Kent Stevens

Imagine that you are an omniscient being. That is an entity that knows everything. You can see that certain murders and crimes will occur carried out by then criminals. From your perspective the murders must take place and the murderers must be who you predict they are.

For you there is no alternative, there is no choice. The murderer could only have done what they did. It is similar to knowing that the result of a murder took place yesterday. You know definitely that the murder took place and given sufficient evidence who the murderer was.

In general there would be no "choice" in the sense that there is only one option for every being. For an omniscient being, you coming to infidels.org right now was the only option that you could have done. For non-omniscient beings we could say there are alternatives. You could have read a book or done some work instead of reading this. But an omniscient being could discard any alternative you offered it and would have known that you would have done one thing only.

Applying omniscience to oneself you may think that you have no choice. Consider what you will be doing next year. If you are an omniscient being you already know what you will be doing. You will not be considering where you might go on vacation, you know where you will be on vacation. You will not be wondering what you will be doing for Christmas, you will know what you will be doing for Christmas.

This sensation of choice arises out of not being omniscient and of having imperfect knowledge. There are alternatives, options, and various possibilities because we do not know what will happen. If we were like an omniscient being our future would be as certain as our past.

There are various examples of omniscient or near omniscient characters. The obvious example is of God. However, if you look at greek literature there is the myth of Cassandra who was cursed with the ability of perfect foresight, but who was unable to persuade anyone with the reliability of her predictions. There is also the greek Oracle who was called upon to make predictions. People are also familiar with the story of the fates that could determine peoples destiny. Looking at a contemporary example you have the movie Minority Report having people with near perfect foresight being able to predict murder.

I will apply the idea of no choice to the familiar example of the biblical god. God being omniscient would have known that Adam would have eaten the forbidden fruit thereby causing the fall of man. God could have expeled Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden on the first day as he knew that they were going to commit that crime. God could see that he had no option but to do this. God could also see that he had no option but to flood the world. He could also see that he had no option but to send Jesus Christ to earth to die and be resurrected. God knows who will be in hell and who will be in heaven. He might as well punish all criminals now as God knows exactly who they are. But God knows that he has only the one option of doing nothing about it right now.

The sensation of having options arises out of not having perfect foresight. Because you do not know what you will be doing for dinner tomorrow means that you can look at alternatives rather than say I will have roast pork tomorrow night, and then pizza tonight four years from now.

There is only one past. There is only one future. That there seems to be alternatives is a prodcut of ignorance. The only disclaimer might be for quantum events which are deemed to be inherently unpredictable. But for non-quantum events there is only one future.

Things just happen. Everything is a determinate system. We experience there being alternatives because our knowledge is imperfect.

[ August 20, 2002: Message edited by: Kent Stevens ]</p>

Laurentius

I couldn't agree more.
Choice is a process.
A subject's free will resides in his settling a matter that has more than one solution.
Moreover, free will is manifest only at his level of decision.

Once his actions are contemplated from a historical perspective or from an omniscient one, the same subject becomes devoid of free will and all his deeds succeed one another in a choiceless chain of events.

AVE

Kent Stevens

Beings with perfect foresight would also be fatalists. They would have feelings of being powerless in the sense that what they do will not alter what the future brings.

Fatalist themes come up in a variety of science fiction movies especially ones involving time travel. So the terminator movies and the back to the future movies have people who know the future would have happened go back in time. In Minority Report you have beings with foresight about future murders. The Matrix has some references to fate.

These movies may play with the ideas of fatalism, but the characters act in a way that rejects the idea of fatalism. They ultimately believe that they can alter the future with their actions. The participants do not give up and say it will happen whatever I do. They don not coast along expecting success is unavoidable, nor do they give up in total despair. In time travel movies you can have alternative futures created by the results of the time travelers. In the movie Terminator 2 Sarah Conner ends up saying that there is no fate and ends up changing the future. With Minority Report the precogs are found to not have perfect foresight. The Matrix has people acting as though their actions will have influence on attacking the computer matrix.

