Critical Logic Failure

[Pedersen]

Yes, I've read the whole thread. Absolutely nothing in it shows that one of those statements must be false. Knowing that if you do x then soandso will choose to do y does not negate the fact that y is free to choose.

Then you have failed to understand the difference between the illusion of free will versus actually having free will.

Free will is the ability to make a choice, simply put.

The illusion that you have if you try to accept all four statements ignores the fact that it is actually God who makes the choice, not you. If you accept all four of those statements as fact, then the actual flow of making a choice is more like this:

You are standing at a fork in the road. You may go left or right. As you ponder, God makes a choice first: Thanks to his omniscience, God knows which direction you will go before you arrive at the fork. However, he has an extra choice to make: Will he allow you to go the direction you would choose without his interference?

Let's assume you would go left. He would prefer you go right. Before you arrive at the fork in the road, he must choose whether or not he should use some of his omnipotence to make you go right instead. Even if he chooses to do nothing (and even if that choice is simply him keeping a promise he made to humanity to avoid interfering), you are only going to the left because he chose to let you go to the left. Had he chosen differently, it is entirely possible (again, thanks to his omnipotence) that you would never have known you wanted to go left.

And don't go for the "Knowing that if you do x then soandso will choose to do y does not negate the fact that y is free to choose." type of line here. We are not talking about humans limiting the choices of others. We are talking about God himself. Jehovah. Yahweh. Allah. The Big Cheese. The all-knowing, all-powerful, maker of everything, father of Jesus, what he says goes, period, no ifs, no ands, no buts, no disobedience possible. Quite literally, his word is the law.

For us mere mortals, we can use the "Well, if I do X, then John will do Y" and only be mostly correct. John could choose to do Z. How many times does it happen that you think you know what someone will do/how they will react, but then they do something completely different, and you have to say "I didn't see that coming!" If you have ever been surprised by the actions of someone else, then that's happened.

God can not be surprised. He knows what we will do. Furthermore, if he changes what we will do, he knows the consequences of that. His knowledge is absolute. He will never be surprised by our reactions, because he is omniscient. He knew our reactions before we knew we could react.

He makes a choice about every choice we make, and his choice is to decide if we are allowed to make the choice we would make on our own.

All we have is the illusion of free will. If you'd like to use the same copout that I've addressed and debunked numerous times throughout this thread, well, I can't stop you. But I can be bored by reiterating the same point to the same question, without actually seeing a working explanation (not even physics or biology based, just go for a purely logical mechanism, since that's easiest) for how an omnipotent and omniscient entity can possibly co-exist with entities that have genuine free will, and not just the illusion of free will.

[HYHYBT]

You haven't debunked anything at all. You've *stated* that those four items are contradictory, and gone on long so-called explanations that if God knows what we will choose with ourselves and the world the way he has made them, then we don't really have a choice (much condensed). And then when someone points out that you haven't actually led logically from one point to the other, you call that a copout.

[BroomJockey]

And then when someone points out that you haven't actually led logically from one point to the other, you call that a copout.

Actually, he has. But I can see you're having issues grasping it. So I'll put it to you this generalized situation:

Your best friend in the whole wide world, who's known you since childhood, whom knows you so well that you've almost got a psychic bond, and knows how you'll react in any situation, one day goes insane. They know if placed in a situation where there are literally only two options, your death, or your wife's death, you'd pick to die yourself. Your former best friend now puts you in that situation, and asks you to choose, you or your wife. You choose to die yourself, as he knew you would.

Now, imagine that your insane former BFF is God. God not only knows what you'll do in a situation, they've created that situation where you'll make that decision. If God created everything in the Universe with clockwork precision, knowing where everything is and what it's capable of, then with that perfect knowledge, he knows everything that will occur from the moment time starts. It's simply a very complicated Rube Goldberg device. Since God put the device together, and knows how it works, at any point, he can step in and change how it works. That's the omnipotence. But since he knows how it all works, no matter what changes he's made, he always knows how it'll turn out. That's the omniscience. If he always knows what will happen, whether he's made changes or not, and he's the one who put you in every situation, knowing how you'll react, then you have no free will. He knows you better than that hypothetical BFF, he knows every thought you've had, everything you've done, and everything you will do.

