The Question of Divine Foreknowledge and Free Will 1 (Column 299)
With God’s help
A few days ago, in a lecture on free will, I spoke about the question of foreknowledge and free choice. I said there that the debate over determinism is usually connected to views about God: most believers (at least Jews) think that we have free will, and many atheists think that we do not. The debate revolves mainly around the question of scientific causality, and therefore the distribution of views is as I described (atheists, of course, prefer science to religious tradition, and religious people the reverse). But one of the central arguments advanced in order to deny freedom of will and support determinism is precisely a religious-theological argument that rests on divine knowledge.
This question is admittedly rather well worn, and the answers to it are well known too. I have already written my own position on the matter. Even so, there are good reasons to deal with this topic and put some order into it: first, many people are still perplexed by it (and even if not, not justifiably so), and most discussions do not solve the foundational problems but perhaps the opposite—they only confuse them more. Second, it raises several important broader principled issues (such as our attitude toward contradictions, whether one should raise questions for which we have no answer, limits on God’s abilities, and more), and therefore I thought it worthwhile to bring some order to it. This will probably take us three columns.
The Difficulty
The best-known source that presents this difficulty is, of course, Maimonides in Laws of Repentance 5:5. From the beginning of the chapter there, Maimonides explains that our freedom of will is a foundational principle without which there is no Torah. On the other hand, there is another common belief, according to which God is omnipotent and therefore also knows everything in advance (even before things happen). It is worth noting that the first assumption is written explicitly in the Torah (“See, I have set before you today… and you shall choose life”). The second assumption is a philosophical conclusion derived from God’s omnipotence. Verses such as “who calls the generations from the beginning” and the like do not necessarily say that He knows everything (including acts that depend on choice).
In that law, Maimonides argues that these two beliefs contradict one another. If God knows everything in advance, it cannot be that we have free will:
Lest you say: Surely the Holy One, blessed be He, knows everything that will be, and before it happens He knows whether this person will be righteous or wicked—or does He not know? If He knows that he will be righteous, then it is impossible that he not be righteous; and if you say that He knows he will be righteous and yet it is possible that he will be wicked, then He does not know the matter fully.
The argument is constructed as a dilemma. Let us assume, for the sake of discussion, that my actions really are given over to my free choice. If I choose to act contrary to what God knew in advance, then it turns out that His knowledge was mistaken, and that of course contradicts His omnipotence. That is impossible. And if there is no possibility that I will do something else, then it is not true that I have free choice. In short, divine foreknowledge is incompatible with my freedom to choose. Seemingly, we must give up one of these two beliefs.
In passing, I should note that many commentators (such as Maimonides in his Commentary on the Mishnah there) see in the Mishnah in Avot (3:15), “Everything is foreseen, yet permission is granted”, an earlier formulation of this difficulty. The claim is that the Mishnah means to say that despite the contradiction, both of these beliefs are binding. Let me say in advance that the simple meaning of the Mishnah is not that. The Mishnah only means that we are given leave to do what we choose, and all our deeds are visible (=seen) to God. Therefore it is worthwhile for us to choose correctly. The freedom to choose does not mean that there is no preference for one side. On the contrary, the freedom to choose was given to us only so that we would use it positively, for only doing good out of choice can acquire the meaning of a good act.
Against this background, one can also understand the continuation in Mishnah 16 (which is part of the series of sayings of Rabbi Akiva brought there under “He would say”) that speaks about this divine watching:
He would say: Everything is given on collateral, and a net is spread over all the living. The shop is open, the shopkeeper extends credit, the ledger is open, the hand writes, and whoever wishes to borrow may come and borrow. The collectors make their rounds constantly every day and exact payment from a person, with his knowledge or without it. They have what to rely on, the judgment is a true judgment, and everything is prepared for the feast..
Maimonides there as well sensed the connection between the mishnayot and his approach. According to my suggestion here, “the ledger is open and the hand records” is nothing other than an explanation of the divine watching described in the previous Mishnah.
The Answer
Maimonides devotes most of law 5 to an answer to his difficulty:
Know that the answer to this question is longer than the earth in measure and broader than the sea, and many great principles and lofty mountains hang upon it. But you must know and understand what I say in this matter. We have already explained in chapter 2 of the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not know with a knowledge that is external to Him, as human beings do, for they and their knowledge are two. Rather, He, exalted be His name, and His knowledge are one. The human mind cannot comprehend this matter fully. And just as a person has no power to grasp and discover the truth of the Creator, as it is said, “For no human being can see Me and live,” so too a person has no power to grasp and discover the knowledge of the Creator. This is what the prophet said: “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways.” Since this is so, we have no power to know how the Holy One, blessed be He, knows all creatures and their deeds. But we do know without any doubt that a person’s actions are in that person’s own hands, and the Holy One, blessed be He, neither compels him nor decrees that he act in such-and-such a way. This is known not only from religious tradition, but also from clear proofs drawn from the words of wisdom. Therefore it is said in prophecy that a person is judged for his deeds according to his deeds, whether good or evil. This is the principle on which all the words of prophecy depend.
It is not entirely clear what he is claiming here, and it is not even clear whether there is an answer here or only an explanation of why an answer is impossible. He states that God’s knowledge is something different from our knowledge, and we are incapable of grasping it. It is not entirely clear what exactly we cannot grasp. Is it the meaning of the statement that God knows (that is, how knowledge relates to Him)? Why is that important? After all, the question is whether He has knowledge or not, not how He attains that knowledge or how it relates to Him. Maimonides later writes explicitly what he means: “Since this is so, we have no power to know how the Holy One, blessed be He, knows all creatures and their deeds”. We do not know how God knows everything that happens. Seemingly, the intention is that we do not know how this information reached Him even though it does not yet exist (the person has not yet chosen). And indeed many follow this interpretation and argue that God is above time and can access future information, and therefore this does not contradict our freedom to choose.
According to this interpretation, not only is there no answer here, it is not even clear what Maimonides is saying. The fact that we do not know how God obtains the information is not essentially different from the fact that we do not know how He creates the world or performs miracles. So what? Why is that relevant to our actual difficulty? Does Maimonides view the question of knowledge and freedom of choice as akin to the question of how God split the sea? Quite clearly not. The splitting of the sea is a miracle, and God can perform miracles even if we do not know how He does so. And the fact is that Maimonides asks specifically about choice and not about various miracles. Clearly, in his view, this is a difficulty and not merely a question rooted in our lack of understanding or knowledge.
Moreover, Maimonides concludes that although we do not understand this matter, we must continue to hold fast to the belief in freedom to choose, because it is a foundational principle of faith. He even takes the trouble to mention again the strong sources (even though they were already brought in the previous laws) in order to reinforce his point. From this whole structure it appears that he thinks he has no resolution for the contradiction; that is, what he wrote above does not reconcile it. Therefore he is forced to add that nonetheless we must continue to hold the belief in freedom of will. If his words contained an answer to the question, there would be no need at all for this continuation. The contradiction would have been satisfactorily resolved, and now one could hold the belief in freedom of will without any problem.
No wonder that Raavad, in his glosses here, understood that Maimonides really had not answered the difficulty, and that is precisely what he attacks him for:
Ra’avad’s gloss: “Since this is so, we have no power to know how the Holy One, blessed be He, knows all creatures and the works of their hands.” A.B.: This author did not follow the way of the sages, for one should not begin a matter and not know how to complete it. He began with questions and difficulties, left the matter as a difficulty, and sent it back to faith. It would have been better for him to leave the matter in the simple faith of the simple faithful, and not stir their hearts and leave their minds in doubt; perhaps at some point a troubling thought about this will enter their hearts.
He criticizes Maimonides for presenting a difficulty without having an answer for it. That can confuse people and bring them into a doubt for which there is no solution.
A Note on Freedom of Discussion
Raavad here assumes that one should not present difficulties for which one has no resolution. Is that really the right way to proceed? If we have no answers, should we really not raise the difficulties? This is a very problematic approach. Beyond the paternalism involved in it—as if I am supposed to formulate positions for the public at large and not allow it to form its own view—there is another problem here: perhaps this very difficulty ought in fact to have led Maimonides and Raavad themselves to conclude that there is no God, or that He is not omnipotent, or that we have no free will. How does Raavad allow himself to ignore a difficulty or logical contradiction for which he has no resolution?
