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Disproving God: An Answer to the Free Will / Foreknowledge Paradox

February 26, 2013

Posted by Koanic under Christianity

28 Comments

Note that all proofs are conditional on the existence of an Omnimax God.

If God knows all, he knows if I’m going to go home and bang some slut tonight, or if I’m going to read the bible instead.

If he already knows what I’m going to do, I have no choice in the matter. At least not in any sense that would make my actions non-predetermined. hence, no free will.

Checkmate theist.

It is incorrect that all philosophical proofs try to prove an Omnimax God, although they certainly tend in that direction. Furthermore, philosophical proofs are not the only evidence for God’s existence. I do not believe a positive philosophical proof for the existence of an anthropomorphic God is possible. However, I am quite certain that there is no philosophical disproof for an Omnimax God.

You chose the foreknowledge / free will paradox.

This is easily resolvable. If God is outside time, then he views you on a line. The error is in the “fore” of “foreknowledge”. Your volition is not abrogated by God’s knowledge, because it is not fore, it is merely knowledge.

Or take this thought exercise. You invent a time machine, go back in time, and whisper in a caveman’s ear the date you lost your virginity. Does the caveman’s foreknowledge eradicate the free will of your act? No.

You may then argue that since God created the universe, he set in motion a deterministic material chain of reaction that dictates all your actions. If life is deterministic, then you lack free will regardless of God’s existence. If you possess a spirit which influences your actions by affecting your physical brain, then you indeed possess free will.

In sum, be very very careful before you say “checkmate” in a philosophy discussion with a man who improved on Kant.

Frost

First of all, the point I was making is that the Bible does not claim an omnimax God. The re-definition of God as literally all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good is a clever reframe by atheists who want an easier time of disproving God. That said…

The foreknowledge of your caveman introduces the same problem as the fore (or whatever) knowledge of God. If I can go back in time and relay to the caveman what decisions I will make, those decisions must be, in some sense, pre-determined and outside the conscious control of 21st-century me.

Koanic

” If I can go back in time and relay to the caveman what decisions I will make, those decisions must be, in some sense, pre-determined and outside the conscious control of 21st-century me.”

Why? From your point of view it already happened.

Frost

Foreknowledge by anyone implies a lack of free will. If Marty McFly can travel back in time and watch himself make the same decision, over an over again, in what sense is past Marty choosing anything?

We might feel like we’re making choices throughout our lives, but future Marty watching past Marty repeat the same actions over and over again would beg to differ. I’m sure you’re familiar with the dilemma of determinism. Either our actions are destined, or they are random. I’ve gone through the refutations, and they are inadequate.

The only rational ‘out’ that a theist/agnostic can take on this question is:

1) There is at least some possibility, however remote, that we have misunderstood free will, the logic of determinism and/or the nature of divine judgement.

2) If determinism holds, there is absolutely nothing we can do to affect our physical or spiritual outcomes. Even the advice to “relax and go with the flow, because nothing really matters” is worthless, because the amount of time we spend stressing about life is pre-determined too.

Conclusion, we are better off in every case living as if Free Will exists, even if everything we observe and deduce seems to imply a deterministic/random universe.

Note that this question is entirely orthogonal to that of whether humans have souls or not.

http://twitter.com/spoos_in_august Spoos in August

Though you could argue at least somewhat convincingly that it is beneficial to live as if humans have souls, even if we do not.

Sort of a modified Pascal’s Wager argument.
Koanic

I have already demonstrated that God’s knowledge is not “fore”, if God is not in the timestream. Just as a 3D object outside of a linelander’s line is neither “east” nor “west”, and can in fact be in multiple locations simultaneously.

You can already watch yourself perform the same actions over and over again through memory. But I assume (I didn’t watch Back to the Future) that you are referring to some situation where future Marty can’t change the past. Of course, nobody really knows whether time travel is possible and how it would work if it was. Likewise, nobody really knows the nature of how the Omnimax God might be outside of time, or even what time is. All I have to do is show that absence of free will does not necessarily follow from the particular version of time you’re using, or that the particular version of time is not necessarily true. In such a situation you will have a very difficult time indeed winning your point.

“Either our actions are destined, or they are random.”

That would be a false determinist’s dilemma. The missing option is “free will”, which is neither random nor destined, but chosen.

Re determinism, of course if it is true then no free will exists, which is a completely different matter than God’s “fore”knowledge. Your assumption that “fore”knowledge = determinism is patently false. They are two different words.
Booch Paradise

The way I approach the idea of free will / determinism is to think of it in much the same way as imaginary numbers. Imaginary numbers cannot exist due to being outside of the complete definable set of numbers. Yet, because when assumed and used in formulas they work so well, there is no question that the actually do exist. Free will is the same way. The truth is that logic has holes in it’s ability to define things. Free will falls into one of those holes.

