Tani

you treat the cats life and death as contradictory to exist in one instance while possible to both be in god's plan. simply, you are claiming contradiction is part of god's nature. and accordingly, his inexistance is also his nature as far as i can understand it. but in any case, it's clear that the phrase "god's plan" is completely meaningless to you since i already told you the condition that god's plan cannot be contradictory for it to be possible in our understanding, and you simply say x and not x can be both god's plan. either you didn't understand my post but continue your logic regardless, or god's plan somehow doesn't really have a solid meaning to you.

let me make it clear, if they are not contradictory, they are the same. for example, let all universe have only point x and y. let there be an electron at point x and point y, in one universe, and let there be an electron at point y but not point x in another universe. they are not the equal, they contradict each other. but don't worry about it, it's clear that although you said the word "multiple universe," it is nothing but a empty rhetoric device to you, and any subsequent conclusion that you make from it makes are absolute meaningless since without a premise, you were jumping to conclusion (although techically it isn't one, but we live in a rhetorical culture that makes everything appear like a conclusion).

before i even attempt to define the terms, how can you even ask the question regarding the effect on "freedom" with only one possible course of event in our universe without a definition to freedom? your posts always contain questions of this sort. you first transform a basket full of terms into rhetorical devices that devoids meaning and then use them to ask question which in fact cannot be interpreted.

anyways, an agent is free if its choice is the determining factor of the course of events that follows. if future exists along with the presence, then there must be multiple futures so that the agent's choice is a _factor_. if future exist only when the choice is made, then the condition is satisfied because it is a factor of making the existence of future possible.

determinism means he is not omniscience, i concluded it for you in the end of the last post already. he is omniscience only if fatalism is true.

i don't know how you were able to conclue that it is a false dilemma when you again jumped to conclusion. he determines it because it hasn't been determined yet, so he has no knowledge of it being determined in any particular way yet. obviously, you either don't understand what omniscience means or you don't know what determination means. omniscience means he knows it before he even attempt to determines it (this is a really bad way of putting it because knowing it means he does not determine it). if he has to determine it, he has no knowledge of its particular end. omniscience makes determination meaningless - a rhetorical device that devoids of meaning - by their very definitions. what you said above, both sentence suggests that he has no idea what happenes before he make a decision, which means he is not omniscience, or you strip the prefix "omni" of its meaning.

that line of argument applies a understandable (to us anyway) meaning of omniscience, you have to admit that omniscience is a rhetoric device that devoids meaning if you were to claim that. don't even start on playing with the word reality.

sigh, it is a literary device, let me rephrase your question and, hopefully, you will then realize that you are commiting the same error over and over again.

"how is merely seeking the reason for an alledgedly 'necessary' state of affairs _necessarily_ paradoxical? it would _necessarily_ be 'self-referencing' if you assume that the 'necessary' state of affairs is _necessarily_ "self-existing."

indeed they are all in adjectives, because you seem to be very comfortable with rhetorics. in limiting yourself from using that word by manipulating grammatical structures, you make it appear to be a legitamate question.
of course unless you found your question unimportant, meaningless, out of topic, not worth answering to, not logically connected, or you are already asserting "necessity" while asking how is necessity necessarily be necessary?

let me rephrase my original statement:
the gist of the problem is not that god lack freewill due to his omniscience. rather, it is the existence of only one future, which enable omiscience, that entails god lack freewill.

now, your question of necessity becomes a complete nonsense even though my statement didn't change its meaning. you have absolutely no grasp on what necessity means.

i was merely being euphemistic, your habit of playing word games really make any discussions with you meaningless.

phaedrus

Ender my man....I am sure it was all lost on'em

owleye

Olorin...

I would think the existence of free-will would depend on the existence of free choices, not foreknowledge. On the other hand, the issue is tricky. I believe we can benefit from studying Leibniz's defense of his brand of theism. In his Discourse on Metaphysics, he addresses many of the same issues inherent in the question you raise, but let me merely refer you to his writings for your own perusal, unless you wish me to get into it in greater detail. In the meantime...

As you probably know, Leibniz held that God freely chose to create the best of all possible worlds. This is also to say that God's infinite will was determined by his omnibenevolence. What followed from this choice must of necessity be a consequence of that decision. This gives Leibniz some difficulty when it comes to arguing in favor of our own free-will, but, I gather, we are not toi focus on this here. Now, one may conceive a difficulty that since the world chosen by God is the best of all possibilities, it would appear that God could not choose other than the best. This would suggest that God did not have a real choice in the matter -- therefore no free will.

