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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
 Posted - 06/07/2011 : 09:10:21 [Permalink]
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kingdavid8 said:
| So are you saying an omnipotent deity would be unable to create creatures with free will? |
Correct.
You can't logically reconcile the two things. Just like creating a stone so heavy that your omnipotent deity can't lift it, it creates a logical paradox.
You can't put those things together (definitely not chocolate and peanutbutter) and remain logically consistent. You have paradox instead.
The only way you get around paradox is, as Dave_W said, special pleading or by ignoring logic all together. You can just be like Descart, and say that logic doesn't apply to your deity. The consequences of that, however, are that you can never provide any evidence in that context for your deity, it is 100% personal belief. No one really cares about what you believe, we care only about what you can prove/demonstrate/etc. The rest is just meaningless nonsense.
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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Valiant Dancer
Forum Goalie
USA
4826 Posts |
Posted - 06/07/2011 : 09:32:01 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by KingDavid8
Originally posted by Valiant Dancer
Originally posted by KingDavid8
I feel like we're just spinning our wheels here, so I'd like to try a different tactic and see if we can't move forward a bit. You're all saying that I can have free will, or God can be omniscient, but not both, right?
So assuming that I have free will, explain to me how it's impossible for God to be omniscient. How, if I do make my own choices, would it be impossible for God to know what choices I will end up making?
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The only way that the construct works is that God doesn't know until the time the decision is made what the decision is. Not omnipotence. Clairaudience and Clairvoyance, maybe. Perhaps a little mind reading there, but not omnipotence. |
Do you mean "omniscience"? Because we can all sometimes predict what a person will do, and we're frequently right about it. But that doesn't mean that the person doesn't have the free will to make their choices. Obviously, it's imperfect when it comes to use because none of us know anyone else perfectly. But if God does know us perfectly, then He could predict anything that we are going to do perfectly, even if we have free will. |
Not even close. I can sometimes predict what some people will likely do based on years of observation. A huge multitude of observations where I was clueless to the outcome preceeded that. That predictive ability is based on a guess.
The operative word you are using is "know". This is a word which indicates that there is no uncertianty especially with the pairing of "perfect". What this suggests that instead of basing this knowledge on observation that the being, since it is never wrong, has some other insight. That insight makes their predictions involate. Ergo, the creator has fated the creation to a set series of parameters. Free will here is mutually exclusive.
| This negates the possibility of free will because there is a zero percent chance of the forsight being wrong. |
Again, we're assuming (for the sake of argument) that free will exists, and just questioning whether it's possible for God to predict our free-will decisions. Since we can do so now and then, I don't see any reason to suppose that it would be impossible for God to do it each and every time.
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We do so based on past experiences and flat out luck.
It is not possible to be 100% right. The probability of such a thing is statistically zero. |
Cthulhu/Asmodeus when you're tired of voting for the lesser of two evils
Brother Cutlass of Reasoned Discussion |
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Valiant Dancer
Forum Goalie
USA
4826 Posts |
Posted - 06/07/2011 : 09:43:22 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Hal
I haven't danced on this pinhead yet, so here's my 2cents (and worth every penny):
It seems entirely obvious to me that "omniscience," with respect to events in time, implies an extra-dimensional perspective from which past, present, and future are visible -- in the same way that the three-dimensional visitor to Abbott's Flatland is able to view everything within that world's two-dimensional plane, while Flatland's inhabitants are limited to a one-dimensional, "edge-on" view.
Even if "God" can clearly see all the events of my life, I can't.
Moreover, omniscience would seem to imply an utterly comprehensive grasp of every material interaction in the universe. As with time, I am limited in my ability to comprehend every material factor which may lead me to make a particular decision. Unlike my dimensional handicap, however, I can, to a degree, improve my grasp of the material universe. In retrospect, at least, I might be able to somewhat improve my understanding of the factors that led me to make a past decision.
So, should there be an omniscient being capable of influencing me in some way, it can do little more than a) manipulate the material factors that motivate my decisions, or b) "suggest" a course of action to me not otherwise indicated by the material circumstances of which I'm aware. Either way, I have no way to distinguish such active intervention from its absence. Given these insurmountable limitations to my vision, I have, ironically, no "choice" but to go through life as if I have free will, whether I actually do, or not. And since I can't know one way or the other, the question is moot.
