pennywise121

simply being a passive observer creates problems, if we take omniscience to be infallible (as it must be). the state of all-knowing implies that god/dess, etc. knows not only the choices available, but what one will be chosen (or else it is not truly a state of all-knowing). so, we have no issue with divine intervention, as it is not necessary if the god of choice knows everything.

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Food for thought.

JumpinJesus

I don't know how I missed this post earlier, but I did. Actually, pennywise, this is precisely what I hoped for this discussion. You said it more succinctly than I was able.

I just think that the existence of both omniscience and free will is a paradox, if we view omniscience as the infallible foreknowledge.

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kramus

If true free will is creating your present by living in the future you choose to create, and omnicience is the paradigm that carries that possibility within it, then I can see the two as not mutually exclusive.

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Peat

So there is the idea that by knowing the choices that are to be made, is the same as controling the choices made. The fact that we canot do anything that the diety has said. This seems more like a contradiction. What about the fact that this diety could exist outside this dimentinal universe of intervention. Then this leaves us with the idea that within our own dimention of existance, we have free will, whilst outside this universe, or, in the power of gods true uncontrolled intervention, This free will disapears. As god would now not be an observer, but involved with existance constantly. Although this is drawing a big line between "our world", and the "world of the devine".

pennywise121

i think, with all due respect peat, that we must be careful to make the distinction between knowledge and intervention. simple knowledge does not necessitate any action or control on the part of a god. we can have the passive observer of previous posts, and still be bound by the knowledge. in other words, we must not mistake effect for cause. the fact that we cannot act outside of the omniscience of a god does not mean that god made us do it. again, the issue falls to the infallability of that knowledge.

moreover, truly free will would carry with it the freedom from any constraints. god cannot simultaneously exist completely separate from our dimension and have omniscience with regards to our dimension. more to the point, however, if we are to draw the line connecting our dimension and another, we cannot give ourselves free will in one without having free will in all, or we have no truly free will. believing we have free will, as in your example, does nothing to change the fact that god is omniscient, even if in her/his/its own dimension of existence.

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Food for thought.

Robaggio

If it is assumed that things operate purely on cause->effect. And that effects are causes in of themselves. Then free will does not exist as current causes have already been determined by those which preceeded them.

Peat & Pennywise121:

My coworker would argue about this to the death. He very much believes in the 3 forms of god: The Son, The Father, and the Holy Spirit. If you asked him "Coul god could create a rock so heavy he couldn't lift it?" He would say: "Yes. The spirit could create it and the son, Jesus, couldn't." To me, this is silly- though it is a clever answer to a trap question.

Here's an interesting point brought up in my school's philosophy club on the subject:
If the nature of god's omniscence implies that we have no free will, then does it also mean that some people are predetermined to go to hell?

asaris

The idea that simple omniscience conflicts with free will is based on a simple misconception about the necessity involved. Say God knows that tomorrow I will drink a cup of coffee. This entails that necessarily I will drink a cup of coffee tomorrow. It does not entail that I will necessarily drink a cup of coffee tomorrow. To put it another way, the necessity is de dicto, necessity of the statement, not de re, necessity of the fact. The truth of proposition is necessary, not the activity in the statement. That this is true can be easily seen if we look at statements about the past. If I know I had a cup of coffee this morning, then necessarily I had a cup of coffee this morning. But nobody would say that this means I didn't have any choice in the matter.

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Robaggio

Isn't the word of god infalliable? And therefore would make any statement of his true? This would mean, god's "de dicto" statement must be "de re".

It doesn't really matter. The end result is you drink a cup of coffee. Whether you have a choice or not is entirely an illusion. Our lives could be completely determined. However, because we don't know what will happen next, it gives us the illusion of choice.

pennywise121

exactly my point, robaggio. we have the illusion of free will no matter what the situation, but it is free will only of a second order. even if it appears free to us, we are still stuck with a lack of ability to choose other options and therefore a lack of truly free will.

i am completely open to the possibility that i am missing the subtle distinction, but isnt what you just said a sort of "A but not A"? it both entails and does not entail the action?
furthermore, if the truth of a proposition (that in itself is an action) is necessary, but the completion of the proposition is not, we are stuck with a conflict. we cannot have a situation where it is true that we drank a cup of coffee this morning, but we didnt actually drink that cup of coffee. either the action happened, or the proposition was faulty.
meh, anyway, dont want to thread-jack this off topic. sorry

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Food for thought.