One can perhaps understand such a claim specifically with respect to a difficulty for which we do have a resolution. In that case we know the truth, but there is a concern that fools will not understand the answer and will remain stuck with the difficulty and draw incorrect conclusions from it. The joke mentioned here on the site a few days ago about people who abandon religion because of the Sabbath cholent was noted in this connection. They read Abarbanel on the weekly portion, and as is well known he begins each of his sections with a huge pile of difficulties. Then the cholent overcomes them and they fall asleep, never making it to the answers. The conclusion is that it is precisely with regard to a difficulty for which we do have an answer that one might argue it should not be presented to the public (at least when the answer is complex and hard to understand). But a difficulty for which we have no answer may indicate that our conclusion is not correct. So why should it be hidden from the masses? Moreover, why are we hiding it from ourselves? After all, we too do not draw from it the seemingly required conclusions, and the question is why. Raavad himself, who apparently thought there was no good answer to this question, ought to have seen in it proof that God does not know the future in advance. Instead of drawing the required conclusion, he demands that the question be hidden from the masses.
The point can be formulated differently. According to Raavad’s own view, there is here a decisive logical proof that at least one of these two beliefs is not correct. And if belief in freedom of will is necessary and anchored in verses and prophecy, as Maimonides wrote, then the required conclusion is that divine foreknowledge does not really exist. Therefore they should have drawn this conclusion, and should also have publicized it. Let everyone know the truth. Instead, Raavad prefers to leave all of us with our false belief that God knows in advance, so as not to create problems of faith. In fact, however, his wording suggests that in his eyes this is probably not a false belief, for it appears that he himself, despite knowing the difficulty, did not abandon it. The question is why. How can one hold two beliefs that logically contradict one another? Is that even possible?
A Note on the Status of Logical Contradictions
Is it possible to remain with a logical contradiction and not draw conclusions from it? It is commonly thought that the answer is yes, after all God is above reason and the "unity of opposites" applies to Him, and so forth. But this is nonsense. The issue here is not about Him but about us. We hold two beliefs that, from our point of view, logically contradict one another. If so, we do not really hold them both. One can think of it this way: I hold the proposition "God knows everything in advance." From this follows the conclusion "my actions are not in my hands." And at the same time I hold the proposition "my actions are in my hands." If so, do I really believe that my actions are in my hands? Is it even possible to believe that my actions are in my hands and not in my hands simultaneously? Of course, one could say exactly the same about the other side of the coin: that God knows in advance and also does not know in advance. Notice: these are two beliefs that I, a flesh-and-blood human being, hold. This has nothing whatsoever to do with God and His omnipotence, or with the question whether logic binds Him or not. Logic binds me, and that is what matters here. A person cannot hold the belief X and also not-X at the same time. He can, of course, utter the sentence "I believe that X and also not-X," but those would be mere empty words (mere lip motion). He does not really believe it; he merely says it. A belief that contains a logical contradiction has no cognitive content.
By the same token, I also cannot believe that God can create a wall that stops every shell, and at the same time believe that He can create a shell that penetrates every wall. The fact that God is omnipotent makes no difference here. There is a logical contradiction between these two beliefs, since if there is a shell that penetrates every wall, then there is no wall that stops every shell, and vice versa. As a human being, I cannot believe both. This is not a claim about God but about me. Alternatively, think about what would happen after God created both of these. What would actually happen when that shell hit that wall? Either it would penetrate it, in which case the wall does not stop every shell, or it would not penetrate it, in which case the shell does not penetrate every wall. There is no third possibility. Therefore it is clear that one cannot believe that God can create both of these together. This is a logical proof, and there is no way to escape it. From Raavad’s words it emerges that the relation between knowledge and choice is similar. There too there is a logical contradiction, and we have no way to escape it (I remind you that this is a difficulty, not merely a question). So why does Raavad insist on holding both sides of the coin himself, and even demand that Maimonides not reveal this contradiction to the masses?
Four Avenues of Resolution
The conclusion from what I wrote above is that one cannot really live with a contradiction. The "unity of opposites" is a distorted Christian notion (conceptualized by the medieval Christian scholar Nicholas of Cusa), devoid of sense, and it is not really an option for dealing with a logical difficulty (unless the opposition is only apparent, but then one must point to the feature that shows it is indeed only apparent, and not make do with a declaration about the unity of opposites). In short, what does one do with this contradiction?
It seems to me that the various explanations of this contradiction can be divided into four types. It all begins with the fact that this contradiction has three components: divine knowledge (His omnipotence), human freedom of will, and the temporal relation between them. The contradiction I presented between the first two components cannot exist unless the divine knowledge precedes the human choice. If the knowledge comes after the act, no problem arises. Therefore the time axis is also part of the story. The first three directions for resolving the contradiction concern these three components: some give up freedom of will and adopt determinism. Some speak of stepping outside time and not being bound by the time axis. And some give up divine knowledge. A fourth direction holds that the contradiction is only apparent—that even if one adopts all three of these components, there is in fact no contradiction. We will now discuss these four directions one by one.
A. Is Theological Determinism Possible?
Some want to give up our freedom of will. This is a deterministic conclusion (which Maimonides and Raavad, of course, were in no way prepared to accept). An example is the view of Rabbi Hasdai Crescas in his book Or Hashem[1], although in his case this stems mainly from his conception of physical causality and not because of the theological contradiction with belief in God’s knowledge. The laws of nature dictate determinism, and therefore it cannot be that we have the freedom to choose what to do. His conclusion is that our actions are indeed not in our hands, and we are not judged for what we did. But because he too accepts—as Maimonides and Raavad do—that it is necessary to believe in our freedom of will, since otherwise commands and commandments, punishment and reward, lose all meaning, he adds that we are indeed commanded and judged, but only with regard to our attitude toward what happens. The act we performed is not in our hands, but if it was a transgression (or a commandment), we can relate to it positively or negatively, and only for that are we judged.
Such an explanation may perhaps be said when the deterministic conclusion is derived from the principle of physical causality. The claim is that our freedom to choose contradicts the laws of physics (because they are deterministic and do not permit free choice). If that is the consideration that leads to determinism, then one can say that our attitude toward events, which is not itself a physical event but a mental-spiritual one, can depart from the laws of physics and be given over to our free will. But in our discussion the deterministic conclusion is derived from a theological consideration (God’s knowledge), not a physical one. If, because of His omnipotence, God knows everything in advance, then there is no room to distinguish between physical events and any others. If He can foresee the future, then He should also know our attitude toward events and not only the acts themselves, and if so the obvious conclusion is that even our attitudes are not in our hands. Incidentally, according to the knowledge currently available to us, our attitude toward events is also a physical event (it takes place in the brain and is produced by electrical currents), and therefore even with respect to the difficulty arising from physical causality it is probably not correct to make Crescas’s distinction. In his time, of course, that knowledge did not exist.
In any event, even if determinism could solve the physical difficulty, it certainly is not a possible solution to the theological contradiction, unless one gives up the assumption that there is any possibility or justification for judging us for our actions.
B. The Time Axis
As stated, there are those who want to argue that God is above time, and therefore He can access information about the future in a way that does not contradict our freedom of choice. We saw above that this is perhaps also how one might understand Maimonides’ own words in his answer to the difficulty. Does this really solve the problem? My answer is no.
The reason is that there is a conflation here between two different questions. One question is how God obtains the information before it comes into being (before the person has made his choice). To that one can answer that God is above time and has the ability to access future information. He stretches a long hand into the future and pulls the information out from there. But the question with which we are concerned is different: assuming that the information is now in His possession (regardless of the way He obtained it), is it possible that we still have free choice afterward? As Maimonides explained, if the information is in His possession, then either we are compelled to act accordingly and have no choice, or, if we have the possibility of acting otherwise, it turns out retroactively that the information was never really in His possession (that is, the information in His possession was mistaken). Therefore this answer too does not provide a response to the difficulty with which we are dealing here. It simply answers the question how He obtains the information, not the question how the existence of that information in His possession is compatible with our freedom of choice in the future.
To sharpen this, I will mention a point made by Richard Taylor in his book Metaphysics. He tells about Osmo, a teacher in a town in the American Midwest, who one day enters a library and finds there a book called… The Story of Osmo. Curious, he opens the book and sees that it begins with Osmo’s birth, at exactly the place and time at which he himself was born. The names of the book’s protagonist’s parents are identical to the names of his own parents, and so it continues through kindergarten, school, college, marriage, and so on. The book contains an exact, detailed description of his life. Then he reaches the chapter that tells how Osmo entered the library and found there a book titled The Story of Osmo. At that point he naturally becomes very anxious, and flips to the next pages, where he sees what is going to happen to him in the future. The book says that Osmo is destined to end in a plane crash (which in fact does happen, because of course he does not succeed in preventing it despite his efforts). For our purposes, that is enough. Now think about what would have happened if Osmo had not entered the library and had not seen the book. In such a case, would the information in the book not have been accurate? The assumption is that the author of the book is equipped with all the information, and therefore it makes no difference whether Osmo saw the book or not. The information in the book describes his entire future life with complete accuracy.[2] For our purposes, the fact that the information exists somewhere, even if nobody has seen it, and even if it is not clear how it got there, is what fixes the future. What contradicts our freedom of will is not God’s knowledge of the information, nor the way the information is obtained from the future, but simply the very existence of the information in the present.