I realize many people place great importance on this matter, but for myself, I'm quite comfortable with the fact that this omniscient perspective is utterly inaccessible to me. Even if I'm not the direct cause of my decisions, I absolutely own the consequences, within this mortal realm. I can't imagine why I'd want to complicate things any further.
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Abbott's Flatland assumes an extradimentional observer. Not one that creates the two dimentional critters. In that case, the critters have free will, the observer merely can predict what will happen next due to information he has access to that the two dimentional beings do not.
By combining the creation and knowledge attributes, you then negate the ability of the critter from having free will.
Owning the consequences would be congruent to a wind up toy on a track taking responsibility for it's path. While nice, it is immaterial to the point posited which is that free will and a creator with omniscience is mutually exclusive. |
Cthulhu/Asmodeus when you're tired of voting for the lesser of two evils
Brother Cutlass of Reasoned Discussion |
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Hal
Skeptic Friend
USA
302 Posts |
Posted - 06/07/2011 : 16:34:33 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Valiant Dancer
Owning the consequences would be congruent to a wind up toy on a track taking responsibility for it's path. While nice, it is immaterial to the point posited which is that free will and a creator with omniscience is mutually exclusive.
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Oh, I get that, and that's what I was alluding to in this paragraph (you may read "influence" as "create"):
| So, should there be an omniscient being capable of influencing me in some way, it can do little more than a) manipulate the material factors that motivate my decisions, or b) "suggest" a course of action to me not otherwise indicated by the material circumstances of which I'm aware. Either way, I have no way to distinguish such active intervention from its absence. Given these insurmountable limitations to my vision, I have, ironically, no "choice" but to go through life as if I have free will, whether I actually do, or not. And since I can't know one way or the other, the question is moot. |
In hindsight, I think it was rude for me to drop in with a bloated comment that basically amounts to, "I don't see any point to this." My apologies, I once greatly enjoyed these types of discussions. |
Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Martin Luther King Jr.
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KingDavid8
Skeptic Friend
USA
212 Posts |
Posted - 06/07/2011 : 16:45:46 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Dude
kingdavid8 said:
| So are you saying an omnipotent deity would be unable to create creatures with free will? |
Correct.
You can't logically reconcile the two things. Just like creating a stone so heavy that your omnipotent deity can't lift it, it creates a logical paradox. |
A stone so heavy that God cannot lift it is, indeed, a logical paradox. So are square circles, silent noises, and empty boxes that are full of marshmallows. God cannot create such things, despite being omnipotent, as far as I'm aware. But "creatures with free will" is not a paradox, thus God would be able to create them if He wanted to. At least, you haven't shown yet how He could not.
| You can't put those things together (definitely not chocolate and peanutbutter) and remain logically consistent. You have paradox instead. |
But there is no paradox. If we have free will, it's not impossible for God to know what we are going to do. If He's omniscient, then He's omniscient. If we have free will, then we have free will. One does not cause the other to be impossible. |
| Edited by - KingDavid8 on 06/07/2011 17:02:24 |
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KingDavid8
Skeptic Friend
USA
212 Posts |
Posted - 06/07/2011 : 17:00:41 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Valiant Dancer
The operative word you are using is "know". This is a word which indicates that there is no uncertianty especially with the pairing of "perfect". What this suggests that instead of basing this knowledge on observation that the being, since it is never wrong, has some other insight. |
Sure, but that insight could just be that He has perfect knowledge of what our choices will be. But if He's omniscient, then this would be true whether we have free will or not. If we have free will, then God, being omniscient, would know all of the choices we will ever make. If we don't have free will, then God, being omniscient, would know all of the choices we will ever make. God's omniscience isn't disproven by either scenario.
| That insight makes their predictions involate. Ergo, the creator has fated the creation to a set series of parameters. |
If He gave us free will, then we aren't "fated" to do what we do. We can choose to do what we do, and God, being omniscient, would know what that will end up being.
It is not possible to be 100% right. The probability of such a thing is statistically zero.