CSflim

An analogy which I have seen to illustrate the difference goes something like this:

Bob is a bachelor.
A bachelor is necessarily unmarried.

Therefore...
Poor bob! He can never get married!

The fallacy is obvious in this example. I believe that asaris is suggesting that the free will misconception is based on a similar confusion (correct me if I am wrong asaris).

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asaris

That sounds about right, actually. Thanks.

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"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

braindamage351

There definitely isn't free will. If the universe doesn't follow causality 100% of the time (which is the only way that works) then the universe is random chaos. And seeing how I haven't turned into a bunny or exploded for no reason, I'm leaning toward causality. And since in causality everything is just extremely complicated cause and effect, there is only one possible outcome.

CSflim

" If the universe doesn't follow causality 100% of the time... then the universe is random chaos."

That is a pure non-sequitur.

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pennywise121

again, if i am misunderstanding, i am sorry, but i am open to that possibility.

csfilm: i understand the way your example is fallacious, but i dont see this situation as being analogous. basically, here is my line of thought.

(Assumption) 1. God is omniscient
2. omniscience implies infallability of knowledge

(basically, god knows all, and is never wrong about anything)
3. god knows that you will drink a cup of coffee tomorrow morning (and for the sake of simplicity, only ONE cup)

now,
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.

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.

perhaps i am thinking too simplistically, but what we are dealing with is a series of dichotimous situations. now, to explain that thought, the question is no longer if god is omniscient, or if omniscience is infallable. rather, god, being omniscient, knows not only all the possible choices, but which one will be chosen at any given time, limiting our dilemna to only two options- whether we 1. complete the action/make the choice, or 2. we do not.
i agree (if you are thinking it) that this seems to be dangerously close to begging the question, but if we are to accept that god is omniscient for the first part of the argument, we must also accept it here (for if god is omniscient, she must be so in all cases, or she is not truly omniscient). that being the case, unless we are free to counteract an all-knowing entity, and thus disprove the quality of omniscience, we are bound by that knowledge whether or not god actually acts on us.

on to the issue of time.
if god exists in our dimension of time, and perceives our actions as they happen, and knows what we choose only because we choose it, we have an issue of a lack of knowledge. 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. if this is the case, we have a problem with the definition of a god, but we certainly have free will.

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). in this case, god is infallable, we have no free will, and we are screwed in terms of who will go to hell or heaven (assuming they exist- totally other topic).

if, on the other hand, god exists outside of our time, but from a disconnected sense where time really does not apply (in other words, god looks at this universe from the outside, and sees all that was, is, and will be in one swipe, regardless of any influence of time on him/her). to me, this is more in tune with true omniscience. if this is the case, we have no free will (based on the omniscience issue), but we are not predestined to anything (because there is no conception of PRE- or POST-destination without a conception of time as it applies to us)

now, as for me, just to be clear as to where i stand, i am definitely on the athiest side of agnosticism (if such a thing can be said to be a scalable thing). i believe we have free will in a limited sense, as strange as that seems.
anyway, sorry for the long-ass post yet again

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Food for thought.

asaris

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.

The analogy is an analogy of the same sort of modal confusion, not the same sort of situation.


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.

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.

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"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

Johnny Rotten

Discussion of free will necessarily presumes the existence of divinity, and a divinity that cannot be disproved. If we are to take the existence of divinity as a given, the establishment of free will is likewise impossible, since it is a system derived from an entity whose properties are strictly unknown, yet custom-extrapolated to the shared schema of a given religious sect.

In other words, god is a supposition, and you can't extract a determination from a supposition. It's the other way around. You're supposed to base speculation on tangible data, not on the original speculation. That way lies madness. And, not coincidentally, thousands of years of wide-scale bloodshed.

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pennywise121

i dont want to threadjack this topic any further, but it would seem that there are some disparate assumptions about the world that need to be pointed out so that we may better understand where the other one is coming from.

for one, you have put forward the epistemological conception of JTB. the platonic conception of justified true belief, while a perfectly reasonable one, is unfortunately not the conception of knowledge that i am working under. JTB does not necessitate certainty, which leaves the possibility of accidental "knowledge" (which i would argue is not true knowledge). if the only requirements for making an epistemological claim are that 1. i have a belief. 2. i can justify my belief to the liking of at least myself, and at best to others, and 3. my belief is true (hence, justified true belief), we leave ourselves open to the possibility that it could well be a coincident.

