How about this - any logical problems?
God ‘sees’ that tomorrow at 3 pm I will eat an apple, of my own free will.
Sure, and we all do that to some degree - as must anyone who is struggling with the questions of what time really is, whether God can ‘see’ ahead to things that have not happened yet etc. I find the SEP to have high-quality articles written by people who put their stuff out there after a lot of thought and study, and invite comments and review, and will sometimes change their minds.
Yes, I’m also totally uninvested in thinking I know the answers to such conundrums. Even with enough units of philosophy to have a degree in it, it seems over my pay grade and even philosophers generally who seem to forever dispute one another on such questions (they rarely enjoy consensus on anything)
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Still, I find it easy to see why many bright people perceive that it follows that IF it can now be a known Fact or Truth that scenario A is what will yet happen, arguing that it’s possible that scenario A won’t happen, or even that some kind of libertarian choice remains to now enact scenario B, sounds like word games or gibberish.
It’s a matter of distinguishing between what happens (a contingency involving, for example, what one will do) and what must happen (a necessity involving, for example, what one must do).
In saying that omniscience is incompatible with the exercise of free will, one is admitting that if God knows a particular choice is made, that choice becomes necessary. The fact that necessity is central to the argument that omniscience is incompatible with free will can be seen in a summary of the argument from Wikipedia.
So, in the argument that omniscience is incompatible with the exercise of free will, we are dealing with a necessity. But the syllogism that accurately depicts the premises of the argument has a conclusion, as seen below, that does not involve a necessity. It involves, instead, the word will that implies contingency, not the word must or words like it that imply a necessity. Note that the word necessarily modifies only the entire proposition in premise 1. It does not transfer to the clause “X will happen” in the conclusion.
Premise 1: Necessarily, if God foreknows X, then X will happen.
Premise 2: God foreknows X.
Conclusion: Therefore, X will happen.
Thus, omniscience does not appear to be incompatible with the exercise of free will.
Unless I am mistaken, knowing that something will happen doesn’t mean it was the cause of it happening. Just because you know what door someone will pick, doesn’t mean they didn’t legitimately pick the door. Magicians used these types of tricks all the time and if a magician can do it, I fail to see how an omni-everything God couldn’t.
At some level, the point that Paidion makes is largely irrelevant, because at some level God has already stacked the deck, no matter how you slice it.
Also “If we have free choice” is exactly that - “if”… Paidion never established we had free choice. His argument then is backwards. He assumes free choice and thus argues that God cannot know the future because of that. I don’t buy that logic. It is working backwards, to me.
But maybe the idea of free will is outside of the understanding of necessity, in other words, we as a human race may not know what the creator wants from us, we keep trying to wrangle it in, but at the end of the day, we have no idea… And it could be that that is the way God wants it to be.
I’m going to restate a question I asked above:
If God ‘sees’ me eating an apple tomorrow, of my own free will, how does his seeing it affect anything?
Well, eating an apple is for the most part a benign act. No offense. But if you were going to do harm to someone and God ‘sees’ it, that totally poses a different scenario.
I agree. But I simply raised what the omniscience/free will argument poses to show that its requirements are not met.
Here is a concise summary of the omniscience/free will argument from Wikipedia.
As you can see, the necessity of our choices being determined by omniscience is central to the argument.
Well, simple! It doesn’t allow you to pull a switcharoo over God! Case closed!
My point was not the act of eating the apple, it was the fact of free will. If God sees me doing it freely, how does that rob me of free will?
That is not theologically succinct! I like it…
I believe I largely understand the arguments. I am open to the idea of free choice, but I don’t think it has been established we do have free choice But even if we do have free choice, I still don’t see how God knowing the choice necessarily makes it not a choice.
Again, I am open to the concept of free choice, but I don’t think we have enough evidence to say we have it. Let me give an example.
Let’s say I know you love you candy bars. Let’s say that I know you just can’t seem to say no, when offered one. Let’s say I offer you one:
Scenario One: You say yes (I predicted this, I knew this)
Scenario Two: You say no (I predicted this, too, because I also knew you had a stomach ache and that this new condition would change)
Scenario Three: You say no (I predicted this, too, because I knew you were on a diet. You told me about it. You are trying to be good.
Now, take a being who knows you inside and out… How would it possible to make any choice that couldn’t be determined before hand? We think our choices are free, but they are really aren’t. At least, not in my opinion. When we break from our normal choices, there is a “reason” we break from them. It is never willy nilly. When you decide no to “Pizza” night Friday, there is a reason. Maybe you are tired of Pizza? I don’t know. But there is a reason when we stray from our predicted choices. The more we know about an individual, the more we can predict what they do. Imagine if we knew the individual better than they knew themselves? How would we NOT know what someone was going to do?
But free will is either a blessing or a curse in your estimation. So when you talk to family and friends, how do you explain free will and how God will react when you make a certain decision…
Well, that’s the point of my posts! God’s foreknowledge does not affect our free will.
Yep, and I largely agreed with your posts.
I know
A) we have free choice, and
B) we can do whatever our will wants.
We are totally given all the tools to do every and anything we want.
Yes, and please see the addition to my second to last post in which I refer to the Wikipedia piece (at the very beginning of the post) in reply to your post.
Well… I repeat for the last time, I never made the point that God’s omniscience determines human action, but rather my point is that it is impossible for anyone (including God) to know in advance what a free-will agent will choose. Then I said or implied, that if one insists that God can know in advance every choice a person will make because He is omniscient (I agree that He is omniscient since He knows everything that is possible to know) then the person can do no other than to perform that action which God foreknows.
Again, that in no way implies that God’s foreknowledge caused the person’s choice, but that if such foreknowledge existed, it would be inconsistent with the person’s choice, and thus the person could not do otherwise than what is foreknown. Thus the person would not have free will, i.e. the ability to choose.
But since every normal person does have the ability to choose, then God (or anyone else) cannot know that choice in advance.
I trust this explanation fully explains my thinking, and that you will no longer insist my claim to be that God’s foreknowledge, if it exists, would prevent the exercise of free will.
I wasn’t referring to your posts when I said that. I was trying to show how necessity is what is required in the omniscience/free will argument, and necessity indeed seems to be required in that argument, as was shown in the Wikipedia summary I listed and linked to above.
And here are the first three steps in that argument, as copied from the Wikipedia summary. These three steps establish not only that necessity is required in the argument, but also that the argument is based on the claim that omniscience prevents the exercise of free will (a claim that I do not agree with).
