Sorry, no choice

T-Rob:

Foreknowledge in itself does not entail determinism. Foreknowledge AND omnipotence does. God interfered the instant he created everything.

My response:

I agree with this point insofar as we assume that the set of God includes all knowledge and ability to bring about your desires, then we can only naturally conclude that God has no free will.

For instance, if you know for certain that actions A, B, and C are going to have effects D, E, and F. To wit:

• A) Kill a muggle.
  B) Pick your nose.
  C) Save the cheerleader.
• D) Get lots of money.
  E) Die.
  F) Save the world.

Ordinarily, one would say that out of A, B and C, A is immoral, B is amoral and C is moral. However, once the results are known, then your action is not merely limited to A, B and C, but becomes AD, BE and CF. Judging an action on its own merit is only justifiable with ignorance of the future. (In this case, the obvious moral action is A. 🙂

Think about it like this:

The more you know, the more constricted your actions become. A completely ignorant person is just as free to go to work naked as he is to kill himself or save the planet. Once he accepts certain things, be them values, beliefs or knowledge, his freedoms become constrained by common sense and rationality. Then, the more he knows, the less rational some alternatives become. Naturally, an omniscient person would only ever have one possible course of events to enact. If you know everything, you would have absolutely no choice on what to do, because choice implies ignorance.

So, God, being all-knowing and all-powerful, would be the exact opposite of a completely ignorant person. Instead of being free in any sense, his knowledge of right and wrong (or advantageous and detrimental) would force him to only choose the actions that would lead directly to the best possible result.

He’s too smart and powerful to have any choices available. If you know everything, you would have absolutely no choice on what to do, because choice implies ignorance.

And, as free will can only rationally be defined as choice of action or fate, then a lack of ignorance/total knowledge by definition forbids free will.

There’s truly no intellectually honest way out of that metaphysical conundrum.

It’s like saying an unstoppable force meets an unmovable wall: it can’t happen, neither exists.

Free will doesn’t exist. Only the illusion of it.

Immanuel Kant figured it out 200 years ago, but his conclusion was a stupid one. He said he was “clearing away the pretensions of reason to make room for faith”

He was like a proto-Intelligent Designer, although his verbose, abstruse philosopher disguise was very good… I just wish we could say the same thing about his philosophy.

T-Rob: Foreknowledge in itself does not entail determinism. Foreknowledge AND omnipotence does. God interfered the instant he created everything. My response: I agree with this point insofar as we assume that the set of God includes all knowledge and ability to bring about your desires, then we can only naturally conclude that God has no…