Monday, January 9, 2017
Divine foreknowledge and free will
The classical interpretation of omniscience raises a few problems. One of the strongest is the question as to how one can reconcile a concept of omniscience where God knows the truth value of contingent propositions prior to their instantiation in the world. If God infallibly knows that tomorrow I will perform some action, then I can't possibly will anything in contradiction to that knowledge. But then in what sense do I possess free will? One defense that can be raised is to claim that mere knowledge of a future contingent does not itself cause the event. A common example being that I can have true knowledge that the sun will rise tomorrow, but clearly my knowing that fact does not have a causal relation to the sun rising, as the argument goes this is also the case for god. However, I don't see how this actually responds to the argument. If I truly know that the sun will rise tomorrow, it is only because the sun does not in fact have free will. The argument is about future contingents having a determinate truth value independent or prior to the proximate agents, not with what ultimately determines those truth values (they may even be brute facts for the sake of the argument). If it is true today that I will perform some action tomorrow then that proposition has a truth value, and what determines that value cannot be me, as the proposition is determinate prior to the my activity, in fact prior to my very existence. If an agent isn't the primary cause of the truth about its actions, I don't see what a classical interpretation of free will could mean.
Another defense is to claim that god, being timeless, sees the entire universe not as a sequence of temporally occurring events, but in one single "eternal now", but again I fail to see how this answers the objection. The argument is about logical priority, not temporal priority. If god and his knowledge are logically prior to the universe then the objection remains the same. If the actualization of some event is instead prior to god's knowledge of that event then god's knowledge, and by extension God, are contingent. Moreover, if god only knows our actions because we perform them, than this knowledge would be entirely useless for prophecy or providence, as he can only know an event after the fact.
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DeleteIf there is no free will then divine foreknowledge is well defined right? I don't believe in god, but I don't think free will makes sense as a concept, and I feel like most evidence suggests we don't have it. If you don't mind me pivoting what you were trying to talk about in this post: what do you suppose would be the consequences of not having free will? would it change our society much? I don't know that my lack of a belief in free will has affected the way I act all that much, but perhaps that is due to me not really contemplating the consequences of that belief deeply enough.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the reply!
DeleteIf there is no free will then divine foreknowledge is well defined right?
Correct. You can retain divine foreknowledge by foregoing free will, but that brings with it a host of problems. You can also simply accept open theism to avoid all these issues.
I don't believe in god, but I don't think free will makes sense as a concept, and I feel like most evidence suggests we don't have it.
I agree that within a naturalistic framework free will isn't coherent, and I find the compatibilist descriptions by Dennett and others wholly irrelevant to the traditional debate surrounding free will. It is little more than semantics. Although even outside a naturalistic framework free will is a difficult concept. I'll likely make a future post specifically addressing free will
If you don't mind me pivoting what you were trying to talk about in this post: what do you suppose would be the consequences of not having free will? would it change our society much? I don't know that my lack of a belief in free will has affected the way I act all that much, but perhaps that is due to me not really contemplating the consequences of that belief deeply enough.
Well if we dont have free will then we'd have no choice in how we respond to that knowledge. Speaking strictly about the effect though I think, and i'd hope, that it would lead to a greater focus on rehabilitation and a renouncement of the retributive justice that pervades society since the reason an indivudal performed some action would be due to treatable/deterministic conditions outside of their control i.e. their brain structure. Once those conditions are corrected there would be absolutely no reason to punish them even if for retribution as they are in the relevant aspects not the same person.
Getting even further off the original topic:
Delete-"Once those conditions are corrected there would be absolutely no reason to punish them even if for retribution as they are in the relevant aspects not the same person."
-Perhaps it would make sense to continue to punish the person if that extra punishment would help prevent others from committing similar crimes.
I don't think that follows. If they aren't the same person but you punish them anyway to deter others then you are
Delete1. Merely using them as a means to end
2. Taking any person, punishing them and declaring that this is what happens to those who commit some crime would be equivalent. If they are punished merely to demonstrate a consequence there is no need for them to bear any relationship to a crime. It would be sufficient to simply declare that that is why they were punished. They'd be no less guilty than the person who has been treated and corrected.
3. Requires you to believe that the indivudal's suffering is somehow worth less than the suffering of whoever might be protected by the deterring effect.
Of course I'm bracketing my personal religious beliefs for the sake of the argument. On a purely spiritual level I find punishment appalling