Theists: How can predetermined fate and free will coexist?

[SteveII]

@OP

Understanding the doctrine of Molinism (named after 16th Century Spanish Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina) is one way to answer your question:

from Wikipedia article on Molinism:

God's types of knowledge

Kenneth Keathley, author of Salvation and Sovereignty: A Molinist Approach, states that Molinists argue that God perfectly accomplishes His will in the lives of genuinely free creatures through the use of His omniscience.[1] After Luis de Molina, Molinists present God’s knowledge in a sequence of three logical moments. The first is God's knowledge of necessary truths or natural knowledge. These truths are independent of God's will and are non-contingent. This knowledge includes the full range of logical possibilities. Examples include statements like, "All bachelors are unmarried" or "X cannot be A and non-A at the same time, in the same way, at the same place" or "It is possible that X obtain". The second is called “middle knowledge” and it contains the range of possible things that would happen given certain circumstances. The third kind of knowledge is God's free knowledge. This type of knowledge consists of contingent truths that are dependent upon God's will; or truths that God brings about, that He does not have to bring about. Examples might include statements like "God created the earth" or something particular about this world which God has actualized. This is called God’s “free knowledge” and it contains the future or what will happen. In between God’s natural and free knowledge is His middle knowledge (or scientia media) by which God knows what His free creatures would do under any circumstance. These are truths that do not have to be true, but are true without God being the primary cause of them. "If you entered the ice cream shop, you would choose chocolate" is an example of a statement God knows via middle knowledge. This is very difficult for some to grasp.

further down the page...

Molinists believe that God has knowledge not only of necessary truths and contingent truths, but also of counterfactuals. (God's knowledge of counterfactuals is often referred to as his middle knowledge, although technically that term is more broad than simply the knowledge of counterfactuals.) A counterfactual is a statement of the form "if it were the case that P, it would be the case that Q". An example would be, "If Bob were in Tahiti he would freely choose to go swimming instead of sunbathing." The Molinist claims that even if Bob is never in Tahiti, God can still know whether Bob would go swimming or sunbathing. The Molinist believes that God, using his middle knowledge and foreknowledge, surveyed all possible worlds and then actualized a particular one. God's middle knowledge of counterfactuals would play an integral part in this "choosing" of a particular world.
Molinists say the logical ordering of events for creation would be as follows:

1. God's natural knowledge of necessary truths.
2. God's middle knowledge, (including counterfactuals).
---Creation of the World---
3. God's free knowledge (the actual ontology of the world).

Hence, God's middle knowledge plays an important role in the actualization of the world. In fact, it seems as if God's middle knowledge of counterfactuals plays a more immediate role in perception than God's foreknowledge. William Lane Craig points out that “without middle knowledge, God would find himself, so to speak, with knowledge of the future but without any logical prior planning of the future.”[4] The placing of God's middle knowledge between God's knowledge of necessary truths and God's creative decree is crucial. For if God's middle knowledge was after His decree of creation, then God would be actively causing what various creatures would do in various circumstances and thereby destroying libertarian freedom. But by placing middle knowledge (and thereby counterfactuals) before the creation decree God allows for freedom in the libertarian sense. The placing of middle knowledge logically after necessary truths, but before the creation decree also gives God the possibility to survey possible worlds and decide which world to actualize.[5]

You ignored the Molinism post I wrote which brings in a third option to your question. The future has not happened yet--even for God. No contradiction.

Interesting. I'll check it out I'll admit I have not yet read every single post in the thread.

But a god that does not know the future is clearly not all-knowing. A god that does not know the future surely must operate within the confines of time in the same way humans do (in the sense that we also cannot see the future because it has not yet happened)... and if god is confined by the limits that time imposes on us all then surely god is not all-powerful.

How did god create the universe if god is limited by time itself? Did god not create time?

I copied it above for reference. 

I did not say God does not know the future, he does through his Middle Knowledge what will happen. But the key is that it has not happened yet.

God created time when he created the universe. Prior to the universe there was no time. God chose to be "limited" by time because once there are events that can mark time, there is time.

[AceBoogie]

Strangely enough, science is showing more and more that free will is bollocks. If it's eventually shown  everything is purely deterministic, it would in theory be possible for an external being to "know" the future, simply by calculation.

