Free will and the necessary evil

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Ah yes the "god can count the numbers of hairs on your head and knows EVERYTHING" part. Hmmm.. ok ok good point. 

Agrboda this is kind of what I'm looking for. Idiosyncrasies within the belief in free will and an omnipotent god.

There are two general areas of concern.  First, whether man is free.  And second, whether God is free.  While it is a common argument that man's free will is inconsistent with God's omniscience, this is not necessarily the case.  It depends upon how one conceives of free will.  According to some definitions, even predeterminism is compatible with free will.

2.2. Two types of incompatibilism

Plantinga's defense presupposes incompatibilism. Incompatibilists, however, disagree over what we might call the Principle of Alternate Possibilities:

PAP. S is free with respect to A only if S has it within his power to do otherwise.

Of course, compatibilists like to understand the power to do otherwise in such a way that one has it even though there is no possible world in which one does other than what one did, given the distant past and the laws of nature. Incompatibilists, however, tend to deny this. As one prominent incompatibilist likes to put the point: if someone is free with respect to an action when deciding whether to do it, they are "in a situation strongly analogous to that of someone who is hesitating between forks in a road."


On this picture of freedom, the power to do otherwise requires that there be "forks" in the road of time, not merely that there seem to be such "forks".

Some incompatibilists reject PAP and the picture of a forking road that comes with it. They replace it with something like the Principle of Ultimate Causes:

PUC. S is free with respect to A only if the ultimate cause of A is S's own will and cognitive faculties.

Incompatibilists who replace PAP with PUC say that it is possible for one to act freely even if there are no alternatives "open" to one. But, they say, it does not follow that it is possible for one to act freely if one's action is determined by the distant past and the laws of nature since, in that case, the ultimate cause of one's action is not one's own will and cognitive faculties. Thus, they say, their view remains resolutely incompatibilist.

Howard-Snyder, D., & O’Leary-Hawthorne, J. (1998). Transworld Sanctity and Plantinga’s Free Will Defense. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 44(1), 1–21.

In terms of omniscience alone, I agree that free will is not impossible. But - in Christianity, at least - God is not just omniscient, but also omnipotent and omnicreative. These three qualities operating together would seem to preclude free will.

Not only does God know all of our choices, God also created those choices and the prior events that led to those choices, as well as the outcomes of all those choices.

The obvious extension of this is that God pre-damns many of the very people it creates, since people are constrained to make choices and take actions that will land them in eternal suffering.

Boru