for example, if i am well aquainted with you asaris, and i believe that you have a raisin bagel in your fridge right now, and i can justify that belief based on my familiarity with you, i can still make no claim of knowledge even if it happens to be true that you have a raisin bagel in your fridge. i did not KNOW that you did, even if i had good reason to believe it.

now, anyone would be hard pressed (myself included) to prove that certainty is required for knowledge. for instance, our modern conception of science does not require certainty to make claims about how we believe the world works. if it did, there would be no breakthroughs in gravity, nor thermodynamics, etc. etc.

however, because we are purely into the realm of hypotheticals, i beleive that we must hold ourselves to a higher standard than is possible in real-life applications.

consider the following
1. true knowledge is infallable (on this point we agree, asaris)
2. if an idea is fallable (i.e. there is a possibility that it can be wrong), it cannot be the basis for a claim of knowledge.
3. if i adhere to JTB principle about belief x, but i had no CERTAINTY that belief x was true, i cannot claim to have knowledge (see 1 above).

now, for the record, this falls along the lines of error theory, derived from Descarte's meditations.
1. Knowledge is infallable
2. if i can not be certain i am not in error about belief x, i cannot claim to KNOW x
3. i cannot be certain i am not in error.
---------------------------------
4. i can not claim to know x

now, to allay suspicions of further modal confusion, what i am saying is not that because i cannot be certain about x, i will NEVER be certain about it. rather, what i am saying is that at the single point in time (and any other subsequent point where proposition 3 holds true) we can make no epistemological claim based on belief x.

furthermore, omniscience is a powerful quality. unless god is correct in her knowledge 100% of the time, she is not omniscient. simply being "really really good at predicting" falls far short of omniscience.

as to the issue of existence inside or outside of our conception of time being a non-sequitor, i respectfully disagree. i put forth only three of the many conceptions of god-time that are possible, and for good reason.

my first example was to disprove the concept that god could be omniscient without experientially independant knowledge (we must choose for her knowledge to be considered such).
if, however (example 2), god created the universe, and is omniscient, it follows that god would know everything that would come to pass, and we have a problem of predestination, or "theological fatalism", which has its own issues and solutions not related to this thread (and thus, not discussed here), not the least of which is ultimate omnipotence (given that god is the creator of everything that is, god is therefore the ultimate cause of everything that happens as a result of her creation of the universe).
if, as another possibility (example 3), god did not create the universe, but exists as an entity outside of our dimension, with omniscience, but not ultimate omnipotence, we have an issue of having free will only to ourselves, and not to god (that sees all of existence at a glance, and knows what was, is, and will be), which amounts to nothing more than second order free will, and as such, is not truly free will.

we must take care not to limit our choices and define our conceptions of "free will" or "omniscience" too narrowly, for if we are to come to any epistemic claim, we must address possible detractions to the idea.

now, with that in mind, i sincerely apologize to jumpinjesus for officially threadjacking a discussion on free will into one on the effects of omniscience. as such, i have created a separate thread dealing solely with the issue of omniscience, and some very interesting (at least to me) theories on the effects of omniscience on our existence, one of which was put forth by a professor of quantum physics, even.

i encourage you to join me at omniscience continued...... for further discussion- assuming anyone wants to.

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Food for thought.

the_ref

This is actually a major question whether you approach it from a theistic point of view or not.

One concept of the Christian God is that He is there are the beginning of time, the end of time, and the middle of time similtaneously. God is at all times, in all places, and knows all that passes before Him. In this case it is difficult to fit in the concept of Free Will -- everything is a "dumb show" that is settled from the very beginning (and end). God, in this model, has foreknowledge AND everything is predestined as it has all already taken place (just as it IS taking place in the present and HAS taken place in the past and WILL take place in the future). This is essentially the position of the Presbyterians, settled on in the 16th century -- Calvin, Knox and the crew believed in this (as did my grandmother up until she died, Auld School Scotswoman that she was).

But let us look at this from a non-theistic perspective just for a moment.

Position 1: Every action has an antecedant condition that impels it. Each previous action also had an antecedant condition, and so on backwards. Each condition sets up a necessary course of action. Just as if we could predict each and every ending position of a break on a billiards table if only we knew each of the variables involved in the break itself, each of the balls, the state of the table, wind currents, etc., so, too, would all of life be reduced to a series of cause-and-effect calculations. In this case there is no Free Will, as each action is predetermined (even we do not understand each and every pre-set condition).