Koanic

That is the correct way to deal with a deterministic universe, Booch, and impressive that you’ve stated it better than any Calvinist or anyone I’ve ever heard. However I still reject a determinist universe. Cheers, I appreciate your philosophical sophistication.

Silas Reinagel

Frost, your logic is fallacious.

- Knowledge (whether fore or post) of an event does not imply anything about how the event occurred.

- The “dilemma of determinism” as postulated is a false dilemma.You have excluded the possibility that real personal entities make real choices.

Addtionally, I would contest your claim that “everything we observe and deduce seems to imply a deterministic/random universe.” There seems to be no merit to this, and I personally would postulate the opposite. Do you have support for this claim?

Koanic

Well said Silas

Koanic

Agreed that the Bible doesn’t claim the usual version of the Omnimax God, also.
Silas Reinagel

Frost, in the given instance of the caveman, the decision has already been pre-determined… by you. Your actions in the future (which is your functional past, though it is the caveman’s functional future) have already occurred.

The real question is not time-consistency or chronology but the means of determinism. Either one’s actions are determined by oneself (internal locus of control) or one’s actions are determined by something outside of oneself (external locus of control). This is the crux of the issue.

August

We do not experience the future- indeed we struggle to keep up with the present. When we say that God knows all, much depends on how all is defined. You may have determined in your heart what you will do tonight, but even with free will, there are many circumstances that could prevent you from doing it. So, God knows probabilities, but a future event does not exist until it happens, therefore He isn’t required to know it in order to know all. In fact, strictly speaking God could merely be conscious of the present and still know ‘all’. I can remember various moments in my past, but none of them are here in the present littering the landscape. It is time, not God, that is the illusion. We are localized, in body, and function off of inertia. Why else would we use terms that describe space for time? Forward, backward, etc… These are terms based in space and contingent on the fact that we ‘face forward’ and have a back, and we are sometimes forced to move in that direction. Time is more mythology than science- an attempt at making sense of movement. Does an hour (based on our planets rotation and the sun) make any sense elsewhere in the universe? No. Nor would God, especially the Father, relate to time in terms of hours, forward, backward, etc… What relevance would this have to a being who is present everywhere?
For a long time I thought I was alone in this observation, but then Vox Day pointed to this book called God of the Possible, which makes a similar point, but it much more reliant on the bible for reference.

Koanic

Regardless of the interesting vagaries of the material space-time continuum, our supernatural consciousnesses seem to experience time in a fairly straightforward linear manner, which is sufficient for discussive purposes.

August

It leads to error. Surely you are aware that we can be deceived? The argument hinges on accepting events that are not real (they haven’t happened) as being somehow real. Why should I accept that?

Koanic

You lost me

August

An erroneous view of ‘all’ leads to an erroneous view of God. This argument starts with ‘if God knows all’. I am saying linear time assumptions predispose us to assume ‘all’ signifies more than what actually is.

Frost

As I wrote in the post Koanic linked to:

od is, to us, for our own practical purposes, all-powerful. Much
like, if you could communicate with a population of sentient avatars in a
game of SimCity 2000, you might similarly describe yourself to them.
And it would not be dishonest. From the Sims perspective, you are God.
Sometimes you fuck up, sometimes you have to get up and take a piss, and
there are some limitations to what you can and cannot will in the
context of the game. But…details, you know?

Taking this view of our God, limited somehow – though all-powerful
and all-knowing within the context of our own existence – makes Him
much, much more plausible. God is God – to us. But perhaps, at some
level, he has his own problems. Perhaps he has his own God or Gods to
answer to. I don’t think this idea is at all incompatible with Christian
scripture.

I also don’t think its nearly as ‘far-out’ and ‘weird’ as it may
appear at a first pass. Humanity, right here and right now, seems to be
on the verge of creating our own ‘artificial’ intelligences, i.e.
sentient life forms who inhabit a digital plane of existence subordinate
to our own, to whom we would be, essentially, Gods. Perhaps we’re the
product of some earlier iteration of this process, in which intelligent
life begats intelligent life on a lower plane of existence than itself.

If humans are mere decades away from becoming, in a sense,
creator-Gods, how can we dismiss the possibility that the universe we
inhabit is the product of a similar event? Many bright people who would
(rationally) admit that it is well within the realm of possibility for
human beings to become Gods, irrationally deny that it’s possible we
have a God.

* * *

God Of The Possible sounds like an interesting book, thanks for the tip.