But most religious people require us to have genuine choices so that God has something to judge and isn't simply assessing robots he set in motion. This logically knows out procognition/fate, and I don't know why they cling to it so tightly. What difference does that make? Why can't God just not know? Would that make it suddenly unworthy of worship? I think it would make God more likeable.

In what way is free will bollocks? In the sense that we are constrained by physical limitations in our brains and bodies? Sure, many, if not all, of our decisions are the result of cause and effect and of certain conditions we have no control over. Does that mean we never make our own decisions? Or that we are not responsible for anything we do? Did Sam Harris not choose to become an author or a neuroscientist?

Are fat people destined to overeat forever? Are criminals destined to commit crimes forever? I'm just not sure how far we can really take this determinism thing.

Edit: Basically... while I'm willing to admit that our scope of conscious decision is probably much smaller than we think it is... I don't think it's fair to say "free will is bollocks"... though I suppose it depends on what your definition of free will is.

And yes I believe a theist admitting to either fate or free will being a lie would completely crumble their idea of an all-powerful, all-knowing or all-loving god.

[SteveII]

Strangely enough, science is showing more and more that free will is bollocks. If it's eventually shown  everything is purely deterministic, it would in theory be possible for an external being to "know" the future, simply by calculation.

But most religious people require us to have genuine choices so that God has something to judge and isn't simply assessing robots he set in motion. This logically knows out procognition/fate, and I don't know why they cling to it so tightly. What difference does that make? Why can't God just not know? Would that make it suddenly unworthy of worship? I think it would make God more likeable.

In what way is free will bollocks? In the sense that we are constrained by physical limitations in our brains and bodies? Sure, many, if not all, of our decisions are the result of cause and effect and of certain conditions we have no control over. Does that mean we never make our own decisions? Or that we are not responsible for anything we do? Did Sam Harris not choose to become an author or a neuroscientist?

Are fat people destined to overeat forever? Are criminals destined to commit crimes forever? I'm just not sure how far we can really take this determinism thing.

Edit: Basically... while I'm willing to admit that our scope of conscious decision is probably much smaller than we think it is... I don't think it's fair to say "free will is bollocks"... though I suppose it depends on what your definition of free will is.

And yes I believe a theist admitting to either fate or free will being a lie would completely crumble their idea of an all-powerful, all-knowing or all-loving god.

I don't think is is clear that the mind is not more than the sum of its parts. My understanding is that scientist don't know how this works. Does anyone have any information to the contrary?

[robvalue]

I'm saying that free will, at best, appears to be the result of randomness. The rest is all abstractions we build up for convenience. This is my layman's understanding. Of course, this is very much a work in progress. The brain/mind is one of the hardest things to understand, I'm sure.

So calling the result of randomness a "choice" doesn't seem to fit; although there may well have been genuine alternative "choices". We stumble across the idea of "self", which is again a useful abstraction and not particularly scientific.

I'm talking only scientifically, not morally. There's no use trying to have a debate about what we should and shouldn't do on the premise that free will is meaningless. That's contradictory. So we assume it means something before we start.

---

Which means that you don't actually exist as an autonomous being and so you have no rights.

Sure, you are just a self-aware cause and effect machine.

Have no rights? What does that mean, and how does it follow?

As I have noted, human morality is out the window. Everyone else loses their ability to choose also. So any argument of what people should and shouldn't do to each other becomes moot.

[Pat Mustard]

So, let's say I build a time machine and then I let it sit for 1 hour before using it.  During that time I leave it in a locked room, completely unobserved.  When the hour is up I open the room, get into the machine and immediately go back in time 1/2 hour and destroy the past time machine I left sitting unobserved.  Would I still win the Nobel?

I'd say you'd be in line for the Nobel in Economics. Except there's no Nobel in Economics.

[AceBoogie]

So, let's say I build a time machine and then I let it sit for 1 hour before using it.  During that time I leave it in a locked room, completely unobserved.  When the hour is up I open the room, get into the machine and immediately go back in time 1/2 hour and destroy the past time machine I left sitting unobserved.  Would I still win the Nobel?

I'd say you'd be in line for the Nobel in Economics. Except there's no Nobel in Economics.

But if they went back in time and created the Nobel in Economics.... Checkmate, atheist!

[Pat Mustard]

I'd say you'd be in line for the Nobel in Economics. Except there's no Nobel in Economics.

But if they went back in time and created the Nobel in Economics.... Checkmate, atheist!

