So then he (probably) does not know which of the possible universes gets actualized. He just happens to see them all. If we ask God, whether the statement “Circumstance E will obtain at time t”[1] is true, all he can say is that it is true in one version of the universe and false in another. Did we not agree just a few messages ago that this would surely not be what we mean by knowledge of the future?
We could even ask him about the past, without specifying that we are talking about the actual history of the actual branch of the universe we happen to occupy. ↩︎
Still, this is difficult to reconcile with libertarian free will in my mind. If God knows the universe that actually happens, and he can tell that that specific one is it, and if he cannot be mistaken, then in what sense is it possible for something else to happen? Sure, there is a different possible universe God is aware of, but nobody in the actual universe can choose to switch its course such that things unfold in a way that conflicts with the one God knows is the future of this universe.
You’re flipping between the viewpoint of a being (like us) embedded in time, in the moving present, and the viewpoint of a being that sees all time. From our perspective, the future doesn’t exist. From his perspective, it does. From our perspective, we choose (that is, if you believe in free will) what future among all possible futures is actualized. He just sees how those choices are. I suppose that “switching the course” can only happen from that temporal perspective. But does that make it less real? As has been pointed out, we know that there is only one sequence of events in the past. Does that mean that there was no free will in the past?
The least it has to mean is that we cannot choose to change our past currently. If our future is just as fixed from God’s perspective, in what sense are we free to choose it? Perhaps God is free to choose which of all the universes he knows is the actual one, but that’s not a freedom we have, is it? So in what sense do we have free will, if the only power of choice is God’s?
Sure, but so what? The question is whether we were at the time free to choose our future.
In the sense that we were free to choose in the past, even though that past is fixed from our perspective.
That seems an equivocation of the meaning of “choose”. I would say that God is not free to choose which universe he knows is the actual one; he just knows which one is the actual one. There’s no choice on his part.
Indeed. And I get the point, too. Just because we know the future from our past selves’ perspective does not necessarily mean that they had no choice in what it was. Likewise, just because our future selves will know some of the things that are yet in the future for our current selves does not mean that we are not free to affect them. And now I, too, ask: So what? Our current and future selves need to wait before we learn what happens. Does God?
Our knowledge evolves with time, along with our universe. We do not know the future. For all we know, maybe it is up to our choice. But does God also not know the future, and needs to wait until it happens before he does?
Maybe God knows the future, because it exists at some infinitely distant future, when all of history has already passed? Or perhaps God knows because it is wholly outside of time (what ever that means).
The question is, does God know at time t_0 things that happen at t_1>t_0?
If yes, then what happens at t_1 is already a fact at t_0, and no choice can undo it. If no, then God’s knowledge changes over time, much like our own.
This is why I pointed out that the learning time travelling physicist is not the same as the non-learning all-knowing god. This is not a minor subtlety that sets the analogy apart from the thing under discussion. It is a crucial difference.
Respectfully, this seems like begging the question. Sure, just because the past is fixed from our perspective, it does not necessarily follow that we had no say over any of it. But it is a leap to infer that therefore we definitely would or could have had a say in it. I suggest we need to demonstrate that libertarian free will pertaining to the past is a possibility under not merely our own retrospective knowledge of history, but under a divine foreknowledge of it, before we can begin inferring things about libertarian free will concerning our future under divine foreknowledge of that.
Why? Time travel implies that the future exists. (Apologies for the language, but the tenses of English don’t play well with this sort of concept.) If it didn’t, you couldn’t go there and back. The same is true for a God outside of time. There’s really no difference here. All this says is that there is one realized universe. Can we agree that in such a universe there can still be quantum randomness, events that are uncaused by preceding events? If so, free will would be in that respect similar, though how free will differs from randomness is another question, one best addressed by someone who doesn’t think the idea is incoherent.
If God is outside of time (whatever that means), that question is meaningless. God supposedly is unchanging and so knows all things at all times.
For sure. You should be aware (if you’ve been paying attention) that I don’t think there’s such a thing as free will. Or God. I’m merely arguing against your particular justification of a claim.
I will point out that “foreknowledge” assumes a timebound entity.
“Uncaused by preceding events” ≠ “able to develop in more ways than one”. In a universe where everything is pre-destined to happen exactly the way it does, nothing has to be causally linked to anything. Libertarian free will is similar only insofar as it, too, defies causal determination. But to allow for things that do that is not enough for free will, especially not if we are openly presupposing a universe the history of which exists as facts outside of time. We are talking about a universe, whose history goes the only way it can, because the facts that describe it do not develop with it, but just exist well outside of it. If that’s not a fatalistic universe, what is?
