Perhaps what I had written did not expand on the issue as much as I would have liked, so I will go a bit more into details about the God vs. Free Will argument.
To begin, this isn't the
free will/predestination argument with God taking the place of humans; rather it is a different free will argument as a different logic is applied to an all-knowing being than would be applied to mortals like you and I.
If God is all-knowing (omniscient), then He, by defenition, knows all future events. Thus, God knows what decisions He will make in the future and is completely powerless to stop those actions from taking place. If God
can change what He knows He will do in the future, then the knowledge He has previous to His change was wrong, and therefore He is not all-knowing. If He cannot change His future decisions, then He has no free will. He is merely a chain of events - a train riding on rails - so to speak. He knows what decisions He will make in the future, but since he knew all along that He would make them, then He is powerless to stop from making them. Ergo He has no free will. A good example of this problem can be formed in the proceeding philosophical question:
quote:
There is a light switch on the wall. God may either turn it on, or leave it off. But since God already knows the future, God knows that he will turn it on. That is a part of His knowledge. What if God exercises freewill, and chooses not to turn it on, despite His knowledge that He will turn it on? Is this possible?
If He does leave it off, He may have free will, but cannot have knowledge of future events.
You are, at this very moment, reading this message; which means that at some point you made a choice to start reading it. You may feel you "chose" to read it. You also know that you do
not have free will to go back and change that choice. It is impossible - even if you want to - you can't. If you had knowledge about a choice you were going to make in the future, then what would it mean? You would have no free will to change that choice. No option, no choices - based on the fact that you know it's going to happen - it is predestined and no amount of power can change it.
An omniscient being knows every action and decision it will make during every moment of time. In effect, God is simply an observer. An omniscient being has no free will - His entire future is set out and He has no choice but to follow His predestined path. God knows your prayers before you make them, He already knows what sacrifices people are going to make for Him - and who is devoted enough to make them. We have nothing to prove to an omniscient being, and none of our actions will "change His mind" (as was lightly discussed in another message). He already knows what our actions will be, therefore His mind is already set. We present no new knowledge so cannot change His mind. Knowing His own future, too, He can never change His own mind and thus has no free will.
God also cannot have free will if He is omnibenevolent (all good) since His decisions are
always directed by the most "good" option. This also raises a question about wether or not God has a moral basis or creed of His own, or if He defines what good and bad are without a moral standard. In the latter case, "good" and "bad" are empty words that carry different meanings than how we humans commonly interpret them to mean. But that's off the subject.
It might be objected that God exists outside of time completely and is therefore not subject to "riding the rails" as if He passes through time with the rest of us, therefore my argument doesn't work. But this defense only raises another objection to God having any kind of free will.
Free will is making choices according to our own deliberation. Deliberation requires thought, and thought requires change over time. If time were frozen and nothing changed, then
no-one would have free will. Free will is a concept that only exists
inside the timeline. If God is - as is required - the Creator of time and space, then God must exist
outside of time. When talking about events happeneing "before" the universe was created is an exercise in logical futility. It is senseless to talk of "before" the big bang, "before" the creation of time, because there was no "before" - no passage of time before these events.
In this "void" where nothing changes, God can not posess free will. His thoughts can't change and flow because time does not change for anything that extends outside of time and space. Taking the hypercube as an example, it may
appear to us to change over time as we view it in a series of 3D slices, but in reality the hypercube is completely unchanging from it's own point of view. From God's own point of view there is no "thinking", no change in states of mind over time. All choices were instantly made according to what is most "perfect" (if God is said to be a perfect being), and there were never any choices or willpower involved. By His very nature, if God is perfect and created Time, then God has had no free will to either engage, change, or affect any free will on His own part.
To re-touch on God being omnibenevolent, from these these we can draw the following conclusion:
God is triply denied free will; the following three contradict the existence of a being with Free Will:
* An omniscient being cannot have free will
* A perfectly benevolent being cannot have free will
* The creator of time cannot have free will
Now what is the point of saying that God is moral if God cannot choose to do anything bad? How can it be a moral being if it has no choice? The answer is that God is not a moral being. He is, at most, an amoral being - the God of Benjamin Franklin, Einstein, Aristotle, and (amazingly) Blaise Pascal.
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