In light of this, we can discuss the proposal of the author of Ohr HaChaim on the Torah, at the end of the Torah portion of Bereishit. The Torah there describes God as regretting the creation of man, which of course raises the question how that can be. Did He not know in advance that this was what was going to happen? Ohr HaChaim there writes (Genesis 6:5):
And although with regard to the blessed Lord it is not appropriate to speak of regret, for He sees and beholds until the end of all generations…
It further seems possible to say, based on what Maimonides wrote in chapter 5 of the Laws of Repentance… and I shall enlighten you: God can withhold from His knowledge that which would otherwise be grasped by that knowledge, so that He does not know it, whenever the Master so wishes—something no human being has the power to do, for when knowledge reaches a person, he cannot simply not know it. This is what Maimonides hinted at when he said, “The human mind cannot comprehend…” For how could knowledge reach Him of itself and yet be withheld from itself? This is what Scripture says (Numbers 23): “He has not beheld iniquity in Jacob, nor seen perversity in Israel.” You thus see that when God wishes not to know, the knowledge is withheld, even though that knowledge exists in itself. For He is not like a human being, whose knowledge is external to him, so that one might say he could refrain and not know it. Rather, God and His knowledge are one, and He does not need to direct His attention in order to know—for only in such a case could one say that if he does not attend, he does not know. Not so with God. And nevertheless, as it were, this aspect does exist, as it is written, “He has not beheld…” We may therefore say that when God created man, He withheld from His knowledge human sins for two reasons. First, for the straightforward reason that God is good and does not look upon what is abominable. But this reason alone is insufficient, since knowledge is needed in order to know what a person will do and what follows from it. There is, however, a second reason: God wisely did this so that the claim of the wicked should not take hold—namely, that His knowledge compels, since if God knew that a certain person would commit a given transgression, then that act would necessarily have to occur of itself, even though God did not decree that it should be so… And once God has informed us of this, there is no difficulty in the verse saying, “And the Lord regretted…” indeed, “I regretted,” for He Himself withheld this knowledge from Himself.
Ohr HaChaim writes that God withholds this knowledge from Himself, and therefore there is no claim that His knowledge compels our actions and deprives us of choice.
But in light of what we saw above, it is clear that there is no answer here to the question. Even if we assume that God withholds from Himself the knowledge of our future actions, still the very existence of the information—even if nobody knows it—is what deprives us of freedom of choice. God preventing Himself from knowing is analogous to a situation in which Osmo had not entered the library and had not read the book. We saw that even in such a case he would not really have had freedom to choose, because it is the very existence of the information that negates his freedom of choice, not his knowledge of the information or that of someone else. The same applies with respect to God. If the information exists, then even if God ignores it and prevents Himself from knowing it, it deprives us of freedom of choice. The explanation of Ohr HaChaim does not resolve the difficulty.
We will continue the discussion in the next column.
[1] There are contradictions in his writings on this issue, as on other issues. I once saw Professor Ravitzky argue that the first half of the book contradicts the second half on several topics, and that these probably reflect different periods in which he retracted some of his ideas.
[2] Of course, if he had not entered the library then this passage in the book would have had to be different, but this is not the place to discuss that.
Discussion
Thanks for the post; it’s just a shame it ended right in the middle of the suspense …
Why not say that God really does not know what a person will choose, and there is no difficulty regarding God’s perfection, because there is no deficiency in not knowing something that has not yet happened, since it does not exist? Just as God does not know what does not exist because there is nothing there to know, because it is nothing, so too He does not know what a person will choose, because it has not happened and does not exist at all until he chooses?
I wrote that there are four possibilities, and this is the third. From its place in the hierarchy, you can understand that I’ll get to it later on as well.
Indeed. Corrected. 🙂
I didn’t understand how the existence of the information negates choice. I can walk down either of two paths; I will choose which one to walk down, and God knows which I will choose because He is above time and knows the future. If at the last moment I choose to take the second path, then God, who is above time, knew that at the last moment I would change my choice and take the second path. But despite His knowledge, I chose!
I don’t understand why Rabbi Michael Abraham needs to change the rock parable to a shell; after all, the rock parable is the famous one (apparently it sounds more explosive..), and then you ask why Maimonides brought sources after his explanation…
As for the matter itself.
If the questioner comes and asks: can God create a stone that is a meter in color, or, in Rabbi Michael Abraham’s parable, a shell that is yellow in size — would we see that as a difficulty?!
After all, these too are things God cannot do: not a stone that is a meter in color and not a shell that is yellow in size. Even if we ask Him directly, He will simply say: I didn’t understand. Would you then also ask: how can it be that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not understand everything?!…
And what, after all, would the Holy One, blessed be He, say to the person asking for the shell or the stone? Explain what you want, and you’ll get it!
And in our case, Maimonides is explaining simple things: since we cannot understand what the Holy One, blessed be He, is, and all the concepts are just tools of assistance for us — for example, we called a color “yellow,” and a length “a meter,” and these are just conceptualizations of our experiences — so whatever we are capable of understanding we conceptualize, and what we are not, we do not. Therefore the concept of ability too is our conceptualization; it is not reality but rather our experience, we little ones. So to ask of One for whom the concept cannot be conceptualized, a request that is not really a request but a troll — for example, “make a yellow length,” or “are you able to?” — this is not a request but a troll.
He simply does not understand what you want from Him. When you ask, He will do it; as long as He does not understand what you are asking, there is nothing to expect from Him and nothing to be disappointed about.
The implication for logical contradiction: if x is a concept only in your head, and therefore in your little head not-x is a contradiction, excellent — but what do you want from Him?!
It is like taking a computer and corrupting and programming it so that 1+1 on its calculator equals three, and afterward it cannot understand how, when it places an order from another computer for one plus one, it gets a result called two?!
True, it will never manage to understand, because it was programmed that way.
Does that mean our software is defective?!
No! It is good, but only for us — for the world of our limited concepts!
There is the well-known saying: “Had I known Him, I would have been Him.”
Yes, our intellect is limited, only to the extent we were given to understand. Should we conclude from this that what we do not understand does not exist?!
It is like a fool drawing a conclusion based on his meager intellect. Does that mean reality is really like that, just because the fool perceives it that way in his intellect?!?! I am astonished!!
One thing is certain, and this is what Maimonides writes based on the “software” that was indeed given to us: 1. We understand that there is no way we are living in a movie, and therefore determinism is ruled out at the outset, and thus there must be free choice; otherwise, once again, we are living in a movie. (Again, all in our little concepts.)
Another basic assumption: 2. It is plainly inconceivable that the Creator is not omnipotent, because the concept “omnipotent” is only a conceptualization in our mind, and it is a conceptualization of our limitation, because we are limited. (Whoever is not limited does not recognize this concept; from his perspective you have asked for a meter-color with a bit of liter.)
And therefore, the fact that our limitedness cannot manage to understand how this fits together does not mean it does not exist.
If I cannot understand how a car drives, and I try and try, and fail to understand, and fail, does that mean the car will not drive?! No; apparently something is defective in me, and that is why I cannot understand!!
One who draws conclusions because he does not understand, in something about which he is told from the outset that he has no chance of understanding, should be considered a fool.
What is required of us is that after the basic assumptions that we are compelled to accept, we need to get into the car and simply drive on the proper future path and do what is upright and good.
Answers such as: why did you decide to assume those basic assumptions, and not simply deny one of them — have already been answered, and I will briefly repeat.
The human intuition implanted in us obligates every rational person, to two foundation stones.
And they are: A. There is no way we are living in a movie!!
B. If we are not living in a movie, then something is wanted from us, and if we do not understand how it works out, that does not contradict the fact that we are obligated to do it even without understanding. It simply works.
I will conclude with a Torah thought that may illustrate somewhat what has been said.
The Holy One, blessed be He, says to Moses: “You shall see My back, but My face shall not be seen, for no man shall see Me and live.”
So one may ask: why doesn’t the Holy One, blessed be He, simply make it possible for a person to see Him and live?!
Perhaps this is the rock He cannot lift, and behold He is limited.. (sorry, the shell…).
And the answer is simple: the whole essence of man and all his work here is because he is limited. Seeing the face of God means seeing the future, and if a person saw and understood everything, then he would have no room for choice, and therefore what would life be to him? Choice comes only because we are limited, and therefore “You shall see My back” means that only after the fact do we understand why things unfolded in such a way; that is called being wise in hindsight. (And even that is not always so — perhaps because the end has not yet arrived; we see half the work and ask questions.)
“My face shall not be seen” means with regard to the future; for if we knew the future, then we would have nothing to choose, because everything would be known to us. That is why this limitation was placed on us!!
We just need to open our eyes and understand what God has done for us.
Have a pleasant rest of the week.
