Q&A: Determinism and God’s knowledge of the future
Determinism and God’s knowledge of the future
Question
Hi,
I finished reading your book Science and Freedom. Philosophy is really not my field, although I’ve been trying to get into it (out of personal interest) over the last 5 years. I found that you often anticipated questions I had while reading, which I found refreshing!
I’ve tried some of these ideas out on colleagues. By the way, I know your experience is probably similar: I find that science colleagues have very little grasp of these concepts, of the philosophy of science in general, and of the basic implications of the determinist/materialist (take your pick) beliefs that they would probably support by default. It’s a shame that that ship has sailed, at least to some extent, after the Vienna Circle, after Positivism and Mach. I read the Pauli/Jung letters that you mention in your references; that kind of scientist hardly exists anymore, or perhaps those too were just exceptional cases that only became known much later. As another example, I’ve read quite a bit about Feynman’s extraordinary (that is, not ordinary) self-experimentation, and of course that of others. Science has become something of a “production line,” and I see that in the coordinated effort by many people to judge success by where you publish, or how much you publish. I’d bet that most scientists I meet wouldn’t know some of the basic difficulties regarding verification and falsification, and couldn’t present an argument about whether they think “science is truth,” etc. I don’t really know what to do about that. Apparently, at the Weizmann Institute, there used to be a course in the philosophy of science. That’s no longer done.
As an aside: you mention a couple of times in the book that God is omnipotent/omniscient, but that despite having infinite knowledge, it does not necessarily follow that He knows what we will choose. I thought you would specifically develop that idea further in the book (and I’m fairly sure you’ve written about this point elsewhere), but you don’t address it further.
If you could point me to the relevant article, I would appreciate it (Hebrew is fine as well).
Many thanks,
Answer
Hello B’.
I haven’t written anything systematic about the Holy One’s foreknowledge. The issue has been discussed here and there on my site, mainly in relation to the question of whether logical contradictions can be attributed to the Holy One. If the contradiction between His knowledge and our freedom of choice is a logical one (and that is my view, mainly because of Newcomb’s paradox), then the claim “X knows in advance what I will freely choose” is a meaningless statement, and it really makes no difference whether X is the Holy One.