Omniscience + Creator = No Free Will

[logician]

"Getting an advance peek into the future does not mean that it must happen."

Then it doesn't mean anything.

 

[Copernicus]

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

In that context, no. Bear in mind that the word "effect" presupposes causality. We cannot categorize events as effects unless we have also observed causes.

 

[Copernicus]

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.

The whole purpose of prophecy-fulfillment was to gain credibility for the religion. The Hebrew religious tradition was not the only one that made prophecies, but the validation of Jesus as Jewish messiah required that he fulfill certain prophecies. That seems to have been the common process for all the other claimants to messiahood, as well.

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.

I think that all or most parties in this thread have agreed that mere knowledge does not cause anything to happen. But that argument is a straw man, since nobody has claimed that omniscience causes anything at all to happen. The point made in the OP was that God had perfect knowledge of the consequences of his creation. Therefore, he could not, in principle, create beings with free will from his (God's) perspective. Free will presupposes that the future is uncertain for the individuals who possess it. We time-limited humans are free to do as we choose, but we are not free to decide what we desire to do, only to follow the desire that supersedes all others. We see ourselves as having free will, because we and others do not fully know what we will do until we actually make the decision to act. None of us knows the future, but God does.

A few people in the thread have been toying with the idea that God could lack absolute certainty of the future and still lay claim to being "omniscient". Such a version of God would have to gain knowledge of events as they unfolded but could make very good guesses about future behavior. In that respect, he would be just like a human being, but better at it, of course.

 

[cottage]

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

Yes, I do! Wasn't it something like: B is always seen to follow A, and that the mind, though custom, wants to understand this apparent conjuction as a necessary connecton: if A, then B? )( Dunno. Long time since I've studied Hume in any depth, but it is very difficult to find fault with him, as I remember.

 

[Copernicus]

Yes, I do! Wasn't it something like: B is always seen to follow A, and that the mind, though custom, wants to understand this apparent conjuction as a necessary connecton: if A, then B? )( Dunno. Long time since I've studied Hume in any depth, but it is very difficult to find fault with him, as I remember.

Be careful not to confuse causation with material implication. Causation can be very complex. For example, there are the matters of force and intelligent agency to consider. If I force something to happen, then there is a predisposition that it not happen. If I let something happen, then I have refrained from stopping an event that is predisposed to occur.

 

[cottage]

Be careful not to confuse causation with material implication. Causation can be very complex. For example, there are the matters of force and intelligent agency to consider. If I force something to happen, then there is a predisposition that it not happen. If I let something happen, then I have refrained from stopping an event that is predisposed to occur.

That is to assume there is such a thing as causation, the very point that Hume was making (above)!

 

[Copernicus]

That is to assume there is such a thing as causation, the very point that Hume was making (above)!

I don't think that Hume was trying to deny causation. He was making a point about the limitations of knowledge. If we did not assume causation, then nothing in our lives would make any sense at all. The fact is that causation, like temporal precedence, requires the assumption of a state of affairs at two distinct points in time. Sometimes we infer effects (consequents) without actually observing causes (antecedents) and vice versa.

 

[cottage]

I don't think that Hume was trying to deny causation. He was making a point about the limitations of knowledge. If we did not assume causation, then nothing in our lives would make any sense at all. The fact is that causation, like temporal precedence, requires the assumption of a state of affairs at two distinct points in time. Sometimes we infer effects (consequents) without actually observing causes (antecedents) and vice versa.

Hume argued that the nature of our reasoning from matters of fact is founded on cause and effect, by which we can go beyond the immediate evidence of our senses. But the contrary of every matter of fact is possible because it can never imply a contradiction. He gave various examples such as the billiard ball that might fly directly upwards, instead of moving in the plane in which it was struck. The conclusion of Hume's mitigated scepticism was the commonsense one: that while no argument from the past is an argument for the future, we have little option but to proceed in that way during our everyday lives. However, it remains the case that no contradiction is implied in the statement 'There is no Law of Causation'.

 

[logician]

I certainly don't belive in predestination, or "everything happens for a reason". Life happens in pretty much a random fashion, with minor events able to effect major outcomes.

