(August 17, 2019 at 2:09 am)Grandizer Wrote:Quote:The argument proposing to show the incompatibility of omnipotence and omniscience is not obviously valid either. First of all, it is not clear in what sense it is logically possible to change the future. So, if God could not change the future this would hardly be a limitation of His power. But even if it was logically possible in some sense to change the future, it is unclear why this would mean that God could not know the future. Suppose that it is possible to change the future by some action A. Suppose that this means merely that if action A were to be done now, some true proposition P about the future would be false and action A could be done now. Clearly I could know a certain proposition about the future, e.g., that I will be alive one minute from now, and yet it is possible that I could change the future in the above sense by an act of suicide. If this is possible for a mere mortal, it is certainly possible for God.
Yeah, sorry, but this doesn't seem right to me. A human being cannot know (in an infallible sense) whether he will be alive a minute from now or no. You can intuit that you will be alive, but that's not really the same as knowing (in the infallible sense).
Well, he's discussing what it would be like to know the future. He's aware that we can't.
So he says "suppose we were able to know that, given all the events in the universe so far, we will be alive a minute from now. We could still change that known future by committing suicide now."
This means that if we were creatures who knew in detail what future the events in the world so far were pointing to, we could still change that by doing something now that prevents that future.
I don't know if that's a good argument or not, but I'm pretty sure that's what he means. He knows that we don't actually know we'll be alive in a minute.