Postion 2: Actions do NOT have antecedante conditions that impel them. Thus a break on a billiards table would cause an elephant to appear in the middle of the table and start discussing the finer point of Newtonian physics. Since this is an utterly random event, again we have no control over the action and thus there is no Free Will involved, only random action.

The problem here is Too Much Logic. Logic works well on a 2-term basis -- yes/no, on/off, black/white, open/closed. This is the basis of most Western thought. We like to think of ourselves of Logical (and Reasonable) individuals. But what if there were a third term in Logic? Yes/No/Maybe? On/Off/Partial? Black/White/Grey? This would up-end most of our discussion, lead to the possibility of Free Will, and punch a large hole in science as we know it.

In many ways, I think our search, as a group, is for an understanding of that Third Term.

Without it, life is reduced to logic gates, there is no Free Will, and thus life is a farce.

I refuse to believe life has absolutely no meaning or purpose.

Pesonal opinion, expressed only by the ex-management.

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braindamage351

It seems ridiculous, but actually it's true. If any one part of the universe is random the entire universe becomes random. Because athough the rest of the universe reacts to the randomness in an orderly fashion the actual source of the change is random.

If anything was truly random than absolutely anything could happen. An infinitely dense black hole could appear, a genie could destroy the universe, superman could be born, a second big bang could occur. Literally anything you could think up would be entirely possible.

Even if things WERE random, you still wouldn't have free will. You'd just be behaving randomly.

As to the last guy, how does the possession of free will even give your life meaning? And there already is a "maybe" in logic. We simply say that we don't know.

Berrum

Id like to add a few points.

In a universe without a god, ruled only by natural laws, free will most likely cannot exist. Since every particle is ruled by set laws of nature, even something as complex as a human being is just a composition of such, and is therefore ruled in a predetermined way by those same laws. The whole course of the universe will in the same way be set from the very start (if a word such as start even applies to a universe, who knows). We could never calculate or verify this, due to the immensity of the factors affecting said things.

(It is possible that a free will system can appear by nature, trough evolution, who can be sure.. the concept is very hard to grasp. A simple example to think in the right direction about this is an electric relay. http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_4/chpt_5/1.html
An electric relay is a very simple way to create one system that is controlled by another, where the second system is quite independent of physical laws, in the sense that it can for example be made of a vast amount of different materials and work in the exact same way regardless of them, thereby partly taking natural laws out of play.
IF our brains, or some electronic brain we will some day create, are/can indeed be independent at least partly from natural laws, then free will can exist (without a god).. id greatly appreciate any input on this paragraph, in pm if you feel it wouldnt be on topic. As an afterthought, wouldnt it be ironic if a computer we one day create will be the first example of free will?)

Now, if you accept my first paragraph to be true, at least theoretically, in a universe that DOES have a god, this means that it must be omnipotent (omniscience is not an issue, though an omnipotent being should be able to acheive omniscience at will, or lose it.) because it will have to alter the rules of nature (which we claim evidently exist) in order to give any being the gift of free will.

So, to sum it up, a god probably needs to exist in order for free will to do so, and it must most likely be omnipotent, or at least be able to manipulate life in mysterious ways.

Berrum

To the previous poster: Randomness is a divine event - it does not exist in nature.
Events we call random, like the roll of a dice, only seem random to us due to the fact that we are too simple to predict its outcome. (or so it would seem to me).

asaris

Just out of curiousity, why does this follow? That is, why should we think that a godless universe would have to only be ruled by natural laws? And why should we think our grasp of those laws is much better than, say, Newton or Aristotle?

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"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

Sweetpea

the fact the you are all still talking about this PROVES that free will does indeed exist


Sweetpea

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Yakk

I'm predestined to believe I have free will.

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Berrum

Nothing in human science suggests that anything is random, and so for the sake of argument i accept it to be true. Isnt it safe to assume that in a godless universe (totally devoid of any spiritual beings, souls etc) everything is ruled by mechanics and laws? (with the possible exception in my first post?).

Im going to make a post and see if anyone can come up with a true random event. http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=94278

On Aristotle and newton:
Our grasp of natural laws would be greater than those personas simply because of the huge effort and progress being made since they lived?
Aristotle was among those first people who sucessfully started contemplating how the world works and keeping records of his findings. Most of those findings were outright wrong, or at least incomplete.. that doesnt lesser his acheivements based on what he accomplished in relation to the pre-knowledge he had. He was for sure a great genius capable of understanding.
Newton may have been one of the most intelligent people to ever have lived,
his acheivements are amazing, and while at least his most famous work is correct, it is only correct based on the pre-knowledge he had. More recent scientists (Einstein) have proven his work incomplete or incorrect when factoring things unknown to Newton.

