Why would omniscience and free will be mutually exclusive?

I think there's a problem with applying our ideas of "possibility" and "necessary" to omniscience. An omniscient being would not need them, would they?

They would just know what "is" happening, would they even need to "know why" it is?
That is, would they need a concept of "history", like we seem to need? Why would an omniscient being need to remember anything?

Why is it so hard for us to avoid applying our concepts of time, history, probabiliy and so on, to the supposed onmiscient state, when there is no logical "necessity" to do so, or to assume anything much about this passive observer status, except it observes the entire universe at once? Why does it "need" to do anything else?

 

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Omniscience isn't about needing anything. By necessary what is meant is a priori necessary. Without a priori necessity there's only trivialism. What's a "passive observer status?"

 

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But doesn't necessary mean "needed"?

What is a priori necessary for omniscience? What does "a being who can observe everything" mean? What does "everything" mean, and does it have a different meaning for omniscient, and for non-omniscient observers?

Is it a priori necessary that "everything" exists, and can be observed? I would say yes, it does. So what else is a priori necessary for omniscience?

 

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It isn't a priori necessary that everything exists but it is a priori necessary that everything is contingent and an omnipotent, omniscient being is inherently a priori necessary.

 

i have difficulty thinking of a God outside of time..its hard to imagine..not saying he is not..just saying it gets difficult to contemplate, cause and effect are useless with a God that is outside time..

incomplete thought;

Mental,
Emotional,
physical,
spiritual,

i keep wanting to try to the fit history into this..
it could be applied to society as a whole, IE caveman days were 'Physical', Renascence period is of 'Mental', it seems we are living today with 'Emotional',
i don't know where 'Spiritual' fits in, could be a 'to be determined' by another age, or it could have happened already and i don't see it..:shrug:

 

Why do you need to imagine a God outside of space-time. Just saying there's nothing for the mind to contemplate there...

That's the idea.

 

This argument, unlike most of the arguments I have been criticising here, is logically valid. Notice the fifth premise. It states that Nec(P) in conjunction with Nec(P -> Q) entails Nec(Q). It doesn't make the mistake or deriving Nec(Q) from the same necessary entailment claim together with the weaker premise about the merely contingent truth of P.

Then this argument discharges the burden of proving the necessity of P though making use of "the principle of necessity of the past". This principle seems false to me. I am prepared to argue against it. If I am right, then this new argument is unsound. If I am wrong, then this would validate the conclusion you were attempting to draw. But your former arguments would still be invalid, unlike this one.

 

The necessity that you correctly see to be implicit in the concept of God's knowledge (although you are again confused about the scope of the modal operator) is also implicit in the ordinary concept of fallible human knowledge. Necessarity, if Joe knows that P, then P. Else, if P were false, then Joe wouldn't know P. (Notice the wide scope of the operator?). Instead, Joe would falsely believe P to be true. This still has no bearing on the necessity of P. If Joe actually known that P, this does not show P not to be contingent. P might still have been false, in which case Joe would not have known P to be true. You'd have to show that Nec(Joe knows that P). Infallibility changes nothing to the logical structure of the argument.

There is no such possibility that is implied by my argument. Maybe God actually knows that P. If P had been false instead, which is merely possible, then God would have known better. He would have known P to be false *in that possible case*.

Edited to add: This is what basically distinguishes Joe's case from God's case. In both cases, P may be contingent but if P had been false then Joe may have had a false belief, whereas, necessarily, God would have known better, assuming he has necessary foreknowledge.

 

You are now arguing in favour of causal determinism, and then, further below you claim determinism to be false. I don't know what to make of this.

I don't need you to "concede the point"; I don't need to show your deeply held belief, which you now hold to be self evident, to be false. I have merely been pointing out logical flaws in the specific arguments you've adduced in its support.

 

No. Even in a probabilistic universe, if you change X then Y will become something else (there is an astronomically small probability that a course correction could happen purely by chance, but it's so small I think it's reasonable to ignore it for our purposes here).

But aside from that, let's look at a Biblical example. Before God created the universe, he knew that he was going to send his son Jesus to die for our sins on the cross. This is Y. In order for Y to happen, X (Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge) had to happen.

Or, before God created the universe, he knew that Eve was going to eat from the Tree of Knowledge (Y). Therefore God had to create the universe (X). Y is always contingent upon X when we've got omniscience in the equation, and every X is also a Y.

 

What's the missing link in the chain of my logic again? Would you mind stating it succinctly once more?

 

One of the deeply held beliefs that may not hold is our belief in the existence of a future.

Why does an omniscient observer of the universe need a concept of future events? Does anything "happen between" any of the events, like say, other events, for such an observer?

 

You are reaching the conclusion that (necessarily I will do A) from the two premises: (1) necessarily, if God knew that I would do A then I would do A and (2) God knew that I would do A.