(Yes, there are also those who do not merit to see the back, even when everyone sees; they simply close their eyes. What can be done? There is choice..).
Tam.
Gad.
Look at the story of wicked and miserable Osmo, brought above at the end of Rabbi Michael Abraham’s words.
With God’s help, 9 Iyar 5780
To Tam — greetings,
The source of the word “shell” is in Targum Jonathan on the verse: “And they shall set their battering engines against your walls” (Ezekiel 26:9), which Jonathan translated: “and they shall place his shells against your walls”
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And there Rashi and Metzudot explained that “his battering engines” refers to a device that throws large stones against the wall, and if so, “his shells” are large stones.
We thus learn that according to Rashi, “shells” are “large stones.”
Regards, Shatz
Dear Shatz!
It seems I crossed the line in innocence and without noticing.
The rabbi struck me on the crown of my head, saying: Grow up!
I “choose,” even if I do not understand how, to return to the border of taste that the rabbi sees as good.
And since we do not believe in determinism, we must take responsibility for our deeds, and we are not actors in the rabbi’s film, nor even extras.
So perhaps it is worthwhile, until the wrath passes, to stop with the homilies and wordplay, though I will miss them very much!
Hoping for understanding, Meir Kastner the Simple.
To Tam — peace,
And I supported my pegs in Sir Erich Kastner, who noted in his book Lyrical Medicine humor as one of the ways to cope with extreme moods. In any case, it is better to be “short” than “long” 🙂
Regards, Shatz
I didn’t really understand why foreknowledge is necessarily the cause of its content being realized. From God’s perspective there is no difference at all between what I will do tomorrow and what some anonymous person did a million years ago. It’s not that He knows what will happen in the future; rather, for Him there are no limitations of time. There is no future. (Of course, with human intellect we do not understand this, but we do understand that there could be a kind of knowledge different and utterly unlike ours — and perhaps this is what Maimonides meant?)
Therefore, He knows exactly what we will choose. But who chooses? I do.
Maimonides’ whole argument does not really stand.
And it somewhat contradicts itself from elsewhere.
If the Torah was given to perfect man, then reward and punishment are supposed to perfect man. Each person according to how bad his condition is. And if a person had free choice, then the Torah would not help regarding the perfection of man, because reward and punishment do not help, since the choice is free (free from threats of external reward and punishment).
No technician would approach fixing a computer that behaves freely.
You are again answering the question of how He knows, not how I choose freely given that He knows. This will be sharpened further in the continuation columns.
You are confusing (and not for the first time) indeterminism with free choice. A person who chooses should certainly take reward and punishment into account. I discussed this at length in my book The Science of Freedom and in my article on free will.
The length here is quite unnecessary. The argument is simple and could have been stated in three sentences.
I completely disagree. I will answer this in more detail in the continuation columns as well, but here I will say briefly: if I say that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows, I mean knowledge in my sense. Otherwise, what am I saying? And if this is knowledge in my sense, then all that remains is only how the Holy One, blessed be He, obtains the knowledge or how it relates to Him. These two questions are irrelevant to the discussion, because the contradiction to freedom of will lies in the very existence of that knowledge.
The arguments as though our logic cannot be applied to the Holy One, blessed be He, are nonsense. According to that, He also did not create the world and also does not exist. For the fact that you proved or thought that He exists does not contradict the claim that He does not exist. And the fact that it is written that He created the world does not mean it is not true that He did not create it. And the fact that He is omnipotent does not mean there is no limitation on His abilities. And so on.
What Maimonides writes, and what the Raavad also agrees with, is that if the Holy One, blessed be He, now knows what I will do in the future, this contradicts my freedom to choose. That is all.
Let us take the parable of the fool as an example.
A fool who arrives at a logical contradiction according to how things appear to him, and the contradiction is not really a logical contradiction, but rather his somewhat defective mind sees it as a logical contradiction.
It should be noted that he is indeed a fool, or intellectually limited, but there is one thing he still does not miss, and that is that there are those wiser than he; and if they tell him he is mistaken, even if he does not understand why, he relies on them, because he is aware of the (particular) limitation in his intellect.
1. Just because the one limited in intellect cannot understand why what he sees as a logical contradiction is not really a contradiction, should he conclude that the contradiction exists?!
2. If we are the fools (relative to our Creator), or more properly limited in our intellect (according to the maximum ability we were given), then our experience of what counts as a logical contradiction does not require that the contradiction really exists. Again, if we think we are not limited, then there is nothing to do with us, and we are compelled by innocent foolishness.
And therefore, the knowledge that we are limited helps us not recoil from what appears to us to be a logical contradiction, and certainly not draw conclusions, because it is not really contradictory; rather, it is our mind that experiences it that way.
3. Regarding the examples the rabbi mentioned: as long as we have no reason to see them as a logical contradiction according to our small intellect, and therefore to conclude that we are missing something due to our limitations, we will not reach those conclusions. (Even though there is no certainty that the contradiction does not exist.)
The conclusions come by force of necessity. Even one who is limited concludes that he is mistaken only in matters where it is proven that he is limited in them (he even understands that relative to the wise man, in this matter he is limited). It may certainly be that he is limited in other matters and is not aware of it, but there is no reason to assume so.
I will wait patiently for the continuation columns.
“The ultimate of knowledge is that we know that we do not know.” We are expected to understand our limitations!
Have a lovely day.
There is a point missing in the explanation here, and I don’t understand it:
“For our purposes, the fact that the information exists somewhere, even if no one has seen it, and even if it is unclear how it got there, is what dictates the future. What contradicts our free will is not God’s knowledge of the information, nor even the way the information is obtained from the future, but simply the very existence of the information in the present.”
Why does the mere existence of the information somewhere dictate the future? After all, “dictating” the future is ultimately a causal matter — the causal chain that leads from action A to result B. If there is no causal connection between the existence of the information and the result, then in the end it is not correct to say that it dictates it.
Therefore, I see no problem with the information existing somewhere, while the person himself chooses in a completely free way (since the existence of the information does not causally affect his choice in any way), and his choice is what leads to the occurrence of the result.
Ariel, look at the story of Osmo.
If there is no chance that my actions will be different from what is written, then I do not have the ability to change.
And for that reason it is certainly considered circumstantial.
(Unless, of course, we have a deficiency in understanding what counts as ability; see what I wrote above.)
How is that considered circumstantial? Please describe to me the causal chain from what is written in the book to the result of the action.
If the final result is already written in the book and I have no chance of changing it, then the book is necessarily also the cause, even though I do not experience the cause.
I read with great interest (ever since I bought the trilogy I’ve enjoyed following along), and I’d be happy to suggest a possibility and hear your opinion.
Winning the lottery has an enormous — but defined — number of possible combinations. Suppose this week’s lottery jackpot were 80 million shekels; a person brilliant enough could cover all the possible combinations, win with certainty, and still be left with about 28 million shekels.
Why not say that this is how things stand with respect to God’s knowledge?
He knows all the possible combinations of human choice, and the millions of potential paths created by each choice that is made in the various branches.
And just as this exists in the individual person, so too regarding humanity and the whole world — the number of combinations grows quantitatively, of course, but this is a reasonable assumption because of belief in the power of the Omnipotent.
The “lottery win” in the parable is that in the end all human choices (collectively, not individually) will lead to “redemption.” “Good” choices are the shorter routes that will bring redemption to the world quickly; less good choices (say, the human choice that brought the Holocaust upon the world) are the longer routes to that same point.
That is, He need not necessarily know what you will choose; it is enough that all the possibilities are spread out before Him. Some of the possibilities include the person’s “good” choices, and his free choice to walk in them is what grants him reward.
That is, a person’s recompense is for the private path he walked among the existing possibilities (which may be an astronomically large number of combinations, as stated).
A person has no information about the future; he does not know the paths and cannot take them into account in order to plan his steps — and therefore God’s knowledge does not dictate his steps as in the example of Osmo, and the very existence of the information does not contradict free choice.
Does that sound reasonable?
If that fool thinks that X logically contradicts Y, then he really cannot hold both. He can say that he holds both.
The concern that we are fools should prevent us from resolving contradictions and drawing any conclusions whatsoever. Maybe we are fools? In the Torah it says of the pierced slave that he serves forever, and it says that he serves until the Jubilee. Maybe these are the ways of the Holy One, blessed be He, that are hidden from us, and therefore there is no possibility of resolving the contradiction and one must remain with both sides of the coin?
As long as there is no contradiction in the things, there is no reason to reject them; that is clear. The question is what to do when there is a contradiction.
Not true. This is not a causal issue but a logical one. There are necessary correlations without a causal relation. Two clocks necessarily show the same time (if they are working properly). Does that mean one is the cause of the other? The claim is not that God’s knowledge causes, but that it logically dictates or compels. It cannot be falsified.
