Quote:
|
Originally Posted by pennywise121
4. IF (1.) god is omniscient, (2.) omniscience implies infallability of knowledge, and
(3.) god knows that you will drink one and only one cup of coffee tomorrow morning,
THEN you will drink one and only one cup of coffee tomorrow morning.
|
Not to nitpick, but omniscience does not imply infallibility of knowledge. Knowledge is itself infallible -- knowledge just means "justified
true belief". This isn't exactly the normal english usage, but it's the philosophical meaning of the term, and anytime I use the words knowledge, or know, or etc., I'm using it in this sense.
Quote:
|
basically, my problem with the analogy is that in a situation such as this, it would seem that just because bob IS a bachelor does not mean that bob will be a bachelor FOREVER. in this example, we are dealing with single choices at various points in time. either i drink coffee tomorrow or i dont. there is no lasting influence, and any assumption as such is, as you pointed out, fallacious.
|
The analogy is an analogy of the same sort of modal confusion, not the same sort of situation.
Quote:
|
god would be all knowing only secondarily, because we would have to choose for him to know. i think of this as all-knowing the past.
|
Not necessarily. If you take this view (and there are philosophers who do), what you can say is that God doesn't see the future in the traditional way, but since he knows all of us really well, and knows all the circumstances in the universe, he's really, really good at predicting (detractors would say guessing) what we're going to do in the future. You might call this view 'practical omniscience' -- God doesn't
see the future, but we can probably say that he knows what's going to happen.
Quote:
|
if god exists outside of our time, and knows everythign that will happen from the time it created the universe (and, say, wrote it all down in the metaphysical book), we have a problem of predetermination (because this entails FOREknowledge of our actions).
|
Again, this is a non sequitur. Merely restating the same point you've been trying to make doesn't constitute an argument. We have free will iff our actions are up to us. It's, at the very least, hard to see how God knowing what we will choose means that our actions aren't up to us. Also, you're creating two cases (this one and the one below) out of just one. If God is outside of time, it's more like the bottom case than the above.
For the record, I assume we have free will. It seems clear to me that we bear moral responsibility for some of our actions but not for others, and whatever it is that makes the difference between these two cases, that's free will. I said above that free will means that our actions are up to us; that's a fairly uncontroversial definition of free will (at least, as uncontroversial as anything is among philosophers), but it doesn't have much content. The two major camps are the compatibilists (who believe that free will is compatibile with determinism) and the libertarians (who believe that free will is not compatibile with determinism. Compatibilists tend to define free will as something like "being able to do what we want". Libertarians tend to define free will as something like "being able to do otherwise". I tend towards the libertarian camp, but I mention this because there are a large number of philosophers, dating at least back to Aquinas, who believe that even determinism does not conflict with free will. If this position is logically coherent, then certainly there is not conflict between free will and mere omniscience.