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DO WE HAVE FREE WILL? PART 3: DIVINE FOREKNOWLEDGE

1/30/2018

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So far, I’ve written about two arguments for determinism which, though not completely conclusive, present serious challenges to belief in free will. The same cannot be said of this next type of determinism. There actually is no reason for accepting it, since there is no reason for believing its premises. Nevertheless, it is a serious internal problem for Christianity. It shows that the beliefs of most Christians aren’t – as shocking as this may seem – entirely consistent.

The basic idea is simple enough: If God already knows the future, he already knows everything you are going to do. The only thing you can do, then, is what God knows you will do. And that means you aren’t free.

There are, however, certain complications here which most people are unaware of. In particular, there is the fact that knowledge does not normally imply infallibility. If one knows something (genuinely knows it, that is), then it follows that it’s true; one cannot know a falsehood. But it doesn’t follow that it had to be true.

How this relates to the foreknowledge argument can best be seen by means of an example:

Suppose that I know you well enough to be sure that you will not vote for Trump in the next election. Does that mean your not voting for Trump isn’t free? That you can’t choose otherwise? That doesn’t seem right. The believer in free will can admit that there are things one would never do, for one can freely choose to never do them. And if I know you well enough, I can know what you will do even if you are free, or have the power, to do otherwise.

If you disagree with the above, it’s probably because you are interpreting the concept of knowledge in a stronger sense than normal. You may be thinking that if there is even the slightest possibility that someone does otherwise, then you can’t know what they will do. But if so, then you can’t claim to know almost anything, for there is a possibility of being wrong for most of the things we claim to know. If, on the other hand, you mean roughly what most of us mean by “knowledge,” then you must admit that one person can know the way another will act even if the other is acting freely and could, if they wanted to, act differently.

It’s helpful to know all this because there are theists who will appeal to it in order to reject the argument from divine foreknowledge. They will maintain that, just as you can know how someone will freely act, God always knows how we will freely act. This, however, ignores a crucial difference. God is supposedly infallible. Unlike human knowledge, God’s knowledge does not admit the possibility of error. And it is that which creates a problem for the theist who believes in free will.  

This difference can best be understood if we think of it in terms of “possible worlds” (that is, in terms of ways things could have been). So, for example, suppose Mario believed yesterday that Luigi would do x today, that he had very strong reasons for believing it (the kind that we normally associate with knowing), and that Luigi in fact did x today. Then we would say that Mario knew Luigi would do x. However, if Luigi was nevertheless free to do something else – if he could have refrained from doing x – then that means there is a possible world in which Mario believed Luigi would do x and yet he did not do it. In other words, that’s the way things could have turned out, and this shows Luigi was in fact acting freely.

But now suppose instead that it is God who infallibly knew yesterday that Luigi would do x. To say that Luigi was nevertheless free to choose to do something else, then, is to say that there is a possible world in which God believed he would do x, yet he did not do it. But of course, that can’t be! If God is infallible, then it is not even logically possible for him to be mistaken – and thus there is no possible world in which he is mistaken. It follows that if God already knows what you are going to do in the future, you don’t have the power to do anything else. To actually be free in that case is to have the power of making God wrong.

It is God’s supposed infallibility that creates a problem for free will. And the only way to avoid it, it seems, is to deny either that there is an infallible being with foreknowledge (or more precisely, that there could even be such a being), or to deny that we have freedom of choice. Most true believers refuse to accept either of these ways out. They therefore continue to have an internally inconsistent worldview.

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[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

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DO WE HAVE FREE WILL? PART 2: RELATIVITY

1/22/2018

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As I mentioned last time, there are both causal and non-causal varieties of determinism. Most people think of determinism only in terms of the former: events are determined, they might say, if they are the result of prior states along with strict laws of cause and effect (so that given those prior states and laws, the events could not have failed to occur). But historically there have also been arguments for determinism that have nothing to do with causation, such as logical determinism and the type of theological determinism based on God’s foreknowledge (as opposed to God’s foreordination).
 
I’ll return to theological determinism next time. Today, I want to talk about a much less well-known kind of non-causal determinism.
 
According to the theory of relativity, there is no absolute “now,” or present moment. What for you are two simultaneous events won’t necessarily be simultaneous for someone else. So, for instance, take what is going on in a galaxy far, far away at the moment you are reading this. There are events occurring there that, from your perspective, are occurring right now. You can’t know about them yet, of course. If the galaxy is, say, 2.5 million light years away, then you have to wait 2.5 million years for its light to reach us. But if you look at it then, you will see what was happening there at the time you were reading this (approximately). However, you can’t say that those events that for you are occurring right now are occurring right now in any absolute sense – because for someone else right now who is travelling relative to you, what is going on in that galaxy will be some other set of events. But that means the universe as a whole cannot be absolutely divided at each moment into past, present and future.
 
What does this have to do with determinism? Well, in order for indeterminism to be true, the future must be open to more than one possible “path.” Maybe event E will occur tomorrow, or maybe it won’t. This means the future is unlike the present and the past, which are already settled. But if there isn’t any absolute sense in which something is still future, then it seems one cannot distinguish between the settled past and the open future in this way. What is still future for you at a given moment may already be past for someone else at that same moment. And if it is already settled for them, how can it be anything other than settled for you as well?
 
