Christians often make the claim that God knows everything. If asked for specifics, they’ll say this includes knowledge about the future (foreknowledge) and that such knowledge is infallible. Christians also often make the claim that man has free will. Upon being asked for specifics, they’ll agree that free will entails the ability to freely make a choice. At quick glance, these claims may not appear to be in conflict. However, if we dig a little deeper into each of these claims, we’ll see that they are.
Let’s say Mark is faced with a free choice of A or B. He is due to make this choice on Tuesday (day 2). We’ll call Mark’s day 2 A/B choice variable Y. This means prior to day 2, variable Y has no value (or the choice lies in an unmade state), and on day 2, variable Y will acquire a value of either A or B - to be decided freely by Mark.
Given the Christian claim that God has infallible foreknowledge, this would mean God knows infallibly what A/B choice Mark will make when the choice still lies in an unmade state. To gain further clarity on this, it can be asked, “if it were asked on day 1 does God know infallibly what Mark’s day 2 A/B choice will be, would the answer be YES?”. Christians would typically agree.
So we’ll call God’s day 1 knowledge of Mark’s day 2 A/B choice variable X. If God knows infallibly on day 1 what Mark’s day 2 A/B choice will be, then it follows that X has a static or fixed value of either A or B as of day 1.
We now have three conditions:
X has a value of either A or B on day 1 and this value is fixed and cannot change. If it is A, it will remain A. If it is B, it will remain B. This follows the assertion that God has infallible knowledge of future events.
Y (or Mark’s day 2 A/B choice) receives its value on day 2. Once Y receives its value, it becomes locked. Prior to receiving its value, it could potentially become A or B, as Mark freely decides on A or B. This follows the assertion that Mark has free will or can freely make choices.
X is equal to Y. This follows the assertion that if it were asked on day 1 if God knows what Mark’s day 2 choice would be and the answer is YES.
Not all three of these conditions can be true.
If #1 & #2 are true, then #3 can’t be true, as X wouldn’t be equal to Y, nor would Y be equal to X. Not only would X receive a value at a different point in time than Y, but Y could be assigned a value in conflict with the static value of X.
If #1 & #3 are true, then #2 can’t be true. Mark wouldn’t be able to freely choose A or B, as variable Y would already be defined as being equal to variable X. Christians will often argue that God knowledge of Mark’s future choice is a function of Mark’s day 2 choice. But this doesn’t hold true if the answer to the question “if asked on day 1, does God know what Mark’s day 2 A/B choice will be?” is YES.
If #2 & #3 are true, then #1 can’t be true. What this means is if variable Y gets its value on day 2, then variable X also gets its value on day 2 and gets the same value as variable Y. It then follows that God can’t have infallible knowledge on day 1 of Mark’s day 2 A/B choice.
Therefore, it is logically impossible for God (or anyone) to have infallible foreknowledge of a yet to be made free choice.
Not necessarily. The omniscience as described for God would definitely envelop being able to see even the minutest of possibilities. I noticed that there was something you left out of your analysis of the situation, which is the unknown variable. In any given situation, people often see only two choices; being two main choices most often given by people driven to the extremes in life. There is actually a myriad of possibilities with only two being the strongest ones based on what is presented in the world around them. If different possibilities were to be presented, the two main ones would no longer be the main ones and would no longer be a basis of perceiving the possibility of actions.
God would therefore remain in a quantum state of being omniscient and knowing nothing. He knows all the possibilities that there are to make and is very rarely surprised as most people fall into the most obvious possibilities as they traverse their life. To say that God in any way can be surprised in anything other than pseudo-surprise would be a lie at the same time as a truth, because such an idea of God would be pleased when people saw different possibilities as then it would be a rare occurence and one that can be appreciated better; and in some ways even if you expect it, it can still be a happy surprise WHEN it happens and can be very refreshing and therapeutic.
Free will is given, but if you make any choice at all, then the possible outcomes of each of those choices; even the rare ones that most people don’t choose; have already been mapped out, thus invalidating free will at the same time as validating it. You have free will insofar as you choose to act in a specific manner, but the free will is stripped by saying that certain things will happen as a consequence of that action. And, it is hard to keep this all in your head at once. The idea of God is the ability to do that with ease and to switch between a quantum mindset and a singular mindset; between that of a viewer as he would be considered and as interaction, as he would so obviously have done for us to have knowledge of him. He is both outside of the equation and part of the equation. If he remained completely out of it, we would have definitive free will because we would not be certain of the consequences of our actions due to the minute differences in choices that affect momentary outcomes with the final outcome still being the same. If he were to fully bring himself into it, we would lack free will entirely and be more like puppets for a grand master puppeteer.
