God, Free-will, and the knowledge of God - Is his knowledge causation?

[firedragon]

What definition are you talking about? Do you see a definition of free will in the snippet that you quoted? I don't, and I wrote those words. Do you think that omniscience implies knowledge of the future? Most people seem to think that it does. If there is a God who judges people's actions and holds them responsible for those actions, how would that make any sense at all? Is it that God was hoping for some different behavior that he knew not to expect from his creations? If God were the author of creation, he could write a script in which people were better behaved, couldn't he?

Respond to the OP.

 

[firedragon]

That's fine, as far as you go with it. But God doesn't just "happen to already know" what people will want. God holds them responsible and accountable as if their behavior could have been different than he knew it would be. After all, besides being an outside observer of other people's behavior, he is also the creator of those people along with their subsequent actions.

Why don't you actually read the Op and respond to it?

 

[Copernicus]

God is the creator of those people but God does not create their subsequent actions.

You are dodging the issue, but you know that you need to address it at some point. God judges people for their behavior. How does that make sense? Does he believe that they could have done something other than what they did? He comes off as the carpenter who blames the hammer for hitting his thumb.

People are choosing what they want to choose. That is the only thing necessary for free will.
Sure people make that claim that God holds people accountable for this. I don't necessarily believe that to be true.
However, if God does, one could assume that God does whatever God wants. Whether you like what God does or doesn't do is not relevant to any of this.

Right, and it should come as no surprise that people are choosing what they want to choose. Free will is entirely compatible in the context of a chaotic deterministic environment in which an agent has to make choices without having certain knowledge of outcomes and consequences. They are judged by other people on their ability to have behaved responsibly in hindsight. Knowing the future, God doesn't have to wait for hindsight to make those judgments.

It isn't about whether I or anyone else likes the nature of this putative God. It is about whether the behavior of such a being really makes sense. That's the problem with an omnimax God. In their zeal to imagine a perfect God, believers have imagined perfect properties that tend to cancel out each other--omnscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence, etc. That's why theists and philosophers tie themselves up in knots trying to figure out how to make sense of such a being without simply rejecting the concept as preposterous.

Reference: The Impossibility of God

Respond to the OP.

I have been, and you are reacting to, not responding to, what I wrote. Reread what I wrote, and respond to that.

Why don't you actually read the Op and respond to it?

Why don't you actually read my posts and respond to them rather than just repeating to me what you repeat to others that you don't want to engage with?

 

[firedragon]

Why don't you actually read my posts and respond to them rather than just repeating to me what you repeat to others that you don't want to engage with?

What am I responding to if they are not your posts. Sorry if I missed some of them.

Tell me. Do you in all honesty believe that God's transcended knowledge of your human future means it's hard determinism? Can you just say it clearly?

 

[firedragon]

What definition are you talking about?

let me define free-will for you.

• Philosophical Definition: Free will is the ability of agents to make choices free from certain kinds of constraints. The principal of free will has implications for ethics, law, and religion. In philosophy, it contrasts with determinism, which holds that all events, including moral choices, are determined by previously existing causes.
• Secular Definition: In a secular or atheistic framework, free will is seen as a product of complex neural processes and emergent phenomena within the brain that allow individuals to assess situations, deliberate, and make decisions.

So how in the world does God's knowledge demise free-will?

mate. you have not understood the OP.

 

[Copernicus]

Tell me. Do you in all honesty believe that God's transcended knowledge of your human future means it's hard determinism? Can you just say it clearly?

Hard determinists are incompatibilists. That is, they are determinists who believe that free will is incompatible with determinism and therefore not a valid concept. I am what one might call a soft determinist. That is, I believe that free will can be defined in a way that is perfectly compatible with determinism, but only because we cannot know the inevitable outcome of our choices. From our limited perspective, the future is undetermined, even if it is determined from a godlike perspective. God is imagined to know the future. Human beings do not.

Now I did not respond directly to your question, because it was too poorly worded to merit a yes or no response. I responded to what I think you meant by "it's hard determinism". The problem is that the antecedent of your pronoun "it's" is far from clear to me. Are you saying that "God's transcended knowledge" is itself "hard determinism"? My answer to that would be "no", but nobody argues that it is. So I wonder why you asked it, if that is what you were asking.

 

[Nakosis]

Right, and it should come as no surprise that people are choosing what they want to choose. Free will is entirely compatible in the context of a chaotic deterministic environment in which an agent has to make choices without having certain knowledge of outcomes and consequences. They are judged by other people on their ability to have behaved responsibly in hindsight. Knowing the future, God doesn't have to wait for hindsight to make those judgments.

It isn't about whether I or anyone else likes the nature of this putative God. It is about whether the behavior of such a being really makes sense. That's the problem with an omnimax God. In their zeal to imagine a perfect God, believers have imagined perfect properties that tend to cancel out each other--omnscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence, etc. That's why theists and philosophers tie themselves up in knots trying to figure out how to make sense of such a being without simply rejecting the concept as preposterous.

Reference: The Impossibility of God

Yes, it doesn't make sense for such a God to exist so God must be different than that.

