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Originally Posted by Francisco
This thread actually started with the following caveat: "This discussion is not about the Christian god or Jesus, but about every religion with a supreme, omniscient being."
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I read that as an attempt to prevent this from devolving into a discussion of "Well, the Bible says...", not to try to further detail the attributes of the omniscient being.
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Originally Posted by Francisco
Actually that's exactly the same as saying Bob can't choose vanilla. The only way to be sure he won't is to know that he can't, because the choices have already been made in advance. Who made them is another question, but in your scenario, it certainly was not Bob.
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Does Alice's knowledge that Bob will choose chocolate restrict Bob's choices? It doesn't.
You find yourself in a Catch-22 as far as the "The only way to be sure he won't is to know that he can't..." assertion goes.
If we treat omniscience as a scaled up version of Alice's knowledge, then Bob still has free will.
If we treat omniscience as a fundamentaly different type of knowledge, it becomes unclear that the "if won't then can't" reasoning applies. Bob's ability to choose vanilla doesn't violate the infalliabilty of omniscience because, though he can choose vanilla, he won't. How do we know he won't? Because we're omniscient.... not because he can't.
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Originally Posted by Francisco
...the freedom relates to the fact it is you that will be making the choice, rather than some force that set things in motion long before your time.
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This is that confusing the issue problem I talked about before. The "force that set things into motion" and the omniscient being are not necessarily the same. So the fact that an omnicient being knows what you
will choose is unrelated to what you
can choose.
To affect free will the being has to exert some influence over the decision. Merely knowing the outcome has no impact on the decision, since the being plays no role and does not participate in the decision in any way.
If we're talking about creator gods, then everything subsequent to the creator's choice to make this particular universe at the exclusion of all others renders all apparent choices in the universe subordinate to that first choice. BUT, we're not explicitly talking about creaor gods.