Roger Penrose put this idea very clearly in what has come to be known as the Andromeda Paradox:
 
“Two people pass each other on the street; and according to one of the two people, an Andromedean space fleet has already set off on its journey, while to the other, the decision as to whether or not the journey will actually take place has not yet been made. How can there still be some uncertainty as to the outcome of that decision? If to either person the decision has already been made, then surely there cannot be any uncertainty. The launching of the space fleet is an inevitability. In fact neither of the people can yet know of the launching of the space fleet. They can know only later, when telescopic observations from earth reveal that the fleet is indeed on its way. Then they can hark back to that chance encounter, and come to the conclusion that at that time, according to one of them, the decision lay in the uncertain future, while to the other, it lay in the certain past. Was there then any uncertainty about that future? Or was the future of both people already ‘fixed’?” (The Emperor’s New Mind, 392-393)
 
In order for free will (in the sense being discussed here) to exist, one must be able to choose from among different possible courses of action. You can either go out tonight or stay home. But if the future is as settled as the past, there is only the one possibility: what will in fact occur. If you stay home, that’s the only thing that you could have done. This view of time is therefore inconsistent with the existence of free will.
 
The only way to avoid this conclusion, it seems to me, is to reject the relativity of simultaneity.
 
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For more on this kind of determinism, see my brief paper Relativistic Determinism.

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]


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DO WE HAVE FREE WILL? PART 1: PHYSICAL DETERMINISM

1/16/2018

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The most common Christian view holds that human beings are free in the usual libertarian sense of the term – meaning that we can choose from among different courses of action (this is what I’ll mean here by “free will”). Eve and Adam chose to eat the fruit, but they could have chosen to obey Yahweh instead; you chose to read at least this far, but could have stopped after the first sentence; and so on. There are serious problems with such a view, however, and I thought it might be interesting to cover the main ones in a brief series of posts. (Plus, I don’t think I could have chosen otherwise anyway!)

To begin with, there are reasons for believing that our decisions are determined. There are in fact several different arguments for determinism, and as a result several types of it. What they all have in common, however, is the idea that in some sense events are unavoidable. Basically, something is determined if it must occur. (The necessity here isn’t logical necessity; it refers to what is necessary in fact, given the way things are.) Thus, for example, if physical determinism is true, the current state of the universe combined with the laws of nature make it the case that only one future is possible for the universe as a whole. (Physical determinism is causal in nature, but in the next couple of posts I’ll mention non-causal types as well.)

Physical determinism, then, states that all of nature is causally deterministic. This is basically the view one finds in classical physics, and was made famous by Laplace’s thought experiment: if a demon knew every detail about the universe at a particular moment (the position, velocity, etc., of every particle, as well as all the laws of physics), he would be able to predict everything that will ever happen. If the laws of nature are such that everything that happens is a result of prior states, then there is only one possible course that history can take. It follows that Adam and Eve had no choice but to eat the fruit, and therefore that the standard Christian view is wrong.

Nowadays, physical determinism isn’t all that widely accepted because of quantum mechanics. But actually, quantum mechanics does not rule determinism out; it merely implies that determinism might not be true. It all depends on what the correct interpretation of quantum mechanics is. Whether physical determinism is true therefore remains an open question.

But even if natural laws are ultimately indeterministic, some problems remain for the proponent of free will. The world may contain a certain amount of randomness, but at the level of everyday objects, the randomness in the behavior of individual particles is almost entirely cancelled out, and things behave pretty much the way classical physics says they should. This is why Newtonian mechanics was thought of as the final word in physics for such a long time. We just don’t see billiard balls, for instance, move randomly (even if, like me, you’re really bad at pool). And human beings operate on this level. We and our brains are medium-sized objects, made up of trillions of subatomic particles, and therefore any quantum effects on our behavior should be completely negligible.

Even worse, if there were some noticeable randomness to our behavior, that wouldn’t mean we have free will. Free behavior isn’t random behavior. Eve wouldn’t be morally responsible for eating the fruit if her decision were the result of a chance event that she did not in any sense choose.

The only way that quantum indeterminacy might make free will possible is if it provides an “opening” for a non-physical mind to act on our brains. That is, if the firing of neurons isn’t completely determined, then a soul might, by taking advantage of the indeterminacy, be able to fire them one way rather than another. However, there are very good reasons for thinking that our minds are dependent on our brains, rather than residing in some non-physical substance (see my previous post). 

Despite quantum mechanics, then, it is far more likely that the activity in our brains – and the behavior that results from it – is essentially deterministic. And that is inconsistent with free will.


[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]


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IS MATERIALISM A FAITH?

1/9/2018

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One often hears the claim that the worldview of atheists is based on faith, so that we have no more reason for our beliefs than the religious have for theirs. (Though many who say such things strangely enough consider their own faith to be perfectly justified!) One of the common atheist beliefs criticized this way is materialism. Supposedly, materialists say there is nothing beyond the physical world simply because they prefer to believe this. But is that true?

I get the impression that, in many cases at least, those who make the above claim know better. It is simply a way for them to quickly dismiss their opponent’s view. For the fact is that materialism has always been based on evidence. And as science has advanced, the case for it has only become stronger.

There are several arguments that support materialism (see chapter 7 of my book The Truth about God for more), but one of the clearest is the following: Damage to the brain, whether from trauma or from disease, damages the mind. A person suffering from Alzheimer’s, for example, loses many of their mental abilities. Yet if the mind is a separate entity – and in particular one that can survive the death of the body – then that is not what should happen. There isn’t any greater damage to the brain than death. If Alzheimer’s, or a serious blow to the head, can damage one’s mind, then how can that mind survive the total annihilation of the brain at the end of its life?

The evidence clearly favors materialism over the belief in a soul. Materialism is not a faith.


[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

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