[Pedersen]

Okay, HYBHYT, we need a formal proof, instead of simply explaining the English language. Very well, then. Proof by contradiction:

My assertion is that the following statements are incompatible: God is omnipotent. God is omniscient. God created everything. Humans have free will.

Since I am already asserting the opposite of the last statement, we can use these statements as the basis of the proof by contradiction.

1. Humans have free will.
2. Free will requires that the possessor of free will be able to make a conscious choice.
3. Humans are able to make a conscious choice between a set of options.
4. A given human, exercising his or her free will, has sole control over the choice coming from the decision making process. Others may influence the process by discussing consequences and benefits, but the final choice is the sole purview of the human making the choice.

Rebuttal: God is omnipotent. Therefore, he can control the decision making process of a given human being. This is in contradiction to point 4.

Conclusion: "Humans have free will" is in direct contradiction to "God is omnipotent". Therefore, either God is not omnipotent, or humans do not have free will. The original assertion that at least one of the four statements is false is confirmed.

Side Note: Thank you for making me write it this way. It shows me that God's omniscience is irrelevant. Simply the fact that he is omnipotent means that we do not have free will.

And before saying "What if he chooses not to interfere? We have free will if he doesn't use his power!", I'll refer you back to the proof above. Nowhere is it required that God actually uses his power to alter things. Only that the power actually exists. Once the power exists, free will goes away. If he chooses not to use his power, then we will have the illusion of having free will, but that is not the same as having actual free will.

Now, if you can punch a hole in the proof, please do so.

[bunnyboy]

...And the reconstructionist pagans are sitting back and enjoying the show, because we realize, the gods are not omnipotent, and that we have free will.... ah life is grand.

Well that and the omnipotence of God and the debate of free will are not part of Logic but Metaphysics so... meh.

[Gravekeeper]

...And the reconstructionist pagans are sitting back and enjoying the show, because we realize, the gods are not omnipotent, and that we have free will.... ah life is grand.

Well that and the omnipotence of God and the debate of free will are not part of Logic but Metaphysics so... meh.

Don't make me shave your stomach and knit a sweater.

[HYHYBT]

Yes, that makes the distinction much clearer. We disagree about what "free will" means. If your notion of free will has hidden within it that no one could possibly have forced you to do differently, whether they ever actually do or not, then you are of course right that it contradicts omnipotence.

And I apologize for the tone of my pervious post (and would have sooner had I been able to get a connection. Happens everytime we get a good rain)

[Pedersen]

Yes, that makes the distinction much clearer. We disagree about what "free will" means. If your notion of free will has hidden within it that no one could possibly have forced you to do differently, whether they ever actually do or not, then you are of course right that it contradicts omnipotence.

Your reply begs the question: What definition can you have for free will that does not actually require the decision maker to be able to make a choice?

And I apologize for the tone of my pervious post (and would have sooner had I been able to get a connection. Happens everytime we get a good rain)

Considering the tone of many of my posts, yours was positively mild. Don't worry about it.

[HYHYBT]

No, it doesn't beg that question at all. So long as no one ever actually prevents you from being able to decide for yourself, it's irrelevant that it *could* be done. You almost might as well say that my freedom to choose whether to get lunch from Zaxby's or Captain D's tomorrow is "false" because you could, though you never would, look up my address and shoot me during the night.

This may just make things worse, but I was thinking about this thread earlier today and got to wondering about what "omnipotent" really means as well. Is it intrinsically possible for an omnipotent being to both do something and not do it? Sorry, I'm really at expressing this sort of thing, but it's related to what I was trying to say before. If an omnipotent being (and omniscient, so there's no need to worry about his changing his mind later even if you're still inclined to thinking that putting God outside of time is cheating) decides that it will never interfere with its creatures' free will, then in a sense it becomes impossible for him to do so because interfering would not be not interfering.