But, we can get around this merely by arguing that since God is omnipotent, it means God is capable of choosing a less than perfect world, despite that God's omnibenevolence would not allow it. There is a real choice in the matter.

Similarly we can separate complete foreknowledge from both oomibenevolence and omnipotence. Though God can forsee the world God chooses, this doesn't negate the power God has of choosing other than the world forseen and it is the power to do (or to have done) otherwise, not the doing (or having done) otherwise that is required for free-will.

Owleye

Ender

Perhaps it's my fault for overestimating the profoundity of the issue, or the possibility that this philosophy forum was familiar with existential phenomenology, either that or I should've played along to the beat of the thread's drummer and stuck to strict one-upmanships.

~WiGGiN~

NialScorva

I enjoyed your post, but I think you overloaded the thread.

phaedrus

Yup i think its getting a lil mundane over here

jpbrooks

Tani,

I apologize for missing your post above, but this exchange is tending toward incoherence.

No, you are missing my point.
My point is that there is no contradiction involved in two different events that each occur in two different universes even though those same two events would be contradictory if they could simultaneously occur in the same universe. Hence (as far as the difference between the two events is concerned), there is no logical impossibility involved and (thus) no inconsistency involved with God allowing the two events to occur.

However, for Theism, there is more than one way that an inconsistency involving the events can occur. Even though there is no mutual inconsistency between the two events, either event (in its respective universe) can be inconsistent with God's plan for that universe.

My posts are not intended to be deceptive. I simply rarely have time to provide a lengthy exposition of each point that I am trying to convey. I'm sorry that you find my language difficult to follow in spite of my best efforts to get my points across as concisely as possible.

How can this represent a contradictory situation when each electron exists in a different universe? (Of course, some quantum theorists might argue that electron "particles" are actually not entities that have a specific location in space at all, but appear to be such when one attempts to observe them. So, for these theorists, there wouldn't even be a contradiction if the two electrons existed in the same universe.)

It's neither a "rhetorical device" nor a conclusion. It is simply an alternative possibility that allows for the existence of "multiple" courses of future events.

No! Again, you gave missed my point.
In asking for your definition of "freedom", I am not implying that I don't have one. I only wanted to see if our definitions were in agreement.

I see. Well, since my posts "always contain questions of this sort", perhaps you can provide specific cases where I have supposedly posted such things, along with the specific "basket" of terms and the specific "rhetorical devices" that they were allegedly transformed into.

This definition of freedom (as it is written) can include agents who have been "programmed" to make choices. It is difficult to see how such a broad definition of freedom could fail to include God.

On the definition that I had in mind for this discussion, a (truly) free agent would be one for whom antecedent causes for choices that are made by the agent, that are outside of the agent itself, could not exist.

This doesn't appear to follow. Can you perhaps fill in the gaps in your chain of reasoning here? Why, for example, must the future exist along with the present? And even if it does, why does it imply the existence of multiple futures. Why couldn't it imply just one future?

It remains to be shown why the future must exist in the present.

Your argument (if I am following it correctly, and I'm not at all sure whether I am), was that God could only be omniscient if He does not determine the future, which, as I pointed out in my last post, doesn't seem cogent.

It is a false dilemma because it proposes a dilemma between knowledge and determination that doesn't exist.

Now I see what you are doing.
You have (re)defined "determination" to exclude knowledge of ends without explaining why this must be done.

Well, I agree that it does if you arbitrarily redefine "determination" to exclude knowledge, as you have done.

You don't seem to understand how the concepts of knowledge, freedom, and existence apply to omniscience. And it's becoming frustrating to keep this discussion coherent. <img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" />

Those insertions of the word "necessarily" are all superfluous. What's your point? In logical argumentation, it is already assumed that conclusions "necessarily" follow from premises.
My use of the word "necessary" had nothing to do with your use of "necessarily" above.

I confess that you have me stumped on that one. When did I ever ask all of that?

Thus, since only one course of events will actually occur, omniscience is "enabled", God lacks free will, and it is not clear whether anyone else has free will either. All of this follows from your arguments, none of which, at this point, appear to be sound.

Nope!
If God's choices are not free, as your reasoning seems to suggest, then someone or something else, besides God makes God choose what He chooses. IOW, God chooses because He must do so; not because He desires to do so.

I don't really have time to continue a long discussion, especially one that involves irreconcilable concepts and definitions.

[ February 21, 2002: Message edited by: jpbrooks ]</p>