| This is to Yasa and Lullaby Chainer:
The existence of an omniscient being, like God, does not remove our free will. For the purpose of this debate to make this clearer, I propose we call this omniscient being "Bob," who is simply any normal person, except he is omniscient: he knows everything, specficially, he knows the future, and the decisions that we will make.
Simply because someone knows what decision you will make does not render you without will. This is a common misconception, and is incorrectly used by determinists as evidence that we have no free will.
For example, let's say that sub-Bob is observing an event: a man comes upon a deadly insect that is steadily moving toward his wife. Sub-Bob is only aware that the man is not afraid or incapacitated by the presense of the insect, does not freeze under pressure, loves his wife very dearly, and would do anything to save her. Sub-Bob "knows," or at least has a pretty good hunch, that the man will prevent the insect from killing his wife. Note that this does not remove the free will of the man to do as he wills: simply because Sub-Bob has a hunch that he will take a course of action does not mean that is so. In fact, in this case, what sub-Bob does not know is that the man is a secret agent that knows the insect will be unable to kill his wife because this is simply a trap to capture a Soviet spy who has fallen madly in love with the man's wife in a fake love-affair, which the wife has knowingly participated in so as to help the nationalist cause.
Yes, this is a fantastically ludicrous situation. But the man has free will here, regardless of whether sub-Bob has a "hunch" of what he will do.
Now, let us transform sub-Bob to fully-fledged Bob, the omniscient being. Bob is now fully aware of the situation and knows by looking in the future that the man will not kill the spider, but this has not removed his free will in any way. The situation has not changed one iota since the arrival of omniscient Bob. Simply because he knows the man will do something does not mean he has no free will. |