Is divine omniscience compatible with human freewill?

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Is Divine Omniscience compatible with human freewill?

The two most basic parts of the definition of God is that he is all powerful and all knowing, or omnipotent and omniscient. This essay will focus on the classical definition of God's omniscience and the problems that this definition creates for human free-will theory. I will outline both definitions and the problems they mutually create for each other, some alternative views of God's omniscience and also alternative views of human free-will, I will then suggest solutions to the problems from both sides of the argument and then conclude if they are compatible

The most basic definition of divine omniscience is that God knows everything, and that everything he knows is a true fact, that god has a complete and ultimate knowledge of everything. This means that God's knowledge is based on the true reality of the universe. Many theists hold that the reason God knows everything in the universe is because he created it, while others say that God's creation or non-creation of the universe is moot as the very definition of God entails that he knows everything that is true.

Most theorists imply that God cannot know absolutely everything, his knowledge is constrained by logic. He cannot know for example that +=5 as this would be a logical impossibility. Logic is held to be a universally accessible and unilaterally applicable truth to all entities, and as such is a necessary limit on God's knowledge. This means that God cannot know something that is false, as his knowledge is only of the truth.

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Because God seems to have limits on his omniscience, a basically limitless concept, it begs the question as to what other limits he has and one of the most personally pertinent is what limits his omniscience has with respect to human freewill. In order to examine this relationship I must first examine human free-will theory.

The theory of origination holds that human beings are capable of creating new causal chains by utilising their free will to make choices. The traditional doctrine of free-will or libertarianism holds that these are genuine causal chains that have the same sort of effect as any other chain. This means that unlike random events or inanimate, soulless objects that are merely links in a determined chain, human beings are capable of making their own legitimate choices.

The problem that traditional free will creates for divine omniscience and vice versa is that one cannot exist as stated if the other is true. This is because part of the theistic definition of omniscience is that God knows the events of the future, and because God only knows truth that these events have truth-value. This means that God's knowledge of the future determines and fixes these events as true and hence that humans have no ability to change these events, as humanity is merely part of God's causal chain.

For example if God knows that I will not go to my philosophy of religion lecture tomorrow, and will instead go drinking, this is a true fact and I have no ability to change this pre-determined future, as this truth will have already existed in the past and I am unable to change the past. This means that regardless of how much I might want to attend my lecture or how studious I am, events will transpire that I will not attend it, and instead I will go drinking. If I have no choice, this means that I have no free will, I merely think I do; in reality I am a completely pre-determined link in a chain.

On the other hand free-will creates equal problems for omniscience in a similar manner, if humanity actually has free will, each being an originator of their own causal chains then God must necessarily have some kind of limit on what he knows with respect to the results of their actions. The concept of free will has an obvious emotive element for most of humanity; so in order to save it free-will theorists must examine what possible limits or problems that could exist on God's omniscience. The conundrum runs that there is also an emotive element to keeping an omniscient God, so we wish to keep that too.

Firstly we must examine what God could not logically know objectively, that of facts that are by their very nature subjective. It may be that in the act of creating subjective beings, God has actually imposed a limit on his own knowledge. There are two arguments that support this idea, the argument from spatial indexes and the argument from personal indexes.

These arguments both run that there are truths that require a personal corporeal experience to know. The spatial index argument runs that since God is timeless and incorporeal he would have no ability to know what a corporeal being meant by "here" as he doesn't have a limited body. The personal index argument refers to God's limited access to our subjective experience. For example there are some truths which need an "I" or some other self-indicatory pronoun to be known such as Descartes' Cogito. It's not logically possible that another being could really understand the implications of the "I" in "I think, therefore I am" as they are not the "I" in this particular cogito.

Two possible responses exist to this objection. The first runs that it could be it's possible that God knows everything it's logically possible for a single person to know. This would allow God to still be omniscient of objective things and most subjective things. The other objection runs that if we are all part of God's mind then he possibly have the ability to perceive our minds as we would be part of his mind.

Obviously a major question with regards to God's effect on human free will is the question of the nature of his timelessness. Is God able to see the future actions of humanity at all and thus fix and pre-determine them? Philosophers such as Boethius supported this very basic assumption of God's abilities. He thought that what we take to be past, present, and future are perceived by God simultaneously in an eternal present. Boethius tries to distinguish eternity from perpetuity. He sees souls as perpetual, that they never die, but they live in time. God, on the other hand, exists entirely outside of time. He also compares divine foreknowledge with human knowledge . Just as human knowledge of present events imposes no necessity on the occurrence of those events, he sees that so too does Gods knowledge of future events doesn't actually impose a necessity on their occurrence.

