The Problem of Divine Foreknowledge #philosophy #theism #freewill #bryanmagee

Anthony Kenny discusses one of the central philosophical issues in the Middle Ages, that of reconciling Divine Foreknowledge with human free will. This clip comes from a program on Medieval Philosophy in a 1987 series on the Great Philosophers with Bryan Magee.

#philosophy #freewill #determinism #bryanmagee

[alexplotkin]

Anthony Kenny was a great philosopher. Also: Nice tie!

[majorlycunningham]

Free will vs. determinism. Love the debate / dialectic.

[hashamkhan]

Boethius, Roman philosopher (480-525)CE, said:" God exists outside of time, and so is transcendent and beyond human understanding. God foresees our free thoughts and actions."

[myrtlechurch]

Don’t neglect Molina and the middle knowledge of counterfactuals

[mileskeller]

I would like to hear him try to reconcile the two. It is a very valid problem for a belief in an omniscient god.

[HegelsOwl]

For me, as a philosopher, the issue of free will has always been the least interesting, because no actual anomaly gets explained either way. There's no solution because there's no actual problem. Is there?

[msmhao]

There is a crucial assumption being made - that all of God's Foreknowledge is actualized, but this needn't be posited if one believes in the Alternate Possibilities Theory - that is God knows all possibilities and determines one of it to be actualized. In this manner, the issue of Free-Will may be resolvable - it can be argued that God knows what we would do of actions, but also determined it for us, which means that we are determined to do what we would've done had God not determined it for us regardless, but as with every theory, it does have some drawbacks I think, which can't be elaborated in this short post.

[stupidrules]

Doesn't this become a "problem" only when you also include god being all powerful?

Because does knowing the future impact the future in a meaningful way?

[ronpaulrevered]

Doesn't seem like a problem at all. If God knew all possibilities, and humans could choose which ones they took, then God would know what would happen and Individuals could choose.

[obamaibnbahish]

This man failed to demonstrate that a totally ”free will” exists first and foremost. Which makes this short clip seem rather arrogant, granted it may be out of context.

[ebob]

Well, that's why determinists don't believe we are free.

[MrBeastjebuz]

God is outside of time and space. He doesn't have to control everyone. He simply knows what will happen. He provides for everyone.

[jonasdamion]

free just means all sorts of things happen. the only agent is god

[cademosley]

I think the understanding of "free will" by free will deniers on determinism grounds is stricter or more narrow than even mainstream free will advocates would hold, so there's a straw man flavor there.

E.g., I don't think a free will advocate would say that if I command my arm to rise and it doesn't rise that that's free will, even though the "free will" alternative means that the action is being absolutely determined (by my command).

That is, I think determinism has always been part of the concept and that the actual question in dispute isn't if action is being determined, but what is determining the action, a person or its component parts. Then I think that's really a question about the nature of a person and action, e.g., if it's fair to call the level of personal decisionmaking a natural category.

Then on that question, there are three points I think one could make on the problem of reductionism. Either decisionmaking may follow emergent rules the lower level can't explain (like classical physics emerges from QM), or the high level and low level descriptions may be equally valid, so it's not wrong to say a "person" did the action, or the higher level description can be eliminated by the lower level. I can't explain it all here, but I think the first two are the better alternatives, and either way, once one concludes it's fair to say a "person" "determined" the "action", then I think the "free will problem" disappears as a problem.

All of this is aside from my main opinion that the main job of philosophers shouldn't be to figure out if "free will" is true or not, but their main job should be to give a fair description of the phenomena to which we use the term "free will" to refer.

Thanks for indulging my reflections. I think we're all watching this video and reading these comments thinking about the same kinds of issues. =)