Author:
Wade A. Tisthammer
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Date Posted: 07/ 1/02 1:30am
In reply to:
Damoclese
's message, "My representation" on 06/30/02 12:50am
I’ve found another way to describe what I perceive to be the argument. (If the below does not represent your argument, please correct me.) To simplify matters, let’s have A be a placeholder for an action, whether it be the action of doing something or the action of refraining from doing something. The key thing to keep in mind here is that A represents a decision if we had free will. We can then use the following argument:
- God is omniscient (a trait from the definition of God).
- God is knows everything that you will do (from 1).
- If it is known in advance that you will do A, then you have no choice but to do A.
- God knows you will do A (from 1 and 2).
Conclusion:You have no free will in whatever you do (from 3 and 4).
Your argument depends on premise 3, for which I have disproved using a counterexample. The example illustrated having foreknowledge without predestination. So far, you have yet to attack it and thus my objection still stands.
>In reference to my last point about your analogy you
>assume that we can travel back in time. I pointed out
>that this example wasn't very good and you replied
>that it was no big deal.
That’s not quite what I said. I think this is a very good example of how one can have foreknowledge without predestination. Time travel is logically possible and there is no reason to suppose otherwise.
>In reality as we experience it, there is only one
>timeline of which we are aware in which events occur
>and it happens in a forward motion. If we were to
>travel back and time and vote for the other candidate
>and God knows that, then the previous event of our
>voting for another candidate is overriden; it never
>happened. Only one timeline exists.
This is only one of several views of time travel. One problem with your view is that if it never happened (the voting for one candidate), then it would seem that (in the future) no one would have traveled back in time to change something that never happened to begin with. Such a view seems quite shaky, if not completely self-defeating.
>We don't have the
>choice for voting for both of them because we cannot.
>It is one or the other even if we go back in time. Can
>we travel back in time and God still know which choice
>we ultimately will pick? Surely, but that isn't the
>point. The point is that whether we can travel back in
>time and the first time through we vote for Al Gore
>and then we travel back and vote for George Bush it is
>if the Al Gore vote never happened, and the ultimate
>timeline that we know of that prevails is one that God
>knew would prevail.
I’m not sure what your getting at here. Can you explain yourself more clearly?
>Since we can't travel back in time, it's a moot point
>anyway. We have one timeline of which God says he
>knows what we are going to do. If he truly knows it I
>ask you or anyone else if there is some way (even with
>a time machine) or some circumstance in which only one
>known choice doesn't prevail.
In this case, God would know that we would originally vote for Al Gore, but then go back in time to change our minds. My theistic view holds that God exists “outside” of space-time and would thus observe the changes in the time stream.
In any case, this challange seems to digress. You have still yet to attack the counterexample I put forth. You claim that all our actions (including the non-time travel ones) are predestined if they are known using the sort of argument I described. I believe I have disproved premise 3 with a counterexample, effectively destroying that argument. Perhaps my counterexample was unsuccessful in that it was not foreknowledge without predestination, but you have yet to do anything to demonstrate this.
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