Why would omniscience and free will be mutually exclusive?

The idea that "god is ontologically primary", whatever that is meant to entail precisely, does not seem to me to derive from the sole idea that he is omniscient. Remember, I have not been disputing that God's existence may be taken to be incompatible with free-will. I have been criticising purported demonstrations that it is incompatible with the bare idea of God's omniscience.

The bare idea that he is omniscient, even conjoined with the idea that he is omnipotent, does not obviously entail that he must create the universe in just one way in all possible-worlds. Maybe this sounds queer to you because it seems to entail some primacy of 'possible-worlds' over universes (and maybe the ontological primacy of some of those possible-worlds in which God does not exist). But it is just an artefact of the technical use of 'possible-worlds' vocabulary to express statements of alethic modalities in a way that's easier to model. I am saying nothing about the ontological status of possible worlds. The first sentence of this paragraph can be rephrased with no alteration in meaning thus: "The bare idea that he is omniscient, even conjoined with the idea that he is omnipotent, does not obviously entail that he must necessarily create the universe in just one way."

 

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um..see below..

we are talking about what you 'know' about me,would you be able to convince anyone that you did 'know' me? (not saying i am worth knowing..:bugeye

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When you say that my choice is "infallibly predictable - determined by these things" you are assuming some form of causal determinism. If this causal determinism holds and God's foreknowledge is grounded into knowledge of facts about the world that obtain prior the the event predicted, which they causally necessitate, then determinism would seem to be the reason why I don't have free-will. God's knowledge might have been fallible, or non-existent, I would still not have been free.

You thus seem to be gesturing towards something like the 'consequence argument' that purports to demonstrate determinism's incompatibility with free-will. God's infallible foreknowledge has no incidence at all unless you are going to stipulate that his foreknowledge must necessarily be grounded into contemporary knowledge of prior facts that are alien to my actions and that causally necessitate them.

 

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The combined knowledge of everyone is categorically incomparable to omniscience. Do you think such combined knowledge can consist of unlimited foreknowledge of the future as well as knowledge of all contingencies. You must be applying a different definition to omniscience perhaps the definition of causal determinism.

 

"Only when P is necessary can one know P" would be written "K(P) -> Nec(P)". I assume this is what you meant to write.

'->' is my symbol for material implication, of course.

Only on the most stringent Descartes-inspired accounts is genuine knowledge thought to be essentially apodictic, that is, meant not only to entail truth but also meant to stem from a cognitive power that isn't liable to yield false beliefs on some occasions. Such accounts may be motivated by the 'higher factor theory' of the objective content of our cognitive states. I myself subscribe to the so called 'disjunctive theory' of knowledge that is more in touch with our ordinary conception of it. This account entails that in order to know something, some small degree of epistemic luck is ordinarily required in addition to positive belief and justification. Your more stringent conception would seem to imply that we never have any genuine empirical knowledge of anything unless we are God or unless we are graced by him (as in Descartes own anti-skeptical solution requiring God's benevolence, although Descartes seems then to reintroduce fallibility through the back door!).

This being clarified a bit (or so I hope), I want to state my two main points.

First, even if you were to grant me this merely definitional point that ordinary fallible (yet genuine) knowledge requires luck, that means that Joe, when he knew that I was going to buy a beer, has been somewhat lucky. Still, his state of foreknowledge, which necessarily entails that he will turn out to have been lucky, logically precludes my failure to buy a beer. We thus have the result that Nec(K(P) -> P) even in this case where K(P) is the actualization of a fallible epistemic power. (This fallible power just can't fail to yield a true belief *when actualized*)

Second, in God's case where no luck is required because his epistemic powers are infallible, the only modal difference that I can see is that it may not possibly have seemed to God that he knew that P while it will later turn out that P is false. Hence, we not only have Nec(K(P) -> P) -- as we already had when we considered Joe's case -- but in addition we have that Nec(B(P) -> K(P)). Whenever God believes that P he thereby knows that P. (And hence P is true, or will turn out to be).

You only seem to get K(P) -> Nec(P) when you assume that foreknowledge must be not only be infallible (this assumption all by itself seems logically idle here, as I have tried to show) but also that genuine foreknowledge must be grounded into temporally prior conditions that logically necessitate P. This further assumption yields something logically equivalent to assuming some form of causal necessitation, which also has the form Nec(CN(P) -> P). In other words, if prior conditions were such as to causally entail P, then P. You still don't get Nec(P) without further assumption. Is has been the task of those who defended the so called 'consequence argument' in debates about free-will and determinism to show that determinism yields the requisite sense of Nec(P) that precludes genuine freedom. But this would be an altogether different argument than the one from God's omniscience.

