So I was driving around the other day when this conundrum came to me. If God is omniscient, is the future foretold? Doesn't omniscience negate free will? It seems to me that any determinism outside of molecules obeying the laws of chemistry and particles obeying the laws of physics eliminates the essence of free will. I've always objected internally to statements such as, "God knew what you were going to do before you did it" or things of that nature.
I suppose you can reconcile such statements with free will by suggesting that an omniscient God could map out all possible permutations of decision and thus He knows not only what you did before you did it, but all the other choices you didn't end up making as well.
For me, free will trumps omniscience. That is, I believe in a God that created the world and then let it go, save for occasional interventions. While He knows all that is and was, what is to come is as much a mystery to Him as it is to us.
Thinking out loud (or rather, in prose), if you decide that God lives outside of time, then you could reconcile free will and omniscience. That is, it's possible for you to know the temperature in Wichita and San Diego simultaneously because we humans can communicate across distances. If you could travel with similar ease across time, you would indeed know last night that I was going to give our Maximum Leader gushifud this morning. I would retain free will, but your ability to traverse time the way we traverse distance would give you omniscience about my decisions.
Hmm. That seems like a more reasonable answer to me.
4 comments:
This is a question theologians and philosophers have been wrestling with for thousands of years, so you've got plenty of company in trying to hash this one out. It's been awhile since I've read Boethius's Consolation of Philosophyand my memory of it is a little fuzzy, but I think his answer to the question sounds a lot like the answer you came up with, and is basically the answer adopted by the Catholic Church: God is omniscient (all-knowing) but His omniscience does not negate our free will. Just because God knows what the results of our choices might be does not prevent us from freely making choices.
Or put another way, because God loves us, he gave us the ability to freely love him back and choose to serve him. There could be no real love and service, unless the love and service were freely given. The downside of giving human beings free will and the ability to chose, however, is that sometimes they make the wrong choices. The church teaches that when when human beings set their own wills over and against the will of God, this is the basis of sin--e.g., that whole unfortunate incident with the apple, the garden and the snake. You may have read about it somewhere :)
Thus endeth Fr. Niall's combox catechesis.
trumery: foolishness, nonsense, balderdash, as in: "Niall's explanation of the relationship between divine omniscience and human free will is the biggest pile of trumery I ever heard."
My gut reaction: when I pick up a rock and drop it, I know the rock would fall. I didn't make it fall, though.
That God's outside of time makes sense to me, but that's not much of an argument-- everyone knows I have no sense. ^.^
Free will. That's a poser. As a scientist, I don't understand how there can be anything outside of Chemistry and Physics. That implies that consciousness is really just self-awareness, nothing more. There isn't free will. There have been studies that show that people can, and do, rationalize their actions even when they don't really decide to do the things they do. So the idea that they decide, somehow outside of control of the universe, rather than do what they must, seems impossible, yet not incompatible with the illusion of free will.
Yet sometimes I feel that I really do have the choice to write or not write this. To publish it, or hit the delete key. Or is it an illusion? Does the decision I will make exist now and forever, and I really can't make the other decision?
Does time really flow, or is it just as complete at all times as space? Given the mixing of time and space in relativity, is there a unity that precludes time flowing and space not? This is, I think, the resolution. Time does not flow. All times and all space exist now and forever (my use of language is simply not up to this part of the discussion). The illusion of free will is just that, an illusion.
What bothers me about this is that it could be used to justify evil actions ("I had to do it... Fate made me... It wasn't my choice"). Can we punish theft, murder, etc, if what we think of as free will doesn't exist? I think so, not because of a free will choice, but because those individuals that do evil, represent a configuration of matter for which those actions are likely.
I have to admit that I do feel less than certain about this at times. Like I started with... Free will. That's a poser.
If free will doesn't exist for those choosing to murder, then it doesn't exist for those punishing them, either.
Basically, I figure if the answer includes the phrase "you just THINK you do" without any really good evidence, it's not worth worrying about.
"How do we know that objective reality exists?"
"You just THINK you do! It's all really an illusion! Can't prove it."
"How do I know this table exists?"
"You just THINK you do!"
.... K, nough digression...
Think folks might enjoy
http://johncwright.livejournal.com/246579.html
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