Omniscience, Time, and Freedom

Is divine foreknowledge incompatible with human freedom? I explore this question by summarizing Dr. Linda Zagzebski's article "Omniscience, Time, and Freedom".

OUTLINE

0:00 A potential argument against God
2:23 Argument for theological fatalism
16:09 Modifying the argument
19:37 Transfer of contingency principle
25:45 A counterfatalist argument
28:22 Theological fatalism without transfer of necessity
31:13 Theological vs logical fatalist arguments
35:08 Four responses to theological fatalist argument
41:03 Conclusion and updates

RESOURCES

[bookishbrendan]

Joe, could you do a series specifically on free will v. Determinism? I’d love to hear your position/breakdown/criticisms on determinism specifically from a secular perspective (leaving, for the time being, theological implications out of the equation).

[ExploringReality]

I’m a simple man. I see Joe post a video, I watch it. Good job on this Joe! ❤️

[yourfutureself]

Great explanation of her paper. Very clear and fun. Good vid

[Aidan-chlb]

This has been a topic of great interest to me! My intuitions say that are compatible. But let me watch

[quantenmoi]

Wow, I'm listening to Zagzebski's argument and it all makes perfect sense - tight as a drum. Of course, I think she's going to conclude that one needs to choose between a god with infallible foreknowledge and free will. You can't have both. But no, she takes a complete left turn. She would rather call into question what is perhaps our most basic intuition about the past. Mind-boggling! Then I looked at her bio and the reason became clear.
It never fails to amaze me how folks will twist their minds into the tightest pretzels rather than give up any single attribute they so fondly ascribe to their diety! 😮

[zverh]

Would you please do a video on Molinism and the problems that it faces?

[dgjesdal]

I am into theology more that philosophy. In the Free Will argument in relationship to exhaustive foreknowledge of the future, why not use the word "certainty" instead of "necessity"? Necessity implies knowledge is causal and required, where certainty leaves room for contingency and dependence on what is knowable. If God knows A then A will certainly happen, but not determined to happen. If A or B happens then A or B is what God knows, then A or B will certainly happen, but not out of the necessity of his knowing. If God knows actuals, then what God knows is dependent on truths. God's knowing then is not the cause so a person is free to determine what God knows - God's knowledge is not tensed. I guess what I am asking is why do I not see more of the word "certainty" of future truths of God's knowledge to help relieve the tension?

[dungeon-wngw]

Great video, I'm posting it in the No-Free Will group I'm in. I think what you could say to disagreeing theists, is, God with his infinite power and knowledge knew that Libertarian Free Will is incoherent and thus he/she/it imbued humans with the undeniable feeling lf Libertarian Freedom because maybe in Gods wisdom freedom is an ultimate virtue or something. That would probably be the closest to having your cake and eating it too, in a way. I have a Christian mom and I always want to extend olive branches like that.

Still, there are problems that aren't pretty even if sugar coated like candy. The Free Will problem also has a very interesting interaction with the Problem of Evil. If one were to say God lets evil be in the world because he gave us free will, that actually indirectly just reveals that this given God figure cares more about the abusers freedom than the freedom of a child who is abused.

[naparzanieklawiatury]

me: yo, pass the aux cord!
friend: you better not play trash
me: plays the abstract objects playlist

[ptis]

I recently heard you bit about the First Way and how it demands an actualizer for how our choices switched from their potential. Which, it turn, demands a actualizer and so on and so forth. I really like your thoughts.

I think I will always understand theism to remove some form of free will of humans. Whether we can have knowledge of this removal and it's exact boundaries is up for debate.

[petery]

So, when are you going to beat Apologetics Squared and explain the Model ontological argument in -1 syllables?

[TimCrinion]

32:00 Is it possible that the word "you" is ambiguous? It could refer to your present self or your future self.
So (7) might mean "Your present-self cannot stop your future-self drinking tea tomorrow", which may be true, but your future-self might still act freely.
Or (7) might mean "Your future-self will not be able to stop himself drinking tea tomorrow". But does that follow simply from the fact that he will? We don't conclude "Your past-self could not stop himself drinking tea" just because he did.

[Abdullah]

By the way I think free will would be something immaterial cause whatever laws that we can't observe that explain probably would be the same for conciouness, some how indeterminate, an essence of it

[Bhuyakasha]

To me it seems that having free will is like having an ego, many would say it is a construct but a very useful one and integral to our human experience. Surely at the physics level it is very unlikely that we *are* some undeterministic process, (maybe there undeterministic processes, but I am not a soul who is in control of them).

If I would be in a state of deep meditation I probably could see reality not from the viewpoint of the ego, but rather from the point of view of the universe, if you will. At least that's what they say :) That is how I see the debate on free will, we really are an ego with volition and it is very useful and important to take that seriously in our day to day life, but if we get reductionist to the core it's not really there.

So depending on your definitions you could call that compatibilist or incompatibilist I suppose, incompatible with the classical definition of free will, but compatible with a more loose definition.

[whatsinaname]

I’ve always thought of it as analogous to a chess grandmaster watching some 600 ELO getting fools mated, but not interfering. He knows with certainty what’s about to occur, but he isn’t making it so. I don’t think God has to force certain actions, he just knows you better than you know yourself, multiplied to everything in existence, gets him a pretty clear picture of all of existence without having to do anything. I’m also a B-theorist though, and I perceive all of existence as being perceived uniformly, so maybe that affects my perspective a bit?

[blakehalley]

Not sure if I have a good response, but l want to have a go.
It seems to me that human freedom is compatible with theses (i) - (iv) - without embracing some sort of compatiblism. For one's free actions would cause God to have such foreknowledge of said actions. It might be the case that God foreknew that I would type this comment, but his foreknowing did not determine my typing this comment; I did! God, to put it in an overwhelmingly crude way, looked into the future, saw what we would freely do, and took on the belief of what he just saw. So we are the ones that choose which actions God foreknew. I am determined in some sense, but this determination is something I bring about - which doesn't sound much like determinism.

If we were to choose differently, then God would have had different beliefs about what we would do.

[etincardiaego]

What is your epistemology? You do analytic metaphysics but with the epistemological views of the later Wittgenstein, Sellars, Davidson, etc., you can't do metaphysics. How do you respond to them?

[STARSS]

I'm quite convinced by her dilemma, it seems intuitive and the formal argument also works. On the modal symmetry of time side, it's interesting to note that at the microscopic level causality is not directional (the laws of physics are symmetric under time reversal), but it's only on the macro level.

[resurrectionnerd]

Even if humans have free will does that mean our universe isn't deterministic? For instance, hasn't God already made a plan and decided that it will be so? If so, then it's been determined, right?

[rogersacco]

If the future already fully exists you are dead buried and past being dust.Or If resurrected already in an afterlife.