Theres just no competing with the communal knowledge humanity gains?

analog

Of course both can exist.

As many have pointed out... just because god knows what's going to happen, doesn't mean those events weren't your choice. If god is really god, then god would be completely omniscient- and omniscience defies all concepts of "time". "Time", itself, being a human invention, not a force in nature. "Time" exists because we like being able to know when things happened. Time is not a rock, or a tree, or something measurable. We can only "keep" or "measure" time because we've stated at some point, "for every instance of ______, that is what we will call one second". Since time is an idea, there is no reason to doubt it's total lack of consequence to a god.

Since god would know all that has happened, is happening, and will happen, god would be able to know, at any point, exactly what you're going to do. You chose to go to Starbucks instead of Dunkin Donuts one day- that doesn't matter. It was your option, but because "time" doesn't exist, god could see you making the decision before you knew you'd made it.

Just because god can see everything happen, and knows everything that WILL happen, does not mean god MAKES those things happen- god just observes them happening "before" you've done it. Keep in mind that even when discussing the idea of god being able to see what you "have done", "are doing", and "will do", that those terms don't even apply to a timeless god. There's no such thing as "before" unless god wants to put perspective on one event to another- god would know, see, and be aware of everything, at once.

Saying "god knows what i will do before I do it" is ascribing the laws of "time" to god, and you can't do that.

braindamage351

Yes, if an omnipotent God really existed then absolutely anything would be possible. He could just ignore logic and reason and make it happen. But we have no reason to believe that he is doing this. It is possible that he is, but it's more logical to behave as if the perceptible universe that we live in is the true one, and that things make sense once you know everything about them.

spongy

Time as a human invention? And this makes it not a force of nature?

I'm not sure I follow this reasoning.

Aren't numbers and letters human inventions? Does that lessen their impact on our lives?
I would argue that time is something measurable the fact that we have units of time.. minutes seconds, millenia take your pick shows that it exists. Why is a tree more real than an hour and a half. I was born. I am now middleages/38/halfway through current life expaectancy.. doesn't this prove that time exists?

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xepherys

I disagree on several counts.

First, infallibility of knowledge is questionable against our ability to understand things which are infinite (be it space, time or knowledge). If there are, in fact, multiple dimensions, so to speak, where branches of decisions are made across time slices, which one you fall into it random, but in thoery all possible choices are chosen in one slice or another. Of course, this is purely academic, but then, so is the inital argument.

Second, a god or goddess in any sense other than a modern monotheistic sense, has never been omnipresent or omniscient. Polytheistic religions, which are still in existence and which have, in many cases, been around far longer than any modern monotheistic religion, have always been wrought with stories of warring and competing deities. This could not be so if they were all omniscient for (I think) obvious reasons. Perhaps this question, then, could be answered differently by a Christian than a Hindu? A Jew than a Pagan? Just food for thought.

xepherys

I think I see what Analog was trying to say (or maybe not)...

Time is a perception developed by humans. It may or may not be linear as we perceive it. Look at the radio spectrum. We know microwave exists (now) and that VHF and UHF exist (though the names of all of the above are useless in this sense). However, we can only physically detect the 'visible light' portion of that spectrum. Most people, even a lot of educated people, can't grasp the concept that the color red (as it's perceived) and the signal sent to their radio is the SAME thing, one's just "wider" than the other. Sound is in there too... and we can detect that. Other creatures can detect pieces of that that we cannot (bats, bees, etc.)

In other words, yes... time is "natural", but our perception of it may be extremely limited in the grand scope of things.

Francisco

Simply put, if there is an omnipotent creator, and/or all things are predictable or determined in advance, we have no free will. Whether all things happen for a purpose, or happen merely as effects of a prior cause, they can still be predictable or inevitable, and again would be consistent with there being no free will. Free will is essentially a human concept that results from our being aware of an abiliy to make decisions based on astract observations and projections.

In my view (not being faith-based), we will never know to any degree of certainty whether or not we have free will, but it's undoubtedly a good idea to act as if we do have it. And it's certainly predictable that most humans will see things from that perspective and act accordingly.

el_soulman

Ustwo - very interesting post, and very close to what I think. I believe that we have free will, but that there is also an omnicient being. There is a "greater plan" for all of us, but we have the free will on how we get there, and may decide to stumble and fall a bit along that path.

