From: dabrowsk@parc.xerox.com (Jarek Dabrowski)
Newsgroups: alt.atheism
Subject: Re: Free will -answer to your questions jarek.
Date: 27 Jul 92 23:08:44 GMT
Organization: Xerox PARC

Though I said I have no time to play with this thread, I found Tony
Chay's reply interesting enough to change my mind (my will is free,
after all :-D). In <detchay.1.712264500@halls1.cc.monash.edu.au>, he
wrote about the omniscience and free will:

-Jarek:
>>>>>Omnipotence does NOT contradict free will. Though omnipotence implies
>>>>>omniscience, omniscience does NOT imply that the omniscient being MUST
>>>>>immediately know about all events (in the past, present, and future). 
>>>>>It only implies that this being IS ABLE to know that. 
-Tony:
>Perhaps what you meant was that God is able to know any and all
>propositions at will with no time delay.   
>
Yes, more or less like that.

-Tony:
>What you are after is a way to allow God be able to know all future free
>actions (thus not limiting his omnipotence) yet retaining human free will.
>
Right.

-Tony:
>If it is possible to for God to know any future proposition (even if he
>chooses not to) then that future proposition (including free actions)
>must have a truth value ascribed to it.
>
Not necessarily. Truth value may be fixed BY THE ACT OF OBSERVATION
alone. See some interpretations of quantum mechanics for examples of
this kind of behavior. And note that it doesn't matter for us here which
of the existing interpretations of QM is 'correct' - what we need is the
idea alone because this idea is then used in a very different context.

The Fixity of Truth corresponds to the ideas behind classical mechanics
and was the only way of thinking available before Copenhagen... Indeed,
I don't see that the ABILITY of knowing must fix the truth, no more than 
the ABILITY of measuring sets the state to one of the eigenstates - and
this opinion as such has nothing to do with religion or belief in God.
I like that you mentioned this, because I introduced the may-omnipotence
precisely to overcome the "Fixity of Truth" problem. And that's why I
reply today, though I said I won't...

-Tony:
>However read on and I'll show you how you can reconcile free will with
>omniscience. 
>
Thanks for the reference to Boethius; however, I DO put God outside time
and I was never able to find out how this procedure could save free will. 

-Tony:
>A better approach and one favoured by myself is to deny that any 
>future event which is not causally determined can have a truth value 
>ascribed to it until the event has occured.
>
Seems we are saying about the same thing. I add to this the observation
that any binding (100% accurate) prediction effectively fixes the truth
value of the event, just as the occurence of this event would. But wait;
there IS quite an important difference between our approaches. You say
that "God cannot know the unknowable" so you apparently limit the domain
of free will to some indeterministic part of the physical world. Eg. we
are as free as quantum mechanics allows us to and we would have no free
will if the hiden variable interpretation of QM turned out to be true as
this would reduce the world to a deterministic, classical clock. My view 
allows for free will even in a completely deterministic world - it leads
to a 'smearing' of paths the world takes, be they deterministic or not.
In a deterministic world (the simplest case) this smearing can be seen
as reducible to some UNDEFINED initial conditions; the act of prediction
or of physical observation fixes or limits some of those conditions so
that the event appears as determined WHEN OBSERVED. In other words, the
laws are viewed as the laws of OBSERVATION, not as laws of EVOLUTION; no
hidden logical or ontological value is given to events which could have
been but had not been observed or predicted.

-Tony:
>The prophecies in the bible seem to indicate that God does in fact 
>know some future free actions (eg. His knowing that one of the members 
>of the last supper would betray Jesus; Judas).
>
It's not a big problem as long as it is not fixed WHO will be the Judas.
And even if this is fixed, I don't see it as a problem - but let's leave
it for later, I have to run and the article is already long enough :-D.


Best wishes,
             Jarek
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