Aeoli Pera

“First of all, the point I was making is that the Bible does not claim an
omnimax God. The re-definition of God as literally all-powerful,
all-knowing, and perfectly good is a clever reframe by atheists who want
an easier time of disproving God.”

This reminds me of the times I’ve had an atheist challenge my diction, and I’ve responded that I use dictionary definitions unless I state otherwise. They always reply with some variant of “Who uses dictionary definitions? Language is fluid and I’m an idiot blah blah blah…”

Which brings me to the point of my comment: Is there a definitive theological dictionary? Google throws up Baker’s and not much else. At first glance, this would supplement the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy.
http://twitter.com/campofthesaints camp

OT: Is Chris Lagan a Thal? Highest recorded IQ, muscular, has those deep eye sockets and sympathetic eyes. Would love to see you do a photo analysis.

Koanic

nope he’s big eye melon

Simon

Sorry to harp on about this here too, Koanic, but your obsession with your “proof” boggles the mind. It is not a good proof. It is shit. You’re a bright bloke, but this is just silly.

Aeoli Pera

Show, don’t tell.

That is, show how it’s wrong, rather than just saying it’s wrong.

Simon

A few initial questions:

What is the difference between noumena and phenomena?

What is the difference between the material and the supernatural?
KWJ

It’s shit because it hinges on the unproven assertion that phenomena is supernatural. Essentially he just made up a definition and called it a proof.

FrankNorman

My first reaction is that I don’t get whatever Frost is trying to prove. It seems a very naive argument. That there’s no Free Will and God pre-determines everything? Plenty of Theists believe exactly that. Calvinists, for example.
Sadly, from my past experience of people like Frost, they are seldom really interested in learning – they just want an excuse. So they will pretend to themselves their argument is strong, and ignore whatever response you make.

http://twitter.com/spoos_in_august Spoos in August

However, proving Calvinists wrong would be a positive good; their idealogical descendants are a blight on Western civilization.

stateofgrace

Koanic, I’m interested in whether or not you’ve ever looked over Michael Hoffman’s work (egodeath.com) His interpretation of Christian symbolism and his model of a fixed-time, deterministic universe is interesting and, to me, quite compelling.

I am very skeptical of the existence of free will primarily for experiential reasons, i.e. from simply trying to pay attention and “watch” what is actually going on. We make decisions via thoughts, essentially, right? However, it seems clear that we cannot choose our own thoughts. Yes, we can have the “experience” of choosing to say something, for instance, but by what mechanism did we decide to have the thought “now I’m going to say this”?

Well, I think the obvious answer is that it was decided by the thought that came before it…and that though was decided by the one before that….and on and on until, I suppose, the first thought that an individual ever had at the beginning of life.

Where in that process do we see room for choice? Nowhere, it seems to me. If we can’t control our thoughts, how can we have free will? Do you know what you will be thinking a minute from now? What do you really have control over and where, exactly, is the “you” doing the controlling?

Yes, I know theology offers some straightforward answers to these issues but those provide, at best, a jumping off point, a “finger pointing at” what the human idea of, for instance, God refers to. Saying that I have a soul, and understanding that conceptually, isn’t the same thing as knowing/experiencing what that idea describes. Conceptualizations (mental models in the mind) aren’t the same thing as what they are trying to make sense of, do you know what I mean?

I would describe myself as a religious person with the caveat that religion is a way for humans to try to understand something that can’t really be expressed in human language or with human thought forms. Sort of like a 3 dimensional world to a 2 dimensional being, as another commentor mentioned. God…reality is what exists, what we are, prior to the mind’s conceptualizations. It’s not that’s it’s too complex or “difficult” for us, I don’t think, just that He/it is different in kind from what can be expressed and understood in mundane (“dualistic”) terms.

The bottom line for me is, regardless of philosophy or theology or any sort of conceptual model, I don’t experiencially see any reason to think that there is some “I,” some independent self seperate from everything else making independent choices. There are “experiences” of these things, certainly, but that is not the same as them being *real* in the conventional sense.

I found this idea (determinism) rather unpleasant and uncomfortable initially as most would, I imagine. It seems like the most coherent model of what I’m experiecing moment to moment, though. I would definitely appreciate any feedback/refutations. Also, if any of that is unclear, let me know, I’d be happy to attempt to better express myself.

Koanic

I haven’t seen Hoffman.

If consciousness is supernatural, then the spirit can intervene in the deterministic chain of the mind, and supply volition.

I think there is both a great deal of determinism, and a great deal of free will.

My proof of the supernatural demonstrates that consciousness exists and is not material.

Koanic Soul

Disproving God: An Answer to the Free Will / Foreknowledge Paradox

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