Francisco

Perhaps you can explain how you reconcile these two aspects of your beliefs: One, that if a being is omnicient, it knows by definition everything that is going to happen in the future before it happens;
Two, if you have free will, and are thus allowed to vary the way you proceed along your path, then everything that is going to happen in the future is not known in advance by any omniscient being.

It would seem that one way to reconcile this would be to hold or speculate that the omniscient being has given you the illusion of free will, so that you can therefor believe in both aspects at the same time - but this could also mean he has given you insufficient skills to spot the contradictions involved. Not to worry - we all suffer from lack of those skills one way or the other.

asaris

You know, Francisco, we've discussed all of this, and I think in this very thread. You might want to check out that discussion...

__________________
"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

1010011010

Everytime you make a decision, ask youself if you could have chosen differently. Mere knowledge of the choice you have made (or will make) does not remove your ability to choose freely.

It's the difference between what someone will do v. what someone can do.

__________________
Simple Machines in Higher Dimensions

Francisco

asaris said: You know, Francisco, we've discussed all of this, and I think in this very thread. You might want to check out that discussion...

I know it was discussed. I was replying specifically to the previous poster, who evidently had NOT checked out the previous discussion. And apparently I have failed to see where that reply duplicated any previous post in any case.

I also saw a lot of repetitiveness in previous posts, and no-one seems to have been chastised for this. Are you a moderator of some sort?

Or do you perhaps have a problem with the non-Christian viewpoint?
I have no problem with Christians, if that's your surmise. I just like to hear their rationale for certain positions - I thought that was what this forum was all about.

Francisco

Perhaps it would be of interest to read again what your man Nietzsche had to say about Christianity (and I think he misses the point entirely, but I've never quoted him as a source of wisdom):

Christianity's Origin

Christianity as antiquity.-- When we hear the ancient bells growling on a Sunday morning we ask ourselves: Is it really possible! This, for a jew, crucified two thousand years ago, who said he was God's son? The proof of such a claim is lacking. Certainly the Christian religion is an antiquity projected into our times from remote prehistory; and the fact that the claim is believed - whereas one is otherwise so strict in examining pretensions - is perhaps the most ancient piece of this heritage. A god who begets children with a mortal woman; a sage who bids men work no more, have no more courts, but look for the signs of the impending end of the world; a justice that accepts the innocent as a vicarious sacrifice; someone who orders his disciples to drink his blood; prayers for miraculous interventions; sins perpetrated against a god, atoned for by a god; fear of a beyond to which death is the portal; the form of the cross as a symbol in a time that no longer knows the function and ignominy of the cross -- how ghoulishly all this touches us, as if from the tomb of a primeval past! Can one believe that such things are still believed?

from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.405, R.J. Hollingdale transl.

asaris

I'd be interested in discussing Nietzsche's views on Christianity, but this probably isn't the thread to do it in.

No, I'm not a moderator, but I play one one TV . That is, I've been posting here long enough that I have a fairly good idea of how things work, so I'm not shy (perhaps not as shy as I should be) about pointing people in what I think is the right direction. If I singled you out, it was because you had asked a specific question that we've discussed in some detail fairly recently.

Of course I have a 'problem' with the non-Christian viewpoint -- I think it's false. But I've known quite a few very intelligent non-Christians, and I don't think non-Christians are all either stupid or especially wicked.

__________________
"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

MqN

Nietzsche was an Anti-christian though, was he not?

As of Free Will...

The idea of free will is extremely appealing, because it suggests that we have the power to change our paths. With that in mind, most religions use that to lure in followers. Religions put a limit to our choices and most often depicts our choices for us. That's not considered free will anymore.

How can we actually define free will? Everything is based on something...can we actually consider it?

Mantus

In order to discus this issue we must first prove that free will exists. So far everyone is dancing around this basic question.

If an action is caused by another event, then it is not "free". If an action is free from any cause then it is random and thus meaningless.

Take away the idea of god from this scenario. How do things change? After all it's not the knowledge of our future actions that make us feel as if free will has been stripped from us but the fact that it is inevitable. Even if there is no one to know what will happen, it will happen. It will happen whether we live in one reality or multiple realities. An infinate number of realities where everything that can happen does happen and none of them give us a choice.

Just what the hell if free will?

An action that is free from influence of another being. It is a social concept. A linguistic term to describe a social situation. Yet here we are, taking something as blunt and vague as the term "free will" and attempting to apply it to the universe around us. Whats next, an attempt to give the universe a "purpose"?!

Some thoughts