Omniscience + Creator = No Free Will

[themadhair]

If that was not meant to counter my argument then why bring it up, what was your point?

It was simply making a comment. I didn’t intend for it to be perceived as a counter to your argument.

And I was actually arguing that future knowledge really isn't possible as the future hasn't happened yet, so how can it exist as knowledge.

If the above is assumed to be true then the OP is trivially invalidated since omniscience, a key premise, is falsified.

For the record, in case it wasn’t clear, I hold that all three premises central to the argument are false (god, omniscience and creator). I proposed the OP because I believe that three common assumptions made in religion (omniscience, creator, free will) are simply not logically compatible.

 

[MoonWater]

It was simply making a comment. I didn’t intend for it to be perceived as a counter to your argument.

My mistake then, I thought your comment was actually meant to serve a purpose.

If the above is assumed to be true then the OP is trivially invalidated since omniscience, a key premise, is falsified.

How so? I'm asking how the future can exist as knowledge when it hasn't happened yet. If the future hasn't happened yet then it doesn't exist so how can anything be known about it? We can hypothesize and speculate about it just as we can with unicorns or elves and other such things that don't actually exist, but we can't actually "know" the future as the future does not yet exist. If the future cannot be knowledge in someone's mind then it would stand to reason that "knowing the future" is not a necessary trait of omniscience.

I'm not trying to falsify omniscience, I'm just trying to argue why one needs to "know the future" in order to be omniscient.

Now are you going to address my questions about how the future can exist as knowledge when it doesn't yet exist?

For the record, in case it wasn’t clear, I hold that all three premises central to the argument are false (god, omniscience and creator). I proposed the OP because I believe that three common assumptions made in religion (omniscience, creator, free will) are simply not logically compatible.

 

[themadhair]

I'm not trying to falsify omniscience, I'm just trying to argue why one needs to "know the future" in order to be omniscient.

If one doesn’t know the future then one doesn’t have absolute knowledge and is thus not omniscient. I can’t put any simpler than that.

The rest of your comment seems to rest on the above point so I don’t the reason to address it until this part is ironed out.

 

[MoonWater]

If one doesn’t know the future then one doesn’t have absolute knowledge and is thus not omniscient. I can’t put any simpler than that.

The rest of your comment seems to rest on the above point so I don’t the reason to address it until this part is ironed out.

I was using the word "know" for lack of a better term at the moment, I guess I should have made that clear(though I thought the quotes around the phrase and what I had said before would have made that clear enough). But you seem to not be getting the fact that I am arguing that the future cannot exist as knowledge as the future itself doesn't exist yet as it hasn't happened. If the future cannot exist as knowledge then it is not necessary for one to lets say "always be able to accurately predict 100% what will happen" in order to be omniscient.

But I grow tired of repeating myself, so let me know when your ready to actually address my argument rather than simply ignore it and take one line out of context let me know.

 

[themadhair]

But you seem to not be getting the fact that I am arguing that the future cannot exist as knowledge as the future itself doesn't exist yet as it hasn't happened.

I get that you are arguing for this. I just don’t think you can argue for this and not be contradicting the concept of omniscience. If one does not know the future then one has a gap in their knowledge. One who has a gap in their knowledge does not have absolute knowledge. One who does not have absolute knowledge isn’t omniscient by definition.

If the future cannot exist as knowledge then it is not necessary for one to lets say "always be able to accurately predict 100% what will happen" in order to be omniscient.

I repeat from my previous post and enlarge so you won’t miss it this time:
[size=+5] If one doesn’t know the future then one doesn’t have absolute knowledge and is thus not omniscient.[/size]

But I grow tired of repeating myself, so let me know when your ready to actually address my argument rather than simply ignore it and take one line out of context let me know.

Bye bye then. Until you realise what omniscience actually entails (from answers.com - Having total knowledge; knowing everything), and stop trying to tap dance around it, my response will pretty much be variants of the above.

 

[Mister Emu]

By knowing the future course of creation at the moment of creation means that god determined the future course of that creation.

