Omniscience + Creator = No Free Will

[OmarKhayyam]

"It just seems that your god's omniscience turns on and off like a water faucet, as it suits your conclusions."

And that IS the basic argument. When cornered (as our theist has been) like ALL theists his response is essentially, "God has both the right and the power to do what he likes. And his doing so is good. QED."

The mythology asserts that god has some vast master plan laid down "before the foundation of the world" and all events will ultimately fulfill that plan.

But we are free to do as we will and our actions have NO effect on that plan.

Of course, how obvious.:sarcastic

 

[Brotownious'_87]

If god existed and were an omniscient creator then I contend we have no free will. God would know the future course of any creation by its omniscience. Thus, in the act of creation god determined the future course of that creation. Because god created, and knew the future course of that creation from ‘before’ (doesn’t make much sense but you get the idea) it created, we cannot have free will.

Discuss.

maybe god specifically designed the end, then precisely designed the begining in such a way, just to watch us destroy ourselves for his own sic sence of pleasure .

or even maybe humans are gods" dirty little secret " that he cant wait to get rid of by givin us "free will".

I'm jus sayin....

 

[Dunemeister]

Not in the slightest. Causation is a relationship between an antecedent and a consequent event wherein the consequent would not occur unless the antecedent had. The word "inexorably" stands.

We still don't have determinism, though, unless you assume ahead of any argument that the initial conditions determine the actions of the agents. If that's so, we're back with logical determinism, which isn't a problem just for Christianity.

You've been accused of verificationism, but you deny it. Nevertheless, you have never proposed any alternative explanation for why you think propositions about the future cannot have truth values.

Of course I have. I won't rehearse it again. Go back and read.

Precisely. They describe conventional usage. As far as I can tell (and I'm just an ignorant linguist), we ought to use words in such a way that others will understand their meanings. If you choose not to, don't be surprised if others refuse to play along.

And I may be an ignorant non-linguist, but it seems to me that conventionally, we may use terms incorrectly, or there may be a more precise way of using language not taken into account by conventional usage. When doing philosophy, for instance, "entail" means something it doesn't in conventional usage. Likewise, "omniscience" might mean something conventionally, but when we get down to philosophical brass tacks, we may find that the conventional use is inadequate or misleading. Thus for those philosophical purposes, a more precise laying out of the term is necessary.

Besides, I haven't changed the meaning of the word. An omniscient being knows all true propositions. You can't know a false proposition. And if there are propositions without truth value, God doesn't know them, either. So if propositions about the future have no truth values, God doesn't know them either. You operate with a definition of omnisicence where future-directed propositions are assumed to be known. What that means is that you're assuming something about future-directed propositions; this doesn't mean that I'm doing violence to the concept of omniscience.

I would expect nothing less from an omnipotent being. It just seems that your god's omniscience turns on and off like a water faucet, as it suits your conclusions.

Well apparently I have my philosophical faults and you have yours.

I still haven't seen the force of this "hence" mentioned earlier, unless you beg the question.

 

[logician]

maybe god specifically designed the end, then precisely designed the begining in such a way, just to watch us destroy ourselves for his own sic sence of pleasure .

or even maybe humans are gods" dirty little secret " that he cant wait to get rid of by givin us "free will".

I'm jus sayin....

Or much more likely gods are concoctions of our imaginations, and we have total free will within the contraints of our environment.

 

[Copernicus]

That seems a fairly broad understanding of causation...

For instance... if Jack the Ripper had never been born, then he couldn't have murdered the people he did... therefore Jack the Ripper's great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents caused the murders of Jack the Ripper?

If Jack had not caused the murders, then how can you deduce that his ancestors were part of a causal chain? Remember that the ancestors must somehow be considered a part of an antecedent event such that the consequent would not happen unless the antecedent had. In any case, Jack would have no great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents if he had never been born, would he?

 

[Copernicus]

We still don't have determinism, though, unless you assume ahead of any argument that the initial conditions determine the actions of the agents. If that's so, we're back with logical determinism, which isn't a problem just for Christianity.

We certainly agree that determinism is a problem for Christianity. That is why you have been trying so hard to weasel out of it.

Of course I have. I won't rehearse it again. Go back and read.

Well, that is kind of you. In return, I won't rehearse all of the refutations that I've made to your posts. Just go back and read.

