Tornado Watch

I'm sure most of you have thought of this before, but I realized this.

Most christians claim that reason why evil exists is because of free will. (Also the free will defense is used whenever the problem of nonbelief is mentioned).

We DONT have free will, because if the Christian god is the alpha and the omega like the bible says he is, then God already knows what is going to happen before it does happen. Therefore we can't suprise him.

graymouser

Most theists proposing the FWD hold both positions and try to argue that they're not mutually exclusive. A few try to limit omniscience to that which has already happened.

I think the most common apologetic is that it doesn't matter if God foreknows it, because the choice is still free. This is problematic when you consider God as the creator of the universe, but argumentation along those lines is pretty much not given the time of day.

-Wayne

Sensei Meela

TW:

I posted this in Long Winded Fool's thread over at EoG (sorry for the repost!)

"Well, there are many problems with 'free will'. The first of which is that there is no clear reason why the freedom to kill others (to name but one) is more desireable than being restricted from doing so.

Of course, the larger problem with free will is that of the Omnimax-Creator God; the OCG is the only one with any free choice in any world the OCG 'chooses' to instantiate. Wyrdsmyth and wiploc have done a number on this Platinga-esque free will, and I can only attempt to do them justice; the short of it is that, since God knows that I will never choose to do wrong in World A, but I would in World B, and decides to make World B because -- as your argument suggests -- instantiating World A would mean He has decided I will never sin...then He has decided I WILL sin by making World B instead.

Divine omniscience is the bane of 'free will.' As HRG put it in another thread, "Using the conditio-sine-qua-non definition of 'causation' (that A is a cause of B if A cannot hypotheically be eliminated without eliminating B), then omnisicient foreknowledge is a cause of everything:

A) God knows X will happen
B) X happens"

...which, if correct, implicates God as directly responsible for all the evils blamed on 'free will'."

breathilizer

God created the world with full knowledge of what would happen in this world.

Therefore, God caused everything that happens in this world.

Knowing this, God caused the Holocaust, caused the KKK, caused mutated babies, and is altogether a complete asshole.

Endymion83

And he also already knows who will go to heaven and hell. So much for the apologetic that people choose to go to hell.

Prophecy and free will seem to be exclusive.

graymouser

The formal argument (with lots of universal and existential operators):

1. Evil is caused by human free will. (Given.)
2. At every point in time T, for every fact Y in the universe, God knows Y. (Def. of omniscience from classical theistic def. of God.)
3. For all agents A, if A has free will, then for some decision C at time T, A could have chosen ~C. (Def. libertarian free will.)
4. For every decision C made by any agent A at time T, at every point in time Tn where Tn < T, God knows that A will choose C at T. (From 2.)
5. For every decision C made by any agent A at time T, if A chooses ~C, then God's knowledge at every Tn such that Tn < T will be wrong.
6. For all T, at T, God's knowledge is not wrong. (Def. of omniscience.)
7. For every decision C made by agent A at time T, A could not have chosen ~C. (From 5 and 6 by modus tollens.)
8. There is no agent A such that A has free will. (From 3 and 7 by modus tollens.)

So, proposing both free will and omniscience entails a contradiction.

-Wayne