(December 19, 2016 at 5:53 am)robvalue Wrote: There seems to be some confusion regarding my scenario.
I'm addressing the claim put forward by many theists that it is possible for a being to know our future before it happens, while we retain free will.
So I'm making the assumption that it's possible to have knowledge of the future. The future. Different timelines have been mentioned. If God only knows one possible eventuality in advance, then he does not know the future. He only knows one possibility. And that's not difficult. So I'm disallowing mutliple timelines for this thought experiment, because it makes the theistic claim meaningless in the first place. It makes precognition meaningless. (If someone wants to challenge that, feel free.)
So to make it simpler, God shows up in front of you, and tells you that in the next 10 seconds, you're going to walk slowly towards and then through the red door. He has seen it already, and he knows it to be true. Can you ignore him and instead walk towards and through the blue door in the next 10 seconds? Or are you compelled to obey, and to do as he has predicted?
If you're a theist and you don't claim that God can see our future beforehand, then you have nothing to address here. There is no contradiction, and free will is coherent. God cannot truthfully make such a proclamation, and so you can ignore him; at least partially.
Some people still seem to treat the future as if it's constantly changing. Precognition is meaningless if that is the case. God can't know the future if he has to wait and see what happens up until that point before finally knowing what will actually happen. That's simply called observing. Go watch the Minority Report, where the only people who can change the future are the police, for some reason.
There is only one timeline in my example. A person who can see the future, or a God who exists outside of it, is able to move to different points on the one timeline. That's why even though something is experienced twice by a precog, it only happens once.
Here's another example:
What are those little particle things scientists say move objectively randomly?
Anyway, the particle thing (we'll call it P) has a future state that is unpredictable.
However, you can see into the future, and know a future state of P via precognition. Or God sees everything, and tells you where P is going to be because he can see the entire timeline. Would that change the properties of P?
Similarly, after the fact, we know where P has been. That knowledge doesn't make the arrival at that place non-random. It is just our perspective after the event that gives us knowledge. We see it randomly arrive at the state. So if we send the information back in time, it's still going to randomly arrive in a specific state.