Alternatively, think about those who see the laws of nature as something non-causal but correlational. The presence of two masses at some distance always results in their attracting one another, but without there being a cause for this. It is just a correlation (this is how David Hume understood it). Does that mean a cause can exist without the effect occurring?
I didn’t understand. Explain to me how it can be that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows that tomorrow I will drive to Tel Aviv, while at the same time I can freely choose to drive to Haifa as well. What does that have to do with the lottery and paths and the like?
I would appreciate a somewhat more detailed discussion of the relation between the Holy One, blessed be He, and time.
I tended to think that just as He created space, He also created time, and therefore He is above time. But I understand that this does not fit with free choice. But if the Holy One, blessed be He, did not create time and is subject to time, then where did time come from? And how is it that the Holy One, blessed be He, is subject to it?
I explained this. He is not necessarily subject to time. Therefore it is possible that He can obtain the information. But after He has obtained the information, it is not possible for us to have free choice.
By the way, it is not certain that He created time. That depends on the question whether time is part of physics or of logic. But this is not the place.
If there is a possibility of reconciling, as with the slave, then there is no reason not to reconcile. I am speaking about places where it is impossible.
Two things:
1. I do not understand the whole question of knowledge and choice at all — what is difficult? The Holy One, blessed be He, does not know what does not exist. People assumed that He knows absolutely everything, and on that basis raised difficulties. Don’t assume, and don’t raise the difficulty.
What is the theological problem with saying this — “God does not know everything”? (I already noticed that Shai asked this and you replied that this is the third possibility and that you will discuss it in the next post; still, I asked so that in the next post there will not be any missing reference to my question — “what’s difficult?”).
2. Regarding the second possibility (that of the time axis): if we do not grasp the essence of time in relation to God, how can we raise a difficulty about it? Let me explain a bit more — if I know what you did yesterday, does that mean you had no choice? If in some sense actions that were not done can also be known with a kind of “yesterday-knowledge,” why does that contradict choice? Suppose someone invented a time machine that could fly forward and see what each person will do — would that mean there is no option of choice?
A. Is there any place where this has been discussed at length?
B. If He is not subject to time, doesn’t that mean that the Holy One, blessed be He, of now is equal to the Holy One, blessed be He, of later, and therefore He knows? That is, He does not obtain the information from the future, but is simply present in the future, and therefore it cannot be that He does not know.
A few comments:
A. Do all the scientific discussions about time travel, and the possibility that messengers from the future might come to us (as in Christopher Nolan’s a-m-a-z-i-n-g film Interstellar — Rabbi Michi should watch it) fit only within a deterministic worldview? Or do they have no scientific value at all?
B. One can dispute the understanding you presented, according to which the Holy One, blessed be He, sees the future because He “stretches out a hand (a giant transparent hand, there, there 🙂 into the future,” as you put it. Rather, He knows the future because He Himself is already there. His knowledge results from our choice after the fact. When I choose something, He knows it after the fact. He knows the future because our present, from His perspective, has already happened in the past. He exists above and beyond time, and from His point of view the messiah already arrived before the world was created. At the same time, for us this does not harm choice, because on our event horizon the future still is not there, and the information also is not yet in the Creator’s hands. It will be in His hands only after the acts have happened. What can be done? For Him all the events have already taken place. Yet from our perspective the events have not yet happened, and the information has not yet been born.
. For our purposes, only if the Creator were to prophesy to a prophet who would say/know/write that future, only then would this negate human choice — because then the information would already be given in a world of past-present-future and a rigid flow of time. (An elaboration of this position appears in Michtav Me-Eliyahu by Rabbi Dessler.)
C. In the past I asked how one can suggest that God does not know the future, given that there are prophecies declaring the name of King Cyrus, who would redeem Israel in the days of the return to Zion (a sort of Herzl figure). After all, this is particular knowledge, and there is no way to determine that the child’s parents will indeed call him Cyrus. (Unless we say that this is a later addition; or else one could say that when the day comes and there is some child whom they call Cyrus, then God will lock onto his mind and turn him into a marionette who redeems Israel. And all this in order to validate His words, which He proclaimed in advance.)
D. Another important recommendation is to look at the chapter devoted to choice and knowledge in Part II of Rabbi Yonatan Simcha Blass’s book Menofet Tzuf. There he distinguishes between a prophet’s knowledge of the future and the Creator’s knowledge, and argues something complex: that human choice is an extension of the Creator’s will that is realized in action. Something complex, but it is divided there into six foundational questions on the matter of knowledge and choice and claims to answer everything. I did not really understand it, in my poverty.
Does this drive have any significance?
Will something relevant to your life’s path result from it?
Will you be required in that context to make choices between the will of God or transgressing His command?
If the answer to any of these things is yes, then there is a crossroads here.
Is there any logical difficulty in the claim that He need not know what you will choose, but that it is enough that He knows the future expected for you within each choice?
That if you choose to go marry such-and-such a woman, the framework of the future combinations of your life will converge into certain paths, and every future choice will reduce the number of possible paths you may walk in the future, and so on until the person’s death?
Is this not knowledge — on the one hand, and free choice — on the other?
In places where it cannot be reconciled, one of the two horns is incorrect. That is what it means that it cannot be reconciled.
Reuven, on that too, see the next column.
Gil,
A. Definitely. I had a column on that. No. 33.
B. It changes nothing. The moment the information is present now (after all, He can give it to some person. If not, then again He is not omnipotent: He cannot make it so that the prophet knows the information and we still have free choice. So what have you gained?) I have no choice. Where the Holy One, blessed be He, is located is an undefined statement; see the next column.
C. I will answer that later.
D. I do not have great expectations, because this is the sort of formulation that in my eyes only obscures and hides the difficulty. But I do not know it, and it would not be fair to dismiss it before reading.
.
A. I don’t know of any.
B. I see no point in discussing this, because the very thesis that He does not change seems to me a speculative delusion without basis and not well defined (for example: if He is above time, then what is the definition of change in His case?).
I didn’t understand the question. Let us assume for the sake of discussion that it has significance.
There is no difficulty at all, except that this means He does not know. You are presenting Him as a supercomputer that knows how to do all the calculations. In principle even a human computer could do that. It is only a question of knowledge and analytic ability (computational capacity).
So what difference does it make whether the Holy One, blessed be He, knows that X happened before X happened or after X happened? In both cases there is only correlation but no causality. So in the end the cause of X is the completely free choice of the person, which is not dictated — neither by the knowledge afterward nor by the knowledge beforehand.
In this sense, one must say that the knowledge of the Holy One, blessed be He, is not through knowledge of the causes — since there is no cause that led to the choice — but through knowledge of the future, so that the choice is the cause of the Holy One’s knowledge before it was made, just as after it was made it is the cause of the knowledge of the rest of the world.
The example of the laws of nature and correlation does not change the answer at all; after all, the effect is the event of the person’s choice, and the cause is both the Holy One’s knowledge before the event and the results of the person’s actions.
It turns out that I am in fact “adding” to the abilities of the Holy One, blessed be He, but I have a very good reason for doing so: I preserve the assumption that He is omnipotent (or at least as powerful as possible).
Why do you not accept the parable of the fool in these cases?
After all, we have two necessary starting points.
A. We are not living in a movie.
B. The Creator is omnipotent.
The reasonable implication is that we have a bug in our perception (we are limited).
The less reasonable one is that we are living in a movie, or that He is not omnipotent (not knowing counts as a deficiency in ability).
I don’t understand the reason for the rejection 🙂
Why do we assume that God’s knowledge expresses His greatness only if we think He knows whether tomorrow morning I will spread chocolate or cheese on my roll, rather than the very existence of a supreme knowledge that leads, by every possible path and in light of every human choice made in any generation by any person, to redemption?
You likened this to a supercomputer, but that may perhaps be a fitting conceptualization of “He who declares the generations from the beginning.” This proposal allows absolutely free human choice, within the human limitations to which one is subject (which causes each person to have a defined and limited number of combinations, however quantitatively vast), and at the same time the existence of a “divine purpose” for the world, and a system that can evaluate human choice for reward and punishment.
Where is the logical flaw in this proposal as a resolution of the difficulty?
I understand that for you there is a basic assumption that the Holy One, blessed be He, changes, and therefore it cannot be that He is above time.
I am not convinced that this assumption is less speculative than the assumption that the Holy One, blessed be He, is above time and that therefore change is not defined with respect to Him.
I do not understand the question. The difference is that the correlation dictates the result. Dictation from the future is not problematic, but from the past it is. See the continuation columns.
I didn’t understand what it adds for us. Indeed, we are not living in a movie. Therefore it is clear that we have free choice. The question is how to relate to the assumption that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows what we will do in the future. And that is what the discussion is about. Why assume there is no contradiction between them and that we have a bug in our perception? It seems to me we have exhausted this. Wait for the continuation columns.