 

Pierre-Normand,

I think the concept of God's omniscience harmonious with human free will can be grasped in terms of an intuitive flash, but not in terms of logical argument.

One must be poetically flexible, as it were.

I can see how the free actions of humans are free, and somehow at the same time God precedes them; yet his (or "His" if you will) precession does not freeze that freedom (such that it logically no longer is freedom), but merely knows that freedom not as "what is", nor as "what will be", but as "what will have been" once it comes to be.

At any rate, I can grasp it; although I have difficulty articulating it in language.

 

Sure, but the entitlement to poetical flexibility mustn't exempt one from the intellectual responsibility not to base one's justifications on invalid forms of inference or the responsibility not to simultaneously advance logically inconsistent theses. In any case I haven't tried to use logic to demonstrate the compatibility of two substantial theses. One can't really do that except through showing the two theses to be logically equivalent. This clearly isn't the case with the two substantial (non-logical) theses of human free will and God's omniscience.

The most one can do is to show that under some reasonable interpretation of the non-logical predicates occurring in the statement of one these, this these entails the negation of another one (also suitably interpreted). Or, faced with one such purported incompatibility demonstration, one can impugn its logical form (that's a logical task) or contest the perspicuousness of the analysis of the non-logical terms (that's a philosophical or theoretical task). That's only these negative tasks that I have undertaken here.

 

This is fair enough. I have been drawing upon additional qualities that are typically assigned to God from the beginning, which I (perhaps incorrectly) assumed to be in play by default. It seemed clear to me that such qualities must necessarily factor into any discussion exploring a proposed incompatibility between omniscience and free-will because to me omniscience is not just a quality that is suspended in thin air for the purposes of examination, it is contextualized by the being that the quality is typically assigned to. Additionally, I know Signal well enough (at least what he shares of himself on these forums anyway) to be able to say that he's primarily interested in exploring ideas about God and religion, so it didn't even occur to me that he might have intended for the discussion to be about omniscience as 'detached' from God rather than about the proposed incompatibility between the existence of God and free-will, omniscience being the quality that is usually identified as that which reveals the problem.

But if we do say something about the ontological status of other possible worlds, namely that it is nonsensical to propose their existence if God himself is ontologically primary, then we end up with immutable foreknowledge (if we hold that God is omniscient and we use the most common definition of such).

Of course once again this is an incompatibility between God (as typically defined) and free-will rather than bare omniscience and free-will.

 

I only quote part of your post for sake of electron economy. I just wanted to say that I fully agree with everything you just said. You usefully clarified the dialectical context of our former exchanges and removed the ground for many of (maybe not all) our former disagreements.

 

Pierre-Normand,

What I mean is that there is no way to logically comprehend how God embraces the "could be"/"comes to be" eventualities of human freedom. One can only intuit this. Logic does not embrace transcendence; it only indicates it.

 

I don't believe there is a personal God, myself. I am a non-militant atheist with a broadly naturalistic -- albeit non-scientistic -- conception of the world. Some of my favourite philosophers are theists (or deists) though, and not only ancient ones such as Aristotle, Bishop Butler, Leibniz and Kant but recent or contemporary ones such as Wittgenstein, Anscombe, Putnam and Taylor.

So, I can make no claim to comprehend God's attributes. All I can do is discuss whatever attributes hypothetically predicated of Him by others (according to *their* understanding of such attributes) entail regarding our putative possession of free-will. I am primarily concerned with the understanding this dialectical exercise yields regarding our positive conception of human freedom.

I do also have *some* interest in theology, though, inasmuch as some acquaintance with the field is required for capturing accurately the broad thinking systems of ancient theistic philosophers. And I thing the history of philosophy demonstrates that theological reflection can yield philosophical insight that are of great intellectual value for anyone, even for a naturalist like myself. So, theistic philosophers ought never be belittled on the ground of their being theists, in my opinion.

 

I am trying to differentiate between the previous translation you gave for K(P) -> Nec(P): "If it is known that P then neccesarily P"
And the case that only those things that are necessary can be known... i.e. it is not the knowledge of P that drives necessity, but necessity that drives knowledge.
Perhaps it is merely restating the same thing, but the focus is different.

We are talking about omniscience, are we not? Why would such a knowledge not be as described here?

The issue with this example is that the truth value of the foreknowledge is not known until AFTER the event... and prior to the event it is just a guess (however well educated)... and fallible.

But since there is, in this example, an alternative to P, then your point is understood... since P is not the only option, Nec(K(P) -> P) but this does not mean K(P) -> Nec(P), as there were alternatives to P from the outset.

However, my point is that this applies where you still have conditionals within P (e.g. it could be P, Q or R etc).

