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Here are a list of links between the two ideas of omniscience and free will and some other info on the topic.

You will need to relearn your notes on free will and determinism with particular care taken on the answers to how to overcome the issue:

• the future has not yet happened so it does not exist in reality and something which does not exist cannot be known, only predicted. This is a limitation brought about by time not by God – God has deliberately given us free choice so that we have some control over our destiny even though he may be able to predict with great or even complete accuracy what that destiny will be for each of us.
• human beings have some degree of choice but within the limits of their nature and upbringing. God knows what our life choices will be but he allows us the chance to make them nevertheless.

Contents 1 Link 1 2 Link 2 3 Link 3 4 Link 4 5 Link 5 6 Link 6 7 Link 7 8 Link 8 9 Link 9 10 Link 10 11 Conclusion 12 Comments

Link 1

If all our actions are predetermined, an omniscient God must know all the details of our life patterns, past, present and future. This would mean there would be no force to the concept of moral blame or praise for actions and indeed, there would be no such thing as morality in humans. Actions could not be noble or atrocious – simply inevitable because they have to happen the way God determines them. Mother Teresa and Adolph Hitler would be on a par and for many, this concept makes us less of a person. Complete free will and complete hard-determinism cannot coexist.

Link 2

Omniscience and hard determinism may be necessary counterparts – if God knows everything including the future then the future is set although it has not yet happened. Similarly, if the future is determined and therefore inevitable, God, being omniscient, must know it all. Free will has no corresponding reality in this concept. Behaviourist claims:

Pavlov – trained dogs to produce saliva and gastric acid when bell rings

Skinner – used the results above to develop a technique known as operant conditioning. Instead of using just association like Pavlov, he used positive and negative reinforces. He rewarded his laboratory animals when they produced a specific behaviour that he wanted and similarly he gave them something unpleasant (usually a mild electric shock) for a behavioural pattern he wished to eliminate. He found rats; mice and pigeons could all be conditioned to perform specific and complex patterns of behaviour in this way. Skinner believed every human attitude or action could be and was the product of conditioning – including our moral code.

Link 3

Some guilty feelings are clearly not the result of a violation of an absolute morality – someone on a diet can become conditioned to feel guilty when they eat forbidden foods. An omniscient God would know this and thus would not hold us morally responsible for our actions. Morality would no longer be absolute but rather a measure of how well our actions correlated with our conditioned preferences. However we could still have some degree of moral responsibility because:

1. God might have all knowledge but he exists outside time and thus although he knows what the future is, it is not yet fixed in time.
2. There may be some occasions when we can choose between different moral responses because, although God would know how we would decide, his knowledge, being independent of time, would not mean that our decision was fixed beforehand.

Calvinism (theological determinism) – Calvin believed society was divided into two groups: the damned and the elect and that the division was made long before the person was born. Calvin did maintain we must still be good because he says hard work and goodness are signs of the elect and that I someone were one of the elect, they would want to be good.

Link 4

If Calvin’s belief in pre-destination is correct then while the elect have the God-given responsibility to be good, the damned may presumably live as amorally or immorally as they like. It is argued however, that no one knows they actually belong to the damned or elect and so they must act morally anyway in case they are one of the elect. The majority of Christians reject Calvinism and say that our future destiny is dependent on our free will even though God knows what that destiny will be. Others say God created the universe and all its life knowing who would reject him and who would not and thus God’s will and human choice are interwoven. For example, God planned the death and resurrection of Jesus before the world was created, outside time and yet Jesus, within time, had the choice of accepting or rejecting God’s plan

Link 5

For this plan to work, other shad to play their parts too and many of these were evil. However, if morally bad actions are a part of God’s plan, this is not consistent with an omni-benevolent God and would mean that individuals could not be held responsible for their actions. For example, Judas’ treachery was needed for the plan to work and yet it does not seem consistent with an omniscience and omni-benevolent God that Judas was effectively used as a giant pawn in a divine chess game. One solution is the suggestion that God, as omniscient, knows how individuals will use their free choices and he incorporates this into his plan of salvation.

The cosmological argument for the existence of God rests on the assumption of Aristotle’s distinction between actuality and potentiality and his definition of causes. In the world around us, we can see that all things are constantly changing and that they are caused to do so by some external factor – to use Aquinas own example, a piece of cold wood has the potential to become hot but it only does so I this potential is actualised by something external to it such as a hot fire. Significantly, wood cannot be both simultaneously hot and have the potentiality to become hot for if it is actually hot, it no longer has the potential to become hot. This means nothing can be self-changing because it cannot precede itself and thus everything must be changed or put in motion by an efficient cause which is itself in a state of actuality. For example, if a piece of plastic has the potential to become a mobile phone, it requires an efficient cause to actualise it and if we say this is the manufacturer, it must clearly be an actual manufacturer for a potential manufacturer is in fact no real manufacturer at all. If this idea of a causal chain is correct, the future is already fixed and unchangeable because of the causes that have preceded it. William James refers to this idea as the “iron block universe” because he believed the future could result only from the past or present and no future is possible other than that dictated by the past and present.

