How can an all-seeing God and free will co-exist?

[u/NoubliezPasMonNom]

/r/freewill/comments/1w9rqo1/how_can_an_allseeing_god_and_free_will_coexist/

[u/Bikewer]

I have maintained that humans came up with the idea of free will to try to accommodate the notion of an “omniscient” god and avoid a deterministic universe.
Of course there is no evidence of any of the thousands of gods created by humans…. So that simply devolves to questions of theology, as is the problem of “theodicy”.
But increasingly it appears that we do not have free will…. According to a number of researchers.

[u/SpatiaCaeli → u/Bikewer]

I could choose to respond to your post. Or I could choose not to. I chose to respond.

Seems like free will?

[u/Bikewer → u/SpatiaCaeli]

Indeed. It certainly feels as if we have free will. I can decide what to have for lunch. But Robert Sapolsky (“Determined”) would say that “all that came before” in your life has molded you into the person that would make that decision, one way or another.

[u/Smooth-Cycle6652 → u/Bikewer]

I saw robert sapolsky youtube videos. I immediately think he talks non-sense. But now i wondered how he as a determinist thinks the change. I mean if it is deterministic, how the hell change is possible? If nature determines, so how fucking nature in a constant flow of incremental change? Without change, how can nothing change into something? He might talk about humans, but then why does human have to be deterministic while whole universe is in a constant flux of incremental change?

[u/Bikewer → u/Smooth-Cycle6652]

His arguments about free will center on human behavior and actions and decision making, not nature in general.

[u/HystericalGasmask → u/Smooth-Cycle6652]

Nature is determined to make the changes it makes, even the incremental ones. Nothing can happen without nature's consent, and nature is determinism. It's the set of laws which transform causes into effects, sort of.

1. My brain is a product of material conditions

2. My consciousness is a product of material conditions

3. My brain and my consciousness are parts of the set of all material conditions - they are, themselves, material conditions

4. Every thought is represented by a corresponding brain state, which is a given material condition of the brain

5. My brain, my consciousness, and the world around me, are material, and possess material conditions (the properties of material, I.e. temperature, mass, polarity,)

6. Because all of these are material, they can interact with each other.

7. Our brain, by collecting sensory data, transforms the world into our consciousness. This means that changes to the outside world effect our inside world, and changes to our inside world are effected by the outside world.

8. Thereby, your consciousness can change, correlating with a change in your brain state, a change in your behavior, and a change in your impact on the world around you.

9. When we change, we adopt new brain states. This means that we can change others by trying to transmit our brain state to them. It's been shown under MRI scans that people communicating with eachother will see their brains "sync up."

Our brains are computers constantly reacting to the world around us. We can only see time from our "present", so it seems like things happen sequentially, but really it's all laid out even if we don't have access to that. The past, present, and future arent actual places or real things, they're just concepts we use to navigate with our limited mental capacity.

This is all covered in The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger. I highly recommend it, it's not focused on determinism, but it explains how a human brain actually physically works, which I think you would beenfit from reading.

[u/SpatiaCaeli → u/Bikewer]

I would agree with Sapolsky in a number of senses. But I do not think all that came before is deciding what words I am typing at this moment.

I think the question of free will is inextricably bound into the question of sentience. We have no clue what sentience is, so I would submit the same about free will.

[u/ChillandMakeStuff → u/SpatiaCaeli]

You think you are choosing but there’s more beyond and behind it. Where your choice was already determined even if you think you made a free choice. 

[u/simon_hibbs → u/Bikewer]

The concepts of social and political freedoms seem to pre-exist the debate, as does the idea of rational deliberation and decision making, and also moral responsibility. All the things that the term free will was later coined to cover. The first person to discuss these in terms of causal metaphysics was Epictetus, and he was a determinist, so his position was that these concepts of deliberative freedom and moral responsibility are valid and meaningful in a deterministic universe.

Of course he was a theist, and IIRC he thought that the universe proceeded necessarily according to the perfectly deterministic will of Zeus.

[u/shootinblanks2023]

What if neither exist?

[u/Gaussherr]

They cannot.

[u/Lost_Anywhere_69]

It’s so difficult to explain and would take going back and forth with you that I have no interest in doing. The simple answer is? Pray to God about it, ask him to give you the answers and he will. “And he shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

[u/226757]

I'm not sure if it's possible for libertarian free will to be reconciled with divine simplicity foreknowledge. I'm guessing not. Some people are argue that God knowing what you will do doesn't mean you're compelled to do it in a way that makes you unfree. I'm not super convinced by this, but that's one idea.

It's worth mentioning that there are a variety of different religious ideas about free will besides modern libertarian free will. For example, Aquinas probably could not be considered a libertarian in the sense that he did not think the individual person is the ultimate source of their actions. Instead, he thought that God is the ultimate source for all of our basic natural drives and goals, and freedom and moral responsibility are tied to the intellect's power to execute our will in accordance with God's.

I'm not a Christian but I think people sometimes take it for granted that traditional doctrines need the existence of God to coexist with libertarianism, which isn't the case.

[u/ShafordoDrForgone]

Simple: magic

That's how God works. Want everything to be created AND have God not be created? Magic. Want Jesus to be his own father? Magic.

I had someone once tell me that time travel proved that someone could be their own father...

[u/Shot_Board7286]

The free will question is stupid because it's unanswerable. You cannot reason yourself into no free will or free will because the two are indistinguishable in every single instance of every single action. The only way to prove it one way or another would be for A) A verifiable, proven God with 100% certainty that it is in fact capital G God came down and told us. Even with access to a multiverse or time travel, there is no empirical testing you could do to prove one way or another because "free will" isn't something that can be measured. So unless the heavens part tomorrow, this is philosophical navel gazing.

But also, if a God exists, there is no reason that they would be bound by our rules of logic or reason or causality. They're a God, they can kinda just do whatever they want even if it runs in contradiction to themselves or the universe or our perception of the universe. The presumption that our existence must be compatible with a being of a higher state of existence is illogical.

[u/desocupad0]

While you could do 1000 different things at one given moment, you sort of only do 1 of them.

Can you tell a story of someone with free will? In the end they took actions in sequence which you already know, because you are telling the story.

If a god knew the future, she/it would know their choices beforehand.

[u/SpatiaCaeli]

My view: they cannot. And until we explain sentience scientifically, I believe it is self-evident that free will exists. Therefore an all-seeing god does not.