Omniscience + Creator = No Free Will

[cottage]

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Originally Posted by cottage http://www.religiousforums.com/foru...ence-creator-no-free-will-26.html#post1601410
Hume is not making a claim that there is no law of causation; he is saying outright that there isn’t one!

Copernicus: I have always believed that outright saying something was making a claim, but there maybe is some fine distinction of meaning that I am failing to see here. But I think that you are getting too hung up in a very specialized meaning of "law" here. Causation exists in our reality, whether you want to call it a "law" or not, and his argument does just boil down to a discussion of the limitations of knowledge.
As you are quite aware, in the matter of the supposed law, Hume was stating what is self-evident, which is that it isn’t logically necessary. And it is ‘our reality’ that is being questioned together with the means we use to understand it.
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Copernicus: We are in violent agreement that Hume was an empiricist. Perhaps our discussion has gotten too side-tracked on how to describe just what Hume believed. I originally dismissed his argument as relevant to my earlier remarks, and I am still inclined to do so. It doesn't bother me that inductive proofs are not deductive or that we cannot ultimately know the truth of empirical claims (synthetic truths) in the same sense that we can know analytical truths. In principle, omniscience includes knowledge of the ultimate truth. For God, there is a Law of Causation. That is what gives him omnipotence and omniscience.
Yes, if there is a Supreme Being, then of course causation will be logically necessary, which is where I part company with Hume.
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One can only observe the world one moment at a time, but Hume needed to make the conceptual distinction between data and information. Effects exist only at the level of interpreted data, i.e. information, so they cannot be observed any more than causes can. It is because of our intuition of causality--we are built to infer it--and our memories of associations between past events that we can call perceptions causes and effects in hindsight.
Yes! That is precisely Hume’s argument: a custom, learned through repeated instances and not a law or a necessary truth.

Copernicus: Not so fast. Hume appeared to be saying that we can observe effects, not causes. I was saying that effects are no different from causes. We "observe" both only in memory. Calling something an effect is to impose an interpretation on it. It is not something that just reduces to pure sensation.
I’m sorry but I don’t know what the point of your disagreement is here!
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We are contingent beings in a contingent world, where every particle of matter can be conceived to be annihilated. So to say, for example, the universe must exist, is a statement that can be denied, since the converse is not demonstrable; but to say a putative, necessarily existent Supreme Being is not the cause of contingent existence involves a contradiction...


Copernicus: We seem to be embedding ourselves in an Anselmian quagmire here. Look, the universe clearly does exist, and we are clearly capable of imagining counterfactual situations. And, if we can deny that the universe is necessary, we can certainly deny that God is necessary. The problem with scholasticism is that every argument mounted in favor of God also works to his disfavor. All you can conclude is that the universe might not have existed but for a being to create it. And that being might not have existed for yet another being to create it. Or...maybe the universe (aka physical reality) never was contingent on the existence of a creator. It just always existed. You can't get God by imagining him into existence.
First of all, it is an evident absurdity to propose an infinite regress, requiring a necessarily existent Supreme Being to answer for its existence to a further Supreme Being, and so on and so forth, as the first instance of the concept is also the last, where by definition any causal series must cease. Secondly, the temporal world (universe) is not necessary and is in a constant state of flux where nothing is unchanged or unchanging. Finite existence is not limited to such things as snowflakes and dinosaurs, but includes mountains, islands, continents, and all of life itself. So in addition to our being able to conceive the world to be non-existent, experience confirms that everything comprising the material world has a finite existence. What, then, is it that has always existed? Now, as you are aware, I’ve already made it perfectly clear that it doesn’t follow from the concept of a Necessary Being that such an entity necessarily exists (essence doesn’t entail existence). However, we can conceive the concept of an immutable, omnipotent, Supreme Being, creating and sustaining our contingent world. This isn’t defining the concept into existence; it is simply a logical proposition. We now compare this conception with another explanation: a world that is a contingent, ever changing and finite, yet somehow self-existent and self-sustaining!

 

[cottage]

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Omnipotence requires omniscience: subtract the latter from the former and you have an inferior Supreme Being, which is a contradiction.

Copernicus: I agree that omnipotence entails omniscience. I do not see the entailment as having anything to do with the concept of supremeness, which carries other baggage. I have always maintain that Christians have impoverished their concept of God by exalting him out of existence. It becomes possible to argue that the Christian god is an impossibility, which just makes other conceptions of gods that much more interesting.

I don’t know how we have suddenly got into the Christian God. I resolutely stick with the concept of Supreme Being, and yet seem to be constantly debating with theists who want weaken and undermine the concept in order to make it fit with their religious dogma, or atheists who wave away logical possibility for fear that it implies a worshipful deity.
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And the Supreme Being doesn’t reason from experience, trying make sense of reality, since the concept is reality itself, or ens realissimum (the most real) as Kant puts it. (I should add that the concept of Supreme Being does not belong exclusively to any religion, ‘God’ or an otherwise worshipful deity.)

Copernicus: I would certainly agree that God is an ideal. Plato is alive and well in the imagination. And we come back into violent agreement that God is conceived of as a being with absolute knowledge, whereas humans can only possess knowledge relative to experience. However, it is not necessarily the case that the concept of "knowledge" can be separated from experience, so it is legitimate to ask how a being without prior experiences can come to know, understand, or plan anything at all.

This is to argue from experience to the concept of Supreme Being, inferring that it must be like man. Experience is learning, discovering, and applying the ways of the world. But the omniscient Supreme Being doesn’t learn or discover anything about the world: it already knows – obviously! And neither does the entity plan, or come to understand anything, since planning and coming to understand a thing is to reason, and the omnipotent, omniscient entity is reason.
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Copernicus: God is really an ideal human, and Christians make all kinds of claims about his limited human qualities at the same time that they deny the existence of those limitations. He is the most vulnerable invulnerable being that we can imagine. Look, he is just a father who sacrificed his only begotten son. That is a terrible thing to happen to a human being, isn't it? But can an omnipotent being sacrifice anything and still remain omnipotent?
The Christian God is just a belief system, full of contradictions.
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That depends on what you mean by "determine upon". I can resolve to do something and then change my mind. Is that the sense that you are thinking of? If I actually perform an action, then I have willed the action, unless, of course, my body is being teleoperated by an unknown agency. (If so, I hope that my controllers are Jedi mindmasters and not the Sith. )
I could perhaps have put it somewhat better. What I am saying here is that, for example, the act of walking doesn’t follow necessarily from the act of cognition ‘I will walk’. There is no necessary link between deciding or choosing to do a thing and the thing then actually happening according to our will. And experience confirms this for us – only too frequently.
‘Jedi mindmasters’, is that a belief system?

Copernicus: When you think "I will walk", you have made a decision only in the sense that you have added a new instruction to a plan. Making a resolution is doing something, so it is an act of will. Actually executing the plan is another type of decision. You can always decide not to carry out a plan. Let's not conflate two different types of decision. What you do is what your greatest desires force you to do. We are compelled to choose freely.


For the sake of this argument, will and resolution are nothing if not the same animal. The term ‘free will’ is meaningless where an intended action does not, or cannot, follow from the prior choice or the decision taken. A brain in a jar may have absolute free will, but it is of little use if it is limited only to its own thoughts. We may be free or, arguably, not free, to choose such-and-such, but our real limitations are evident in the marked difference between choice and outcome. So, the crucial question is this: assuming free will, in what specific way do our contingent choices confound the concept of Supreme Being?