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Ruminations.
Apr. 7th, 2011 12:29 pmMany people (including Saint Augustine) have claimed that if God knows what will happen in the future, then that future is predestined, and free will is an illusion. That knowing the future causes the future to be fixed, and therefore we do not have a choice but to act in certain ways. Whether God exists outside of time, or has supernatural prescience of some other variety, or is truly, directly pulling the quantum strings of all us puppets to cause this future is seldom addressed, which is but one of the things about this argument that has always annoyed me.
So let's talk about it.
I have never believed Augustine's premise that foreknowledge is necessarily equivalent to causation or predestination. There are all kinds of things that I know will happen in the future, and I have no hand in the mechanics by which they occur. The sun will rise tomorrow, and if I cared I could tell you when, down to the minute. Trust me, I am not making it happen.
If we assume an omniscient God (and I am not saying that we must), then God is the perfect weatherman. By knowing every facet of existence in more exquisite detail than humans can ever know anything, God can know every variable, predict every interaction. By knowing the current position (AND the current momentum!) of every electron in the universe, God can know where each of them will be five years, five hundred years, five million years from now, without any need for transcending time itself -- only a perfect understanding of math and the ability to graph every molecular interaction with perfect elegance and accuracy.
That is still stunning, and well beyond not only human ability but perhaps even human imagination, that a being could contain that magnitude of knowledge, but if God is all-knowing, then it is possible to do without moving a single electron, with no causation entering into the equation.
And if it's true of electrons... sometimes I know what a friend is going to say, and I can finish their sentence for them. Sometimes I know my wife is going to hate a dumb joke in a TV show before we watch it together. When we are close to someone, and we know them well, we can be weathermen for their behavior. Of course, we can't predict everything, and not all our predictions are right.
But an all-knowing God would know every memory, every desire, every thought of every person. Every irrational bias, every quirk, every firing of every neuron. God would always know what jokes we won't laugh at, but that doesn't mean God has caused our sense of humor. It just means God knows us well enough to always guess right.
So if God knows every being in the universe that intimately -- their positions, their minds, the lifespan of every cell in their body -- why couldn't God predict, with perfect accuracy, everything about our future? And it what way would that prediction make our choices less our own? When I finish a friend's sentence for them, they never complain that I made them speak that sentence.
So let's talk about it.
I have never believed Augustine's premise that foreknowledge is necessarily equivalent to causation or predestination. There are all kinds of things that I know will happen in the future, and I have no hand in the mechanics by which they occur. The sun will rise tomorrow, and if I cared I could tell you when, down to the minute. Trust me, I am not making it happen.
If we assume an omniscient God (and I am not saying that we must), then God is the perfect weatherman. By knowing every facet of existence in more exquisite detail than humans can ever know anything, God can know every variable, predict every interaction. By knowing the current position (AND the current momentum!) of every electron in the universe, God can know where each of them will be five years, five hundred years, five million years from now, without any need for transcending time itself -- only a perfect understanding of math and the ability to graph every molecular interaction with perfect elegance and accuracy.
That is still stunning, and well beyond not only human ability but perhaps even human imagination, that a being could contain that magnitude of knowledge, but if God is all-knowing, then it is possible to do without moving a single electron, with no causation entering into the equation.
And if it's true of electrons... sometimes I know what a friend is going to say, and I can finish their sentence for them. Sometimes I know my wife is going to hate a dumb joke in a TV show before we watch it together. When we are close to someone, and we know them well, we can be weathermen for their behavior. Of course, we can't predict everything, and not all our predictions are right.
But an all-knowing God would know every memory, every desire, every thought of every person. Every irrational bias, every quirk, every firing of every neuron. God would always know what jokes we won't laugh at, but that doesn't mean God has caused our sense of humor. It just means God knows us well enough to always guess right.
So if God knows every being in the universe that intimately -- their positions, their minds, the lifespan of every cell in their body -- why couldn't God predict, with perfect accuracy, everything about our future? And it what way would that prediction make our choices less our own? When I finish a friend's sentence for them, they never complain that I made them speak that sentence.
