RE: Why God doesn't stop satan?
June 10, 2021 at 11:34 am
(This post was last modified: June 10, 2021 at 11:35 am by R00tKiT.)
(June 10, 2021 at 10:26 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: That's a long winded way to acknowledge that the participants of a replay from any pov have no option to do another thing, don't you think? The mere possibility of foreknowledge, no matter who has it, and in fact even if no one and no thing has it, precludes free will. You're fixated on the idea of force, that the knower must somehow force the actor (and this is bad, I guess, but I can't imagine why it would be or even why it would matter if it were bad, it's not exactly the worst thing you think god will do to lowly human worms...)- but that's not the case nor is it why foreknowledge precludes free will - therefore arguing that a father doesn't force his daughter or a god doesn't force humans is completely irrelevant. He simply needs to know, for a fact, that his daughter will do x. The possessor of foreknowledge doesn't have to instantiate this state of affairs himself or itself, it merely needs to be a competent observer of the true fact that some actor absolutely will do a specific thing and no other at some future point. It's just seeing what is true.
Well, in the case of God, he clearly instantiated everything, including our choices. My position is that what he instantiated is exactly what we end up doing with our own free will. If the deity instantiates a particular set of actions which isn't the same as those we decide by free will, then it does preclude free will, but there is no way to show that this is the actual state of affairs.
Foreknowledge is an absolute and eternal property of the deity, free will, on the other hand, as I said, really depends on time. I clearly don't have free will relatively to my past actions, but this is not the same as saying I never had free will about anything.
As a sidenote, although I am no physicist, special relativity clearly shows that the past exists in the present of other reference frames. There is no privileged Present moment because it depends on the reference frame. Namely, there is no concept of time to order the events with.
We can see the Sun's past 8 minutes from our planet, if we have a far enough reference frame (let's call it A) from which we can see the Earth, we could watch all human history unfold. So, relatively to A, what's happenng now on Earth is the future.
Although I still need to look this up, it seems that foreknowledge is technically possible if we can travel at the speed of light -there is nothing logically contradictory about this, we just need zero mass, photons already do this-. Now, for a deity, it's trivial to move between reference frames or even break the speed of light, and thus have foreknowledge and access what everyone will do throughout their lives, this doesn't seem to preclude free will.