i can see a paradox.

[AnotherN00b]

HatterMaxwell started this thread which got closed by ArmsMerchant because there was no serious reply.

http://www.totse.com/community/showthread.php?t=2184432

i got one that i would like to share.the paradox is this-

if god is omnipotent/omniscient and infallible, then that means everything is predetermined and therefore we were programed from the moment of creation to follow one path. therefore we have no free will.

am i right or wrong.

[truckfixr]

There was no serious reply because this subject has been visited many times already in this forum.

[AnotherN00b]

Originally Posted by truckfixr

There was no serious reply because this subject has been visited many times already in this forum.

well not by me

Originally Posted by truckfixr

It's simple, really. For god (or anyone else) to know future events with certainty , said events must be predetermined. If the future is predetermined, free will is merely an illusion, and you have no choice but to do that which was predestined.

Omniscience and free will are mutually exclusive.

this

i am genuinely interested in a theists reply to this apparent paradox. if its been discussed before then there must be one

[JesuitArtiste]

Originally Posted by AnotherN00b

HatterMaxwell started this thread which got closed by ArmsMerchant because there was no serious reply.

http://www.totse.com/community/showthread.php?t=2184432

i got one that i would like to share.the paradox is this-

if god is omnipotent/omniscient and infallible, then that means everything is predetermined and therefore we were programed from the moment of creation to follow one path. therefore we have no free will.

am i right or wrong.

I don't see the neccesary relation between god omni-ness and predetermination.

[truckfixr]

Originally Posted by JesuitArtiste

I don't see the neccesary relation between god omni-ness and predetermination.

It's simple, really. For god (or anyone else) to know future events with certainty , said events must be predetermined. If the future is predetermined, free will is merely an illusion, and you have no choice but to do that which was predestined.

Omniscience and free will are mutually exclusive.

[JesuitArtiste]

Originally Posted by truckfixr

It's simple, really. For god (or anyone else) to know future events with certainty , said events must be predetermined. If the future is predetermined, free will is merely an illusion, and you have no choice but to do that which was predestined.

Omniscience and free will are mutually exclusive.

It doesn't seem that way to me.


IF, assuming the omni-ness of God, we can do away with this linearity and 'Future'. God being omniscient is aware of all time in a single moment, God is not bound to time, because God is omnipotent, it is possible for him to be outside of time. There is no future, and no past to God, there can only be now.

Assuming this, God does not know events before they happen, but AS they happen. God knows what we do only because to his perspective we are in the process of doing, he does not see things as having been done, because he has no past, there is no sense of things to be done, because he has no future, there is only things as they happen.

Not sure if that's clear.

Either way, I think it entirely possible for God to know what we do, and for it not to hamper our free-will.

That said, I don't really think we have much free-will, but that has little to do with God and more to do with stuff.

[---Beany---]

Originally Posted by JesuitArtiste

That said, I don't really think we have much free-will, but that has little to do with God and more to do with stuff.

I believe you:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=uE6Z1nBqLwo

[Obbe]

Originally Posted by JesuitArtiste

Either way, I think it entirely possible for God to know what we do, and for it not to hamper our free-will.

That said, I don't really think we have much free-will, but that has little to do with God and more to do with stuff.

I agree with you jesuit, and I think you said it well.

[Rust]

Originally Posted by JesuitArtiste

It doesn't seem that way to me.

Your counter-argument ignores the crucial point: It's not god's "timeness" or timelessness (for lack of better words) that causes the problem, it's ours.

He knows that will happen before we are even born. That you want to label him as timeless doesn't change this. To us, the beings whose freewill is being questioned, the event is already set in stone before we are even born.

God being timeless is irrelevant so long as it can be said that future events in our timeline are known.

[Roxberry]

Originally Posted by Rust

He knows that will happen before we are even born. That you want to label him as timeless doesn't change this. To us, the beings whose freewill is being questioned, the event is already set in stone before we are even born.

God being timeless is irrelevant so long as it can be said that future events in our timeline are known.

I don't want to get in a debate about this (so this may be my only post in this thread), but there is a pretty good Wikipedia article pointing out the problem of the conclusion that free will and omniscient beings are incompatible.

One criticism of the Argument from Free Will is that in point 4 of the proof it simply assumes that foreknowledge and free will are incompatible. It uses circular logic to "prove" this, by simply stating that "a being that knows its choices in advance has no potential to avoid its choices". Point 4 is therefore saying, in essence, "A being that knows its choices in advance has no free will, and therefore has no free will". By assuming what it is trying to prove, that point undermines the entire argument.

Specifically, point 4 commits the modal fallacy of assuming that because some choice is known to be true, it must be necessarily true (i.e. there is no way it could possibly be false).[11] Logically, the truth value of some proposition can not be used to infer that the same proposition is necessarily true.

Using logical terminology and applying it to AFFW, there is a marked distinction between the statement “It is impossible (for God to know a future action to be true and for that action to not occur)” and the statement “If God knows that a future action is true, then it is impossible for that action to not occur.” While the two statements may seem to say the same thing, they are not logically equivalent. The second sentence is false because it commits the modal fallacy of saying that a certain action is impossible, instead of saying that the two propositions (God knows a future action to be true, and that action does not occur) are jointly impossible. Simply asserting that God knows a future action does not make it impossible for that action not to occur. The confusion comes in mistaking a semantic relation between two events for a causal relation between two events.

With these assumptions more explicitly stated, the proof becomes:

1. Assume that person X has free will (assumption).
2. By the definition of free will, at any point in time, X can choose to do any action A, where A belongs to A(T), the set of all actions that X is physically capable of at time T (definition of free will).
3. At time T, person X will choose to do action A (i.e. a person can not logically choose to do both A and not A) (Law of the Excluded Middle).
4. Assume that an omniscient God exists (assumption).
5. By the definition of omniscience, God knows everything that will happen at any point in time (definition of omniscience).
6. From 3. and 5., God knows that at time T, person X will choose to do action A (logical conclusion).
7. Therefore, person X must do action A at time T.

This claims to prove that at time T, person X is unable to do any action other than A. However, you could also remove steps 4–6, and arrive at the same conclusion. This is called logical determinism, and it suffers from the same modal fallacy as AFFW. If a certain proposition is true, that does not imply that the proposition is logically necessary. Once you remove the invalid assertion, then the argument for logical determinism is shown to be false. Similarly, when that same invalid assertion is removed from AFFW (“by the definitions of ‘knowledge’ and ‘choice’, if one knows for certain what choice one will make in the future, one will not be able to make the opposite choice”), the proof is shown to be false.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_free_will