 

[Copernicus]

Hume argued that the nature of our reasoning from matters of fact is founded on cause and effect, by which we can go beyond the immediate evidence of our senses. But the contrary of every matter of fact is possible because it can never imply a contradiction. He gave various examples such as the billiard ball that might fly directly upwards, instead of moving in the plane in which it was struck. The conclusion of Hume's mitigated scepticism was the commonsense one: that while no argument from the past is an argument for the future, we have little option but to proceed in that way during our everyday lives. However, it remains the case that no contradiction is implied in the statement 'There is no Law of Causation'.

To me, that means that he was making a point about the limitations of our knowledge not that he was arguing against a "Law of Causation". In fact, he was arguing for the "commonsense" conclusion that we must operate within a realm of limited knowledge. God, unlike us, is imagined to operate in a realm of perfect knowledge. The argument here is over whether the idea of such a being collapses into absurdity when one also claims that he created beings with free will. I think it does.

 

[cottage]

Quote:
Originally Posted by cottage http://www.religiousforums.com/foru...ence-creator-no-free-will-25.html#post1596596
Hume argued that the nature of our reasoning from matters of fact is founded on cause and effect, by which we can go beyond the immediate evidence of our senses. But the contrary of every matter of fact is possible because it can never imply a contradiction. He gave various examples such as the billiard ball that might fly directly upwards, instead of moving in the plane in which it was struck. The conclusion of Hume's mitigated scepticism was the commonsense one: that while no argument from the past is an argument for the future, we have little option but to proceed in that way during our everyday lives. However, it remains the case that no contradiction is implied in the statement 'There is no Law of Causation'.

Copernicus: To me, that means that he was making a point about the limitations of our knowledge not that he was arguing against a "Law of Causation". In fact, he was arguing for the "commonsense" conclusion that we must operate within a realm of limited knowledge. God, unlike us, is imagined to operate in a realm of perfect knowledge. The argument here is over whether the idea of such a being collapses into absurdity when one also claims that he created beings with free will. I think it does.
Hume certainly argued from a mitigated scepticism to conclude the common sense view (which I acknowledge, above). But throughout the Treatise and the Enquiries Hume makes a common argument: ‘The true state of the question is, whether every object, which begins to exist, must owe its existence to a cause; and this I assert neither to be intuitively nor demonstrably certain.’ That sample quote, just one of many, throughout those two works, just couldn’t be clearer: there is no law of cause and effect.
However – if there is a Supreme Being, then Hume is wrong, for then every object, which begins to exist, must owe its existence to that entity by definition. That the Supreme Being has infinite knowledge, knowing all that there is to be known, is entirely of a piece with the phenomenon we understand as cause and effect. The Being causes, and is therefore aware, that when (not if) a person does A, B will follow. We of course enjoy no such certainty. We reason from cause and effect, just as Hume describes, but it is by no means the case that when we determine upon a particular action it follows necessarily from the fact that we will it.
Any freedom of will is constrained and limited to what is possible in the contingent world, which is to state that there is no absolute free will, the truth of which obtains with or without the notion of the before-mentioned Supreme Being.

 

[Copernicus]

Hume certainly argued from a mitigated scepticism to conclude the common sense view (which I acknowledge, above). But throughout the Treatise and the Enquiries Hume makes a common argument: ‘The true state of the question is, whether every object, which begins to exist, must owe its existence to a cause; and this I assert neither to be intuitively nor demonstrably certain.’ That sample quote, just one of many, throughout those two works, just couldn’t be clearer: there is no law of cause and effect.

Clearly, you are more familiar with Hume's writings than I am, so I'm not going to argue with you about the quotes that support your case. What I will do is point out that he appears to have contradicted his claim of "neither...intuitively nor demonstrably certain" when he admitted that one had to take the "commonsense" position that effects had causes. That is, in the end, he succumbs to the very conclusion that he challenges. And I still maintain that to call something an "effect" is to presuppose causality. 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.

However – if there is a Supreme Being, then Hume is wrong, for then every object, which begins to exist, must owe its existence to that entity by definition.