And I am aware of that. Still, the argument you present in countering my justification is one that (in my opinion) overstates the similarity between our knowledge of the past and divine knowledge of all times. That’s not to say that my justification is necessarily therefore robust, of course. Rather, I’m saying your analogy is insufficient to address it, because of what I believe is a non-trivial dissimilarity.
Whether such phrasing might assume this, I shall leave to the judgements of our readers. Still, you understand, I should hope, that I, for better or for worse, did not assume a timebound entity when I said it. In context, I explicitly contrasted divine knowledge of what is to us the future (or all of history, really) from our knowledge of what is to us the past. And I explained more than once how they are different, too. You do not sincerely find it fair to interpret my choice of words in the passage quoted, as an indication that I am clumsily conflating timebound knowledge like the sort I explicitly say we have with the timeless knowledge like the sort I explicitly say a god might have, do you?
No. You’re again assuming that God is time-bound. God knows nothing at time t_0, but he knows what happens in time t_0 and t_1 simultaneously. (I don’t hold this view, but that’s what a theistic believer in LFW would claim.)
No, I am not assuming that God is time-bound. I’m asking, is the statement “God knows what happens at t_1” true at t_0<t_1 or not. There are three options:
“God knows what happens at t_1” is true at t_0<t_1. What happens at t_1 is already a fact at t_0, and nothing anybody does at any time t\in\left[t_0,t_1\right) can change what happens at t_1. There is no libertarian free will.
“God knows what happens at t_1” is false at t_0<t_1. Two options:
“God knows what happens at t_1” is true at some time t\neq t_0. Libertarian free will may or may not exist. There exists at least one claim of God’s awareness of what happens at a particular time, that is not true at all times.
“God knows what happens at t_1” false for all times. Libertarian free will may or may not exist. There exists at least one claim of God’s awareness of what happens at a particular time, that is not true at any time.
Unless what happens at t1 is the result of libertarian free will. Again, that God sees it as a fact makes no more difference than if some human being around at that time sees it as a fact.
If what happens at t_1 is a fact at t_0<t_1, then I do not understand how it can be the case that someone can choose to do anything to make it false. Facts are not false. They cannot be chosen to be false either. I do not understand how a suggestion otherwise can be coherent. I’m sorry, I sincerely do not understand.
You are right, God’s awareness is here a mere way to express the factuality of the event’s occurrence. That God sees it as a fact, provided that it is one, does nothing to make it any more of a fact[1]. If God is unaware of it, or if there is no god, or if some human comes to be aware of what exactly happens at t_1 at any time at all, all of that is incidental.
Either what happens at t_1 is a fact at t_0 or it is not. If it is, then we are talking about something that is fated to occur. If it is not, we are not. Those are the options. “It is fated to occur but one can also choose to make it not occur” sounded like a contradiction to me from the very beginning, not like a third option, and it continues to sound just as preposterous to me now.
After two weeks or so of listening to people insisting that maybe it is a third option somehow, I’d be well advised to consider the possibility that my logic is faulty here. But until someone can coherently articulate what the mistake is, I’m afraid there is no fixing it for me… Thank you, however – all of you, really – for your patience.
Though, of course, if we say God is infallible, then the fact that he sees something as a fact should indicate to us that it is indeed one. ↩︎
What if is a fact that God regards people as exercising free will - past, present, future? Would you suggest that God is logically incapable of creating beings with free will?
From our persective, what happens at t1 is not a fact at t0. What is a fact t0 (for us) is that God knows what happens at t1.
It seems to me the peculiarities of this situation that you point out arise from the inclusion in the scenario of an omniscient being who is not bound by time. They don’t much pertain to the issue of free will.
No, I’d say that then (assuming that free will in its own right makes some sense) people do indeed exercise it. The contradiction isn’t between God knowing something and libertarian free will existing. The contradiction is between the idea that God knows that some specific event happens and the idea that some person has enough freedom and power to make it not-happen. It is between there being a proposition that is true (a prerequisite in our definitions so far, for a proposition being known to be true) and that same proposition being actually false. I know of no way to logically conceptualize A\wedge\neg A being true.