You could break your brain thinking about it if you let yourself. Every time you look into the future, you change it; too. That’s unavoidable. You make choices at that point that you otherwise wouldn’t have made even if you try to compensate for it. It is possible to not do this, but it would require a very strong will. To say that God is is to entertain the notion that he is both strong and weak and while certain parts of him are able to accomplish this, certain parts are similarly predispositioned to action and such becomes a part of the cycle and a part of the overall picture and a part of knowing what will happen based on knowing the nature inherent in men, which would make his knowledge infallible at the same time as remaining fallible in the viewpoints of certain parts of himself that fail to see the whole of the picture as it should be seen by the objective parts of God.
Knowing possibilities doesn’t equate to knowing which possibility will become reality.
There is nothing left out. If you’re asking why the choices are limited to A and B, it’s strictly to keep it simple for illustrative purposes.
How does this pertain to my argument?
Is this meant as an attempt to refute my argument?
How do you know? If God tells Mark what A/B choice he will make tomorrow (say he knows Mark will choose A) and Mark freely chooses B, then there is no puppeteering involved. God’s foreknowledge would be compromised. So if God’s foreknowledge is infallible, then Mark can’t freely choose A or B.
Please explain how looking into the future changes the future? Do you believe the future exists?
Not for all things, no. But for some things, you can count on their predictability in certain occasions. In fact, if you were witness to every single minute detail that ever occurred, you would be able to see a chain of cause and effect and be able to predict the future with startling accuracy the more you knew as people fall into stereotypical and predictable roles in society. There is still that dormant potential there, but it only becomes so much kinetic energy, hence why mid-life crises are fairly common. They feel a desire to do something, but they’re not sure what because they’re limited by pre-conceived notions they had been fed since birth. Certain realities become absolute within a set parameter when such parameters have shaped themselves over time based on peoples subconscious reactions to nature.
Don’t do that; you only further a faulty form of communication which has constantly failed mankind. Do not over-simplify a concept just because it’s easier. To really understand the equation, you have to have those unknown variables in there and explaining them at the appropriate moment instead of throwing them out there when someone brings it up as a question. It’s an excuse.
why does everything have to be about you?
Lol, no. It’s just taking it to a whole new level.
Mark might surprise God by choosing a third option that was never given. Perhaps God saw a string of events that lead to a set-in-stone future based on the particular set of butterfly effects that caused something to happen to choice B that makes it impossible to choose it, thus refining him to choice A or devising a new choice. Perhaps God did not say that Mark would choose choice A because he knew that Mark would choose choice A, but because he wanted to see what Mark would do when told what he would do ahead of time and to continuously check out random strings of occurrences to reinforce and strengthen the possibilities that such a being could see; perhaps add something new. Perhaps this being is constantly growing, too.
By seeing something that would happen in the future, you change how it happens by reacting subtly to what you see. It acts on an emotional and instinctive level causing you to imperceptibly change your habits because of what you saw; either to try to bring yourself closer to it or to try to distance your self from it. I believe your second question stems from lack of rudimentary logic: We see where we have been, we see where we are; the momentums going, are we going to stop? No. We’re gonna see where we’re going to go. Whether we see or not, it still maintains that what is in motion will stay in motion until it comes to a rest and it constantly takes us into a future we can define by the inclusion of other factors with deductive reasoning that is this has happened and this is happening; this is going to happen. Extrapolation, inductive reasoning and a continual pursuit to test the results of your hypotheses.
We are able to shift momentum if we do it right; if you’re able to see enough and account for enough. You can change your entire life just by persevering in the trying and failing until the successes come rolling. It’s just a matter of time and inevitability unless you die, which we all die, and it’s just a matter of doing what we can to hit the ground running once we find our feet. You could shift the momentum of the entire world if you saw and accounted for enough and caught it at the right pitch in its momentum; the right push in response; the finding of balance to move an impossible object with a simple touch.
People make fun of what the mind imagines because they think it can’t happen in reality, but through those imaginings, the mind is able to balance in such a way as to make impossible things happen. Perhaps not to the degree that is imagined, but still very inspiring nonetheless and these things are done by those who see the future and reach for it. How could you not believe a future exists when so many people are working to make one for you?
I can see that you don’t even understand the concept of illustrations. To help you out here, assume the choice A is one choice and the choice B equates to any choice other than A. Now do we have a dichotomy that encompasses 100% of all possible choices or not?