And I may be an ignorant non-linguist, but it seems to me that conventionally, we may use terms incorrectly, or there may be a more precise way of using language not taken into account by conventional usage...

I think that you need to define the basis of "incorrect" usage, if you reject the idea that convention defines correct usage. I've got nothing against creating precise language, but I do against equivocation.

When doing philosophy, for instance, "entail" means something it doesn't in conventional usage...

No, "entail" has ordinary language senses for philosophers, too. It has a precise conventional definition in logic. You cannot treat every conversation that uses the word "entail" as if it could only have its conventional sense as defined by logicians.

Likewise, "omniscience" might mean something conventionally, but when we get down to philosophical brass tacks, we may find that the conventional use is inadequate or misleading. Thus for those philosophical purposes, a more precise laying out of the term is necessary.

Philosophers have debated omniscience for centuries, and I see nothing at all wrong with the idea that omniscience includes knowledge of all events--past, present, and future. I agree that time-limited human beings seem not to have knowledge of the future, but God has always been thought of as a being that did have knowledge of the future. The existence of prophecies in biblical mythology supports my point. Also, you have opened the barn door to determinism by admitting that God knows the future when his "omnipotence is in view", whatever that means.

Besides, I haven't changed the meaning of the word. An omniscient being knows all true propositions. You can't know a false proposition. And if there are propositions without truth value, God doesn't know them, either...

However, your weak claim that future propositions lack truth values has been thoroughly discredited. Either you will come to acknowledge that or you will not. BTW, any logic 101 student can construct a truth table for the previous sentence. I've already given examples of statements that lack a truth value (e.g. "The present king of France is bald").

So if propositions about the future have no truth values, God doesn't know them either. You operate with a definition of omnisicence where future-directed propositions are assumed to be known...

Not only do claims about the future have truth values, but we understand God to know what the future will be. That's pretty clear from just reading the Bible.

What that means is that you're assuming something about future-directed propositions; this doesn't mean that I'm doing violence to the concept of omniscience.

I am not just assuming something about future-directed propositions. I have explained the basis for that thinking, and we have seen references that explain why most philosophers believe that. Your position has been thoroughly discredited, yet you go on. Argumentum ad nauseam.

I still haven't seen the force of this "hence" mentioned earlier, unless you beg the question.

Take your own advice. Go back and read...

 

[Mister Emu]

Remember that the ancestors must somehow be considered a part of an antecedent event such that the consequent would not happen unless the antecedent had.

Had the ancestors not had the children they had Jack the Ripper could not have murdered the people he did...

 

[Dunemeister]

Had the ancestors not had the children they had Jack the Ripper could not have murdered the people he did...

If things were different, they just wouldn't be the same.

 

[Copernicus]

Had the ancestors not had the children they had Jack the Ripper could not have murdered the people he did...

Indeed. Your point?

 

[VinDino11]

If god existed and were an omniscient creator then I contend we have no free will. God would know the future course of any creation by its omniscience. Thus, in the act of creation god determined the future course of that creation. Because god created, and knew the future course of that creation from ‘before’ (doesn’t make much sense but you get the idea) it created, we cannot have free will.

Discuss.

Free Will exists!!!

Free Will = Destiny

When you come to a fork in the road of your life, you are destined to make a decision, and whatever decision you make (free will) your destiny lay there.

Thank-you for reading...

 

[Willamena]

Actually, I have observed causality in action, as has every other living being.

Do you consider Hume's distinction --that we observe effects, not causes --to be significant?

 

[Mister Emu]

Indeed. Your point?

Under your earlier statement, would that not relay cause to Jack the Ripper's ancestors?

 

[Falvlun]

Thinking further, the laws of nature must be deterministic if created by an omniscient creator (looks like the title is accurate afterall), because an omniscient creator could not, by definition, create anything nearly like randomness, and no supernatural force could occur that the omniscient creator didn't know about. Therefore, an omniscient creator must know the future with absolute certainty, so free will cannot exist if an omniscient creator exists.

I'm still not seeing why the Creator part matters. The crux of the problem-- a future that exists (and is therefore able to be known by an omniscient being)-- remains, regardless of whether the omniscient being is the Creator or not. All the Creator premise does is show who got to make the choices.*

*Actually, I was just thinking about this: If God is omniscient, meaning he knows the future, then wouldn't that follow that he saw himself in the future creating the universe in precisely the fasion in which he would create it? So perhaps even God doesn't have free-will.