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Only because we aren't omniscient. If, hypothetically, I were to suddenly become omniscient, then, logically, I could always predict what other people will do, even if they have free will. My being able to do so wouldn't take their free will away from them, though. They'd have it if I was omniscient and they'd have it if I wasn't. |
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 06/07/2011 : 17:09:01 [Permalink]
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kingdavid8 said:
But "creatures with free will" is not a paradox, thus God would be able to create them if He wanted to. At least, you haven't shown yet how He could not.
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It is a logical paradox and it has been explained to you a dozen times (maybe more) why.
If your tactic is to pretend no one has answered you, I'll have to give you points for originality as I don't think I have ever encountred that one before, but you still fail.
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 06/07/2011 : 17:16:47 [Permalink]
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kingdavid8 said:
| If, hypothetically, I were to suddenly become omniscient, then, logically, I could always predict what other people will do, even if they have free will. My being able to do so wouldn't take their free will away from them, though. They'd have it if I was omniscient and they'd have it if I wasn't. |
This is what, the tenth time you have intentionally misrepresented this specific point in order to argue against it?
You fail to include the act of creation, which is inseperable from the topic at hand. Stop being a douche and deal with it. I'm sure your religion has a prohibition against bearing false witness, and straw man arguments are exactly that, false witness. You aren't one of those people who thinks its ok to lie as long as you are lying for jesus, are you?
And sure, if you suddenly became omniscient people would still have free will, but only if you remained completely as an outside observer. As soon as you interacted in any way with a single molecule in the universe you'd remove free will from that instant forward.
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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Valiant Dancer
Forum Goalie
USA
4826 Posts |
Posted - 06/07/2011 : 18:44:43 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by KingDavid8
Originally posted by Valiant Dancer
The operative word you are using is "know". This is a word which indicates that there is no uncertianty especially with the pairing of "perfect". What this suggests that instead of basing this knowledge on observation that the being, since it is never wrong, has some other insight. |
Sure, but that insight could just be that He has perfect knowledge of what our choices will be. But if He's omniscient, then this would be true whether we have free will or not. If we have free will, then God, being omniscient, would know all of the choices we will ever make. If we don't have free will, then God, being omniscient, would know all of the choices we will ever make. God's omniscience isn't disproven by either scenario.
| That insight makes their predictions involate. Ergo, the creator has fated the creation to a set series of parameters. |
If He gave us free will, then we aren't "fated" to do what we do. We can choose to do what we do, and God, being omniscient, would know what that will end up being.
It is not possible to be 100% right. The probability of such a thing is statistically zero.
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Only because we aren't omniscient. If, hypothetically, I were to suddenly become omniscient, then, logically, I could always predict what other people will do, even if they have free will. My being able to do so wouldn't take their free will away from them, though. They'd have it if I was omniscient and they'd have it if I wasn't.
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Only works beacuse you are not the creator of the critter.
Omniscient Creator and free will are mutually exclusive. |
Cthulhu/Asmodeus when you're tired of voting for the lesser of two evils
Brother Cutlass of Reasoned Discussion |
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H. Humbert
SFN Die Hard
USA
4574 Posts |
Posted - 06/07/2011 : 19:51:43 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by KingDavid8
If He gave us free will, then we aren't "fated" to do what we do. We can choose to do what we do, and God, being omniscient, would know what that will end up being. |
Yeah, we're kind of going in circles here. Let's try another approach.
Okay, you say that omniscience is compatible with free will because foreknowledge of a choice has no affect on its outcome. But now let's say, for the purposes of this argument, that god decides to come to your house tomorrow and share his knowledge with you. He shows you a vision of your future life exactly as he's foreseen it with his perfect omniscience. What happens now? Can you change what you've seen? Let's say in this vision, you see that tomorrow you will break a lamp. Can you do something different tomorrow so that you avoid breaking it? If you can't change tomorrow and no matter what you try you end up breaking the lamp exactly as envisioned, then you have no free will and are merely living out a fated destiny. If you do exercise your free will and avoid breaking the lamp, then it means god wasn't really perfectly omniscient after all.
See, one precludes the other. They cancel out. Both can't be true at the same time. And this remains the case even if god keeps his perfect omniscient visions to himself and doesn't share them with you. It's only your ignorance of what god knows that gives you an illusion of free will, since if you did know you couldn't change your future without disproving god's omniscience.
Does that make sense now?
