Philosoft

<strong>Quoth Taffy Lewis:

Having a plan does not depend upon meticulously arranging everything that happens. My plan to go to work tomorrow does not depend upon my controlling everything that happens.</strong>

Meticulously arranging?! My word man, there are billions of free-will decisions made every minute! God can't control anything that is caused by human volition! What can he possibly do if every nano-second, the state of his knowledge is being massively replaced?

<strong>Further, it is part of traditional theism that God has chosen to create persons with free will and control over their own destiny. If God exists and we have free will then this plan has been fulfilled.</strong>

Yes, of course, you can always just move the goal-posts.

<strong>First, humans are a particular biological species of organism and God is not.</strong>

Naturally. God is nothing but a philosophical heuristic at this point. Obviously, the analogy was in terms of power or ability, rather than physical makeup.

<strong>Secondly, God can still know everything.</strong>

Except that which is disallowed by your prior assumed definition of "free will."

<strong>Nothing about free will conflicts with maximal knowledge understood as knowledge of everything that is actual and possible.</strong>

Hold on now, this is new. So God knows everything that we can possibly do, just not everything we will do?

<strong>Not only is this far beyond anything humans are capable of but it also seems that no greater degree of knowledge is possible.</strong>

A greater degree of knowledge is certainly possible, but your conception of free will, which you have not shown to be valid, a priori disallows it. What reason is there to believe that your conception of free will is correct to the degree that the scope of "omniscience" must be limited to fit within?

[ July 23, 2002: Message edited by: Philosoft ]</p>

Liquidrage

Right.
So if an omnipotent god created humanity it is clearly a not benevolent.
Conversely, if a benevolent god created humanity it is clearly not omnipotent.

So even though one is free to believe in whatever they choose, there are some restrictions on what those choices can be.

Answerer

As I had said, if God is an omniscience being, He will be also an uncompassionate being. As all of you know, majority of the total human population(from the past to now) are non-christians and yet, in the past,God still had the 'foresight' or 'intellect' to create a religion or method in some isolated or remoted part of the world which, in no doubt, tell us that God had already sentenced millions of people into hell at that time. Even now, His method of salvation is becoming less and less appealing and it is funny to think that God , with His omniscience ability, could make such a silly mistake or bad plan. Anyway, if HE is not silly but He must be a sadist.

Taffy Lewis

Philosoft,

It is a logically necessary truth that one person cannot cause someone to freely choose some course of action. This is simply the nature of free will. And it is no argument against God that he cannot perform logically impossible actions.

Next,in an earlier post you say:

Then you say that the analogy was merely meant to involve him as a being with power or ability--- "the analogy was in terms of power or ability, rather than physical makeup."

So God is simply a being with power or ability far exceeding ours including the ability to know everything that is actually the case and everything that is possibly the case. If that's all your analogy is supposed to draw out then I agree.

Next, you quote my remark that "God can still know everything" and then respond:

If this implies that God doesn't know something that is the case then I disagree. Again, if I freely choose to do some action A then it is in my power to do not-A. In addition, it is not true that I will do A and it is not true that I will do not-A.

Confusion arises if one assumes that the expression "what you will do" refers to something that is actually the case. Some event or state of affairs only qualifies as something that can be known if it is the case. For example, you can't know that it is raining unless it is raining.

This is perfectly consistent with maximal knowledge understood as knowledge of everything that is actually the case and everything that is possibly the case.

This isn't new. This was the purpose of my first post. If one's choices are merely a realm of possibilities (ie. free), rather than necessities, then that is all that there is to be known with regard to them. There is nothing else to know. Why require of God knowledge of more than is actually and possibly the case? Does this even make sense?

Consider an arrangement of checkers. There is some arrangement that is actual and there are other possible arrangements. What else is there to know? The difference in the case of free will is that there are only possibilities.

I have not claimed to demonstrate that anyone has free will or that anyone is omniscient. But I have shown that free will is compatible with omniscience. "Omni-" means "all" and "-scientia" means "knowledge". That means "all knowledge". Should that include things which are not even the case? Should that include something of which there is nothing to know? That's nonsensical.

If it is indeed a "limitation" upon some person's knowledge (even a person who knows everything actual and possible) for there to exist persons with free will, it must be remembered that theists believe that God has freely chosen to create other persons with free will. So whether or not his knowledge is thus "limited" is completely within his control.

Further, God's "ignorance" of his own future free actions are really no limitation at all. Consider the alternative. If his actions are not free then they must be necessitated. How can "not being necessitated" be understood as a limitation? You would think that being necessitated would impose limitations.

And lastly, God can "know" his own future actions in the same sense that you and I can---we can form an intention to do something. For example, I intend to go to work tomorrow.

mibby529

There are numerous proofs that a god couldn't be omnipotent. The classic being creating a rock so heavy said god couldn't lift it.

