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From: david@ssc-vax.UUCP (David Norris)
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Omniscience vs. Free Will (again!)
Message-ID: <844@ssc-vax.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 21-Feb-84 12:46:03 EST
Article-I.D.: ssc-vax.844
Posted: Tue Feb 21 12:46:03 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 22-Feb-84 02:34:14 EST
Organization: Boeing Aerospace, Seattle
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The free will vs. omniscient debate is getting fun.  Byron Howes recently
posted an article and Darrell Plank sent a letter on the subject, and I
thought the matter was of sufficient interest to be posted to the net.
(Hope you don't mind, Darrell; nothing derogatory here.)

I don't think that a definition of terms is necessary;  free will implies
ability to choose.  Further, it implies that there is a selection of choices
to make (you can't "choose" to eat only bananas on a deserted island if there
is no other fruit to be had).  This is an important point to make, as I shall
try to demonstrate. 

Darrell made the analogy of a ball/trajectory:

> If I calculate the exact trajectory of a ball that is thrown into the air,
> you can claim that I only KNEW the flight of the ball but I didn't ALTER the
> flight in any way.  It still remains a fact that the ball didn't have free
> will in its flight.  Free will implies that along the way the ball could
> "make its own decisions" and suddenly veer off to the right.  Of course this
> is not true.  Balls do not have free will.  Balls don't have will of any
> kind, free or constrained.

This is good fun.  Doesn't this work whether God exists or not?  If God does
not exist, then we may say the ball is only obeying the law of gravity.  But a
person will obey that same law of gravity.  This implies that man does not have
free will, regardless of the existence of an external Diety.  We have no choice
but to obey certain kinds of laws, among them gravity, friction, inertia, etc.
But certainly this does not imply lack of free will.  These laws exist
regardless of the existence of God.  As I said earlier, free will implies the
existence of choices; the ball has none.  (The same argument could be used for
Byron's piece of yarn analogy, I think)

But there are other kinds of laws that may be called "spiritual" laws.  They
are, I hope, higher than the "natural" laws.  These include what we may call
common sense, jurisprudence, and the "moral" law.  In these cases, we almost
always have a choice (we may may exceptions for mentally disturbed types, but
let's concentrate on the general case).  You always have the choice to be
mean or kind to the beggar on the corner.  It may be painfully obvious to point
out that the free will of man only comes into play in these cases, because only
in these cases is there real choice.

Real choice, then, arises from one of the spiritual laws (it is interesting to
note that a bad choice in the spiritual realm often results in a bad
consequence in the natural realm.  As C.S. Lewis said, if you don't obey the
law of jurisprudence when walking on a slippery sidewalk, you may suddenly find
yourself obeying the law of gravity).  But I think my original point still
holds up.  God, being omniscient, knows that we are going to disobey the law
of jurisprudence tomorrow and fall on our butt.  It does not follow that He
makes it happen, because watching someone do something is not the same as 
making them do it.  But I might point out that this view (that God can't be
omniscient because we have free will) operates on the idea that God is not
omnipotent.  It puts a limit on God's ability.

Finally, Byron will be correct in pointing out that this may be in violent
contradiction to Calvinist teaching.  But I am not here to defend the
Calvinists. 

	-- David Norris        :-)
	-- uw-beaver!ssc-vax!david