(December 3, 2015 at 7:08 am)robvalue Wrote: It seems many theists can hold the contradictory beliefs that an omniscient being knows the future, and the idea that we have some control over that future.
If it's even possible to know the future before it happens, then it's deterministic. In other words, there are no alternatives to what is going to happen. Even if you replayed it a million times, the same thing would happen. If there is a genuine choice, then it's impossible the knowledge of the outcome can exist beforehand.
To demonstrate this: God knows what I will do for the next ten minutes. He appears to me, and tells me what I will do. Can I ignore him and behave otherwise?
So to be consistent, theists have to pick just one of these: free will, or God knowing the future. But since neither of them have any effect in reality (no free will, if it's the case, still seems like free will), neither get challenged so both can be held even though they are mutually exclusive. Just like I could say my pet dragon has both 30HP and 60HP. Since he doesn't exist and never gets hit, neither of those gets challenged so I can "believe" them both.
Whether or not things are deterministic remains to be seen. Maybe, maybe not. I lean towards determinism myself. Whatever is the case, I think the amount of choice we have is significantly less than what we think it is. It is known that the time we think we make decisions is not the time we actually make them, that alone shows we have some sort of self delusion about our choices.
Free will doesn't even make sense. It's not real. It couldn't be real. It's an illusion of an illusion.
That could make you depressed, I guess, if you really thought about it - but there's really no point. We still act as if we have free will - at least language wise. I think we just need to find better ways to explain and conceptualise our own decisions and not elevate definitions of things themselves to a higher level than the thing they describe. I think that's what happened with a lot of things, including free will. Language overreached and played a game of its own here, with no relevance to reality.
