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Author | Topic: Free will vs Omniscience | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
PaulK Member Posts: 17822 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
It’s easy to come up with scenarios, the problem is making them relevant to the discussion. If a believer wants to say that your views are what he believes that’s a lot more relevant than a scenario that maybe nobody at all accepts.
quote: That is God knowing all our decisions before creating the universe, which is what you were trying to avoid.
quote: I don’t think that helps. God still chooses to create a universe knowing what will happen. Even if he’s holding himself to an arbitrary rule that once he gets started he has to go all the way, he’s still responsible. And - this just occurred to me - it makes him fallible. Which is another thing that believers generally refuse to accept.
quote: If God is rerunning things until you choose white then it’s a forced choice and not really free. You aren’t allowed to choose pink lemonade. But I don’t really argue about freedom, I argue about responsibility and that’s what believers don’t like. They want God to be unimaginably great and perfect but they don’t want to blame him for anything they consider bad.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17822 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
quote: That assumes that the thought-experiment versions of us, are us, despite not actually existing. Since I disagree with that I have to disagree with you and insist that in that scenario God does know our decisions before we made them and chose to do so.
quote: Responsible for everything in this universe, including our decisions. God knowingly chose all of them and is therefore responsible. I won’t quote the rest because I largely agree with it. And I think it is especially true of the Jewish-Christian-Islamic God who started off as just one of the Canaanite pantheon, chosen by the ancestors of the Jews to be their patron deity (just as Chemosh was patron of the Moabites).
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PaulK Member Posts: 17822 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
quote: But there’s a fundamental contradiction in the scenario. The whole point of the thought experiment is that it isn’t real, our universe does not exist and hence we don’t either. So I think we are getting into logical impossibility here.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17822 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2
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quote: I did explain it.
quote: It seems to me that you proposed a scenario that avoided God knowing everything about our universe before it was created. When I pointed out that it implied that God wouldn’t know everything about our universe until some time (in God’s perspective) after it was created you proposed this new scenario - which has God knowing everything about our universe before it was created. Free will is not really an issue I argue about in this context.
quote: The idea that it isn’t real is inherent in the fact that it is a thought experiment rather than the creation of a universe.
quote: I’m not using your rather idiosyncratic idea of real. I am using the fact that it is a thought experiment and the universe is only being simulated, not actually existing. If you want it to be real you have to have an actual universe instead of a thought experiment. (I will note as a side point that libertarian free will would make the thought experiment useless since people in our universe might then decide differently than the versions of them in the thought experiment. While that doesn’t affect my views there are plenty of believers who insist on libertarian free will).
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PaulK Member Posts: 17822 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
quote: Because God chooses to create a universe where those decisions will inevitably be made. How God happens to know doesn’t matter. God made the choice of how the actual universe would go, and bears responsibility for that decision.
quote: Nope. Haven’t you noticed my focus on God’s responsibility?
quote: The contradiction was your assertion that God would not know our decisions before we made them - despite knowing them before creating the universe. If God knows our decisions before arranging our actual existence then obviously he knows them before we make them.
quote: Well, no, it doesn’t. We can’t make our decisions before we exist - the imagined entities of the thought experiment are not our actual selves (And even if you assume that identity, what would be the point of us existing again in this universe replaying the same decisions all over again?)
quote: Yes. The whole point of using a thought experiment relies on that distinction. So you are insisting on it.
quote: That is not what I am objecting to at all. I am insisting that the thought experiment universe is not the actual universe (which is part of your idea). The imagined people in it are not actual people. Therefore God knows the decisions of the actual people in the actual universe before the actual people in the actual universe make them.
quote: How is that possible if the decision is inherently unpredictable?
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PaulK Member Posts: 17822 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
quote: Sure he did. He knew how it would go before creating it.
quote: I repeat that I’m talking about responsibility instead of free will. Can we please not go around in circles?
quote: That’s obviously untrue. We can’t make decisions before we exist. Only things that exist can do anything,
quote: Which is not at all the issue.
quote: But that isn’t anything I’ve argued against so what is the point of dragging it up?
quote: Then the actual universe would be created at the start of the thought experiment in contradiction to your scenario.
quote: The first sentence is a non-sequitur. The second is impossible. The time-based issue is introduced by you by insisting that the thought experiment precedes the creation of the universe. You really need to work on producing a coherent scenario rather than assuming that you can just introduce anything you feel like. Making up nonsense is just making up nonsense.
quote: Either we exist to get the information from - and the universe too - which contradicts your scenario, or we don’t exist and it’s impossible to get the information from us for that reason.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17822 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
Missed this but I want to reply, so...
quote: We’ll see who is making the really big mistakes. Remember, my position is that if God creates a universe, knowing everything that will happen in it, then God has primary responsibility for those events.
quote: Well, that’s obviously false. Knowing in advance is not the same as not knowing in advance. So there is one really big - and obvious mistake on your part.
quote: Neither of these is the case in your scenario. In your scenario God ran a simulation and then chose to actualise that simulation. In doing that God chose that the events that occurred in the simulation should occur in reality. So God did clearly choose how the actual universe would go.
quote: By choosing to actualise the simulation. That is absolutely clear.
quote: This is an outright falsehood. All I am doing is pointing out the implications of your scenario.
quote: But that is not what I am saying. You are leaving out the whole question of certain foreknowledge, despite the fact that you intentionally introduced that element and in spite of the fact that it is an essential part of the assignment of responsibility. Indeed, we had already agreed that simple creation without understanding the consequences is different.
quote: Since you are unable even to accurately represent my position and your objections fail to address it, it is clear that the problem is yours.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17822 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
quote: Because God knowingly decided that those things would happen, and as a consequence they inescapably will. Given that, how could God not be responsible? Are you going to argue that God can’t understand what he’s doing?
quote: For what? God’s decisions made long before we were born?
quote: This is incoherent.
quote: I didn’t say that it was eliminated, just that it was secondary to the responsibility of the primary decision-maker - whose decisions came first and were made in full understanding of the consequences.
quote: It cannot be when discussing this subject because it is one of the most relevant issues.
quote: There is no problem with addressing the question of responsibility as a hypothetical. We do not have a duty to be sycophants. If you insist we do, you paint God as a tyrant. And you know my feelings about that.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17822 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
quote: If our actions and choices are predetermined by God they are clearly subordinate to his decision. That is more than foreknowledge,
quote: Obviously it IS relevant to the question of responsibility.
quote: In the scenario we are discussing God has already decided our free choices.
quote: If you are proposing a different scenario, you are the one engaging in irrelevancies. If you are not then you are simply ignoring the issues. Either way it changes nothing.
quote: I was referring to your attempts to deny God’s responsibility even when God clearly does have the primary responsibility. Again either you are proposing a different scenario or ignoring the issues in the scenario under discussion.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17822 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
quote: Free will is a rather slippery term with more than one meaning. The real question is to what extent God has predetermined our choices. If God has done that, then God has the primary responsibility even if we have some form of free will.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17822 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
However, if God chooses to create a particular universe, knowing in advance everything that will happen in it (including all the choices made by the inhabitants) then God has predetermined everything that will happen in that universe. That is the essential point being argued.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17822 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2
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quote: That is obviously wrong. Certainly we can look at theological beliefs and examine their implications, and if people are claiming that their theology is true it is something that should be done.
quote: What God actually does or does not do is not the point. The point is to examine the theology.
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