 

[Falvlun]

And, BTW, note that Aristotle's argument (when converted to a 20th century argument about "truth values") actually abstracts away from the semantics of the sentence. A statement about the future becomes a "tenseless" proposition, which is then examined outside the context of a speech act. Approached in that fashion, one invalidates the presuppositional context (what Austin referred to as "felicity conditions"). Claims based on false or invalid presuppositions do lack truth value. The philosophical problem, not surprisingly, seems to have arisen from a fundamental misanalysis of natural language.

I must admit, I have absolutely no concept of what you are talking about here. A tenseless proposition? I won't make you explain it, unless you want to. Suffice it to say, I understood the article enough to see why it is problematic to claim that future propositions do not have a truth-value.

My one question was that you said a false presupposition lacks a truth-value. Perhaps I misunderstood what a truth-value is, but I was under the impression that a truth-value was simply the assignation of "true" or "false". So, then, "false" would be the proposition's truth-value.

Yes, this is a well-known philosophical position in free-will debates that is called compatibilism. That is, in fact, my own position and that of a great many modern philosophers (e.g. Daniel Dennett).

For those who might not have read the third proposal in the article, I'll reproduce it here:

The truth of propositions does not 'make' events happen (occur).

Consider: My wearing a short-sleeved shirt today [Oct. 28] is what makes (the proposition expressed by) "Swartz is wearing a short-sleeved shirt on Oct. 28, 1997" true. It is not the other way round. Logical fatalism confuses the semantic (truth-making) order. It makes it appear that the truth of a proposition 'causes' an event to occur. It is, rather, that the event's occurring tomorrow 'makes' (but does not cause) the proposition to be true today. This is not 'backwards causation': the relation between an event and the truth of the proposition describing that event is not a causal relation whatever. It is a semantic relation.

and

I personally think that Proposal Three is the best (and dare I say?, the correct) reply to the problem of Logical Determinism. Logical Determinism may appear to pose a threat to the existence of free will, but that is only because it misrepresents the nature of the relation between a true proposition and the state-of-affairs in the world that accounts for that proposition's being true. It is the way the world was, is, and will be that account for propositions being true. It is not the other way round.

If you accept this proposal, then why do you also hold the position that God's omniscience denies humans free-will? It seems that this is the traditional defense of theists: Knowledge of an event does not cause the event to occur. Thus, humans can have free-will, even though God already knows what they will do.

Compatibilism asserts that determism and free-will are compatible. This is so, compatibilists claim, because nothing can be uncaused, but causes themselves do not deny free-will: ie, I choose chocolate icecream, because I desired chocolate icecream. My desire caused my choice, but because my choice was based upon my own desire, then it is free-will. Free-will is only compromised when another agent forces you to make a specific choice (ie, someone will shoot me if I didn't choose chocolate icecream.)

I do not see a clear parallel between Proposal 3 and Compatibilism. (Yes, they both claim that free-will and knowledge of the future can be compatible, but they appear to solve it in two different ways.) Could you clarify?

Additionally, if you accept compatiblism, I again do not see why this would change in the presence of an omniscient God... even if he were the Creator.

 

[themadhair]

Additionally, if you accept compatiblism, I again do not see why this would change in the presence of an omniscient God... even if he were the Creator.

If you, as an omniscient being, set a course of events in motion knowing how those events would turn out then it was you that determined that set of events. I don’t hold omniscient, in and of itself, sufficient to deny free will. But when an omniscient being has determined my actions in an act of creation then things are somewhat different.

 

[Copernicus]

Under your earlier statement, would that not relay cause to Jack the Ripper's ancestors?

Absolutely. But it would not relay responsibility to them, because there were other causes that contributed to the future events. Causal chains can be very complex. My definition of a causal event was very generic and did not include the concept of responsibility, which is an interesting concept under determinism. If our choices are fully determined, what does it mean to claim that people are responsible for their behavior? In my view, responsibility only makes sense if one buys into determinism.

 

[Copernicus]

I must admit, I have absolutely no concept of what you are talking about here. A tenseless proposition? I won't make you explain it, unless you want to. Suffice it to say, I understood the article enough to see why it is problematic to claim that future propositions do not have a truth-value.