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"A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true." --Demosthenes
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool." --Richard P. Feynman
"Face facts with dignity." --found inside a fortune cookie |
| Edited by - H. Humbert on 06/07/2011 19:59:15 |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
Posted - 06/07/2011 : 19:56:31 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by KingDavid8
I agree. |
Now we're getting somewhere. Maybe.How so? If God foresees what I will end up choosing, He's omniscient. And I think we can agree that, free will or not, I will end up choosing what I will end up choosing.
...
So all you're saying is that I can't not choose what I will end up choosing. If I am going to end up picking "A", then I can't end up picking "B". But that's true whether God is omniscient or not. |
Now you're just suggesting that both free will and omniscience are irrelevant, which I would have to agree with.
I happen to agree with Hal that we're stuck acting as if we have free will even if we don't. I'd also agree that god's omniscience is irrelevant, since I don't think any gods (especially not the Christian god) exists. We live in a largely deterministic universe but have no capability to "read out the tape" before it actually occurs, and so can't learn what's determined to happen before it does (except in limited cases like physics demonstrations or short-term gross weather predictions). This is strictly analogous to us having no free will but feeling like we do, and god not telling us what he has foreseen. That's reality, and you won't see me arguing against it.| But really, you're simply rejecting (for no stated reason) the part of the hypothetical in which god tells you what you're going to choose before you do so, in which case this exercise can tell us nothing about free will. |
No, I accept that part of the hypothetical, provided that I would decide to go along with God's prediction. If God tells me I'm going to drink the water, then I could decide to play along and drink the water. But if my purpose is to see what would happen if I didn't drink the water, and thus I don't drink it, then God, being omniscient, would know that I wouldn't drink the water in the end, so He wouldn't predict that I would. |
But in the hypothetical, he did say you would. Once he says that, it doesn't matter if you "decide to play along" or create a whole slew of rationalizations as to why you should get the water even though you don't want to, you will get the water. To not do so would prove that at least one of the premises (god is omniscient and honest) is wrong.| If God is omniscient, then He knows what's going to happen in the end. If I won't drink the water in the end, then, God, being omniscient, would know that I won't drink the water in the end. |
But he said that you would.| Of course, there's also the possibility that God would momentarily over-ride my free will and force me to drink the water against my will. |
No, we're talking about logic here, and not coercion. Omniscience and free will are logically contradictory, not momentarily incompatible because god is a meanie.| Because I still make the choices. The fact that God foreknows what those choices will be doesn't change that fact. |
You "make choices" which are predetermined. It's an illusion that you make any choices at all.
Look, in a Newtonian universe, we could (conceivably) map all the molecules in your body and your environment into a gigantic computer simulation, play it forward and learn what choices you will make before you ever make them, just through purely physical interactions between your neurons and their surroundings. The universe is deterministic that way (we just can't make use of it because we don't possess enough processing power).
Quantum physics doesn't save us from this condition, because most of its effects are drowned out by thermal noise, and those that aren't only generate randomness, not intentionality. So there's nothing about physics, biology or neuroscience that even hints as us having free will. There's no "free will center" in the brain. There are no "consciousness particles" in physics.
The reason "do we have free will?" is even a question that people find interesting is that we feel like we have free will. We feel like we "make decisions," but it's really just simple and deterministic neuronal interactions played out across a backdrop of years of memories (which are also retrieved deterministically). That the Bible says we have free will (which verses are those?) is, I suspect, only an attempt to counteract the hopelessness one might feel if one realized that god's omniscience has already determined which ones of us will be saved and which ones damned, and not even the strongest intentionality can change that.
So, "I still make the choices" isn't something we can simply assume to be true. If we grant you free will for the sake of argument, we're firmly placing the argument in some universe that has no relation to ours (as if chatting with god in your living room didn't already do that).
But even in this alien universe in which people have free will, it must trump god's omniscience or it isn't free. You can't say that you will make the choices when what you would do has been known since before you were born.
God's omniscience means we can't surprise god, but free will demands that we be able (merely able) to do something that hasn't been foreseen. If we can't, then we may as well just be robots following a pre-programmed path through life. That's not free will. Your buddies the Calvanists understand this.| Assuming (for the sake of argument) that I have free will, an omniscient God would still be able to foresee what I will choose. I won't need to be able to do something that God hasn't foreseen, since an omniscient God can't not foresee something. |
If you are incapable of making any choices not already written out in the Divine Script, then you don't have free will.