Reuven.
1. It is better to assume that we do not know than that He does not know; and especially if you do not see any deficiency in His lack of knowledge, then your lack of knowledge is much less of a deficiency, and he who grasps too much…
Regarding the theological problem, why assume that He does not know if we can assume that we do not know? For one who is omnipotent apparently knows even things that it is not understood how He knows.
2. Why is it that the matter of the time axis you understand, even though there is no way to understand it, and yet this does not lead you to conclude that He too is not above time?
Bottom line: if we do not understand how there can be infinity and yet we have still reached the present moment and are not dragged into regress backward, and yet the option of a beginning of something from nothing is also not an option the intellect understands.
And yet we live. So there are things that work even if we cannot understand them, and it is worthwhile that we conclude this regarding places where the alternatives are us or Him.. Enough said.
Have a pleasant day.
Meir..
Matanya, I’ll explain one more time and that’s it. If the Holy One, blessed be He, knows all the possibilities and their consequences, but does not know which of them will be realized, that means you accept that He does not know which of them will be realized. That is exactly the third possibility on the list, and I have not yet dealt with it. It is not a rescue of one of the two possibilities for resolving the contradiction that I rejected in this column. So wait for what follows.
No. I have no such assumption. I simply do not have its opposite either. I do not know whether the Holy One, blessed be He, changes or not, and I assume nothing about it. Either way, there is nothing in these matters that touches our discussion in the least. Even if He is “above time,” whatever the meaning of that vague expression may be, what does it have to do with the discussion? I explained in the column that it is not relevant.
You argued here that belief in logical contradictions is impossible, since the claims are about me (“I believe”) and I am indeed subject to logic.
Can one infer from this more precisely that perhaps God in Himself is not subject to logic, only that this cannot be known / believed?
Or do you still adhere to your position that God in Himself must also be subject to logic?
Okay, I’ll wait for the next column and see whether it answers my question, because I do not see a difference between dictation toward the future and dictation from the past.
To Meir the Simple, greetings,
1. We will wait patiently for Michi’s next column and argue there. Briefly, I simply see no point in assuming that He knows everything. (This is a view on which many of us may have been educated as a cornerstone of Judaism, but when you look deeply into it, you will see that it does not have many implications; besides, some of the Rishonim qualified it to one degree or another.) There is no point to it. Moreover, this assumption that God is omnipotent leaves the question of evil in the world unsolvable (unless we say that God is evil).
2. Regarding the time axis, I asked in the style of “even if you say this,” or “according to your view.” Besides, the time axis is something far simpler and more comprehensible than to say that “God can do everything.”
And regarding your very claim: there are things we understand that we will not be able to understand, but there are things whose existence our understanding contradicts; these are two separate things. There is someone blind who does not understand what “sight” is, but there is also someone who sees one thing and his friend sees something else.
Enough with this.
In any case, if you belong to the camp of those who hold that “there are things that work without understanding them” and with this you solve every theological question of one kind or another, I do not understand what you are doing here on Rabbi Michi’s site and in the comment threads here that deal with theological questions of all sorts.
Suffice it for the wise.
Correct. Either things have a cause or they do not.
For some reason you decided that man is at twilight.
Maimonides claims this is a pillar of the Torah. And I say it has no importance at all from the standpoint of Torah and law.
Even R. Yosei (whose reason is always with him) says that in truth there is no such thing as twilight.
If a person who chooses takes reward and punishment into account, and he chose punishment, then either he is stupid, or he has a reason to choose punishment.
Either Maimonides is mistaken, or, if one is precise in the wording, he is saying something else: “And there is no one who compels him, nor decrees upon him, nor draws him to one of the two paths, but rather he himself, of his own accord and with his own mind, inclines to whichever path he wishes.”
If one is precise in the wording, then there is no contradiction between “of his own accord and with his own mind” and determinism. And the explanation is that as long as the coercion is not from the outside, one can judge and punish. All thinkers will agree that “opinion” is not a free thing but something that formed over time.
If he claims that choice is free in the way you want to claim, then he is certainly mistaken. The simplest example: a person who grew up in the jungle and did not learn to read or write. It was decreed that he would be like an animal. He cannot think.
To write an article about knowledge and choice is like writing an article about genetics and unicorns. Unicorns exist only in the imagination.
Reuven.
Who are this “camp” who hold that things work without understanding them?!
Perhaps everyone who has studied physics and does not try to study metaphysics?.. because he gives up in advance and understands that he cannot understand it with the physical toolbox placed at his disposal?..
Perhaps every person who walks down the street even though he does not know how to explain Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise?!…
Do paradoxes make you stop moving?!
Reuven! Remove the beam from between your eyes.
And enough for the genius in a word.
With God’s help, 9 Iyar 5780
It is not correct to say that the information held by “He who declares the generations from the beginning” about what I will choose in the future leaves me no freedom of choice, for the information that exists now says that my future choice will be of my own free will. I believe this is how the Rivash explained Maimonides’ opinion.
Regards, Shatz
Incidentally, one of the proofs from the sacred writings that the Creator foresees a person’s choice is the answer given to the simple son: “It is because of this that the Lord acted for me when I came out of Egypt” — that by virtue of the fact that we now observe the Passover commandments, the Lord brought our forefathers out of Egypt.
In special relativity, and especially in general relativity, there are situations of an observer who sees the entire future of everyone else (if asked, I can elaborate). This has nothing to do with their lack of knowledge and their freedom of choice, because there is no communication between the observers — or, more correctly: the observer who sees my future sees the numbers that will win the lottery in my tomorrow. But if he sends me that information, it will arrive after the drawing. And this is not hand-waving and not intuition — it is the result of the equations.
I am not claiming that this is how the Holy One, blessed be He, “works” — because I have no idea how He “works” — and it is doubtful whether the equations of general relativity are relevant to Him, and presumably our time categories are not relevant to Him. But in any case, He can know whatever He wants, and so long as He does not affect me or communicate with me, my ignorance and my freedom have not been impaired.
Hello Rabbi Michi,
The word “דלעלרשכמרמכ” has no meaning in Hebrew.
But the sentence “There is a language in which the word ‘דלעלרשכמרמכ’ has meaning” — does have meaning in Hebrew.
In the same way, the sentence “X and not-X” really has no meaning within the framework of human thought.
But the sentence “There is a ‘super-thought’ in which the sentence ‘X and not-X’ has meaning” seemingly does have meaning within the framework of human thought (without entering into the question whether it is true or not).
What do you think?
The question is meaningless. Even a statement about God is my statement, and as such it is subject to logic.
As I already wrote, even in such a case He would have a problem conveying the information to me. So it does not matter. One way or another, you arrive at a limitation on Him.
My opinion is that I cannot speak about anything whose meaning I do not know.
With God’s help, 10 Iyar 5780
The Holy One, blessed be He, has no limitation in conveying to a person what His knowledge had already attained regarding that person’s future choice; rather, it is His decision not to intervene in the person’s choice.
Regards, Shatz
And as I wrote above (and as, it seems to me, the Rivash explains), the Holy One’s prior knowledge includes both facts: that the person will choose in the future, and that this choice will be by his own will.
There is reason to say that God can produce the aforesaid shell and wall without a logical contradiction arising. After all, such a shell and such a wall would have to possess infinite mass. For a body with infinite mass always has zero acceleration, and therefore its speed is forever constant and cannot be changed. The fact that the speed cannot be changed is the reason why the shell cannot be stopped and the wall cannot be broken.
So what happens when two bodies with infinite mass meet? If neither is capable of changing the other’s speed, that means there is no interaction between them, so apparently there is reason to say that they simply pass through one another. This claim in itself is fairly accepted, especially when speaking of the opposite extreme case of two zero-mass bodies, like photons, between which there seems to be no interaction; they simply pass through one another without scattering at all. A neutrino particle, for example, has nearly zero mass and is capable of passing through the entire earth from end to end with no scattering at all.
So let us suppose God creates the aforesaid shell and wall and fires the shell at the wall. From the standpoint of relativity, the shell is moving toward the wall, which is at rest; but to the same degree the wall is moving toward the stationary shell — it makes no difference, there is no preferred inertial frame. Therefore, when the wall meets the shell and passes through it without scattering, it turns out there is no contradiction either from the shell’s standpoint or from the wall’s standpoint!! The shell still penetrates every wall (including this wall that it passed through), and the wall still stops every shell (including this shell, which was in any case already at rest)!!
Blessed be His name.
It is not meaningless. Just as claims about noumena are not meaningless (“the object exists in the noumenon”). One can speak about that, even if we have no access to check it.