These two premises correspond to premises #4 and #1 in the argument you quoted from the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. But this argument is valid because if effects the transition from those two premises to the conclusion you want to draw with the use of a further premise. That is premise #2, the principle of necessity of the past, that enables the logical inference from #4 and #1 to the conclusion #6 (through the intermediate steps of #3 and #5). If you dispense with #2 then you can't infer #6 from #4 and #1 alone. But this is what you attempted to do using the invalid inference form:

If (4) Nec(p -> q)
and (1) p
then (6) Nec(q)

The missing premise has the form Nec(p), corresponding to #3 (derived from #2) in the Encyclopaedia article.

 

You are bringing in the novel assumptions that if God knew he would create the universe one way then he could not have created it another way (I can easily grant you this truism), and that he indeed knew he would create it that way (I can also grant you this, since his omniscience can naturally be assumed to be reflexive). This pushed the argument one step back. But you still must rely on the same incorrect argument form to move directly from those two premises the conclusion that he couldn't possibly have created the universe another way than the way he actually created it.

 

You are looking at things in terms of human time perception and not the time perception of the concept of God. Say you had infinite time on your hands. You don't want to be too perfect, or else you will finish everything too fast, and then have too much time left over to twittle your thumbs.

To fill in all that infinite time you would use your omniscience to keep the process from ending too fast. One way to do that is to create an opposing principle such as Lucifer. He was the morning star that appears in consciousness (light). He is similar to entropy helping to stretch time out by adding change to the perfection of instincts.

An analogy is building a puzzle, but wanting to make it last longer, while, at the same time being an expert puzzle maker. You can use you omniscience to complete the puzzle in record time. But then you are bored since there will be an infinite numberd of tomorrows with nothing to do.

A more challenging way, that can pass more time is to have a two year old help you. He/she is far less perfect and more impulsive and will mess things up, which is predictable. You will have to repair constantly, chasing them around the room to get the next piece, etc.,causing the puzzle to last much longer. This imperfection puts you in touch with more of your omniscience, since you will need to go in more directions.

This sounds dumb if you only have limited time, like humans. Humans need to get the most out of what they have due to limited time. Perfection is very compact for that purpose. But if you have infinite time on your hands, one seeks completeness. This passes more time, keeping things interesting and full of surprises where one can get a better workout for their omniscience, since omniscience is completeness.

 

I agree with you so far.

If (Joe knows P) is a necessary truth, then P would appear to be a necessary truth as well.

But Joe's human. He's fallible. P can be contingent, with the question of whether or not Joe really knows P contingent as well, dependent (at least in part) on the truth of P.

What? It changes everything!

You just wrote: "Necessarity, if Joe knows that P, then P. Else, if P were false, then Joe wouldn't know P. (Notice the wide scope of the operator?). Instead, Joe would falsely believe P to be true."

Infallibility says that it's impossible for God to hold a false belief. It's impossible that God's belief about P could be mistaken.

So omniscience tells us that it's necessary that the sum of God's knowledge include P, and infallibility tells us that it's necessary that God's belief about P be true and correct knowledge with no possibility of error.

That's your Nec(God knows P) interpreted in a couple of subtly different senses.

Plug it into your earlier assertion:

Necessarily (if somebody knows P => P)

then crank it, and it looks to me like the Nec(P) drops out.

 

Keep in mind that we aren't trying to establish that P is T in all possible worlds. We are concerned with a subset of worlds, examining instead whether P must necessarily be T in all possible worlds in which omniscience and infallibility hold, in which God knows P, and so on.

 

When philosophers or logicians say that P is true in all possible worlds, they are saying that P would be true whatever way the actual world could possibly have been (counterfactually). This is the way the 'possible world' locution works in modal logical statements. This makes the statements "P is necessary" and "P is true in all possible worlds" synonymous. Likewise, the statements "P is contingent" and "P does not hold in at least one possible world" are synonymous. So, denying that P must be necessarily T in all possible worlds is in effect denying that P is necessary.

Further, as I have pointed out many times now, that P is contingent despite God knowing it to be true does *not* have the implication (which you mistakenly draw) that there are possible worlds in which God is mistaken. The only implication from God's infallible knowledge and omniscience is that in every possible world in which P isn't true, God, in that world, knew P to be false.

 

Yes, this form of argument is valid. (Although you need to add transfer of necessity principle to make it explicitly formally valid, but I grand you the truth of this principle).

However we were never agreed on the truth of the premise Nec(God knows that P). This is only true if you assume Nec(P). If P is contingent, then all that follows form God's omnicscience and foreknowledge is Nec(If P then God knew that P).

 

I don't know. I keep seeing a problem with the idea that an omniscient being would even understand "contingent".

When something is contingent it depends on the outcome of something else which an omniscient being would know about, so no "contingency" to see here.
But non-omniscient observers would see contingencies necessarily, because the outcomes of the "something elses" are not known about.

We necessarily have to "wait", but omniscience does away with contingencies, so there is no "waiting".

In my version of omniscience, everything about the universe is known "now". There is no concept of waiting for events to occur, so by extension there is no concept either of events having occurred. There are only events in a continuum of events, and no "necessary" past or future.

IOW, an omniscient being is outside of time as we understand it.