Q&A: They Asked About Knowledge, Free Choice, and God
They Asked About Knowledge, Free Choice, and God
Question
I read your article on free will that appears on the site. At the end of the article you write that God does not know what a person will do in the future.
I wanted to ask: in your opinion, does the Holy One, blessed be He, not know the future because there is no such thing as a real future and it is only a human concept, or is there such a thing and God is simply limited in His ability to know it? For example, does God know that the ball will go into the basket because it has a 100% chance of going in (a physical state of affairs with no epistemic gap), but if there are additional variables (a person’s free choice), then the equation is incomplete and therefore has no solution—not from God’s standpoint, but from the standpoint of the equation? Or do you want to argue that it is simply not necessary that God be omniscient, and therefore He does not necessarily know the future (and if so, then what is, in your view, the relation to physical reality)?
In other words, is this because of the object itself (the future) or because of the subject (God)?
I got a bit tangled up in how to describe the question; I hope you understood…
By the way, how would you like people to address you? Second person / third person / something else…? I couldn’t really tell from the site what is customary.
Thank you, and have a good day.
Answer
Hello.
You can address me in any way you like (very preferably not in the third person). It doesn’t really matter.
I didn’t understand your question (usually when people get tangled up in phrasing the question, there is no question. So it is recommended to think again and try to formulate it precisely).
What does it mean that there is no future? In practice, something will happen, won’t it? I argue that knowing something that depends on choice is like making a round triangle. It is essentially knowing information that does not exist. Therefore it is not within the Holy One’s power to know it, and this is not an infringement on His omnipotence.
Discussion on Answer
Again, the wording is vague. You probably mean to say that the information about the future does not exist now (and not that the future itself does not exist). Knowing information that does not exist is an oxymoron, like a round triangle. I discussed these distinctions in detail in the fourth book of the Talmudic Logic series (The Logic of Time).
I am unable to understand:
Fine—if the Creator can know what will happen in the future but chooses not to know, then apparently there is no problem. But if He simply does not know, is that not a limitation on the Creator’s infinite ability?
Hello Eyal, each time you ask me in a different thread, and I keep referring you back.
The fact that He gave us free choice means that He chose not to know. The two go together, and there is no other possibility. If He knows, then we have no choice; and if we have choice, then He does not know. Clearly He chose not to know, but it is not that He could have known despite our choice; rather, He could have taken away our choice and then known. For Him to know while we simultaneously have free will is an oxymoron.
You could say that you answered me. What I meant was: is the future something real, meaning it already exists in the flow of time like a videotape, where we are located at some point and the knowledge of the future is already “written” on it, and we simply do not see it because we experience time chronologically? Or is time a human concept for describing the things that will happen later, and all the talk about prophecy is not about “seeing the future” but about “predicting the future,” like by means of a complex equation? From what you answered me—that “the information does not exist”—I understood that you hold that the future is not something real but rather a human concept, and one can speak only about prediction, as in an ideal deterministic picture regarding physical things; but with variables like free choice, the information simply does not exist.
Did I understand you correctly?