What they actually did (in 1968) was chuck money at the Swedish central bank (I believe as a bribe while the Swedish government nationalised its country's bank of reserve), who used most of the money to set up the Swedish National Bank Prize in the Economic Sciences [sic] in honour of Alfred Nobel, and chucked the rest at the actual Nobel committee as a bribe so as they'd go along with the fiction that their prize had a connection to the Nobel foundation.

[RoadRunner79]

Let's remember that an all-knowing creator creating the future before it occurs to us as humans is quite different than a human time traveling and have "precognition." An all-knowing, all-powerful creator created me and knew I would make this thread before I made it. That eliminates my free will in the matter and means that every single "choice" I make is actually not a choice at all, but actually part of god's plan.

So either fate is real.

Or free will is.

Which one is it?

It's very simple and we need not be bogged down by hypothetical scenarios or silly semantic debates. Which one is it, theists? Fate or free will? Because either your god is all powerful, or he is not.

I appreciate the enthusiasm in the subject that everyone has displayed but we're really getting far off track here. It's a simple contradiction that many of you are simply failing to see and quite honestly I'm not sure what's so difficult about it. Either god created the future, or he didn't. He either knows what you're going to do, or he doesn't.

Fate?

Or free will?

Strangely enough, science is showing more and more that free will is bollocks. If it's eventually shown  everything is purely deterministic, it would in theory be possible for an external being to "know" the future, simply by calculation.

But most religious people require us to have genuine choices so that God has something to judge and isn't simply assessing robots he set in motion. This logically knows out procognition/fate, and I don't know why they cling to it so tightly. What difference does that make? Why can't God just not know? Would that make it suddenly unworthy of worship? I think it would make God more likeable.

I think that it is strange, because if everything is deterministic and you eliminate choice, then you can no longer trust logic (and therefore any scientific conclusions).  If you cannot choose, then you cannot make a determination that one thing is more reasonable than another.  Or at least, the determination, isn't based on logic or reason, but on the physical configuration of the brain.

Given two opposing ideas, you cannot evaluate them in any real sense, as your answer is predetermined based on physics, not on logic.  You cannot answer any differently.   And even though you think you may be correct, as well as thinking critically, this is also just an illusion (under this view).  Even posts and discussions here, are not an example of any creativity, thought, or rationality,  it is just the output that corresponds to the input.  Although the algorithm processing the inputs may be quite complicated; in the end you have no choice, determination of your own, or ability to evaluate whether a correct or incorrect output is the result. 

This argument appears to me, to be cutting off the branch that it is sitting on!

[Edwardo Piet]

Sure, you're taking about how you could actually know the future. But theists don't tend to go into much detail about that side of it. Generally it's magic, or some idea of being outside of our timeline. Magic is nonsense of course; being outside our timeline reduces our reality to a slideshow. The whole thing becomes a VHS tape, with clearly no real choices because there could never be any others. Saying there could have been different choices if the initial conditions were different is true but irrelevant (I'm not saying you're suggesting this). You might as well say the characters in a video are making choices because you could have watched a different but similar video. The characters feeling the illusion of choice doesn't make the choices real or "free". (Again, this isn't aimed at you.)

Indeed, running that point in the future over and over would indeed be the same as watching the vid over and over. However, in a reality where genuine choices are actually being made, you're only watching a replay of one possible choice. Sure, you're watching a decision being made, but not a "new" one. I find the idea of traveling in time incoherent anyway, especially when you're dealing with futures that can "change".

The point is that for precognition to be possible, for the knowledge to be obtainable somehow, there must be only one fixed future event which cannot change. If it's at all subject to change, then you're only seeing one possibility.

I don't know how I can explain this any more clearly to our theists. I guess I'll just have to give up now.

While I can only speak for myself, I don't believe in the type of free will that you are describing here either. Is there a world view, where this is tenable?
I wouldn't say that choice is an illusion or that we have no free will; however, I mean something different by the phrase.  I don't have much problems with your arguments.

Polite of you

[robvalue]

RR: Yes, that all seems pretty much correct.

However, it's not an argument, it's a possible conclusion based on observation. Indeed, you can't use the premise that there is "no free will" to determine what we should do, because that is contradictory. This is a frequent mistake I see. If there is nothing but hard determinism, it's all a show which we happen to be experiencing.

We don't know if things are purely deterministic yet. Nothing is to be gained by assuming that they are, and I wasn't suggesting we should.