Lots of bashing for the belief of God....

[r505Matt]

GameOver22 said:

r505Matt said:

What are you doing here, actually making me think! Go back from whence you came! =)

My only point with the extra dimensions was that, well, how to put this. The usual idea of these other dimensions is that there is more stuff going on around us than we can actually perceive or know. I guess, in a far too roundabout manner, I was trying to put out an idea that maybe it can be the opposite or something else, and a dimension might actually remove or change something we already perceive. We don't really have much to compare to with our limited perception of the whole spectrum, so who knows? What if in perceiving more layers and more dimensions we would actually perceive less or something completely different? That's all I was getting it. We have no proof either way, I just like to bring up stranger points from time to time.

Let's put some free will in more human terms. If a mother asks her son "do this for me" and he does it, is that free will? You can say he made the choice to do it or not do, and the choice of doing it implies free will, but there are other factors at work. If there is a God, can you say with any reasonable amount of certainty that God isn't in some way doing this? Maybe you don't even know it. Maybe the messages appear to you as dreams, or random thoughts during the day. This wasn't really where I wanted to go with this, but it just kind of popped in my head anyways.

Back on target, we'd have to clearly define what is free will. Omniscience is pretty self explanatory, all knowing, it's pretty simple and straight forward. However, what is free will? My point was that if any higher power does know the future, then it is no longer free will. This can merely be a discrepancy in defintions which I why I don't really argue too much for it. So yes, maybe God does know everything that will happen and does not influence it at all. But in that case, to me, there is no free will. You are following a set path. The decisions you make, that you feel you freely make, are actually predetermined. You were supposed to make this decision at that time. That's not free will to me.

As for omniscience without knowing the future, that's not all knowing. The word all is, well, simple. It means ALL. Not all but not X (where X is the future). That is not all. If a deity does not know the future, then that deity is not omniscient. I'll concede often about definitions of free will, but this is pretty explicit. Saying "God knows of everything except..." means there is something he doesn't know. Sure, as humans, we require knowledge have a basis in reality. But God is not human, he doesn't necessarily face the same issue. Or rather, we start getting into questions like "Well, what is reality? What is knowledge?" which can each be a thread on their own. 

In the case of defining free will, free will is taken to require two things: the ability to decide differently and the person making the decision is the sole arbiter of their decision. Your argument was challenging the claim that a person has the ablity to decide differently; becuase God knows everything, a person does not have the ability to make a decision that contradicts God's knowledge. If I'm reading it correctly, that is your argument.

My argument wasn't meant to show that God does not intervene. I wasn't trying to prove that God cannot be proverbally pulling our strings like we are puppets. I don't think we can prove this with any certainty. It was just meant to show that free will and omniscience are compatible.

With your last paragraph, I might need to explain better. When we say God is all-knowing, we mean he possesses all knowledge. The problem arises because there is not any knowledge about the future until the future becomes present. I can predict that the sun will rise tomorrow morning, but this prediction does not become actual until tomorrow. In order to test the truth of a statement, we need to have something to test it against, but this correspondance between a proposition and reality is not available when talking about future statements (the future being unobserved). Point being, there is not any knowledge about the future, so it does not count against God's omniscience.

Personally, this makes sense to me, as long as it is only applied to free will. I don't think the same can necessarily be said for physical laws. This arises because of the fact that there is an indeterminate aspect to free-will (not so with physical laws). In order to defeat this argument, I think someone would have to attack the second claim of free-will- the claim that people are the sole arbiters of their decisions. They would need to show that my decisions are not really my own decisions and that God or some other entity is making the decisions for me.

Edit: In regard to your first paragraph, I don't think there is any way we can disprove such claims with any certainty, but I think we can ignore most of these claims because they require awkward explanations and become too complex (Ockham's razor in other words).

You are right, about what I was trying to argue, which is the idea of free will not being compatible with predestination (the idea of a higher power knowing the future). The thing we're not agreeing on is 'what is omniscience?' which is a HUGE question. There have been debates for a very long time, and there really is no right answer. Before I get to that though I want to get to Occam's razor (I always spell it this way =P).

First, some background for anyone else reading that thinks Occam's razor is about 'the simplest explanation is most likely the correct one'. This is a misrepresentation, Occam's razor is about shifting burden of proof onto more complex theories. The better overall statement is that "Simpler theories are, other things being equal, generally better than complex ones". That is, unless the more complex theories can in some way provide proof for the necessity of their complexity, they should be re-worked or abandonned until a simpler form is found. Also, the key words are 'other things being equal'. 

Okay, that out of the way, the problem I have with Occam's razor with discussing the extremely theoretical is that it tends to lead to complete disregard for what may possibily be correct. My idea is a little strange, overly complex, and harder to follow then the simpler ideas we already have. Is it wrong? The part that makes it especially tricky is that I'm commenting beyond our perception. It's completely unknown territory, and as far as we know now, may very well remain unknown forever. In essence, just applying trends and ideas we can perceive to things we cannot perceive seems kind of lazy to me sometimes. Maybe this is more important but I'm not looking for validity, I'm merely discussing possibility. A possibility that would normally be easily disgarded due to following Occam's razor.

Now, onto Omniscience! I need to hold back here or I'll go on for about 10 paragraphs. I've been reluctant to say this but yes, there are more than one kind of omniscience and different beliefs regarding omniscience and perception of time. I mentioned predestination before, and that plays a role in this too. You and trestres are both talking about inherent omniscience, the ability to know what one chooses to know and can know. So you posit that the future is not knowledge to be known, that just by being the future, means it is something that has not happened yet and thus has no direct basis in reality. 

My point is that I simply disagree with that notion, and when we're done, we will both have to just agree to disagree. Let me put it in a different perspective though. We view time in a dynamic, linear fashion. We remember the past, live in the present (which instantly becames the past of course) and dream of/hope for/think of the future. But what's to say this is actually the case? Yes, this is why I went into Occam's razor in that much depth, but what if time is not dynamic, and is actually static, and we only view/experience time in a dynamic manner. This is more of what I'm getting at, it's completely theoretical, but it's not like it hasn't been discussed before. Was it Slaughterhouse 5 that was mainly about this very point? I can't remember, it's been too long. That is to say, that everything is merely the past in sense.