Friday, March 27, 2009

Omniscience and Free Will, Part I

I'm interrupting my series on the hideous sense of entitlement to post elements of a debate I've just begun in the facebook group, 100,000,000 Christians worship God. The debate can be found in its original form by clicking the title of this post.

In this post, we'll start with the opening question and definitions and my response. Mr. Owen is a noted atheist member of the group who usually asks great questions. Here we go!

Mr. Owens,

"Assembled party of good, intelligent, and honest people, we are here to discuss omniscience and its effects on free will. Let's start by agreeing on definitions of both. I propose:

Omniscience: infinite knowledge, free of all bounds. The state of knowing literally everything about everything - past, present, future. For the sake of this thread, omniscience will be paired inseparably with infallibility. That's the context of Christianity, after all.

Free will: the ability of an agent to make choices and act completely unrestrained by circumstances external to the agent, such as fate, destiny, predetermination, what have you.

Everyone happy?"

Myself:

"Good topic! And a great opportunity to consider the questions involved. And bravo to you sir for making certain the terms were clear before we begin, as I do indeed have objections to them.

'Omniscience: infinite knowledge, free of all bounds. The state of knowing literally everything about everything - past, present, future. For the sake of this thread, omniscience will be paired inseparably with infallibility. That's the context of Christianity, after all.'

I would note two things. Omniscience, like all properties of God in the Christian tradition, is a logical derivative of His nature. This means for our purposes that it is "bound," by God's own nature and properties, in that it refers to all things logically possible to know, all things that can be known. This also means that, if we're going to treat fully with the issue, we need to understand HOW the property is derived.

For the sake of discussion, I hope you'll forgive my assumption of God in the Christian context without attempting to prove Him. Christian theology dating back at least as far as St. Thomas Aquinas has called God that Being whose essence is equal to His existence, in other words, God is an eternal act of existence, and the means by which all other existence begins. This was in conclusion to the problem of the origin of existence taken in light of infinite regression, and causa sui being impossible. It is from this understanding of God that we understand Him to have the properties commonly associated with Him, like omniscience. And the derivation works essentially as follows: Because God's nature is existence, we argue that all existence draws upon His existing to sustain itself. In other words, wherever anything exists, so too does God exist, even if that something should deny Him. This is because to exist, a thing draws upon the act of existence, which is rooted in God. This is how God is omnipresent in the universe, or immanent. Simultaneously, God, as an eternal act of existence, does not reside within the universe or as part of the universe, nor is He bound by it or its properties, He transcends it and is beyond it, giving Him an outside and objective perspective into it. Essentially, to use a metaphor, take a piece of paper with a circle drawn on it. The circle represents the universe. What is in the circle is everything that exists in that universe, including us. The paper would be God. The paper is simultaneously beyond the circle, within the circle, and the underlying fabric which the circle requires to exist, as you cannot write on nothing, so to speak. Due to this combination of transcendence and immanence or omnipresence, God is able to observe all moments of existence objectively, simultaneously and intimately, thus giving Him this perfect knowledge of all things that can be known.

If you desire to argue omniscience with Christianity, you must first accept the nature of that omniscience, since as I'm sure you realize, if we can't agree on that, we can't make any headway.

'Free will: the ability of an agent to make choices and act completely unrestrained by circumstances external to the agent, such as fate, destiny, predetermination, what have you.'

This isn't actually the Christian conception of Free Will, though it is the most common idea of it among Christians and from my understanding most other people religious or non-religious alike.

Christianity, however, would never claim that human choices and actions are unrestrained by circumstances external to the agent, that's the entire doctrine of Original Sin and the Fall and Grace. Christianity would in fact argue that humanity as a whole, due to humanity's Fallen nature, is bound to sin unless redeemed by the Savior. It is only through cooperation with God, whom Christianity says IS good, not defines Good, or adheres to Good, that humanity can be good and do good, it is not in and of ourselves. Even conversion is inspired and aided by God, and is not a wholly independent and separate human action. Our moral wills likewise are clouded by concupiscence, which is the tendency to sin regardless of our redeemed or fallen state, an effect of existing in a fallen world, necessitating again the need for God's Grace in our lives in order to stick to the narrow path of Good.

Christianity would argue that we have a will, and that that will is supernatural, and free only in that it can reject the prompting of God's Grace to unite itself to God's Will or it can accept those promptings. Without those promptings and the aid of God to our wills, we are "slaves of sin" as it were, or bound to act in a fallen and imperfect manner. True Free Will of the sort your describe was lost at the Fall, if it ever actually existed."

Please note, I'm confining these posts to whatever arises out of the discussion between Mr. Owens and myself, and not including the posts and questions of others, like Mr. Hedrich, which may also arise. Perhaps in another series, haha.