I highly recommend to the reader the Free Will Theorem:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem
Or to watch lectures by Conway of blessed memory on the subject:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ftIllWczf5w&sa=U&ved=2ahUKEwizoabVvJjpAhUC_qQKHQosAtYQtwIwCnoECAUQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0xkAgoua_DaipK7SdkHkkg
What is not so clear to me in this discussion is why the insistence on knowledge, when the information simply does not exist — and that is the essence of free choice.
Also, what does “omnipotent” even mean, from which knowledge necessarily follows?
If we are believers in determinism (even though there is no deterministic explanation for the collapses themselves), then there is no choice and no contradiction.
If there really is choice, then knowledge — meaning knowledge of the future — is not something we see as possible at all, and perhaps one can pour different content into the concept of knowledge in a way that will satisfy those for whom the matter of knowledge is important. Yes, I am being lazy, but not apologizing.
Regards,
DChag
With God’s help, Netzach shebe-Netzach 5780
To DChag — greetings,
After all, “the baker testifies to his dough.” The whole point of prophecy is testimony from “He who declares the generations from the beginning” about what is going to be. It is the Torah that says that God foresees what is to be, and on the other hand it is the Torah that says that God gives a person recompense for his choice, from which it is clear that he has the possibility of choice.
One who believes in the Torah is therefore obligated to hold both principles — divine knowledge and human choice — and therefore an explanation is called for of how the two principles operate without contradiction.
Regards, Shatz
Dear Shatz,
Indeed, a wonderful answer — for you.
When you respond seriously to the content in context, perhaps I too will become wiser.
Blessed night
It is not clear to me what degree of law-foo the writer means, but let us assume. An okimta does not help when the questioner is free to generate mishnayot. We can ask you whether such a wall and shell can be produced with non-infinite mass (and therefore they can have acceleration different from zero). Or we can ask whether God can change the mechanics of the world to Newtonian mechanics and then create such a wall and shell. And what is infinite mass at all (actual infinity).
Law foo. Typo.
We have not left pilpul at all. The Holy One, blessed be He, is supposed to be able to do this even without infinite mass and without relativistic effects..
No connection whatsoever. The noumenon is not known to us, but that is not a logical contradiction. A logical contradiction would be meaningless, not merely unknown. One can also say that the Holy One, blessed be He, performs miracles even though I do not know how He does it.
With God’s help, 10 Iyar 5780
The Rivash discusses the issue of knowledge and choice in his responsum (sec. 118). After explaining the opinions of Gersonides and the Raavad, the Rivash proposes his explanation:
“But what seems to me to answer this question is this: that of necessity we must believe that man has choice regarding his actions, in order to uphold the commandments of the Torah and its rewards, as is explained in the Torah… And likewise we must believe that the knowledge of the blessed God encompasses everything that man will do by his choice before the matter comes into actuality, for no deficiency whatsoever may be attributed to His knowledge, Heaven forbid.
And this knowledge does not compel at all, because once it is posited that man has choice and it was possible for him to do the opposite — then when God knows that he will perform a certain act, He knows that he will do it by his choice and that it was possible for him to do the opposite. If so, this knowledge does not compel, since the knowledge is that the act will be done by choice…
And therefore we say that man’s deed does not follow from God’s knowledge of that deed before it comes into actuality; rather, His knowledge follows from that deed, which is done by choice and with the possibility of doing the opposite, even if God knows it before it comes into actuality. And in this way man remains free, and the knowledge of the blessed God remains complete, with no deficiency, and without taking man out of his freedom of choice.”
Regards, Shatz
The words of the Or HaChaim quoted in the post are based on the Raavad’s explanation.
Rabbi, were not your Torah my delight, I would have perished in my affliction; in vain did Cardigno’s wrath go out against me. Was it not said: all pilpul is permitted except for pilpul concerning idolatry, which is forbidden. I trust that the rabbi knows the source and will know how to compare the differences, and enough for the wise…
🙂
Many of the readers above wondered at your words as to why God’s knowledge of the future prevents people’s choice in the present, and you wrote that even so He is limited from informing a person of His knowledge, because then the person would be limited in his choice. [This is your wording: “It changes nothing. The moment the information is present now (after all, He can give it to some person. If not, then again He is not omnipotent: He cannot make it so that the prophet knows the information and we still have free choice. So what have you gained?) I have no choice.”]
First, this is tremendous progress, that you agree that His knowledge of the future does not compel the person’s experience of choice in the present, even though the result is already known to one who knows the future in the present. Now the deficiency is not in an all-knowing God but in an omnipotent God [and there is no proof from the verses that He is omnipotent, only that He knows everything in advance].
Second, I did not understand why if He informs a person of his choice, the choice would be taken from the person. After all, He does not deprive the person of the possibility of choice; He simply tells him what he will decide to choose in the end, for after all he will choose something, and that is what He will tell him. What would cause the person who heard this information not to choose otherwise, I do not know; but if he were to decide otherwise, then that too would have been the knowledge. There is no escaping this.
First, the verses prove nothing. Usually, when people speak of His knowledge of the future, they base it on His omnipotence, so the direction is the opposite. With the verses there is no problem at all.
Second, I did not accept that He can know the future; I merely argued on your own view: even if I accept this, you are still stuck with His omnipotence, so what have you gained?
As for your question at the end, see the next column.
I wanted to ask: does God know what He Himself will do tomorrow morning? And if so — will He have free choice tomorrow?
Of course — I understand that it is not the same: God does not have to know today what He will decide tomorrow, because tomorrow He will be free to decide otherwise. But He does have to understand what a person will decide tomorrow, and not because tomorrow already exists.. Why?… I don’t know, because it sounds strange that a person could “surprise” God tomorrow morning and do what God never imagined; He would literally fall off His throne of glory…. I don’t know — believers are actually supposed to be more deterministic, because “He who declares the generations from the beginning” also planned the human mind as well as the future of humanity, the world, everything… supervises and intervenes in all things — what is left for poor man? And in general, is it easy for anyone nowadays to believe in free choice in a world that knows the laws of genetics and psychoanalysis…?
With God’s help, Netzach shebe-Netzach 5780
To Rabbi Michael Abraham — greetings,
Regarding your claim in section B: the Holy One, blessed be He, can reveal the information He has about a person’s future choice, and thereby the person’s free choice would be prevented, but He does not do this so that the choice will remain free. There is no limitation here on the Creator’s ability.
Regards, Shatz
One may further comment, based on Maharal’s explanation, that a prophet cannot attain the life of the World to Come because a prophet testifies to what he sees with his senses. A prophet can pass through a kind of “time tunnel” and see with his physical eyes the future as though he were already there, but he cannot sensory-perceive a non-sensory reality such as the World to Come. According to this, it is understood that even a prophet does not now see what will happen tomorrow; rather, he sees the day after tomorrow what happened yesterday, and then returns to the present and tells what he saw in the future..
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… so that the choice will remain free, ….
“because it sounds strange that a person could ‘surprise’ God tomorrow morning and do what God never imagined”
It’s not strange — that is how the Holy One, blessed be He, decided. Especially if we are talking about minimalism, that is, only certain choices have free choice, and there is a kind of dialogue between God and man there, and there the Holy One, blessed be He, does not know. Everything else has no free choice at all. On the contrary, He truly does declare the generations from the beginning. The question is whether you, as an individual with consciousness and the possibility of choosing (sometimes almost “sporadically”), will be part of the game.
You are directing the question in the wrong direction. My guess is that He doesn’t browse here. But I promise to try, when I meet Him, to ask and pass His answer on to you.
Rabbi Michi, if you can also address Rabbi Ashlag’s approach in “The Article of Freedom,” thank you
(link — http://www.kab.co.il/heb/content/view/frame/31386?/heb/content/view/full/31386&main
I’m sorry, but I don’t have time to take assignments. If there is a specific question or a specific argument you want to discuss, please go ahead and bring it up here.
Letting loose here with random thoughts unrelated to the matter under discussion; yet the eraser is in the hand of the one who erases — when he wishes he draws near and when he wishes he distances. One of my favorite words in Hebrew is “hikkaved” (“please go ahead” / “be so kind”). Even when the wording is completely matter-of-fact (as here) and not the slightest trace of mockery is mixed into the matter, it reminds me of an amusing passage in Kings. The king of Judah stirred up war with the king of Israel and was answered: “You have indeed struck Edom, and your heart has lifted you up; glory in that, and stay at home.” In Chronicles they apparently had pity on the honor of the king of Judah and read: “Behold, you have struck Edom, and your heart has lifted you up to boast; now stay at home.” It is possible that the variation is random, like the other various and bizarre differences between Kings (and other books) and Chronicles, but to my speculative feeling they tried somewhat to soften the self-righteous mockery.
Why erase? A nice idea, and perhaps even correct. By the way, in my words the term “hikkaved” is indeed accompanied by a trace of criticism (not mockery).