We are debating this statement... you have not given sufficient reasoning that it must follow that a God who knows and creates must also determine...

 

[Mister Emu]

Until you realise what omniscience actually entails (from answers.com - Having total knowledge; knowing everything),

She is debating what "everything" means...

If one does not know the future then one has a gap in their knowledge

Only if knowledge of the future is possible... if God knows everything that there is to know, God is omniscient... I agree with you that it includes the future, but I disagree that a definition of omniscient must do so...

Now when coupled with omnipotent, it would make a stronger case for omniscience having to include future knowledge, but this thread is about omniscience and creating, not omnipotence...

 

[themadhair]

By knowing the future course of creation at the moment of creation means that god determined the future course of that creation.

We are debating this statement... you have not given sufficient reasoning that it must follow that a God who knows and creates must also determine...

Before god created it must know how any creation it chose to create would turn out. By choosing what to create, and knowing how that creation would develop, god has determined that creation’s development and robbed us of our free will. Can you elaborate on your objection to this line of reasoning?

She is debating what "everything" means...

I assumed that ‘everything’ meant ‘everything’. Am I wrong here?

if God knows everything that there is to know, God is omniscient... I agree with you that it includes the future, but I disagree that a definition of omniscient must do so...

I use omniscience to mean “knowing everything”, “having absolute knowledge”, “to be the set of knowledge of which every set of knowledge is a subset”, etc. This definition must include the future surely?

 

[Storm]

If one doesn’t know the future then one doesn’t have absolute knowledge and is thus not omniscient.

I disgree. The future can only be known if it already exists. If it's not "written," it can't be known and is not part of omniscience.

 

[Copernicus]

Before god created it must know how any creation it chose to create would turn out. By choosing what to create, and knowing how that creation would develop, god has determined that creation’s development and robbed us of our free will. Can you elaborate on your objection to this line of reasoning?

Just finished reading the entire thread up to this point. I applaud your consistency in trying to repeat the equation that is the thread title. Most of the debaters seem to keep wanting to restate it as "Omniscience = No Free Will" rather than "Omniscience + Creator = No Free Will". I agree completely with you that an omniscient creator is logically incapable of creating beings with free will. Most Christians (albeit not all) will admit that God cannot do logically impossible things. Creating beings with free will would be logically precluded by God's omniscience. Any way you look at it, God is an extremely limited being because of his omnimax properties. Another thing that he cannot do is make himself ignorant of any event in his created universe.

I also like your refrain that God created us as if we were robots. That is another excellent point. By the way most defenders of "free will" have argued here, robots actually do have free will. Their human creators invent them in such a way that the robots actually make the decisions. Indeed, most of us who work with robots do not even know every move that their creations will make, but God actually knows all the moves that his robots will make.

 

[Mister Emu]

Can you elaborate on your objection to this line of reasoning?

Certainly...

It seems you assume that God used His foreknowledge to choose the best creation development, I don't... I think His knowledge of our future exists because we do, and our actions do. If we didn't do something, God doesn't have knowledge of us doing it, because that knowledge doesn't exist, because we didn't do it...

That is I don't think God experimented, creating things "Oh no, that didn't work, better start over"...

I assumed that ‘everything’ meant ‘everything’. Am I wrong here?

Sigh... but you have to determine what is a thing, to be a part of everything... if the future doesn't exist, it is not a thing yet, and thus not necessarily a part of everything... As a prior poster noted, Unicorns do not exist, does omniscience cover their gestation period? They don't exist, thus knowledge of a supposed gestation period does not exist, thus omniscience need not cover it...

Future knowledge fall under the same parameters...

 

[Copernicus]

It seems you assume that God used His foreknowledge to choose the best creation development, I don't... I think His knowledge of our future exists because we do, and our actions do. If we didn't do something, God doesn't have knowledge of us doing it, because that knowledge doesn't exist, because we didn't do it...

