Hi, Bob.
(BTW, I didn't realize your real name was Bob when I made up my illustration.
I just pulled that name out of the air.)
bshow1 wrote:When the time for choosing comes, choices C1 and C2
are excluded. Bob will chose C2. Period.
I'm curious what your warrant is for this assertion.
Otherwise, God would have held a false belief.
No, otherwise God would have held a belief that Bob chose C1 or C3.
any choice other than C2 would render God's prior belief about C2 false.
Nope. Any choice other than C2 would render God not having a prior belief about C2, but rather a prior belief about the choice other than C2.
To make the point more clearly, suppose that God had given Moses a stone tablet with the inscription: "At time T, Bob will choose C2". There's certainly nothing to prevent Him from having done so, since He knew about C2 from all eternity. Now time T arrives. What choices are open to Bob? Seemingly only C2. It's literally written in stone. So how can the choice be said to be "free", in the incompatibalist sense?
This is to confuse something being causally prior with something being chronologically prior. In the prophecy given to Moses concerning Bob, if Bob had chosen C1 instead of C2, then God would not have given Moses a prophecy that Bob would choose C2, but rather that Bob would choose C1. If it was God's intention to give an accurate prophecy about Bob's choice, he would be able to see into the future and report that Bob's choice was for C1 rather than C2. You would not get a situation where someone makes a choice contrary to prophecy, because a prophecy is simply a report of what
will occur in the future (or in the case of conditional prophecies, what will occur in the future given certain circumstances such as Israel's obedience or disobedience). Bob's choice at time T
determines the nature of the prophecy given at the time of the prophecy, not the other way around. A prophecy is not a decree, but rather a reporting of events which have not yet occurred. We humans do not have the ability to see into the future to be able to report on what will happen, but God does because he is omniscient.
Furthermore, you haven't established *how* God could know C2, given indeterminism.
Well, the simple answer is that God is omniscient. He knows all true propositions. C2 will happen, therefore he knows it. He doesn't have to decree the decision in order to know that it will happen. I cannot explain *how* any further than that; if you want me to explain how omniscience works, I'm afraid I'm unable to do that. There are a lot of things God does that I can't explain, like *how* did he create the universe, etc.
Calvinists rather maintain that God's decree is the basis for His foreknowledge.
Why is it necessary for God to decree something in order to foreknow it? You don't think he's capable of knowing about something that he didn't decree?
2) You are equivocating on the term foreknowledge. You have an *expectation* that the movie will follow the book plot, but you don't *know* it (in the sense that God knows future events).
A fair criticism. So let's refine the example a little. Lets say I go to see the movie a second time. Upon my second viewing of the movie, I *know* how the events will turn out. But my knowing isn't because I decreed that the events will turn out as they did; I just know it because I've seen it. That's how I imagine God knows future events; not because he necessarily decrees them, but because he sees them, being omniscient.* How it works I do not know. Just like I don't know how he created the universe or figured out how to design a human brain, etc.
(* Of course, I'm not saying he didn't decree
any future events, either. Certainly there are many things he
did decree. But I do believe he delegated a little bit of his free will to mankind.)
This is like the Middle Knowledge position. But how would God (or anyone else) know that factors X, Y, and Z would cause choice C2 and Q, R, and S would case C3, given the incompatibalistic notion of freedom?
Simple: he's omniscient (refer to my comments above).
If that's the case, then our actions are determined by prior conditions outside of ourselves.
I think I wasn't exactly clear enough. God might not necessarily control or need to control
all events by manipulating circumstances. But if he wants to or needs to in order to bring about an overall historical scenario, then he can. I was thinking here more about intervention. Homer, several posts above, states it much more elegantly than my stammering, long-winded, partially informed philosophizing:
Homer wrote:I would say God is always aware of all events, does not interfere most of the time, but when it suits His purpose He exercises His veto power. Paul still had free will on the Road to Damascus, but God made it practically impossible for Paul to make another choice.
This would apply to anything and everything. God is sovereign, in control of all events, while allowing for nature, which He established and superintends, to follow its course and man to have free will.
God established the laws of nature, thus we have gravity. How often does God intervene and not allow gravity to function normally? Yet He is not without ability to do so.
Back to Bob:
bshow1 wrote:
But the indeterminism you defend maintains that *no* set of prior conditions is sufficient to produce one choice over another;
No, if it sounded like I was defending that sort of indeterminism, then I didn't do a good job of communicating. That is too extreme. I believe that free will is such a basic part of existence that we cannot exactly explain what it is or how it works. Just like it appears to be impossible to state exactly
what energy is, or for that matter, matter, too. We can say that energy is the ability to do work, but that only describes what it
does; not what it
is. What it actually
is is not a question we can answer. Same with free will, and that applies whether you're talking about creaturly free will or God's free will. Same problem. We just have to accept the fact that it exists for we can go no further. So free will being basically a mystery of existence, I can be flexible about what possibly can and cannot influence it, since I know so little about it. From experience I see that it can be
influenced by prior conditions as well as external inputs, but I would not try to say that it is completely
determined by those conditions. Where the line of demarcation is is something that I leave to the Secret Councils of God.
we can always act contrary to our desires.
No, this is contradictory. Although as stated above I see a lot of mystery in free will, I also recognize that it has a lot to do with desires. Desires are either the result of or the source of our free will (I haven't figured out which, and probably never will, since it is so mysterious). We might have
competing desires (as C.S. Lewis describes in Mere Christianity), but I can't make sense of the assertion that we can of our own free will "act contrary to our desires."
So does God get His way by manipulating and tricking us?
So? Who art thou that repliest against God? Who are we to question his means? I admit my illustration may have been an unfortunate choice because of the connotation we have of a magician using deception to "trick" his subject. I'm not trying to suggest that God is a trickster, but that he can get the results he wants by controlling circumstances so as to execute a macro-level plan or to convict someone of sin while not interfering with free will.
I'm not sure that the idea of God controlling circumstances in order to prod someone in the right direction is any more crass than the idea of God deliberately predestining vast numbers of people to hell.
Bob, I have to say that even though I disagree with your viewpoint, I've enjoyed this exchange and your thoughtful commants so far (though I do feel a bit guilty for maybe having stolen the conversation away from Sean
). It has challenged me to think even more deeply about things, and it is certainly a vast improvement over some of the things that had been going on here a couple days ago with the discussion about the irc chat, etc.
Interesting avatar, BTW.
--Jared
)