All Knowing God proves problematic

ABE: Remove double post.Edited by Percy, : See above.

Logic? Reading your post brought images of the Red Queen to mind. All you did was restate the contradiction as if it were an answer.--Percy

Hi Bluejay,I found your answer as contradictory as Truthlover's, specifically here after you provide a number of real-world examples of predictions: You can't equate knowledge by an omniscient (all-knowing) God with a prediction by a person with incomplete (*not* all-knowing) knowledge. Yes, exactly, and that's why you can't equate God's omniscent knowledge with people's incomplete knowledge. No, it is not the same. You're confusing knowledge with other things that have nothing to do with the conundrum, like responsibility and overt actions.Here's the contradiction in a nutshell:Assume God is omniscient and man has free will. God therefore knows what a person will do before he does it, and a person is free to choose what he wants to do.But if a person decides to do something different than what God knows he will do, then by simple logic the part of the initial assumption about God's omniscience is incorrect.Or if a person always ends up doing precisely what God knows he will do, then by simple logic the part of the initial assumption about free will is incorrect.There cannot be Godly omniscience and free will by God's subjects in the same universe.Both you and Truthlover correctly characterize the contradiciton, but somehow or other your "makes sense to me" switch is going on anyway.--Percy

People's decisions preceding their existence? --Percy

Do you predict your past? Or would you say you know your past?Those are rhetorical questions intended to point out that God has no future or past. God exists across all space and time (I'm not describing my theology, I'm just working within the premise of this thread of an omniscent God). He *knows* the future (yours, not his) because he's omnipresent across all time. He is not predicting it or projecting forward from the current state. He knows your future in the same way you know your past, not as a prediction but as knowledge.Therefore if you do something he didn't know, he's not omniscient. No it doesn't. That's an odd way of expressing it. Would you say that warmth violates ice?The claim is that omniscience and free will cannot exist in the same universe.--Percy

You and Bluejay are both missing the fact that just because a person believes he exercised free will doesn't mean that he did. With an omniscient God, free will is just a mistaken illusion, just one teensy tiny part of everything everywhere and everywhen that cannot change in a universe with an omniscient entity. For example, an omniscient God would know that you believed you were exercising your free will when you made the decision he already knew you would make.It isn't that omniscience has taken free will away. It's that the concepts are mutually exclusive in the same universe. One doesn't battle and eventually overcome the other because they could never exist in the same universe. Unable ever come in contact with each other, they could never do battle.--Percy

You can't, as you make clear later in your post when you ask how one would tell the difference between no God and an omniscient God. The fact that signals are traveling down nerve paths and firing synapses that set the "I am exercising my will free will" bit in your brain doesn't mean that you actually are, and there's no way that we could ever tell if we actually are or not. As residents inside this hypothetical universe we don't have access to this information.What it really comes down to is how you can know something in the absence of any evidence. Are you exercising your free will as you read this sentence, or are you just a collection of matter behaving in a manner in which it has no choice.And that's the ultimate implication of omniscience. If it is possible in a given universe to *know* (not predict) what will happen, then all events in that universe have no choice but to happen, which means no free will. Even the firing synapses that cause you to experience free will have no choice.This is why the tests you proposed for detecting whether or not an omniscient God exists are inadequate. Perhaps such tests from within the universe exist, but my bet is against it. You ask, "If it's so mutually exclusive, why are you unable to show me how they are different?" and it's because these are hypotheticals, not scenarios drawn from reality. How could anyone ever devise a real-world test for an imaginary world? What real-world test could you devise to determine who would win a battle between Snape and Harry Potter? It's the nature of such things to generate endless discussion and few if any unquestioned answers. That you made a decision is an illusion. It's just the word we use when the synapses in one's brain fire in a certain pattern. You can call it a decision if you want, but it certainly isn't free will, because the synapses in your brain had no choice but to fire in the pattern they did and render the decision you made.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

Omniscience means knowing everything. There are no qualifiers.If someone wants to start a thread where they define omniscience with qualifiers that would be fine with me, but that's not how this thread started. This is from the opening post: AbE: Also, there can only be a debate about the contradictory natures of omniscience and free will if one defines omniscience as all-knowing. As soon as you qualify it as all-knowing of things that can be known, and explicitly state that free-will decisions by men cannot be known by God, then there's nothing to debate. I certainly agree that under this definition of omniscience that it can exist in the same universe as free will.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Add AbE portion.Edited by Percy, : Spelling.Edited by Percy, : Grammar.

Gee, I wish I had said it that way, that's much more clear.Power is still out, we're coping fine. The only impact on the website is that if it experiences a technical problem during this period, I won't be able to fix it.--Percy

Here's how one site describes the fallacy of composition: When you claim that material reality at our own macro level must have the same qualities as material reality at the quantum level, you're committing the fallacy of composition.And as someone else said, fields at the quantum level *are* material and real.--Percy

I think you've misinterpreted what I meant by "material and real". I did not mean solid like a table top. I meant in the same way as anything else in our universe. Table tops, radio waves, and quantum fields are all material and real.But looking back through your posts, like Message 50, I see that you are using "material" when referring to objects of the macro world, so I'll stop using that word to describe the quantum world. I'll just say that quantum fields are as real as table tops. Quantum uncertainty is just as real as a stubbed toe.The mistake that you're making *is* the fallacy of composition. You've concluded that the qualities of quantum fields which do not have the quality of solidity must be extended to the macro level of our perception without offering any justification.But isn't this is a diversion from this thread's topic. I don't see the tie in.--Percy

Okay, now it's obvious, you're nowhere near the topic. If quantum reality is what you want to talk about then you should find another thread.--Percy