The expression "owe its existence" is metaphor for "was ultimately caused by". Hume was speaking about the limitations of human experience, and those limitations exist whether or not a supreme being exists. And then, of course, there is the knotty philosophical problem of what the "supreme being" owes its existence to. If to nothing, then the need to posit such a being as an "initial cause" evaporates. Any prior state of the universe has the potential for being an initial cause, if such a thing could exist. In principle, we could all have sprung out of nothing, complete with our memories of the past, just 5 minutes ago.

That the Supreme Being has infinite knowledge, knowing all that there is to be known, is entirely of a piece with the phenomenon we understand as cause and effect. The Being causes, and is therefore aware, that when (not if) a person does A, B will follow.

I don't agree with this chain of reasoning. In principle, God need not have omniscience in order to have initiated a causal chain that resulted in us. Perhaps all he did was the divine equivalent of tripping over a chair leg, and we were part of the catastrophic result. The idea that God, qua initial cause, was omniscient is entirely gratuitous. In reality, though, I do not believe that omniscience is possible, since I do not believe that knowledge is inherently quantifiable. Understanding is the process of relating new experiences to past experiences. What experiences did God bring to the table?

We of course enjoy no such certainty. We reason from cause and effect, just as Hume describes, but it is by no means the case that when we determine upon a particular action it follows necessarily from the fact that we will it.

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. )

Any freedom of will is constrained and limited to what is possible in the contingent world, which is to state that there is no absolute free will, the truth of which obtains with or without the notion of the before-mentioned Supreme Being.

I think that I agree with you there, assuming that we both have the understanding of "absolute free will" as having no prior determinants. We have free will despite either God or determinism. Free will is really the freedom to do what we will to do, but we are not free to choose what we will to do. We can give reasons why we do the things we do, but sometimes we deceive ourselves about what basic motivations are driving our own behavior. The mind is a very complex thing.

 

[logician]

Of course free will is contrained, just like flipping a coin has the contraints of heads or tails, or rolling a die has the constraints of 1 thru six. For people, though, the contraints may have a broad range, and are many times affected by outside variables not even within their own scope of control.

 

[cottage]

Copernicus: Clearly, you are more familiar with Hume's writings than I am, so I'm not going to argue with you about the quotes that support your case. What I will do is point out that he appears to have contradicted his claim of "neither...intuitively nor demonstrably certain" when he admitted that one had to take the "commonsense" position that effects had causes. That is, in the end, he succumbs to the very conclusion that he challenges. And I still maintain that to call something an "effect" is to presuppose causality.
Hume is not making a claim that there is no law of causation; he is saying outright that there isn’t one! In other words there is no logically demonstrable truth in the belief that one thing must be the cause of another, which of course is correct. But let us remember he was an empiricist, and therefore a commonsense view was always going to be his position…while going on to acknowledge the problem of induction! He concludes: ‘All belief of matter of fact or real existence is derived merely from some object, present to the memory or senses, and a customary conjunction of that and some other object.’ So his commonsense conclusion, (habit, not causation) is a psychological explanation, and not a metaphysical one.

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.

Hume was speaking about the limitations of human experience, and those limitations exist whether or not a supreme being exists. And then, of course, there is the knotty philosophical problem of what the "supreme being" owes its existence to. If to nothing, then the need to posit such a being as an "initial cause" evaporates. Any prior state of the universe has the potential for being an initial cause, if such a thing could exist. In principle, we could all have sprung out of nothing, complete with our memories of the past, just 5 minutes ago.
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. And while a thing might come to exist where before there was nothing, it is of course illogical to say something can come from nothing. Therefore the thing, which appeared five minutes ago, is in want of a cause, whereas the necessarily existent Supreme Being, by its own definition, is self-evidently not! But existence does not follow from essence, and so although the predicate ‘necessary’ cannot be separated from the subject it does not follow that the concept necessarily exists, as the statement: ‘There is no Supreme Being’ has no greater claim to the truth than its opposite. And yet…the concept is still a logical step ahead of other explanations and even brings theist and sceptic to a common ground, albeit with differing views as to the nature of the source. To quote Hume again: ‘why may not the world be the Necessary Being’ [since] we know not all the qualities of matter?’ Good question!


Quote:
That the Supreme Being has infinite knowledge, knowing all that there is to be known, is entirely of a piece with the phenomenon we understand as cause and effect. The Being causes, and is therefore aware, that when (not if) a person does A, B will follow.