 

[Copernicus]

Yes, it doesn't make sense for such a God to exist so God must be different than that.

Right. Or else not exist at all.

 

[Trailblazer]

You are dodging the issue, but you know that you need to address it at some point. God judges people for their behavior. How does that make sense? Does he believe that they could have done something other than what they did? He comes off as the carpenter who blames the hammer for hitting his thumb.

God judges people for their behavior because God knows that they could have done something other than what they did, since people have free will to choose.....
It is for the same reason that courts of law judge human behavior.

 

[Nakosis]

Right. Or else not exist at all.

You are certainly free to believe that.
Unless we are both wrong. In which case we are both going to pay.

 

[Trailblazer]

Yes, it doesn't make sense for such a God to exist so God must be different than that.

Either that or some people humans do not understand what omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence entails.
I am voting for the second option. The arrogance of some people is beyond incredible. They think they know more than God about 'what God should do' in order to earn omnibenevolence.

 

[firedragon]

Hard determinists are incompatibilists. That is, they are determinists who believe that free will is incompatible with determinism and therefore not a valid concept. I am what one might call a soft determinist. That is, I believe that free will can be defined in a way that is perfectly compatible with determinism, but only because we cannot know the inevitable outcome of our choices. From our limited perspective, the future is undetermined, even if it is determined from a godlike perspective. God is imagined to know the future. Human beings do not.

Now I did not respond directly to your question, because it was too poorly worded to merit a yes or no response. I responded to what I think you meant by "it's hard determinism". The problem is that the antecedent of your pronoun "it's" is far from clear to me. Are you saying that "God's transcended knowledge" is itself "hard determinism"? My answer to that would be "no", but nobody argues that it is. So I wonder why you asked it, if that is what you were asking.

Rather than stating the obvious and resorting to adhominem, why not try and respond to the OP?

 

[Koldo]

Now I did not respond directly to your question, because it was too poorly worded to merit a yes or no response. I responded to what I think you meant by "it's hard determinism". The problem is that the antecedent of your pronoun "it's" is far from clear to me. Are you saying that "God's transcended knowledge" is itself "hard determinism"? My answer to that would be "no", but nobody argues that it is. So I wonder why you asked it, if that is what you were asking.

Do you know what is worse than ignorance? Misunderstading the subject and yet presuming to understand it properly. This is what has been going on since the very first page of this topic and what eventually lead you trying to figure out what the heck that question you were trying to answer was even supposed to mean. How do we fix this though?

 

[firedragon]

Do you know what is worse than ignorance? Misunderstading the subject and yet presuming to understand it properly. This is what has been going on since the very first page of this topic and what eventually lead you trying to figure out what the heck that question you were trying to answer was even supposed to mean. How do we fix this though?

you could fix it by quoting a well established Atheist philosopher who is truly immature enough to say say that God's knowledge dimities free0will logically.

 

[Copernicus]

let me define free-will for you.

• Philosophical Definition: Free will is the ability of agents to make choices free from certain kinds of constraints. The principal of free will has implications for ethics, law, and religion. In philosophy, it contrasts with determinism, which holds that all events, including moral choices, are determined by previously existing causes.
• Secular Definition: In a secular or atheistic framework, free will is seen as a product of complex neural processes and emergent phenomena within the brain that allow individuals to assess situations, deliberate, and make decisions.

Thanks. It looks like you copied that text from something you found on the internet, but you provide no source. The philosophical definition is fine with me, but bear in mind that not all philosophers believe it is incompatible with determinism. For example, see compatibilism. The "Secular Definition" is not really a definition of free will, since many, if not most, compatibilists are atheists. Compatibilists argue that incompatibilists such as libertarian free will advocates and hard determinists simply have an unusual concept of what people ordinarily mean by the expression free will. That is, compatibilists argue over how to define free will, not that determinism is wrong. There is no single "secular or atheistic" definition of free will. Your "secular definition" confuses determinism with incompatibilism.

So how in the world does God's knowledge demise free-will?

Normally, demise is not used as a verb, but I get what you mean. The answer is that God's foreknowledge does not cancel out our free will, because our free will only makes sense from the perspective of agents that are ignorant of future outcomes. Hence, they have to guess at those outcomes and make their choices accordingly. The freedom in free will has to do with whether the agent feels in control of its own actions and that its intentions were carried out in accordance with its will. God's perspective is different, because God already knows every choice that humans will make before they make it. It's not so much that human free will is cancelled out by God's knowledge as it is that God's behavior in judging humans like a human parent or legal authority is unfair and pointless. If he didn't want people to disobey him, then he should not have created them in the first place.

mate. you have not understood the OP.

I guess you think that we are mates, which is OK, I guess. I suppose it's an improvement over being called "dude" or "brother".

My only reply to this repetitive demand is that I think I understood the OP as well as anyone could. It was not well-written, and that may be part of the problem. You think that you said things clearly, but your language did not reflect that clarity in my mind. So reading the OP over and over will not help. You clarifying your position would.

Rather than stating the obvious and resorting to adhominem, why not try and respond to the OP?

