The question of Free Will is rather general, not limited to Christians. It gets an additional twist if we add to the question God that knows our future even before we are born. Some think that the combination of God knowing our future and Free Will are not compatible. My interpretation is that this conclusion omits important aspects and therefore does not capture the reality. If everything has been decided before the creation, then there is no Free Will. If God knows our future because He is omnitemporal and can see our decisions as we make them or after we have done them, then the combination of Free Will and God knowing our future is possible.
We have some amount of Free Will, although our alternatives to choose are very limited at any given moment because of external conditions and our previous decisions. Free Will could be understood as a possibility to select a path rather than having occasions where we can select freely from a large set of alternatives. Each minor decision directs our path towards a particular direction and the Free Will to choose the direction is the cumulative sum of minor decisions. That is my interpretation.
I’ve grown accustomed to saying that all it takes is for a single person to act without being caused to act or to choose a simple series of numbers for determinism to be false.
Oh, and these two quotes have been important to me:
“God’s providential direction as an unseen, behind the scenes, ‘primary cause,’ should not lead us to deny the reality of our choices and actions.”
Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology
“This divine activity accompanies the action of man at every point, but without robbing man in any way of his freedom. The action remains the free act of man, an act for which he is held responsible.”
It is simple but philosophical theologians have made it difficult. There is a 1500+ years tradition of writing philosophical ideas about the combination of all-knowing God and Free Will, and these philosophical writings have made many to deny the possibility of either the Free Will or the idea that God can know our future.
But then sometimes the mind doesn’t find or rejects the justifications and either the will chooses against the heart’s desire or the person lives with the conflict.
To my mind, the debate over whether physics rules out or enables free will is moot. It’s like citing quantum theory in a debate over whether the Beatles are the best rock band ever (which they clearly are). Philosophers speak of an “explanatory gap” between physical theories about consciousness and consciousness itself. First of all, the gap is so vast that you might call it a chasm. Second, the chasm applies not just to consciousness but to the entire realm of human affairs.
Physics, which tracks changes in matter and energy, has nothing to say about love, desire, fear, hatred, justice, beauty, morality, meaning. All these things, viewed in the light of physics, could be described as “logically incoherent nonsense,” as Hossenfelder puts it. But they have consequences; they alter the world.
This is what reasonable is supposed to sound like. And where it says “alters the world” at the end, I hear alters the world as we experience it, not as physics describes it.
Not my view necessarily but one held by quite a lot of people
I suppose the only plausible answer to this is that it would defeat the purpose of God making us in the first place. Though many question his wisdom there!
I hear this argument from both atheists and Christians, mainly ones who hold more progressive beliefs
Very interesting take, not heard it before. I suppose we could say Free Will isn’t an absolute thing at least? Or it at Least means we are Free to do what we want but we are not absolved of whatever conseqeunces lie before us? Maybe God’s intervention would stop us learning in some circumstances…Ok, i’d better stop hypothesising off the top of my head
There is an instantaneous dynamic between God’s omnitemporal will (so no pre- prefixes apply, nor any other tensed words – the only kind of verbs we have in English, anyway)… there is an instantaneous dynamic between God’s omnitemporal will and our free wills which are constrained to sequential time. (We know there are exceptions to the linearity of that time we experience and that time can be warped – per special relativity and the twin paradox, for example.)
That dynamic relationship is something beyond our fathoming and we are not going to get our heads around it. That it would have been better for Judas not to have been born is something that Jesus foreknew (a tensed verb in sequential time), but Judas was still responsible for his decisions and behaviors in his free will.
So it is certainly conceivable that the indeterminacy/observation paradox in QM is related to the timelessness (or rather ‘timefulness’) of God’s functional interface with us in our free will and his cool providences. It is better to have the understanding and know that they are cool providences for our good even if they are hard – and that God is a good Father who is in control and whom we should doxologize – than to not know and have them be terrifying. Not knowing God maybe should be terrifying – this beautiful but broken world is not a safe place to live. If anyone thinks it is, they are badly mistaken. But God is gracious and patient beyond measure.
I suppose the only plausible answer to this is that it would defeat the purpose of God making us in the first place.
Seems to me, either you have an odd definition of “progressive,” or I must wonder what argument you are talking about. It is usually the fundies who believe more in the Christian version of determinism called predestination and thus argue against any necessity of free will. And I can hardly imagine any Christians employing a “problem of evil” type argument like the one you were leading us into.
Not everyone is the same with regards to what they can wrap their heads around. And not everyone is as willing to sweep things under some cannot-be-understood-maloney rug.
For example, special relativity and the twin paradox is not an exception to the linearity of time, but an example of how such a Euclidean understanding of space-time is wrong. The Euclidean picture sees space-time as being like a movie film – as a sequences instances. But that is just not how space-time is structured.
Instead space-time is locally divided by a two-sided cone defined by the speed of light, with a past cone and a future cone. Everything inside the past cone is the past with respect to the center, everything inside the future cone is the future of the center, and everything else is equally the present instant of the point of space-time at the center. There is no exception to the ordering of time in this. It is just that the ordering of time doesn’t apply to events which are more greatly separated from each other in space. So, the problem with “linearity of time” is that it is an overly simplistic understanding of time - with time independent of space.
Even when we can wrap our heads around special relativity we may still be unwilling to believe in a God incapable (for whatever reason) of a real relationship with beings who can surprise Him. I don’t see the point of believing in such a thing.
But a good father is NOT in control. This sounds more to me like a God who is a non-person… praising something like the weather.
Just because something takes forever doesn’t mean it is undoable. Such is the way in a relationship with an infinite God. It is not that God is unknowable but only that He cannot be known.
I was watching this TV show today, in which a character concluded from special relativity that there was no such thing as the present. Not quite correct. The correct conclusion is that the present isn’t a 3d snapshot of the universe. There certainly is a present in the here and now. It is only, how you extend this idea of a present to the rest of the universe which is less clear.