See, right here, you’re saying something that can’t truly be expressed by the words you are saying. It is deeper than that. You are saying, ‘fuck you, stranger, for being smart and interjecting into this conversation something better than I was presenting thus showing me up. even though you have not done it intentionally, I will now intentionally mess with you just to see if I can get a reaction out of it so I can feel better about myself that I managed to ruin your day because I’m a jealous person.’
Of course, you do not know you are saying this, but you are saying it nonetheless. Perhaps you think you are actually doing something ingenious or practical, but you’re not. It’s okay, though.
I can know what decision someone is going to make even though they still have the “free-will” to make it.
Of course, all of these “free-will” arguments are nonsense because “free-will” has multiple meanings. All things are “determinate” and in that sense, there is no such thing as “free-will”. But that has nothing to do with the kind of “free-will” involved in the claim that Christians make concerning the freedom that God gives.
The freedom that God provides, the freedom that Christians are talking about, is merely the freedom from slavery. And God allows for people to choose it or not as they wish by either conforming to morals, or not.
Of course, you didn’t want to hear that and thus aren’t going to, because it pulls the rug out from under your trolling, mundane, anti-Christian proselytizing.
Let’s say on day 1, you know I will make a day 2 A/B choice of ‘B’. I then go ahead and freely choose ‘A’. What then happens to your knowledge that I would choose ‘B’?
With respect to this discussion, free will means the ability to freely make a choice between two or more options. It would also mean that up until the time one chooses ‘B’ out of an A/B choice, they still could choose A.
…kind of silly thing to say. How could I really know it if it wasn’t to be so?
That really doesn’t narrow it down much.
People are predictable. But they still have to make their decisions. The fact that what they are going to choose is predictable, doesn’t change their freedom in choosing.
I suggest that you ignore idioticidioms, who tends to write long-winded, colourless texts which under scrutiny turn out to be hot air.
I don’t understand why James would accuse you of trolling, considering that your OP is a watertight logical argument in my reading.
My solution to the problem you pose is basically the same as my answer to the question whether God can create a stone too heavy for him to lift. My answer to that question is “Yes, he can, but he can also lift it. For God is not limited by anything, not even by logic…” Perhaps needless to say, I believe neither in God nor in free will. Or rather, I believe in a God who is identical with the–deterministic–universe. Your post has led me to finally take Seung’s Nietzsche’s Epic of the Soul off the shelf again, in whose Preface your exposition of the problem is found almost verbatim. It’s a book that, though I had to “bear with it” a great lot, actually catalysed in me the change that it describes–only for a while, but quite a long while–:
[size=95]“Zarathustra as the Faustian hero breaks to pieces, but he emerges as a new subdued superhero of the Spinozan [kind].” (page 192.)[/size]
Given his/her responses, I plan on doing just that.
Actually, I think it was idiotcidioms who accused me of trolling, not James. Or is James = idiotcidioms?
That being said, I would like to ask what would happen if as of day 1, God knows that Mark’s day 2 A/B choice will be ‘A’ and Mark proceeds to choose ‘B’?
God knows on Day 1 what Mark's Day 2 choice will be with respect to A/B. Mark's choice with respect to A/B is still free (in the real, libertarian sense, not in the compatibilist bullshit sense) on Day 2. A statement about a free choice being true or false before the choice is made is not a logical contradiction, it is an intuitive conflict.
Why? I agree with you that it’s hard to understand how this can be so, but that’s not the same thing as saying it’s impossible. You don’t have a logically rigorous argument here. This has been pointed out to you over and over and over again:
“It was true yesterday that I would freely choose to eat beets today”.
It's not an example of a paradox or a contradiction. It's an example of something that's hard to understand. It's important that you understand the difference between logical contradiction and intuitive disagreement, because it's often very subtle in cases like this. Suppose I were to ask you to explain to me why it is that a thing must not be true before I make a free choice about it. Your answer wouldn't be a logical proof, it would be an attempt at an explanation of 'what everybody knows' free will is, and how 'everybody knows' time works, neither of which you can demonstrate. Yes, all you say may be true GIVEN that the past is immutable, and GIVEN that truth values have temporal locations and GIVEN that it makes sense to talk about God coming to know something at a specific time. But none of that is logically rigorous.
Anyway, this is all assuming the definitions you've used, and assuming the definitions you've used, your argument still has a great deal of inductive strength even though it's not logically rigorous. The more effective response (which I've also given you before) is simply to suggest some slightly different understanding of God's knowledge than what is most frequently put forward by the Christian on the street, and yet which doesn't affect essential Christian doctrine much if at all.
I like your post, but I don’t think your argument really works.