[The erasure was so as not to textify another person’s subtext (it affects its weight with respect to the living addressee; after all, it is not for nothing that certain content is embedded specifically in the subtext), and for this I came to distance my interpretation as much as possible. But indeed, after the distinction between criticism and mockery (that is, my interpretation was not correct, and I was blowing from my own lungs), the problem diminishes.]
Shvaya Shveik
It is not the first time that your words have implied that you understood that I, in my response to you (under this name or another), was not amused by the matter. I really do sometimes get angry at the waters of Meribah (what can one do), but here (and there) I am at the opposite pole. Apparently I need to learn the art of cheerful phrasing. In any case, I was tempted to criticize the pilpul mainly because the saying about the okimta rang nicely to me.
DChag, you assume the information does not exist, but that is not precise. After all, it says: “This is the book of the generations of Adam,” and the saying of the Sages is known that the Holy One, blessed be He, showed him in a book each generation and its expounders, each generation and its leaders, etc. — implying that it exists in a book. And as Shatz said, such information is testimony from “He who declares the generations from the beginning.” And in Midrash Tanchuma (Ki Tisa 12) they said on this verse in the clearest possible way: “And the Holy One, blessed be He, also showed Adam that Abraham would arise from him, and his descendants would go down to Egypt and be enslaved there … and that David would found the House, and his son Solomon would build it, and Athaliah the mother of Ahaziah — her sons would tear out the nails of the Temple, Jehoiada would repair it, Amon would make idols, Josiah would remove them, Nebuchadnezzar would destroy it, Darius would build …” The contradiction indeed exists in all its sharpness: what choice did Amon have, after all, since it had already been determined in advance that he would make an idol?
And to Josef Shveik] he said —
To the question of knowledge and choice, the Rivash answered (no. 118 — I cited his wording above in my comment “The Rivash’s Explanation”) that the Creator’s prior knowledge includes both the outcome of the choice and the fact that the person’s choice was by his own will and that he had the option to choose otherwise.
Regards, Shatz
See also Yossi Potter’s comment, that according to the theory of relativity there is a situation in which another person, situated in parallel at a later point in time than the point at which the doer is situated, will already know what the doer did in the “past.”
All the more so with regard to the Holy One, blessed be He, it would be correct to say that His consciousness can also be in the future, while the acting person is still in an earlier period of time.
[And that is the reason for the remarkable patience of the good soldier Shveik, who in his consciousness is already at “six after the war,” and therefore is not agitated by what is happening around him 🙂
I am not a teacher giving anyone homework. Certainly no one works for me. I only wanted to interest you in a less familiar approach related to the topic. By the way, according to Rabbi Ashlag we choose only one thing — our friends. For example: if we live in a society with respectful discourse, then our responses too will be like that, more substantive and less blunt…
Perhaps physics דווקא allows for choice, since at least at the micro level it is fundamentally a probabilistic theory that allows randomness?
Hello Rabbi,
I wanted to understand why one cannot say that God’s knowledge operates in such a way that He sees what a person will choose at the time of the act, and then, as it were, “knows” it already beforehand.
That is, the knowledge is like a kind of prophecy that observes the future act and stores it now. So that the divine knowledge does not generate the cause of the person’s choice, but, as it were, is based on the data created by the person and simply carries them backward in time…
Thank you very much, Rabbi.
I explained this in the next column (301). This is exactly the film theory. See there.
With God’s help, 12 Iyar 5780
Rabbi Michael Abraham noted that R. Hasdai Crescas’s view — that a person’s act is not chosen, and only his acquiescence in the act is chosen — does not resolve the question of knowledge and choice, because if the Holy One, blessed be He, knows in advance what the person will want, then the option whether to want or not has already been removed.
It may be said that the faith-based need to assume that God knows the future in advance is because Scripture is full of prophecies about future actions of people, such as “and they shall enslave them and afflict them.” And here one can say, according to Crescas’s view, that prophecy always foretells a future deed and not a future thought; therefore the certainty given by the prophecy that the deed will occur does not guarantee that the doer will identify with his deed (and therefore God will still be able to judge the doer by his intention).
The fact that the Creator is “omnipotent” does not prevent human choice, for God could have denied man choice, but does not want that; therefore He will forgo the possibility of prior knowledge in a case where He wishes to allow choice (as the Or HaChaim says), or He will suffice with a kind of retrospective foreknowledge (like the Rivash).
In short:
According to Crescas, it is seemingly possible to reconcile advance prophecies of a future action, because the prophecy relates to the future action and not to the person’s thought at the time of his act.
Regards, Shatz
Libet’s experiment, which seemingly shows that the instruction in the brain to the nerves to perform the action comes before the person’s feeling of will, can fit very well with Crescas’s view that the act is not chosen, and that a person is judged only for his acquiescence at the time of the act, about which he was not compelled.
Maybe I don’t understand or am missing something, but if He knows that I will drive to Tel Aviv, doesn’t that mean He knows that I freely chose to drive to Tel Aviv? That is, He knows in the future what I will freely choose, and although I could have chosen to drive to Haifa, I did not do so. Is there a problem with thinking like that?
The words of the Or HaChaim, that God chooses not to know a person’s choice so as not to deprive him of choice, can be understood in light of Maharal’s words (in the second introduction to Gevurot Hashem, p. 9), who holds (contrary to the philosophers) that knowledge is not part of the definition of God’s essence, since we have no definition of His essence whatsoever.
“The knowledge of God,” according to Maharal, is one of His actions toward created beings: “For there is no difference between the apprehension by which He apprehends beings and the other actions that He performs, because apprehension too is an action and is expressed in the language of action, as one says, ‘And God knew,’ just as one says, ‘And God spoke.’ And just as at times He performs this action and at times another action, all according to the recipient — so too in His apprehension He apprehends each thing according to the nature of the recipient, for apprehension is nothing but an action…”
Likewise, the plain meaning of the verses suggests that “knowledge” is “relation.” “And God knew” — He turned His attention to them to redeem them; and likewise “for I have known him,” “the Lord knows the days of the blameless,” and “the Lord knows the way of the righteous” — He relates to them and turns His attention to benefit them.
Since what is defined as God’s knowledge is “His relating” — the words of the author of Or HaChaim are understandable, that regarding the person’s future choices, the Holy One, blessed be He, “chooses not to know” — that is: He chooses not to relate to them in the present, so that this relation will not prevent the person’s future free choice.
Regards, Shatz
There is no need to reconcile Crescas, because as I wrote, he came to resolve the causal-physical difficulty, and there his words can be said. But I noted that the theological difficulty cannot be resolved in this way. Regarding your proposal, which has already been written here, see the next column.
The question is what the results of Libet’s experiment would be when conducted on the attitude rather than on the act. In any case, this experiment has no importance for our matter (this was explained in a whole chapter in my book The Science of Freedom).
You are not missing anything. This is exactly the film theory discussed in the next column.
With God’s help, 12 Iyar 5780
Maharal, in Derekh Chaim on the mishnah “Everything is foreseen, and permission is given” (Avot ch. 3), says that although Maimonides’ words are correct — that God knows in advance what a person will choose, and nevertheless a person’s choice is not denied — Maimonides should not have brought the reader into this topic, but should have explained simply: “Everything is foreseen” means that God sees all of a person’s deeds, and nevertheless “permission is given,” and there is a situation in which God does not intervene immediately and does not prevent a person from sinning.
And this is like the Raavad’s criticism of Maimonides: he should not have tripped up the reader with questions without explaining the answer fully. The author of the post shows quite plainly how difficult it is for a time-bound person to understand the ways of his Creator, who is not limited by time, and for whom, and only for whom, the future is present.
Regards, Shatz
Regarding the explanation the Raavad gives, that God knows in advance “like the knowledge of astrologers,” that is, a prior vision of the likely choice a person will make according to his character and nature — the Raavad admits that this does not give a full explanation of the principle of the Creator’s foreknowledge, which certainly also applies to human decisions that rise above natural inclination.
With God’s help, 16 Iyar 5780
According to Maimonides’ view that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows in advance what a person will choose in the future, there is room to say that He can pre-program the entire system of nature so that it will carry out what the person will decide in the future.
According to this, the results of the “Libet experiment” would be resolved, since it is not the person’s decision that moved his finger, but the prior programming with which the Holy One, blessed be He, programmed the system of nature in order to enable the realization of the person’s future choice.
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Regards, Shatz
With God’s help, 36th day of the Omer 5780
On knowledge and choice in the thought of the Rishonim and in Kabbalistic and Hasidic literature — see the article “Knowledge and Choice” in HaMichlol; on discussions of the subject in general philosophical thought — see the article by Rabbi Dr. Moshe Rat, “Knowledge and Choice,” on the website Lada’at Leha’amin.
Regards, Shatz
Thank you!
Correction: how *the Holy One, blessed be He* split the sea (not Maimonides)