The explanation can get complex, but basically one needs to distinguish between formal languages such as logical notation and natural languages such as English. Natural language expressions are "situated". That is, they are embedded in the spatio-temporal context of a speech act. Every natural language has clause structure built up around verbs, which typically (but not always) carry some kind of marking for tense. Propositions differ from assertions/statements in that they are typically "unsituated" in a spatio-temporal speech context. So talking about "future propositions" is a bit dicey in that it fuzzes over the distinction between assertions (i.e. speech acts) and propositions. That becomes important when one is discussing presuppositions, because formal languages usually have no way to express presuppositions. They break out presuppositions as propositions. One could characterize them as background assertions, but no such concept really exists in a formal language.

My one question was that you said a false presupposition lacks a truth-value. Perhaps I misunderstood what a truth-value is, but I was under the impression that a truth-value was simply the assignation of "true" or "false". So, then, "false" would be the proposition's truth-value.

I may have been imprecise, but what I really meant was that an assertion lacks a truth value when a presupposition it depends on is false. For example, the assertion "The present King of France is bald" relies on the presupposition that there exists a present King of France. When that presupposition is false, you cannot assign a truth value of "true" or "false" to the sentence. Ideal language philosophers such as Bertrand Russell wanted to construct a formal language that would not permit such claims. Hence, the logical form of that sentence would need to include the proposition that the King of France presently exists. If the entire assertion is translated into symbolic logical notation, one can assign a truth value of "false" because there are no longer any cases of presupposition failure. Note that such examples of truth-valueless sentences are nothing like claims about the future, which have truth values. Such claims do not presuppose that the event being predicted is true at the time of utterance. They assert that it is true at a point of reference in the future. That assertion may be true or false, depending on how the future turns out.

If you accept this proposal, then why do you also hold the position that God's omniscience denies humans free-will? It seems that this is the traditional defense of theists: Knowledge of an event does not cause the event to occur. Thus, humans can have free-will, even though God already knows what they will do.

WanderedOff explained why theists mischaracterize the argument when they make it a claim about causation. Themadhair added the assertion of "God created the universe" in order to get causation into the discussion. I think that he was right to do that, because it grounds this thread in the essential religious claim--that God caused everything to happen. Note this: humans have free will from their own perspective. The discussion is not a denial of human free will in that sense, since ignorance of the future is a necessary ingredient of free will. It is a denial that humans have free will from God's perspective. After all, it is God who is taking free will as essential to his act of judging us. But God cannot judge us as good or bad if we lack free will from his perspective. What all this ultimately comes down to is that, if an omniscient being could exist, then that being could not logically create other beings with free will. To do so would compromise its omniscience.

Compatibilism asserts that determism and free-will are compatible. This is so, compatibilists claim, because nothing can be uncaused, but causes themselves do not deny free-will: ie, I choose chocolate icecream, because I desired chocolate icecream. My desire caused my choice, but because my choice was based upon my own desire, then it is free-will. Free-will is only compromised when another agent forces you to make a specific choice (ie, someone will shoot me if I didn't choose chocolate icecream.)

I would simply say that free will is a fully-determined process. It is not "free" in the sense that it is uncaused. It is free in the sense that I retain the power to choose to do what I most want to do. I just don't have ultimate control over what I most want to do. That is determined by conditions in my brain at the time that I decide to act. The concept of retribution only makes sense if it is embedded in a deterministic world, where fear of retribution may cause me to choose not to do what I might otherwise choose to do. Hell and heaven exist in the minds of Christians, because they believe that desire for heaven and fear of hell will cause people to behave as their religious doctrine dictates. That is a very deterministic way of looking at things.

 

[Copernicus]

Do you consider Hume's distinction --that we observe effects, not causes --to be significant?

The answer depends on what you mean by "significant".

 

[Willamena]

The answer depends on what you mean by "significant".

Having significance for you, in this case in terms of the assertion made that you've observed causality.

 

[converted]

The bible is full of examples when prophets were told or given visions of things that were to come. Getting an advance peek into the future does not mean that it must happen. God knows us perfectly because we are His spirit children and He knows how each of us will act in whatever circumstances we experience. That does not mean that He makes us act the way He knows we will act.

Just as we all know that if we drop an object it will fall to the ground unless there is something different from our previous experience. Just because we know the object will fall to the ground, our knowledge of the law of gravity does not make the object fall to the ground, gravity still makes the object fall to the ground.