FREE WILL....... or is it.

I would go further than that, Asgara. I think that omniscience excludes even the free will of the omniscient being itself.An omniscient being knows everything there is to know. 'Everything there is to know' includes all future actions of every being there is, or ever will be. So an omniscient being must necessarily know all its own future actions. But if it does, then it cannot choose to do anything other than what it already knows it will do. And if it cannot do that, then it has no free will.One could even go so far as to conclude that omniscience excludes omnipotence. After all, a minimum requirement for omnipotence is free will. Thus, if a being is omniscient, [it cannot have free will, and if it has no free will,] it can not be omnipotent.It gets worse. If an omniscient being cannot be omnipotent, it cannot know what it is like to be omnipotent. But if it cannot know that, then it doesn’t know everything. And if it doesn’t know everything, then it isn’t omniscient. The conclusion is a contradiction: if a being is omniscient, then it isn’t omniscient. Therefore a being cannot be omniscient.It could well be that there are some mistakes in my reasoning. If so, feel free, anybody, to point them out, I’m open to criticism.On a sidenote: I notice that, each time some form of infinity is involved (omniscience = infinite knowledge, omnipotence = infinite power), something becomes impossible. Is it possible that ‘infinity’ exists solely as a theoretical concept and has no link to reality? That no quality of anything that exists in reality can be infinite? That there is no infinitely large universe, no infinitely small particle, no infinitely short timespan, et cetera?Ciao.------------------
"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move." - Douglas N. Adams

I'm afraid I do not agree. I said that 'everything there is to know' includes all future actions of every being there is, or ever will be. I used 'include' to indicate that I meant that "all future actions (etc.)" comprise a subset. They comprise a subset of the set of all knowable facts. It goes without saying that a 'knowable fact' must be logically possible. The number of horns on a unicorn is a knowable fact, whether a unicorn exists or not. Another knowable fact is, for example, the amount of time needed for ten buddhist monks to count all the grains of sand in the courtyard of their monastery, which is probably never actually going to happen, but knowable, in principle. You said that "omniscience is about knowing actualities", but I think it's also about knowing possibilities. A truly omniscient being not only knows everything about what has happened or will happen, but also everything about what would happen, if things were going differently. And all of that is still a subset. One can also know facts that have nothing to do with things happening, but rather with things being. For instance, the 10^99th digit of pi has a certain value which can be known. Nothing much happens there.Now, contingent on whether omnipotence is logically possible, the set of 'all knowable facts' also includes 'what it's like to be omnipotent'. So I think I used the word 'everything' in the same sense (of "all knowable facts") on both occasions and that my reductio ad absurdum regarding the possibility of omniscience still stands.------------------
"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move." - Douglas N. Adams[This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 10-10-2003]