EggplantTrent

Does god's omniscience preclude free will?

For example:

god knows that Tim will play basketball at 7 pm.

Is Tim free to not play basketball and stay at home instead?

If the answer is yes, then God is wrong, ergo she is not omniscient.

EggplantTrent

Golgo_13

Well, if you could open up a dialogue with an all-knowing entity, ask it questions, and have it answer them truthfully in a timely manner, you could disprove either free will or the beings omnicience.

For instance, you have a deck of cards, you ask the deity what you are going to do with the deck with the intention of doing the exact inverse of what the deity says. if you end up doing what it said anyway, despite it going against your will, then there is no free will. There is only the illusion of free will, which is maintained only if there is no such open contact with the deity in which to conduct such experiments.

If you do something other with the deck than what the deity specified, you falsify the deities omnicience.

Either way, omnicience and free will are mutually exclusive. Free will is being able to make decisions without them being predetermined in advance.

Just one of the multitude of reasons I don't subscribe to the notion of omnicient supernatural deities.

ChrisW

and why exactly couldn't the diety tell you exactly what you are thinking, therefore ending your meaningless test?

Golgo_13

You ask the entity what you are going to do with the deck of cards.

Lets say, you are thinking in your mind, you will shuffle them.

The deity says you will shuffle them.

You throw the deck of cards as far away as you can instead.

You have falsified it's omnicience.

Inversely, if you were forced to shuffle the cards despite not wanting to at that point, you wouldn't have free will.

Nowhere357

Yes, you are right, although I'd say that the existence of our free will precludes an omniscient creator.

The real mystery to me is why doesn't everyone see this?

Nowhere357

I'd like to point that god's knowing doesn't cause the loss of free will - but the fact that god knows means the decision is illusion. We are following a path that we have to follow, we have no choice. If we don't follow the path god has seen, then clearly god was wrong, and that's not possible, right?

So we have to follow the path. HAVE TO. We have no choice. No choice = no free will. Omniscience and free will are mutually exclusive, so one must be wrong.

Which one?

Golgo_13

That, my friend, is the 30 million dollar question.

So on the off chance that there is some form of omnicient consciousness in the universe, we either have an illusory free will (and a powerful illusion at that), or the deity in question is not truly omnicient.

EggplantTrent

In the case of the Christian God, that means everything is predestined and we have no say in whether we go to heaven or hell. So if the Christian God exists (which I doubt), I would like to know what is the criteria God uses to determine who should go to heaven or hell. Or is it all arbitrary and he's just picking names out of the great cosmic hat?

EggplantTrent

ChrisW

the deity would understand your intentions in testing it, it's a stupid test. unless you can somehow hide your intentions from the deity it would never accomplish anything.


anyways you can't claim anything about the christian god, the god would have to limit itself to create a universe, therefore why couldn't it limit it's future knowledge of the universe to give us "freewill"? even when faced with a decision in the bible it seems as though god changes it's mind with a given input. this doesn't denote that the god didn't know the outcome, it just allowed itself to be limited with the knowledge of the input. it allows us to choose, then takes action.

you can look at one of my previous post in one of the plethora of "free will discussion" posts, god only knows why so many are needed.

99paa

I don't think the playing card test falsifies the being's omniscience. The problem with it is that you are restricting answer choices to two incorrect ones. The omniscient deity's correct answer would be: the opposite of what I say you are going to do.