Free will argument

[kingofmirrors]

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Had you read your Calvin you would understand.

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i know this could be a whole separate thread, but on that note i'm really looking for some good philosophy books. i find philosophy fascinating but the extent of my knowledge is what i've gleaned from this forum plus one semester of intro to ethics. care to make a quick recommendation?

[NotReady]

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care to make a quick recommendation?


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I made the Calvin reference mostly for that subject only. He spends a lot of time in "Institutes" and other works on the problems of God's sovereignty and human responsibility.

However, everything he writes is based on Scripture. He was contemptuous of secular philosophy so if what you're looking for is in that area you won't find much of it in Calvin.

I think your best bet, if you don't want to struggle through the main writings of philosophers (read a few pages of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason to get an idea of the task involved), would be a good overview. I don't know of any, though I think there are some posters here who could point you in the right direction. I recently found this
and though I haven't had a chance to read all the entries, it looks like a good synopsis of Greek philosophy. I recommend starting there as most Western philosophy derives from the Greeks.

If you want to know a lot about what Reformed theology says about the Bible then read the "Institutes". It's available online, and though I don't always agree with Calvin, I can't think of anything easily available that says it better.

[vhawk01]

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i guess existing outside of time is the part i'm having trouble wrapping my head around. i always imagined the idea of transcending time as just being able to see the past, present, and future all at once.

your argument would make more sense to me if i could better imagine the significance of existing outside of time... but i see what you're getting at.

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I agree. I don't much care for free will in general, even less so for God, and I definitely understand what you are going through and why this is an appealing argument. It was very appealing to me for a while too. But it ultimately just boils down to an argument from incredulity, something along the lines of "I can't imagine what outside of time means, therefore God must adhere to time and causality as I am capable of understanding it." Heck, this argument might even be correct, but its also easy to defeat and dismiss, and probably fallacious.

[wtfsvi]

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Suppose you invent a time machine and travel back to 1963, Dallas, Texas. Suppose you enter the School Book Depository and see Lee Oswald heading for the staircase. You could now prevent the assassination, but instead you decide to watch. Oswald pulls the trigger, you hop in the time machine and come back. Did Oswald have free will?

[/ QUOTE ] One trip does not show anything. If you travel back to different situations many times, and everybody does the same every time as long as you don't change the circumstances, that would mean they probably didn't have free will. If you travel back and see Oswald infinite times and every time he pulls the trigger, he clearly could not have chosen to not do it.

[thylacine]

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I was having a discussion with some religious folk the other day about whether or not free will and an all-knowing god could coexist. They argued that everyone can make their own choices, but god can see a "timeline" of all the choices you will ever make because god transcends time. I argued that if god knows what my choices are going to be I actually don't really have choices. In other words, if god sees me choosing to go to sleep in 10 minutes, I WILL choose to go to sleep in 10 minutes and I can't change that. To me, that means I'm just living out a story I've already written and therefore don't have any way of affecting my future even though superficially it appears that I do. If I'm stuck on a timeline, even one that I've written, that seems to indicate that my free will has been compromised.

The whole discussion was fairly pointless and never got resolved because the other side never really countered my argument, but I'm very aware that my argument is probably faulty and/or circular. I'd like to hear some thoughts on the issue. And sorry if the language is unclear, I'm confused just thinking about it.

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I had a thread on this a few months ago. There is an airtight argument that:

If there is an omniscient omnipotent being, then there cannot be free will (for any other being), or equivalently,

If there is free will (for any other being), then there cannot be an omniscient omnipotent being.

The complete incompatibility of (a) an omniscient omnipotent being, and (b) free will, is yet another blatant contradiction that theists have to deal with.

On the other hand it is reasonable for an atheist to take either side on the free will debate.

[m_the0ry]

obviously you won this argument.

[m_the0ry]

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I'm very aware that my argument is probably faulty and/or circular.


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I've never seen the logic of why God's knowledge of what we will do affects our free choice. You're not alone, though. In recent years there's a whole new movement in evangelicalism that denies God's omniscience just to avoid this problem. I think it's called "process theology", not sure.

However, I have an example that may help you think about it a little better.

Suppose you invent a time machine and travel back to 1963, Dallas, Texas. Suppose you enter the School Book Depository and see Lee Oswald heading for the staircase. You could now prevent the assassination, but instead you decide to watch. Oswald pulls the trigger, you hop in the time machine and come back. Did Oswald have free will?

There's a difference between inevitability and necessity. Had you read your Calvin you would understand.

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Bringing backwards time travel into this just causes a myriad of causality paradoxes that weaken any argument for or against the concept of free will. Travelling backwards in time is impossible.

[wtfsvi]

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Travelling backwards in time is impossible.

[/ QUOTE ] There is no reason to be a nit and dismiss the argument just because travelling back in time probably is impossible for humans. Like omniscience is. It is an example for the sake of the argument.

[NotReady]

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There is no reason to be a nit and dismiss the argument just because travelling back in time probably is impossible


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Correct. It's called fighting the hypothet.

[Philo]

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I argued that if god knows what my choices are going to be I actually don't really have choices. In other words, if god sees me choosing to go to sleep in 10 minutes, I WILL choose to go to sleep in 10 minutes and I can't change that.

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You can't say that you will choose to go to sleep in 10 minutes if you think that divine foreknowledge and free will are incompatible. You don't choose it in that case.

I think they are compatible, because I think that what god knows in that case is what you will choose to do--you make the choice according to free will, and god knows what choice you will make. If you chose to do x instead of y, then god would know that you were going to choose x.