Clarification on how we infer the theists intent wrt free-will/omniscience

Originally posted by googlefudge
Only one future.

Well then, that future can be said to be fixed, but we just don't know what it is. The issue then is not whether or not the future is determined or not, but whether or not the future is deterministically dependent on the present.

Lets say for the sake of argument that libertarian free will exists.
I think we would have to look at the definition of 'libertarian free will' a bit more closely.

God sees that I make a particular choice, winds the universe back to
time A and makes the prediction that I will make this choice at time B.

Now the universe winds forwards again to time B, and I have a choice
to make. I have libertarian free will, and this time choose differently.

Gods prediction is now wrong.
I don't get why you think God must have the ability to wind time back and forth and change it.

The only way this cannot happen is if all the events are predetermined and unchangeable.
I think you already admitted that they are. The only question is whether or not we can know, based on the current state of the universe, what they will be.
God being able to predict the future changes the universe from one which is indistinguishable from another possible universe with a different future, to one that can only have one possible future ie it become deterministic.
But I don't think any of this has a genuine impact on free will, so long as you accept that there is only one actual future.

Originally posted by Agerg
It has been established previously (by some pretty talented logicians) that omnipotence is logically compatible with libertarian freewill subject to all parties agreeing [b]not that

1) Necessarily, God knows P (precluding ¬P)

but that instead

2) Necessarily, if P then God knows P.

This does make uneasy sense [hidden]I suppose we can imag ...[text shortened]... hange it (and I suspect it could be refactored to have half its length and twice the legibility)[/b]

How are you mistaken? You're not God, and neither is the theist that says "God knew what we would choose to do before he created the universe".

We only know what God tells us about Himself, and the last time I checked I didn't find where God said He knew what we would choose to do before He created the universe.

People draw conclusions based on the idea of what they think omniscience means. The logic is that if God knows everything, then He knows everything. But we don't know everything, so how can we say what knowing everything means?

Another way of looking at it is like this; God set the perimeters of man not to exceed a finite comprehension of his existence, and produced a limited number of options to which man can attain. To believe or not to believe. The choice is ours. If we believe, God then predestined us to be thus. If we choose not to believe, God then predestined us to be lost forever.

God knows it all, but we only know what he gives us to know. It is enough for faith.

Originally posted by josephw
How are you mistaken? You're not God, and neither is the theist that says "God knew what we would choose to do before he created the universe".

We only know what God tells us about Himself, and the last time I checked I didn't find where God said He knew what we would choose to do before He created the universe.

People draw conclusions based on the id ...[text shortened]... forever.

God knows it all, but we only know what he gives us to know. It is enough for faith.

This is what omniscience is normally understood to mean. That is to say that in the beginning God already knew all possible and all actual outcomes. Since so far we haven't been able to generate a contradiction between this and free will I don't see the need for you to wander off into mysticism.

Originally posted by DeepThought
This is what omniscience is normally understood to mean. That is to say that in the beginning God already knew all possible and all actual outcomes. Since so far we haven't been able to generate a contradiction between this and free will I don't see the need for you to wander off into mysticism.

That's not all you don't see.

Do you really expect to find truth through rationalism? There's your mysticism for you right there.

Originally posted by josephw
That's not all you don't see.

Do you really expect to find truth through rationalism? There's your mysticism for you right there.

Best post in a long time. Gave me a good laugh. I hope humor is what you intended.

Originally posted by josephw
That's not all you don't see.

Do you really expect to find truth through rationalism? There's your mysticism for you right there.

Not particularly, but I do expect to eliminate falsehoods and inconsistencies through a rational approach.

Originally posted by josephw
How are you mistaken? You're not God, and neither is the theist that says "God knew what we would choose to do before he created the universe".

We only know what God tells us about Himself, and the last time I checked I didn't find where God said He knew what we would choose to do before He created the universe.

People draw conclusions based on the id ...[text shortened]... forever.

God knows it all, but we only know what he gives us to know. It is enough for faith.

Well to be accurate, you only know what the Bible says about "God"Reveal Hidden Content.

But that said, once theists stop asserting, or suggesting he knew what we would do before there existed any sort of timeline at all from his own perspective, or otherwise, someone comes along and shows in sufficient details where lies the error in my thinking, I will stand down from this one.

We've been talking about omniscience so far. I wonder if the formulation works with predestination. In other words can we show that predestination is logically compatible with free will. Intuitively this does not make sense and if we can do that then the earlier result is in doubt, at least in my mind. The question simply is can we replace "God knows that I will do P" with "God preordained that I will do P". So if we use D to mean "God preordained that I would do P" can we write:

□(P -> D)

In which case predestination and free will are compatible. Or do we need an if and only if relation:

□(P <-> D)

then if we assume K, the axiom of distribution, we have

□P <-> □D

and because of the if and only if, we have:

□D -> □P

but we have free will meaning ¬□P, in which case by modus tollens we arrive at ¬□D. Or in words "I am not necessarily predestined to do P" and predestination and free will are logically incompatible.

Originally posted by DeepThought
..... predestination and free will are logically incompatible.

If God brings his knowledge of the future into the universe at any time prior to the event, then it becomes predestined. The state of the universe will be such that only that particular future will be possible amongst all previously possible futures. Therefore although God may happily have omniscience, he must keep that knowledge external to the universe and thus he cannot truly be said to 'know the future'. He is no better at telling the future than you or I reading a history book.