I don't agree with this chain of reasoning. In principle, God need not have omniscience in order to have initiated a causal chain that resulted in us. Perhaps all he did was the divine equivalent of tripping over a chair leg, and we were part of the catastrophic result. The idea that God, qua initial cause, was omniscient is entirely gratuitous. In reality, though, I do not believe that omniscience is possible, since I do not believe that knowledge is inherently quantifiable. Understanding is the process of relating new experiences to past experiences. What experiences did God bring to the table?
Omnipotence requires omniscience: subtract the latter from the former and you have an inferior Supreme Being, which is a contradiction. 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.)
Quote:
We of course enjoy no such certainty. We reason from cause and effect, just as Hume describes, but it is by no means the case that when we determine upon a particular action it follows necessarily from the fact that we will it.

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?

 

[disciplewhomjesusloves]

It does. If God knows everything, then he knows exactly what you'll do with your life before he even creates you. All of your life's decisions have already been made for you by God before you were born, and you're nothing more than a puppet being pulled by the strings of God's plan.

silly humans- applying our limited abilities and ways of thinking to our creator. could god be omniscient and yet we have free will at the same time. alsoanima hit it on the head, but don't think she went far enough. god exists outside dimension of time, is not bound by it, and chooses to allow our individuality in time.

 

[CarlinKnew]

silly humans- applying our limited abilities and ways of thinking to our creator. could god be omniscient and yet we have free will at the same time. alsoanima hit it on the head, but don't think she went far enough. god exists outside dimension of time, is not bound by it, and chooses to allow our individuality in time.

Silly disciplewhomjesusloves -- projecting her limited critical thinking skills onto the rest of humanity. It is logically impossible for an agent created by an omnsicient being to perform any action which was not previously determined by the omniscient being.

 

[disciplewhomjesusloves]

Silly disciplewhomjesusloves -- projecting her limited critical thinking skills onto the rest of humanity. It is logically impossible for an agent created by an omnsicient being to perform any action which was not previously determined by the omniscient being.

thank you- i included myself in the catagory of silly humans- and i believe you are doing the same thing you accused me of- projecting your limited critical thinking skills onto the rest of humanity. the difference between you and i is i am not vindictive in my replys to other human beings opinions.

 

[Copernicus]

Hume is not making a claim that there is no law of causation; he is saying outright that there isn’t one!

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.

In other words there is no logically demonstrable truth in the belief that one thing must be the cause of another, which of course is correct. But let us remember he was an empiricist, and therefore a commonsense view was always going to be his position…while going on to acknowledge the problem of induction! He concludes: ‘All belief of matter of fact or real existence is derived merely from some object, present to the memory or senses, and a customary conjunction of that and some other object.’ So his commonsense conclusion, (habit, not causation) is a psychological explanation, and not a metaphysical one.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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.)

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.

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?

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?

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.

 

[ManTimeForgot]

Not that I actually agree with the assertion that omniscience precludes free-will, but I think it bears mentioning that Hume's argument about causation does not preclude causality being logically necessary. There are plenty of things which while logically necessary are not obvious (in nature or otherwise) nor easily understandable in practice (I still have problems understanding retro-causality; causal relations where the determinant is in the future and the consequent in the past).


Just because we are empirically ignorant of causality does not mean that it is not logically necessary. Exactly how can something be derived from nothing? If something lacks a quality, then how can that quality be passed on or copied to something else? Causality in one form or another is logically necessary. It is "simply" a matter of understanding what form causality takes. Notice: Probability is not the same as pure chaos/completely random events. A proton does not suddenly become a half-unicorn half-toaster oven because the universe stops watching closely. Even if for some reason the "ultimate cause" of a probability could never be used to isolate a definite outcome there is still a cause of some sort.


MTF

 

[Copernicus]

It is important to remember that science itself rests on the foundation of causality. Force is a key concept in causation. Scientific hypotheses and theories are needed to supply an understanding of the nature of force in causality. That is why quantum mechanics can be so troubling to scientists. Observations at that level of reality suggest that something really can come from nothing. Causality seems to break down, although there have been various attempts to explain how causality might be restored (e.g. the many-worlds speculation).