Again, you react to my post without responding to what I actually said. My reaction to you is that you should reread what you quoted me saying and then respond to that. My criticism of the language in your OP was not an ad hominem. It was a request that you clarify the content of the OP if you think I and others have misunderstood it. I'm not the only one that you have commanded to go back and reread the OP. That should be a clue to you that the OP isn't perfect.

Do you know what is worse than ignorance? Misunderstading the subject and yet presuming to understand it properly. This is what has been going on since the very first page of this topic and what eventually lead you trying to figure out what the heck that question you were trying to answer was even supposed to mean. How do we fix this though?

Normally, one would point out the source of the misunderstanding and ask for clarification. That is exactly how I have responded to the OP.

 

[muhammad_isa]

No, it can not be shown by any scientific and mathematical analysis, because the main premises of the any such equation, that is, the existence of God and also his creation of space-time and omniscience, can not be proven.

That is totally irrelevant.
Steven Hawking talked about the possibility of multiverses, so do you reject his theoretical
ideas too?

Perhaps you are not scientifically minded .. nevermind.

 

[Copernicus]

This conversation is going to go on for quite a while, but I am preparing for a trip out of town for a few weeks. Hence, I will need to withdraw and finish preparing. Also, I'll have limited opportunity to respond or follow up in the next few weeks.

 

[Copernicus]

That is totally irrelevant.
Steven Hawking talked about the possibility of multiverses, so do you reject his theoretical
ideas too?

Perhaps you are not scientifically minded .. nevermind.

This is something of an argument from authority. Hawking was a physicist who speculated about a lot of things, multiverses being one of them. It was a speculation, not a theory, because the speculative claim is not one that can be verified or falsified. It was not what one would call a scientific conclusion, either.

 

[wellwisher]

God judges people for their behavior because God knows that they could have done something other than what they did, since people have free will to choose.....
It is for the same reason that courts of law judge human behavior.

If we had only determinism, we would be automatons. An automaton has a built in program, that makes it predictable. Natural instinct is similar to that, in that if we know the natural behavior of any animal species; its program, we also know what it will do in various situations, even before it acts. The Koala Bear will chose and climb a eucalyptus tree. His instinctive program has predefined logic steps and by knowing this and by watching and learning, you can see its logical future in given situations.

What free will does is allow one to make choices that deviate from the instinctive program. This distinction is why the Bible goes from paradise to a harsh reality via Adam and Eve. Paradise is connected to not having to plan or worry about the future, since you are preprogramed; by natural determinism, to do what it needed, when needed, as a natural human. This takes away a lot of potential pressure and worry due to having to make choices. One does not have to worry what to wear or eat or even say, today, if the program chooses for you. It is like Mother Nature caring for you, her little smiling baby.

The way humans are able to make choices, apart from their natural instinctive program or human nature; free will, is because the human brain evolved a secondary center of consciousness. Humans have two centers of consciousness. The inner self was first and is common to all animals has the natural program for the human animal that evolved over eons as part of God's natural creation and is written on our human DNA.

That is the litmus test of God's will and choice; natural automaton program. The ego or the newer secondary center is based on learned knowledge from outside; cultural and environmental. We have the internal natural program; innate, as well as external programs that the ego learns from culture and its own choices. These do not always match and can be a blends of choice and determinism.

As a good example, if you compare human babies and small children, from around the world, baby and child development is very similar independent of culture. They eat, cry and poop. They learn to stand and walk. They have a variety of cries for different needs and wants. They are very natural and have an active imagination. They learn language like a sponge. They may even have an imaginary friend, which is connected to an inner self projection. Although the imaginary friend is fine for a small child, in most cultures it becomes taboo or subject to shame after a certain age and needs to be repressed. The inner self and natural human instinct is also lost with childhood; repressed but not shut off. Unless you become as chidden; led by the inner self program, you cannot enter heaven or paradise.

As the developing childhood ego; secondary, learns from their family and external cultural world; school, what started out very similar and predictable becomes as different as night and day based on culture and circumstances. That new cultural determinism is based on cultural education, exercising will and choice to deviate from the natural program. A rebel may even buck cultural determinism; cultural superego, with will and other choices, such as from a different cultural super ego; change political party or move to a new country and culture.

In my experience, the various religions of the world are more concerned with the inner self, while secular culture works the ego. Jesus refers to the inner man and outer man as two opposing world views. The inner man is the internal innate natural program and the externally man is th ego and learned program. The internal man is seen as higher; enlightenment. The reason it is higher is the inner self uses the mainframe part of the brain since it connects consciousness to body. We have about 30 trillion cells in the human body with nerve endings near most of them. This massive data is processed constantly integrating mind, body with the sensory environment and internal ego and inner self thought processing of conscious and subliminal data.

Evolution is such that the next step appear to be for the ego to gain more access to the main frame; inner self. With that access comes more responsibility, which is what is taught by most religions. It blends the needs of the ego and inner self with the inner self first; inner man.

 

[Nakosis]

Either that or some people humans do not understand what omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence entails.
I am voting for the second option. The arrogance of some people is beyond incredible. They think they know more than God about 'what God should do' in order to earn omnibenevolence.

Which is why I think it better to not have any beliefs about God. I'd think it's most likely they'd be wrong.