Indeed. And yet, if God knows what happens at t_1, then it is not the case that what he knows happens at t_1 is not what actually happens at t_1. So the question is not about who knows what or not[1]. The question is, rather, whether the future is factual at all. If it is, then there is no choosing it, any more than there is a choosing of whether or not five and seven do in fact sum up to twelve under Peano’s arithmetics. If it is not, then there is no “knowing” it, neither for gods nor for mortals, because something has to be true in order to be known by the definition of knowledge we were working with here.
And I reject the notion of perspective-dependent facts altogether, frankly, at least in this fairly formal, logical context. ↩︎
I’m not sure this distinction follows. The specific event can be exercising free will to make a choice, and if that person does not have enough freedom and power to make it not happen, how can they be exercising free will?
Note: I’m not arguing for free will, it is just that I do not see foreknowledge as having much to do with it.
True enough. But I think there’s good evidence that this universe works primarily by causality, not predestination. Of course it’s possible that it’s all set up so that predestination mimics causality, but that’s the problem with a deceptive god. I would suggest that if most events are caused by prior events, then we should suppose that uncaused events are not predestined.
I think we have a problem with time here. A universe in which the prior state determines the subsequent state is causal, not fatalistic. Even though random, uncaused events must occur in one way, it’s still reasonable to say that they could have occurred in another way. Again, there are many possible universes, or universal paths through time, but only one of them actually happens. What happens can’t be predicted from inside time, only observed from outside. I say that doesn’t prevent free will; what prevents free will is its incoherence, regardless of whether God knows the future.
Only if we suppose that God is embedded in a moving present, the same way we are.
I don’t agree with your explanations, and I’ve pointed out how.
Yes you are. For example, when you say
What do you mean by “nothing anybody does…can change…”? How does that differ from “that’s what happens”? Many paths are possible, but only one happens. Many choices are made, but each choice has one outcome. There’s still a distinction between prediction and observation, and God at t0 knows because he sees it, not because he predicts it.
Since nobody knows about that fact other than God, nobody can make the choice to make it false. They’re just making a choice, and whatever choice they end up making, that’s what God knows. I think, by the way, that you have a poor definition of “fated”.
I don’t think anything is insisting that there’s a third option.
Indeed, if God’s knowledge pertaining to the actions of mortals is only of this kind, then fair enough. However, if God knows that “Peter will be prompted to pick between chocolate and vanilla ice cream tomorrow afternoon and pick vanilla” is true, then surely it cannot also be that Peter will actually end up picking chocolate[1]. What you are suggesting is a restriction on the class of statements God is able know the truth-value of.
Admittedly, I was not specific enough to insist on inclusions of statements like this example on the outset. Though I think it is reasonable to assume a maximally large class of statements pertaining to future events at first, and only restrict it if and when an argument can be rendered in favour of such restriction.
I do not think any quality or amount of evidence can support any idea about the nature of the universe’s evolution over fatalism specifically. In even a partly predestined universe, all the evidence any of the beings living inside have could happen to be predestined to be exactly what it is. Any particular thing could be predestined to look causal, or it could be predestined to look random, or it could be predestined to look like a combination of the two, but no observation indicating or conflicting with predestination can ever be made from within a universe like that. Of course this makes it scientifically uninteresting. In the search of descriptions we can draw dependable predictions from, we are, in my opinion, better advised assuming that apparent patterns reflect underlying patterns. But I could easily be just predestined to feel we are better advised to do that, and, indeed, we could be predestined to do just that, too.
The reason we need to consider fatalism here is that we are assuming that a universe’s entire history is completely factual, enough for some god to know every detail of it. If that is not a fatalistic universe, again I ask, what would be?
Was it less than perfectly clear in context, that I did not mean that the agent would make a choice specifically intending to violate God’s knowledge? Was it not clear that my expression was rather some equivalent of “can choose to do anything that would conflict with the proposition God knows to be true”? I think you were understanding me perfectly well when you read the passage in question. Your English is certainly good enough for it, and so is mine. With all due respect, you are being obtuse and pedantic here, and I do not believe that this serves to advance the argument.
Or refuse the choice altogether, or do anything else, really, that would end up rendering the proposition in question false. ↩︎
True. We must also presume that the universe was not purposely designed to be deceptive. There are infinitely many possible fatalistic universes, and a vanishingly small proportion of them would give any significant appearance of causality.
A universe in which time t is unconnected to time t + 1. Most such universes would be chaotic collections of instants.
It was. I stand corrected. Now in your formulation I think there’s a problem with the difference between “can” and “will”. Someone could have made a different choice, but it turns out that they didn’t. If they’d made a different choice, God would have known differently.