Incoherence of God - Omniscience

What is the puzzle of Omniscience and Freedom?

• To do an action freely, you must be able to do it or not do it

• If God knows what you will do an action before you do it, then it must be true that you will do that action

• If it is true that you do that action, then nothing you can do can prevent it coming true that you are doing that action i.e. you can’t refrain from doing it

• Therefore, if God knows what I will do before I do it, then that action is not free

What questions are raised with the problems between Omniscience and Free Will?

• The argument suggests that omniscience and free will are incompatible

• So, we could just abandon free will and defend omniscience

• But why should we defend Free Will?

Can God know the future?

• If God is outside time, then yes, God knows all events in time in the same way

• Past, present and future are the same to God

• If God is within time, then the answer is no, but that means God wouldn’t be omniscient

Is Free Will a great good?

• Free will is a great good that allows us to do good or evil and to willingly enter into a relationship with God or not

• If God is supremely good, he wants our lives to be morally significant and meaningful, so he has given us free will

Free Agent Response to Omniscience and Free Will problem?

• God does not know what we will choose

• But it is impossible to know what a free agent will choose, so there is nothing that is possible to know that God doesn’t know

Kenny’s Solution to Omniscience and Free Will problem

• God can know what I will do before I do before I do it and yet I can act freely

• There is confusion with this problem:'

  • Whatever God knows is true - this claim is necessarily true

  • Whatever God knows is necessarily true - this claim is false

• So God can know what I will do, but the fact that I will do it is contingent - it not necessary that I do it

  • It is not true that I must do it, only that I will do it

Objection to Kenny’s Solution

1. To do something different from what God knows I will do would mean changing God’s knowledge

2. If God already knows what I will do, then changing what God knows would mean changing the past

3. I can’t change the past, so I can’t change what God knows

4. So I can’t change what I will do

5. So there is nothing I can do except what God already knows that I will do

Kenny’s Response to the Objection

• We don’t change the future - the future is what is after all the changes are in

• Instead, our actions make a truth about the future become a truth about the past

  • “I will eat” becomes “I have eaten”

  • Notice we can change the past: “I have not eaten” becomes “I have eaten”

• When I act, my action is what makes God’s belief about what I will do true. But this doesn’t show that I can’t decide what to do

Flaws in Kenny’s Response

• Kenny doesn’t explain how I could know the future while I remain free

• We can infer that, given God’s knowledge is complete and perfect, then he can accurately predict what action we will make

Knowledge and Determinism

• If God knows my future choices because he has perfect knowledge of my character, he still won’t be able to predict my future in detail

• If God knows this, this suggests that the future is fixed in some way

• If the future is not fixed, then how does God know the future?

  • Reply, we can’t answer this, we don’t know

• However, we have shown that omniscience is not logically incompatible with free will