Just trying to make things clear, I side with you in claiming that free will is too much paradoxical to be allowed, and I am thoroughly inclined to think that it’s just some form of self-deception (culturally induced by… well, that would be too long to look into – then, I recently discovered the 46+2 thing, so, maybe… it’s not even “culturally” induced).
My objection is that logic has no use here. Or, rather, that the faith that the use of logic is decisive here it is exactly that, a form of faith. It mirrors the faith Christians use – maybe unconsciously – to posit free will.
Anyway, if we really want to go down that path, then one can use some modal-time logic syntax and Kripke-semantics, so that one may be able to represent a situation where, eventually, one would still find the contradiction you present – but to support a point quite different from yours.
So, thou that’s no more than a toy to me, I’ll sketch it to try to make myself more understandable (an attempt possibly doomed to fail).
I introduce the operators ‘P’ for “it is possible that” and ‘N’ for “it is necessary that”.
In a nutshell, Kripke’s possible worlds semantics stipulates that the truth value of propositions with modal functors depends not (necessarily) on the value of the same propositions (without functors) in that same world, but on the truth-value those propositions (without functors) have in other worlds. More specifically N(X) is true iff. there’s no possible world – that N(X) “sees” - where X is not true, and P(X) is true iff. there is at least one possible world – that P(X) “sees” - where X is true. So, given a certain Kripkian model, we may have in a world both P(X) and P(not(X)) with no contradiction.
I shall also change your propositions, probably oversimplifying them, I hope that this does not take them too far away from your intended meaning.
On Day#1 we have a possible world where these propositions hold:
N(X) – which is God’s knowledge (and will)
P(not(X)) – which represent a possible future choice differing from God’s knowledge.
Note that Day#1 is not necessarily inconsistent - thou, frankly, that may prove technically tricky.
(We should rule out inferences like P(not(X))==>not(N(X)), which actually is quite unorthodox, as normal modal logics hold the axiom N(X)<==>not(P(not(X)), and we would have to assume that propositions with P are by default undecidable – which I guess that, inasmuch as we do not aim at building a calculus, can be conceded).
The contradiction would appear in some future world, which falls under the class Day#2, as there we could infer X AND not(X), which is always false and, therefore, we would have some inconsistent world.
A Christian may argue that such a world cannot exist: it would not be ‘logical’, and, if you oppose to that, you would emasculate your argument. That implies that we are using a semantics model where the truth-value of P(not(X)) is not determined (that which I implied above), which can become a sort of leverage to assert the fact that the choice was indeed “open”.
Therefore the only future worlds are those that are consistent, and therefore those complying with God’s knowledge (and will).
At the same time it would not disprove free will, as the possibility existed…
It could be used as a way to preserve both God’s attributes and free will. (Moreover, it would match pretty well the Calvinistic concept of Grace and free will - predestination).
As I said, that’s just a game – and, as you can guess, there are technicalities that can be debated over for quite some time (even more with a non rigorous exposition like mine).
I am not really trying to make a counter-argument, I just tried to show that a counter-argument would be possible by using your same weapons, or something very similar to them.
My point can be subsumed by simply saying: you can’t support your claim by using logic – and, frankly, there’s something deeply wrong in assuming that logic is a tool apt to represent reality (at least without a tightly defined model - which I doubt it’s possible at all).
Making logic the ultimate authority in matters like this means to conceal deep assumptions that, conversely, a philosopher is supposed to strive to disclose. Logic is authoritative in a Platonic universe - which is not ‘our’ universe.
It is a conflict if variable X is equal to variable Y and if variable Y isn’t freely given a value until day 2.
If variable Y had to be equal to variable X and variable X has a value as of day 1 (e.g. "if it were asked on day 1, ‘does God know what Mark’s day 2 a/b choice will be?’ and the answer were yes), then variable Y could potentially be different from variable X. Which refutes the assertion that variable X and variable Y must be equal.
Then we’re getting into a semantics discussion about what ‘true’ means.
I made it very simple:
On day 1, variable X has a static or fixed value
On day 2, variable Y is freely assigned a value by Mark
variable X and Y are always equal to each other
Not all three of those can be true.
If you are contending that all three of those can be true, then you are making a straw man argument, as you’re arguing against a position that is other than what I’m making.
Well, obviously, since items 1, 2 & 3 can’t all be true, it must mean something about the Christian God which is presented in the Bible or posited by Christians isn’t correct.
On day 1, variable X has a static or fixed value
On day 2, variable Y is freely assigned a value by Mark
variable X and Y are always equal to each other
From my perspective, I’d say #1 and #3 aren’t true. There isn’t a variable X, as no one has ever shown that a god with knowledge exists. And if there isn’t a variable X, then it makes X=Y moot.