The situation where there are no such conditionals is different... and this is the situation, as I see it, with an omniscient. All conditionals are removed from their perspective.

This is not the difference. Afterall, at the time it would not have seemed to Joe that he knew P while it later turned out that P is false.
The difference, as I see it, is that the knowledge of God is perfect... it is not a case of always getting lucky, but of having the knowledge that makes conditionals a meaningless concept.

I.e. there was no alternative to P... nor to what preceded P... nor to anything God does.
An omniscient therefore -> Necessity in all things.
An omniscient could not have known differently (or they would not be omniscient).

This is different to merely "knowing" where you leave conditionals within that knowledge, and it is not perfect.

But since there are no conditionals with regard P, K(P)->Nec(P)... or really just Nec(P).... i.e. that in the presence of omniscience, all things that happen are necessary. And it is not possible for an omniscient to know anything that is not necessary.

 

That is all fine and well, as long as you are not a member of an organized theistic religion, don't seek to be one (within the scope of organized theism, what you say above is a recipe for heresy), are not threatened by any such members, nor do you expect that your views on God and transcendence would be in any way relevant to your life.

This concern above is important because without reference to an actual theistic religion, a person's "philosophical theism" or "natural theology" is irrelevant to and impotent in terms of application (e.g. one cannot sensibly pray to the "God of philosophy"), as it gets bogged down in circular reasoning, self-referentiality.
One cannot set oneself to be the authority on matters about God and remain rational. Doing so would, for one, present God as lesser than oneself - in which case it would be irrational to consider such an entity to be "God".

 

(I wish to comment on this part of your post separately)

But, of course, it isn't the same thing at all. The claim that A entails B is quite different from the claim that B entails A. It's not mere difference in emphasis.

But now that you wish to defend the claim that knowledge of P must entail the necessity of P, I merely point out that this claim should be noted "K(P) -> Nec(P)" and not the other way around as you had done.

On edit: OK, sorry, I reread what you just wrote and I now understand what you mean. Indeed it is logically equivalent to say that (1) if K(P) then Nec(P) and to say that (2) *only* if Nec(P), K(P). However both of these equivalent claims are written "K(P) -> Nec(P)" in logical notation and not "Nec(P) -> K(P)" as you had written them in the post I quoted before that.

Example: "If N has two and only two integer factors then N is prime" is equivalent to "Only if N is prime does N have two and only two integer factors". Both are written "(N has two and only two integer factors) -> (N is prime)"

 

Why, because I was specifically directing your attention to my Joe-example and your retort was that Joe's successful prediction couldn't possibly constitute foreknowledge owing to its being fallible. We were indeed talking about old non-omniscient Joe, there.

 

First, you seem to be sliding from an epistemological claim to an ontological claim when you say that prior to the event the prediction is just a guest. Sure, it can't be known *with certainty* (by Joe or anyone else who isn't God) whether or not Joe's prediction will turn out to constitute foreknowledge or a failed prediction. For that matter, neither can this be known with certainty even after the fact, for human empirical knowledge always is fallible. Consider that many ordinary claims of knowledge concerning future events have much higher degree of certainty than do many claims about directly observed events. For instance I know with great certainty that next week rabbits will be mammals, Ottawa will be the capital of Canada and the sun will rise in the morning. I may know that there is milk in the fridge when I open the fridge door and see the milk carton there. But my degree of certainty is much lower that is was for in the former examples owing to the non-negligible probability that someone drank the milk and put the empty carton back there.

In all of those cases, if my prediction doesn't pan out, or my direct observation turns out to have been misleading, this will impugn my belief's status as knowledge. It will turn out to have been a false belief rather than a case knowledge, all along. But in many (most) other cases these are still ordinary instances of knowledge.

Second, your comment about their being "conditional within P" is ambiguous. Do you mean this to mean that P is contingent? Then you seem to say that your point is that the omniscient perspective removes contingency. But I don't see your argument. This isn't a point; it's an assertion. What the omniscient perspective removes is both (1) doubt and (2) the possibility of false *belief*. It is this second consequence of omniscience that I characterized thus: Nec(B(P) -> K(P).

The further fact that Nec(K(P) -> P) just is a consequence of the definition of knowledge, whether fallible or infallible.

Of course it never seems to one that one's beliefs are false when one holds them on pain of irrationality. Your claim that God's knowledge is perfect and that he can't thus be epistemically unlucky just restates the fact that his knowledge is infallible. In other worlds his power of knowledge is actualized in every instance where he has a belief. This is expressed by my formula above Nec(B(P) -> K(P). It entails the necessary conditional, from which you invalidly derive a conditional necessity.