This is an argument that's been hashed out for thousands of years, by people more expert than you or I will ever be, and you're not bringing anything new to the table. Free will has lost the fight, philosophically and theologically. Perhaps the best argument in favor of free will is that god's omniscience allows him to see every possible choice we might make, along with the quickly branching and exponentially growing "tree" of different futures those different choices provide, but that just means that god's omniscience fails 99-plus percent of the time.
To illustrate, let's say you're faced with a choice between two options that you like equally well, so that an outside observer would say there's a 50-50 chance on what you'll pick. Well, if god's omniscience has him foreseeing both, then he'll be wrong 50% of the time. After only 32 such choices by you, sequentially, god will have foreseen only one (1) correct future, and 4,294,967,295 futures that failed to occur. The number of times god is wrong under these conditions only gets bigger with the more real-world factors you take into consideration, so this is a pretty poor argument for reconciling free will with omniscience, especially when coupled with infallibility.
The second least-poor argument is nothing more than special pleading and word games: that god "turns off" his omniscience in order to allow people to have free will. But then god is just voluntarily not omniscient most of the time, and the argument explicitly acknowledges that omniscience conflicts with free will.
Your argument has come down to simply assuming that you have free will, and challenging us to show that it's incompatible with omniscience. We've already shown the incompatibility from the other direction (and since we have to accept both simultaneously, it doesn't matter which way we attack the problem), but you just keep repeating the same old stuff. |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too. |
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H. Humbert
SFN Die Hard
USA
4574 Posts |
Posted - 06/07/2011 : 20:02:21 [Permalink]
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Oops. I guess I should have read more of the thread before commenting. I see Dave already explained something very similar to my own hypothetical.  |
"A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true." --Demosthenes
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool." --Richard P. Feynman
"Face facts with dignity." --found inside a fortune cookie |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
Posted - 06/07/2011 : 20:18:07 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by H. Humbert
Originally posted by KingDavid8
If He gave us free will, then we aren't "fated" to do what we do. We can choose to do what we do, and God, being omniscient, would know what that will end up being. |
Yeah, we're kind of going in circles here. Let's try another approach.
Okay, you say that omniscience is compatible with free will because foreknowledge of a choice has no affect on its outcome. But now let's say, for the purposes of this argument, that god decides to come to your house tomorrow and share his knowledge with you. He shows you a vision of your future life exactly as he's foreseen it with his perfect omniscience. What happens now? Can you change what you've seen? Let's say in this vision, you see that tomorrow you will break a lamp. Can you do something different tomorrow so that you avoid breaking it? If you can't change tomorrow and no matter what you try you end up breaking the lamp exactly as envisioned, then you have no free will and are merely living out a fated destiny. If you do exercise your free will and avoid breaking the lamp, then it means god wasn't really perfectly omniscient after all. |
Your example, H., isn't substantially different from the "gets a glass of water" hypothetical.
I predict that KingDavid8 will say that if he doesn't break the lamp, then god won't show him that in the vision. This is somehow supposed to show the compatibility of free will and omniscience, but really it's just insisting that the hypothetical situation be changed to make the discussion moot. Because if god doesn't say, "you will get a glass of water" (or show him breaking a lamp), then whether KingDavid8 gets one (breaks one) or not is irrelevant to the question of whether he's got free will.
As KingDavid8 already agreed, if Jesus didn't predict Peter's actions, then nobody would be talking about them. Non-events are non-issues. God not sharing his omniscient visions doesn't allow us to test free will in any way. |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too. |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
Posted - 06/07/2011 : 20:19:23 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by H. Humbert
Oops. I guess I should have read more of the thread before commenting. I see Dave already explained something very similar to my own hypothetical. |
Ooops, I guess I should have given H. more time to read the thread, as I see he's already realized that his example and mine are substantially identical.
Ha!  |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too. |
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 06/07/2011 : 22:01:05 [Permalink]
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The response is going to be more broken record. If I choose to avoid breaking the lamp then that is what god would have seen, blah blah blah. He will totally ignore the point of the thought exercise and just shit all over it with nonsense.
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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The Mythicist position