Originally posted by twhitehead
If God brings his knowledge of the future into the universe at any time prior to the event, then it becomes predestined. The state of the universe will be such that only that particular future will be possible amongst all previously possible futures. Therefore although God may happily have omniscience, he must keep that knowledge external to the universe ...[text shortened]... 'know the future'. He is no better at telling the future than you or I reading a history book.

I have a reply to this but the robo-mod keeps eating it.

I like it as it is, so I am appealing on the grounds that I cannot find anything
wrong with it in terms of meeting the sites T&C's.

Hopefully they will allow it to be posted.

Originally posted by twhitehead
If God brings his knowledge of the future into the universe at any time prior to the event, then it becomes predestined. The state of the universe will be such that only that particular future will be possible amongst all previously possible futures. Therefore although God may happily have omniscience, he must keep that knowledge external to the universe ...[text shortened]... 'know the future'. He is no better at telling the future than you or I reading a history book.

That's an interesting idea, essentially your argument is that omniscience and free will are incompatible if God intervenes in the world. To justify that you would have to show that knowledge is causative, that's to say God's knowledge of something would cause it to happen. I don't know that that is sustainable.

Originally posted by DeepThought
To justify that you would have to show that knowledge is causative, that's to say God's knowledge of something would cause it to happen. I don't know that that is sustainable.

It depends on what you mean by 'causative'. If Gods knowledge within the universe is true knowledge, and the universe without said knowledge would have more possible futures than a universe with such knowledge, then I would say it is causative by any reasonable definition of the word.

Originally posted by twhitehead
If God brings his knowledge of the future into the universe at any time prior to the event, then it becomes predestined. The state of the universe will be such that only that particular future will be possible amongst all previously possible futures. Therefore although God may happily have omniscience, he must keep that knowledge external to the universe ...[text shortened]... 'know the future'. He is no better at telling the future than you or I reading a history book.

EDIT: HAH. finally spotted what the robo-mod was complaining about, stupid thing.

I am not happy about the freewill being necessarily contingent on the
existence of a mind.

If the action is predetermined, or predestined, it is so not because god knows it.
God knows it BECAUSE it is predestined, because the nature of the universe is
deterministic and does not allow alternative possible futures.

The actions are thus predetermined and unchangeable and thus there can be no
[libertarian] free will whether god knows the outcome or not.

The key here is that for god to be ABLE to know these things the universe must
be such that it's POSSIBLE to know these things in the first place.
And for it to be possible, the universe must be deterministic.



Another point I want to make.

The reason I was talking earlier about running the universe forwards and backwards
so that god can see what happens and then go back before it happened and thus
'know' before it happens. Is that for a hypothetical universe where only the present
exists, the only way to 'see' the future is to run the universe.

If you just take the initial conditions and the rules of the universe you cannot just
look at those and know everything that will happen in that universe.

You have to apply the rules to the current state to change it to the next state and
then apply the rules to that, iterating your way from the past to the future.

And it doesn't matter if you are doing that with the actual universe, or as a simulation
in your mind [or some sort of computing substrate].

You must run the universe from beginning to the point you wish to view to find out what
will occur.

This is similar to Turing's "halting problem", in that the only way to tell if most programs
will stop [halt] is to run those programs and see if they stop or not.

A nice example of this problem is Langton's Ant:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langton%27s_ant

This very simple universe has a very simple set of rules:

Squares on a plane are colored variously either black or white. We arbitrarily identify one square as the "ant". The ant can travel in any of the four cardinal directions at each step it takes. The ant moves according to the rules below:

At a white square, turn 90° right, flip the color of the square, move forward one unit
At a black square, turn 90° left, flip the color of the square, move forward one unit

Langton's ant can also be described as a cellular automaton, where the grid is colored black or white and the “ant” square has one of eight different colors assigned to encode the combination of black/white state and the current direction of motion of the ant.

However despite the fact that we know everything about the initial conditions of this universe and exactly
what the rules of this universe are, you still cannot predict how the universe will turn out without actually
running the universe, and seeing what the behaviour actually is:

Modes of behavior

These simple rules lead to complex behavior. Three distinct modes of behavior are apparent,[3] when starting on a completely white grid.

Simplicity. During the first few hundred moves it creates very simple patterns which are often symmetric.

Chaos. After a few hundred moves, a big, irregular pattern of black and white squares appears. The ant traces a pseudo-random path until around 10,000 steps.

Emergent order. Finally the ant starts building a recurrent "highway" pattern of 104 steps that repeats indefinitely.

All finite initial configurations tested eventually converge to the same repetitive pattern, suggesting that the "highway" is an attractor of Langton's ant, but no one has been able to prove that this is true for all such initial configurations. It is only known that the ant's trajectory is always unbounded regardless of the initial configuration[4] – this is known as the Cohen-Kung theorem

Picture of what wiki is talking about:

http://webloria.loria.fr/~fates/multiagent/TurmiteImage/OneTurmite-t11500.png


The point being that if we have a universe where only the present exists and that 'present' changes according
to a set of rules, it is generally not possible to know any particular future state of the universe without actually
running that universe from it's initial conditions until that particular future state is reached.

And functionally there is no difference between a simulation of the universe or the universe itself.

So god cannot see the future in such a universe without running the universe to find out.

IF free will existed and intelligent agents could make choices and chose ~P instead of P, then every run
through would be different and it would be impossible for god to know in advance what would happen in
any given run.

Thus for it to be possible for god to be omniscient, [libertarian] free-will cannot be possible.