This again look to me like an assertion with no justification.

Suppose that there are occurrences of contingent events (C1, C2, C3, etc.) in the actual world. If God is omniscient and has infallible foreknowledge then it follows that (C1 -> K(C1) at all times in all possible worlds and (not(C1) -> K(not(C1)) at all times in all possible worlds whether or not C1 occurs of fails to occur in any one of them. In other words, it follows directly -- by the model-theoretic definition of 'Nec' -- that Nec(C1 -> K(C1).

I have just describe a case where God has infallible foreknowledge of anything that contingently happens and he never holds any false beliefs. Why would you claim his knowledge to be imperfect?

 

No, in post 180, reply to you I was not assuming anything (other than logic) - I was only using your post 149 statements, which I quoted and made bold (and logic).

Also your statements there, which I used, do not concern or assume that God has "foreknowledge." Only that he has complete and perfect current knowledge of the present and of the past. From this YOU concluded that unlike the friend guessing that a beer would be ordered, God infallibly could predict it would be. ("zero probability of error")

This must logically be because the past and present do determine your actions -to order the beer, in this case. - No other choice is available as if it were possible, then God would not have zero chance of error in his prediction that you would order the beer. His predictions are not based on "foreknowledge" according to you, but upon complete and perfect knowledge of the present and the past, which the friend only had partial knowledge of with possible error in his knowledge.

SUMMARY: I am not postulating foreknowledge or determinism - only showing that logically YOU have assumed determinism is true, without realizing you had done that. Either that or YOU are assuming God does have foreknowledge. Again I assumed nothing but that logic is true.

 

OK, I understand now. We have been miscommunicating and it may be mainly my fault. What I said was that "God is less likely to overlook a circumstance that would falsify his prediction." and I may have seemed to imply that God bases his predictions on knowledge of the present from which he derives predictions in the manner of Laplace's demon who can deduce the global state of the Universe at any time from the conjunction of it's global state at any instant and his knowledge of deterministic physical law.

But all I meant to imply is only that while Joe's predictions are liable to fail God's predictions never fail because they needn't themselves be derived from incomplete empirically acquired knowledge. Indeed, they need not be assumed to derive from knowledge of the present at all. Such an assumption would entail the untoward consequence that God is a creature of time who can only know the future in a nomologically deterministic universe (i.e. in which all phenomena are causally necessitated by the conjunctions of all earlier facts and the deterministic laws of nature).

Rather, the postulation of God's infallible foreknowledge only entails that necessarily his prediction will turn out to be true, whatever the nature of his 'predictive method' may be. It may be that his gaze directly encompasses all temporal instants of the universe, for all I know (...or rather, for all one may postulate).

On edit: Also, I had said that "His foreknowledge isn't fallible like Joe's is." but you didn't bold that statement. So it isn't true that I didn't assume him to base his predictions on foreknowledge as you claim above; although I'd rather say that his predictions constitute cases of foreknowledge, and need not be assumed to be based on anything else than direct acquaintance with the future facts thereby known.

 

At 37 minutes past the hour, I realized that there was a second logical position you could be taking so I edited my post 197 to add near the end:

“Either that or YOU are assuming God does have foreknowledge.”

Your post 198 made at 51 minutes after the hour (14 minutes after this addition) seem to confirm (in text I have made larger) you hold that second alternative position. I.e. God is somehow outside of time and can see all the future, so simply knows that you will order the beer. I.e. you are assuming the entire future is already determined and known to God.

I made no such claim (as part I have made bold) In fact I said just the opposite -i.e. That only the present and the past were the basis for God's ability to predict perfectly.

Then I realized the second logical alternative existed so added it at 37 past the hour (Namely that, as appears to be the case, you are postulating that the future in already determined AND God knows what it will be perfectly.)

You seem to be undecided. At times suggesting God has perfect knowledge of past and present so can infallible predict. At other times you seem to assert or guess that he is not predicting but knows the future. Which is it (or both?)? In either case what will happen is what will happen and their is no choice being made, unless you consider "doing the inevitable" a choice.

 

Yes, yes, sorry. I forgot to add the word "not" somewhere in that sentence. "I didn't assume him (not) to base his predictions... " is what I meant to say.

Rather I make no assumption regarding the nature or existence God. I am simply working out the consequences this assumption would have for our possessing genuine free-will, since other have argued that God's infallible foreknowledge of our action is sufficient to precludes our having free-will and I don't see the assumption about infallible foreknowledge to entail causal determinism.

I also deny that God's infallible foreknowledge entails that "the future is already determined" if this is meant to imply that there aren't future contingent events. The quoted phrase is, in any case, ambiguous.