What I'm wondering is why, after the Fall, Yahweh didn't just zap us back into ignorance. That's what I would've done. Of course, I wouldn't have put that silly tree there in the first place. No tree, no Fall, no sin.

Answerer

It seem that although God is said to be an omniscience being, often made silly mistakes. Therefore, it all boils down to the fact that even though God knows everything, He is not intelligent or wise enough to choose the best course of action. In short, God=idiot, maybe He has too many choices to choose from, haha.

HRG

If your knowledge is inerrant, it does.

Let A = "I know inerrantly today that Bush will say X tomorrow (and not Y)"
Let B = "Bush says X tomorrow (and not Y)".

If A, then always B. Changing A implies changing B. A precedes B in time.

That's the definition of causation. It does not require that we can describe an actual mechanism how A influenced B.

Regards,
HRG.

One-eyed Jack

Hello, all; I'm brand new here but we've been kicking this freewill thing about on another forum, so perhaps I can slip in a few observations without sounding too moronic.

First, I need a strong definition of which version of God we're discussing. I prefer the Biblical definition, which, I believe holds that God is:

• Omniscient and eternal (knows and has always known all that was, is, and ever shall be)
• Omnipotent
• Perfect: perfectly good, compassionate, and just
• Creator of the universe

In the Book of Isaiah the Lord says,

"I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me: I girded thee, though thou hast not known me: That they may know from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside me. I am the LORD, and there is none else. I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things. Drop down, ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness: let the earth open, and let them bring forth salvation, and let righteousness spring up together; I the LORD have created it." (Isaiah 45:5-8)

That isn't all the items on the list, but it gives a fair idea of the LORD's opinion of Himself. I am always interested in the line, "I make peace and create evil"--good of Him to warn us.

Now, just as was noted in an earlier post, if God knows and has always known all that was, is, and ever shall be, then He has known for all time every choice that mankind will make. To somehow pretend that these choices are hidden from Him by "indeterminacy" is false: Archduke Ferdinand was killed through a choice made by his assassin, and a World War was triggered. A God who has not known for all time how that would happen, including the choice made by the assassin, would simply not be omniscient.

So! Since God knows and has always known all that was, is, and ever shall be, then He has known for all time that man would be tempted and man would fall from grace. In the terms of the Bible, this fall from grace is the cause of all subsequent evil and suffering.

But God knew before and during the act of creation how it would all play out. Could He have created the universe otherwise: created, for instance, beings which would NOT fall, which would, of their own free will, always choose good instead of evil?

Actually, there are two such situations already in place in Christian belief: in both Christ's reign on Earth and in Heaven there will be no evil, but souls will retain freewill--therefore it must be that in Christ's reign on Earth and in Heaven beings will be so constituted as to always, by their own free will, choose good instead of evil.

A couple of months ago some Congolese soldiers went into the streets of Kisangani and killed innocent civilians, disemboweled the bodies and filled them with stones, and threw them in the river. It appears that some of the victims were not dead before their disembowelment.

Now, God knew and has always know that this would happen. God could have ordered creation otherwise, so that mankind would NOT choose evil, and then aeons of horrible suffering and evil like the Kisangani massacre would have been avoided. Such a creation is perfectly possible, as explained above, and He has in fact promised to do just that some time in the indefinite future.

But not just yet. The bloody game--of which He knows not only the outcome but every detail of every move along the way--the bloody game is still being played.

Incidentally, I did not originate this particular refutation of the Freewill Defense (of God's goodness), I just restated it. The philosopher J.L. Mackie wrote on it extensively in "The Miracle of Theism" and used this and similar lines of reasoning to conclude that theism requires irrational belief.

I'll see if I can dig up some websites. Nice discussion, guys.

Theli

One-eyed Jack...

There are ofcourse problems with this definition.
1. Omniscience and Omnipotence crashes, as I stated earlier in this thread. They don't fit together.
2. "Perfect" is subjective, so it has only abstract/subjective quality to what it describes. Perfect might just aswell imply evil.
3. "Creator of the universe" is abit over the top. I would say that "Cause of the universe" would be much more fitting, as the universe shows diversity through chaos rather than design.
4. Eternal can have 2 meanings.
5. All these attributes are speculative and assumptive. They have nothing to do with reality.

I never understood this. We have free will in heaven, and can't commit evil.
But, when you ask a christian why god didn't make all people good on earth, he claims that it would make everyone into robots.
Wouldn't that mean that we become robots in heaven to?

[ July 24, 2002: Message edited by: Theli ]</p>

Jamie_L

You know, I actually don't see this as a problem for a God that created the universe and sits somehow apart from it. If this god could look at 4-d space-time laid out before him, he would know all things in all places at all times. Effectively, from his trancendental perspective, he would have created this 4-d contruct "at once". Once created, he could conceivably reach in and change things as he saw fit until it was just the way he liked it. But this all relies on a god that interacts with time in a completely different way than humans do.

Of course, even if this scenario were possible, it would still deny any kind of human free will relative to god.

Jamie