We might have to go to the tale of Cassandra to get a fictional character with perfect foresight. Her feelings of being powerless must be near overwhelming as no matter what she does her fate must happen.

The character of God though omnipotent could in one way feel powerless with his perfect foresight. For he can not chose to do anything different from what he predicts he will do. If God tells someone of their exact fate this could also be overwhelming to the person concerned. If she person if told that something good will happen to them might think that they were powerless to get anything else to happen instead. If they were told their fate is bad they would have feelings of despair as they can do nothing to prevent this bad outcome from occuring.

Answerer

Is God making a choice when He, so-called, created the humans or did He treat the creation of humans just as an action that He will do?

Ierrellus

Answerer,

Good resonse! Was god so incomplete that "HE' had to create humans in order to define himself?

Ierrellus
PAX

owleye

Kent...

I'm sure you think you are on to something here, but there is more to what is going on than meets the eye. I would recommend reading Leibniz, a Theist who believes that omniscience and omnibenevolence are compatible. God's will is omnibenevolent and completely free. You make it sound as if God plays no part in the creation of the actual universe. God, being omniscient knows exactly how the universe will unfold given initial conditions. However, since there is an infinity of initial conditions which may be graded in terms of goodness (according to Leibniz), the one universe that God chooses on the basis of His omnibenevolence becomes the best of all possible universes that could have been instantiated from God's setting of the initial conditions.

God's will is free in that He is able to choose from among the infinite range of possible initial conditions. Much of the argument of Leibniz's time was directed to whether or not God's will is free in consideration that His omnibenevolence requires Him to choose the best. How can necessity be used in conjunction with contingency? Leibniz argues that possibility and goodness precede the discussion and it is God's doing that makes the actual from the contingent set of possibilities.

owleye

Paddy

Does god transcend his own omniscience? If so, he is not omniscient. How can he be omniscient if he doesn't know what choices he will make? How could he know what choices anyone will make? He could capriciously decide humans will hereafter have four legs; in this instance he cannot be all knowing due to his own choices affecting the choices we will make.

If he is subject to his own omniscience, that is he is a determined being, how can he be all loving when according to christian rationale love requires free will?

Paddy

Kent Stevens

If you have a look at the bible it has the character god deliberating and choosing. It also has an imperfect god.

If God knew everything why did he not know that Adam would eat the forbidden fruit, and hence why not put Adam and Eve outside of the Garden of Eden. This would prevent them eating the apple in the first place.

If God is omnipotent why did he make imperfect people. God killed off a lot of people in the flood that sinned due to his own imperfect creation of them in the first place.

The problem is that the bible has God choosing, not knowing everything, and making mistakes. I suggest these attributes are incompatible with what we are namely told about God later on in the story. That is that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent.

If God had perfect foresight he would have seen that he had only one option. That is to create the best of all possible worlds compatible with his goodness. But even a small degree of evil in the world is at odds with God being all good.

jpbrooks

Hello again, Secular Web.

Nice topic, Kent.
You guys raise so many profound and perplexing issues that you have sent me scurrying back to the textbooks.
Though it may be a matter of theological debate whether omniscience includes knowledge of all future events, the choice to create a world was made with full knowledge that something could go wrong. So, the most fundamental issue seems to come down to why God would even choose to create any world at all, much less a world with living beings in it who could do evil. And the only possible answer that I can come up with at this time is that a world was created to satisfy God's desire to express His creativity.

Interestingly, I have an article to read tonight that deals with this very topic. And it will be interesting to see if the author of this article can provide any novel insight on this issue.

-John Phillip Brooks

[ August 24, 2002: Message edited by: jpbrooks ]</p>

Amos

Except Kent that omniscient means that you understand everything you have knowledge of, ie. that you understand and know yourself.