactly the same as your second argument.

 

[HandroZ]

Michael David. I never meant for it to seem like just an ‘educated guess’ in the common sense of the words. Christ DID know those things, and the Father DID know Mary would say yes. But it’s not that HE determined they would say or do that, it’s that THEY THEMSELVES chose those things, with God as the omniscient witness, even in their own futures.