This would mean that we have no moral choice and any human attitude such as gratitude or resentment would be illogical and meaningless. Our moral ideas and aspirations would be concepts with no possible corresponding reality – it would be as illogical to judge an action as good or bad as it would be to punish a car for running out of fuel or water for wetting things.

Link 6

If the law of universal causation is true and God knows what the outcomes will be, morality is worthless. An option is to suggest however that cause and effect can only apply to our physical selves and not to our spiritual selves and thus the spiritual self may make free moral choices.

Pierre-Simon Laplace maintained that the universe was purely mechanistic and when Napoleon complained to him that he had left God out of his system of analysing the universe, Laplace is claimed to have replied, “I have no need of that hypothesis.” One hypothesis that he does use however is the idea of a hypothetical mind (often known as Laplace’s demon) which would know everything that would occur in the future if it were powerful and knowledgeable enough to do so. The existence of the demon is irrelevant – the events would still be theoretically predictable.

Quantum mechanics however suggests that atomic particle movement may have a random quality to it (Gaia theory and the Butterfly effect) and thus the universe may not be as inevitable as Laplace believed.

Link 7

If there are random events, our spiritual wills may be able to operate through random molecular events in our brains. God knows outside time what these events will be but the events allow us to make willed moral choices within time. As Kant states, morality requires free will if it is to be true morality since ‘ought implies can’ and this could still be totally compatible with God’s omniscience.

<bring in soft determinism – free will and determinism from omniscient God possible>

Link 8

If freedom and determinism do co-exist then we have moral choice. We can choose to act contrary to God’s will and we can commit sins. God has always known that this would happen and because he is omnipotent and omni-benevolent, he could have stopped the evil occurring.

1. We can argue then that ultimately moral responsibility rests with God – if he chooses not to stop evil that is his problem.
2. He is omni-benevolent and therefore wants the best for his creation so he allows evil because it strengthens us so that we can achieve what is good. He wants us to love him and we could not if he did not allow us free will.

If God is omniscient however he must know both the right and the wrong things we will do – some argue this means we have no freedom and others that such knowledge does not restrict us: an employee always leaves at 5pm exactly. His employer knows this from 20 yrs of experience of his employees working pattern but although the employer knows what is going to happen, his knowledge in no way constrains the employee – he could always stay later if he chose.

Link 9

However, although the employer thinks he knows when the employee will leave, there is always the possibility that he could be wrong because his knowledge is human and thus finite and temporal. By contrast, God’s knowledge of our future moral acts is infinite and not limited to the preset or indeed any time at all. God could not be wrong and thus there is no way I could do anything contrary to what God, in his omniscience, knows I am going to do and thus it seems I do not have free will after all.

St Augustine – for Augustine, free will is God’s gift and thus the future is not predetermined but it is understood by God. For a human being to know a future outcome inside time would fix that outcome if there is no possibility of flaw. God’s knowledge however, while certain, is outside time and thus his omniscience does not negate our free will. Christian doctrines teach that we have free will and that we are all instinctively drawn to agape – if we had no free will this could not be true for we would inevitably have to follow certain actions without intention mattering.

Link 10

We could argue that had God programmed us so that we have to do good and were incapable of doing bad, he could have saved the world from the damaging effects of sin and, being omniscient, he would have known whether we really wanted to do the good we were doing or whether we simply did it with reluctance. There would then be no need for us to have free will for he could still judge if we wanted, for example, to love him. The Christian reply however follows this thread: if two grand-children give a present to their grandmother – one has been forced to buy it and the other wants to and if the grandmother knows the conditions under which each present is given, the second present will afford far more pleasure – in the same way, God would rather have our free, unconditioned love.

Conclusion

We cannot have unlimited freedom. Such a concept would be logically impossible to imagine for we are physical beings and thus by our very nature, we are limited. However, a degree of freedom is necessary if we are to grow in love according to Christian philosophy. A truly loving relationship with anyone is denied if no freedom exists on one or both sides. Suppose, a bio-robot is programmed to tell you it loves you repeatedly every 5 minutes – it would be pitiable if anyone were to assume this constituted a truly loving relationship in any sense of the phrase. Even those who do not believe in God must admit their loves would be a lie without freedom.

Comments

Originally written by hunibuni on TSR Forums.