Which I suppose could all be shortened to "my understanding of omnipotence does not include the ability to do that which reduces to nonsense."

[Pedersen]

Honestly, I'm tired of this. If you have a hole to poke in the logic, I'll debate it with you. Right now, you're going in a circle of "We have free will and God is omnipotent because I believe we have free will and God is omnipotent." And a nice circular argument has finally gotten overly boring.

Hell, you haven't even answered the question I asked before of how you can define free will in such a way that someone else can make the choice and yet you can have free will. Let me know when you actually have a hole to poke in the logic.

[Wingates_Hellsing]

That isn't the issue, I would think.

The point is that god being Omniscient and the free will of humanity aren't mutually exclusive. Just because someone knows what you will decide doesn't necessarily mean you don't make the decision.

Let's say that someone knows I am going to vote republican in an election. That they know which person I will vote for doesn't change that I have the ability to choose whoever I will, all it means is that the person has enough information about me and the situation to figure it out. In Gods case, he has infinite information and cognitive ability...

[Pedersen]

Wingates_Hellsing: Omniscient, as it turns out, is irrelevant. See http://www.fratching.com/showpost.ph...2&postcount=43

[HYHYBT]

Hell, you haven't even answered the question I asked before of how you can define free will in such a way that someone else can make the choice and yet you can have free will. Let me know when you actually have a hole to poke in the logic.

Free will, to me, means I get to choose. It really is that simple.

To you, apparently, it means that you get to choose PLUS no one *could* interfere whether they actually do or not. I very much would like to understand why it isn't instead the actual existence of interference that matters, but, so far as I can tell, that is precisely what you have only said that you've explained, rather than actually explaining it.

I really don't see any way to explain it more clearly.

-*-Okay, I've spent the last half hour or so at this point, typing another paragraph here about five times so far, erasing each and replacing it with something different, and in the meantime I *think* I see your meaning, and only missed it because it depends on what *isn't* in your fourth point a couple of posts ago.

A given human, exercising his or her free will, has sole control over the choice coming from the decision making process. Others may influence the process by discussing consequences and benefits, but the final choice is the sole purview of the human making the choice.

There are countless other things that go into forming any decision, such as biology and upbringing. The problem seems to be with whether or not those count as interference. If any of them do, then of course we don't really have free will whether God even exists or not: the contradiction isn't between free will and omnipotence at all (which would explain why I didn't see it there), but between free will and, our very concrete existence. If biology and upbringing and whatall *don't* count, the only thing I see left that could count would be direct miracle, and it's back to "so long as he doesn't actually do it it doesn't matter that he could." Either way, it puts the answer back into exactly what you mean by free will; I mean the second and you, as best I can tell, mean the first.

[HYHYBT]

Sorru, just one more point: it's not like having more than one understanding of "free" is uncommon. If I'm holding a "buy one, get one free" sale on, say, chocolate bars, is the second bar free? It is, at least if you were going to buy the first one anyway, because I didn't raise the price first nor can you get one at half off. But it isn't, in the sense that you can't just get the free one by itself. For that matter, suppose I'm giving them all away for no charge. So it's free... unless your definition of "free" means you not only don't have to pay me, but also have no other consequences like gaining weight. Which, if any, of these forms of "free" you consider to be false depends on what you meant by "free" in the first place, but naturally if you mean the third when you say it's not free and I mean the first when I say that it is we're not going to get very far.

But read the other post first; given the time there's a strong possibility that this one is just me babbling

[Gravekeeper]

Buddhism does not believe in absolute free will, nor absolute determinism so its fully compatible with the problem at hand. But than Buddhism doesn't have a supposedly omnipotent supergod. So this logic problem is mainly for the God/Allah/Yahweh crowd. Which is no fun.

Buddhism is one of the few religions that fully embrace science and logic. Since the default stance is not one of utter denial that there could be any other possible explanation. But rather to constantly seek said possible explanations regardless of where they are found.

Heck, if you want to really fark with your head, look at Hinduism. Depending on what school, you're either delightfully free or adhering utterly 100% to a pre-written script you have no say whatsoever over.