Does God Know the Answer of Free Will?

Posted on March 5, 2008
Filed Under Free Will, Philosophy | 8 Comments

I have to admit that I’d gotten a little bored with the debate over free will. Science tends to point, albeit inconclusively, against Libertarian free will. The argument from responsibility within religion tends to point towards Libertarian free will (although not conclusively). As I’ve often said I’m agnostic towards the question of free will. Beyond being pretty dubious about determinism proper. However in the recent discussion about free will over at New Cool Thang Jeff made a comment that has had me thinking.

Jeff said, “if determinism is true, nobody would ever be able to tell the difference from if it were false, even God.” Perhaps he’d made this point before during the period when I didn’t have time to read many blogs. However it really got me thinking.

Of course in the more traditional Christian view of God everything other than God is created ex nihilo by God. Thus God would know the ontology of free will simply because he created it. Now there is an open debate about whether creation ex nihilo is even compatible with Libertarian free will (LFW). Blake has an excellent discussion on this in his second volume of theological writings. But ultimately this is a moot question since I think the defining point of difference between the Mormon form of Christianity and the more traditional forms is that Mormonism rejects ex nihilo. This has huge ramifications. Certainly one major ramification is over the epistemological limits of God.

The question then becomes whether God himself could possibly know whether LFW holds. Now clearly there are empirical ways to find LFW false. One could discover that the laws of physics are not background invariant. (And of course this is the default view of most physicists due to General Relativity and perhaps the main reason I’m somewhat skeptical of LFW) One could discover that backwards causality is possible. And, at a minimum, God knows whether he has foreknowledge or not.

So it seems like God might know that LFW is false. But can he know if it is true? I can’t see any way. Is there a way?

If God doesn’t know if we have LFW or not, what does that suggest about responsibility and punishment?

Related posts:

  1. Mormon Free Will Redux
  2. SEP: Free Will
  3. Responsibility & Foreknowledge
  4. People Assign Blame to the Mentally Ill
  5. Metaphysics of Agent Libertarian Free Will
  6. Mele Part II

Comments

8 Responses to “Does God Know the Answer of Free Will?”

Just to clarify for those not familiar with the science debate. You can have Libertarian free will or you can have space-time but you can’t have both. That is either Einstein was basically right and LFW is false or else you end up with something fairly convoluted making an “as if” relativity was true for gravity but there is really a preferred reference frame of the sort believed in the 19th century.

The site looks great, Clark!

The point that I made in this recent thread was, I’ve come to realize, slightly different than how I put it in earlier discussions. What I said before had more to do with pre-destination and having a closed future. To be more specific, I said that since nobody, not even God, can know the future exactly, what difference does it make whether it is closed or not? From there I went on to suggest that whether there is LFW or not doesn’t seem to make any difference at all, even for God, so why should we hold out for it? So you can kind of see the direction I was heading with it.

Now as for you post, I’m not sure which kind of LFW you are talking about. Are we talking about Blake’s emergentism or Geoff’s “mostly-determined-but-not-quite” type?

Still tweaking to do. But at least now it’s good enough that I can use it and then just do the tweaking when I have time. The problem before was that there was so much to do that I had to find a four hour block to work on it solid. And that was hard to come by…

Yes, the way I took the question is slightly different from you.

As I said I think LFW can be falsified but I’m not sure a fixed future can. (I prefer that term to determinism since I don’t believe in determinism but am quite open to a block universe)

I think this applies to most forms of LFW. The exception might be a more extreme variant on Geoff’s position that I’d speculated on way back on my old blog. The idea that perhaps when a new universe is formed there is a moment of freedom that might be similar to LFW. (Although the requirement of both reasoning and openness at the same time would probably preclude true LFW)

My thinking though is that if we reject creation ex nihilo that it would appear that many of these metaphysical positions are essentially unknowable by God. Given that, aren’t we led to a position of “as if” revisionist free will?

4 Michael Dorfman on March 7th, 2008 4:30 am

I think the whole question of “the epistemological limits of God” is an interesting one, even prior to the question of “free will”. Now, admittedly, my knowledge of Mormon theology is minimal, but the very fact that we are raising the question implies that the Mormon God is not omniscient (according to any conventional use of the term.) If God does not create ex nihilo, there’s no reason to believe he has special knowledge of his own origin and functioning, or the origin and functioning of the “raw materials” which preceded (or are co-eval with) Him. In fact, it’s altogether possible that the raw materials had an expiration date on them, and He wouldn’t necessarily know. So, even forgetting about the creation of humans (and the associated issues of free will), there’s no real reason to think that God has perfect knowledge of what is going to occur in the future.

Or am I missing something?

(The next obvious question: given the foregoing, how do we even know that God is the smartest guy in the room?)

Well, one does have to take into account the eternal regression of gods in Mormon Theology as well. God doesn’t know about the beginning and continuing existence of things in the same sense that I don’t know about the mortal birth and continuing existence of things here on earth. Specifically, I can ask people who were at my birth what it was like and I can observe that things just don’t blink out of existence. Furthermore, God isn’t the smartest guy in the room in one makes the room big enough. He is clearly smarter than any of us mere mortals, but almost surely not smarter than the gods that came before him.

It’s all very analogous to the world we know.

6 Gerald Smith on March 7th, 2008 12:35 pm

I am by far an amateur in these things, and am glad for deeper thinkers that can posit interesting things for me to pound my head against. As I’ve been reading and learning along these lines, a thought came to me that I hope some of you may have better ideas on. First, it seems to me that a God that creates ex nihilo would have to be some form of determinist, having absolute knowledge of all things.

However, as Clark points out, LDS belief is that God is only partially responsible for our creation. Could God actually have a form of compatibilism, based upon his foreknowledge of many (if not all) things, yet due to our being formed from intelligence (not ex nihilo), it would allow for a form of free will? Being that we are part formed of God and part other, perhaps we are part free will and part determinism?

Another question: I believe that if God does not have complete foreknowledge, he at least should be capable of completely determining what will happen in the short term. If, say, his perfect determinism goes out to a few days only, how does that impact libertarian free will? Is LFW still reduced to nothing if God has partial foreknowledge, versus complete foreknowledge? And if God can foresee nothing at all, then how can I have confidence in him? What happens to all the prophecies, etc? Does it mean that God has to manually tweak and fix things to fit his prophecies, and if so, how does that damage LFW?

Jeff, I don’t think those things follow.

If there are universals that are knowable then I think that resolves a lot.

The problem of knowing all things is interesting if one demands a materialistic view of knowledge where a separate sign/token is necessary for every element known. One can quickly show that more tokens for knowledge are necessary than exist in a finite system. Once you have an infinite system then things change considerably.

As to knowing he’s the smartest in the room, I don’t see why that would be hard to know. He might know what maximal knowledge is and whether he has it.

Gerald, Blake argues in his book that creation ex nihilo entails something like determinism. I’m not entirely convinced on that point although I think arguing that it’s incompatible with LFW is more doable. (As I noted we shouldn’t fall into the false dichotomy of determinism or LFW)

If God knows everything for a few days then there still isn’t LFW logically.

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