This basically means that if for example he knows every true fact regardless of time and situation in the universe because he knows all the laws of the universe including those of human motivation and psychology and his limitless intelligence means that he is always perfect in his calculations, then he would be able to know anything simply through thought. Basically, this is an attempt to reject the implied necessity of God's knowledge.

This would mean that he had a "soft" understanding of the universe. This means that his knowledge of the future was like humanity's in that even if it is correct and true we don't say that our knowledge caused or determined the event. These facts would only become "hard" facts when they had actually happened. This would mean that at the beginning of time, God could have thought out the entire span of reality perfectly and knowing his own perfect nature, would have been able to take knowledge from this thought, but this knowledge didn't determine what happened in the universe it merely reflected it.

By its very nature, omniscience is infallible; therefore it seems that one is not free to choose anything other than that which God knows. This was outlined to Augustine by his disciple Evodius. Answering, Augustine states that God knows the will of man, but does not actually cause that will to be so. He explains that,

...although God foreknows our wills to be, it does not thereby follow that we do not will a thing by our will. [A] culpable sill, if you are going to have one, will be none the less your own will because God foreknows that it is to be so.

Evodius seems happy enough to accept this explanation, and proclaims that he sees the error in his previous thinking. This means that humanity would still be choosing the options; only God would know them so completely that he could predict them totally. This would mean that according to Augustine humanity would still have free will and God would still be omniscient.

The first problem with this idea is outlined by Nelson Pike; the problem is that it doesn't really seem to get rid of the problem that God's knowledge has behaviourally determining effects. Because God would always be correct in his forecasting of our actions and for his forecasts to be wrong would hold a contradiction in the nature of God, we still have no choice but to do what God knows we will do.

There is a very basic problem with the concept of omniscience regarding the set of god's knowledge being incoherent. This means that God might know every single truth in the universe but he can not know that he knows everything. This is due to the fact if he knows everything, it is another fact that he knows everything, and he would need an infinite number of these extra facts to cover the inclusion of its predecessor. This would create a logically impossible situation where he both knows and does not know everything.

Another objection to God's foreknowledge is based upon the question of whether or not future events actually have truth value at all. This is based on the idea that only the past has truth value as it has already occurred, and hence that we cannot say that anything in the future is truth until it comes into the past. It is also possible that God has no knowledge of future events as he is as bound in linear time as humanity is. This means that as God is not outside time, he cannot foresee the future any more than we can.

St. Thomas Aquinas maintained the freedom of man's will in spite of divine omnipotence, holding that God's omnipotence meant he could do all things possible or consistent with his goodness and reason, which did not include the predetermination of human will. This possible account of his omniscience runs that God can know the future and hence determine it, but chooses not to. This would be consistent with the classic Christian account of our free will as a gift from God. It would not limit God's omniscience or our free will as god has effectively delegated some of his omniscience to us, but it also means that at any time if he wished to, God could determine our actions.

Overall I see the debate over whether we have free will or if God is omniscient to be quite baffling as many of the proponents of free will impose limits on God's omniscience while still claiming he is omniscient. Even separately from the need for free-will the idea of omniscience claims that God knows everything that is logically possible to know, yet this is already a kind of limit on something that's theoretically limitless. Even if this can is a justified limit, it sets a trend that if God can set a limit on the limitless, he's already broken a logical truth, that of the law of non-contradiction. This means that God has demonstrated his ability to break a logical law by not breaking a logical law, which is a logical impossibility. I find this kind of inconsistency to be proof that God isn't omniscient, but not proof that we have free will. It's possible that God isn't omniscient and also that we don't have free-will, as God might know and determine the future through his knowledge, but also that he doesn't know everything as he is constrained by the illogical. While it claimed that God cannot know the illogical because the illogical is not knowledge it, this problem with limits at least raises the question of what are the limits that we can know God has? There are many possibilities as the exact nature of these limits but overall I must conclude that the likelihood is that God's omniscience isn't compatible as one almost necessarily takes away from the other.

Bibliography

http//www.homestead.com/philofreligion/files/Augustboethius.html

http//www.auburn.edu/~clarkc6/other/freewill.html

http//www.tyler.net/triddorus/omniscience.html

www.xrefer.com

Augustine. Divine Foreknowledge and Human Free Will. in "Philosophy of Religion An Anthology", ed. Louis P. Pojman, nd ed. (Belmont, CA Wadsworth Publishing Co., 14)

Pike N., Gods Foreknowledge and Human Free Will Are Incompatible. Ibid

Swinburne R., "The Coherence of Theism-Revised Edition" (Oxford University Press ,1)

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