But he would have knowledge of all the alternative choices that we could have made. Yet he still holds us all accountable for those choices, even knowing exactly how we would make them.

That is I don't think God experimented, creating things "Oh no, that didn't work, better start over"...

An omnipotent being does not have to experiment. Perhaps we really do live in the best of all possible worlds that Professor Pangloss imagined.

Sigh... but you have to determine what is a thing, to be a part of everything... if the future doesn't exist, it is not a thing yet, and thus not necessarily a part of everything... As a prior poster noted, Unicorns do not exist, does omniscience cover their gestation period? They don't exist, thus knowledge of a supposed gestation period does not exist, thus omniscience need not cover it...

Don't forget that it goes beyond just knowing all outcomes in the future. He actually chooses to create the reality in which those outcomes occur. From God's timeless perspective, we have no future. It is only from our perspective that future is mere potential and not actuality.

 

[Dunemeister]

[SIZE=+5]If one doesn’t know the future then one doesn’t have absolute knowledge and is thus not omniscient.[/SIZE]

Not necessarily. If propositions about the future have no truth value (a fairly popular philosophical position in contemporary literature), they can't be known, even by God. So not knowing them would be no bar against a claim that God is omniscient.

 

[themadhair]

I disgree. The future can only be known if it already exists. If it's not "written," it can't be known and is not part of omniscience.

Can you define what you mean by omniscience? A lot of people have taken issue with this but don’t seem to explain what they mean by omniscience.

It seems you assume that God used His foreknowledge to choose the best creation development, I don't...

I deliberately attempted to avoid using the word ‘choose’ for the entire thread. The one time I messed up and it slipped through it gets picked up despite not actually being part of the argument. And I reject outright that I, in any way, implied god chose ‘best creation development’.

I think His knowledge of our future exists because we do, and our actions do.

I think you have it backwards here. God, through omniscience and creating, determined our actions rather than the other way about. But this objection doesn’t seem to be addressing the argument.

That is I don't think God experimented, creating things "Oh no, that didn't work, better start over"...

Where did imply this to be the case??????

As a prior poster noted, Unicorns do not exist, does omniscience cover their gestation period?

The flaw here is that the future will come to exist (hence the whole foreknowledge) whereas the same is not true for unicorns (unless they do exist elsewhere or come to exist in which case the objection is trivially false).

They don't exist, thus knowledge of a supposed gestation period does not exist, thus omniscience need not cover it...

Future knowledge fall under the same parameters...

See above.

 

[themadhair]

Not necessarily.

Yes necessarily.

If propositions about the future have no truth value (a fairly popular philosophical position in contemporary literature), they can't be known, even by God.

Then omniscience isn’t a valid concept because there would be things that cannot be known. I really don’t buy your attempt to avoid contradicting omniscience while portraying the future as being unknowable.

So not knowing them would be no bar against a claim that God is omniscient.

I disagree. That something cannot be known to god renders god not omniscient. I can’t put it in any simpler terms.

 

[Storm]

Can you define what you mean by omniscience? A lot of people have taken issue with this but don’t seem to explain what they mean by omniscience.

"All-knowing." Which does not include information that doesn't exist.

 

[themadhair]

"All-knowing." Which does not include information that doesn't exist.

I really don’t follow. If there are facts that are not known, such as what time I will wake up tomorrow, then that isn’t all-knowing. I really really don’t follow this and I don’t think a one-liner like the above, which doesn’t make sense to me, is going to help.

 

[Storm]

I really don’t follow. If there are facts that are not known, such as what time I will wake up tomorrow, then that isn’t all-knowing. I really really don’t follow this and I don’t think a one-liner like the above, which doesn’t make sense to me, is going to help.

"All information" does not include information which does not exist. I don't know how I can make it any simpler.

Are you also of the opinion that being unable to mak a square circle negates omnipotence?

 

[CarlinKnew]

If god exists outside of the universe and therefore outside of time, the future of the universe already exists for god.

 

[Storm]

Maybe, but how can we be sure either way?