Q&A: Free Will Versus Prophecy
Free Will Versus Prophecy
Question
[1] "The prophet said that this would happen. He didn’t say it was a miracle.
He can know in advance that it will happen because we have such a culture and such a commandment and we have a Torah.
And one who knows, who ‘calls the generations from the beginning,’ can say that this will happen." (said regarding the prophecy of the establishment of the State of Israel)
[2] "Choice always exists, and in the end a person can decide to do something else. Note that God’s knowledge is not disproved in such a case, because from the outset He did not claim that this is what would happen in the future, but rather that this is what the present would probably lead to. This is the expected (proper) future, not the future that will actually occur (the established one)."
I didn’t understand how the two quotations fit together (here are the gaps):
"He can know in advance that this will happen . . . one who calls the generations from the beginning can say that this will happen . . ."
(from the first quotation)
"because from the outset He did not claim that this is what would happen in the future, but rather that this is what the present would probably lead to . . ."
(from the second quotation).
I’d appreciate it if you could explain the gap between the two, or refer me to a source where you explained it.
If you’re going to argue regarding the first quotation that you meant that prophecy “only foresees this” based on looking at the present (that we have Torah, commandment, and culture), then the very fact that the prophecy foresees that the Jewish people will not kick against the Torah, the commandments, and the culture, contradicts our free will, doesn’t it?
In addition, it’s also very hard to see how a prophecy “foresees” that a people known to the Creator of the world as “stiff-necked” will continue to cling to the Torah and to the commandment. That is, even the excuse that “prophecy only foresees the future according to the data of the present” doesn’t fit so well with the data of the present. After all, the prophecy about the establishment of the State was given after many rebellions by the Jewish people. .
[1] https://youtu.be/7eajo-ohOLM
starting at 1:23:30 (from the starting point).
[2] Column 302 on the site.
Answer
I don’t see any contradiction, and it seems to me that I explained it there (in any case, I’ve explained it here on the site more than once).
My claim is that one can predict in advance the behavior of a large body (many people), with high probability, even if not 100%. It can turn out otherwise with a small probability, but there is a very high chance that it will come true. This is the law of large numbers in statistics. I can predict in advance that a fair die thrown a billion times will land 1/6 of the time on each face. There is some chance that this won’t be true, but that chance is tiny. But each individual throw is random, and its result cannot be predicted. By the way, physics, which predicts a free fall toward the earth, also operates only on a statistical basis, and still nobody bats an eye when I predict in advance that the object will fall.
Therefore, there is no obstacle to God predicting events far in the future, and they will probably come about (with very high probability), though it is also possible that they won’t. This has nothing to do with the question of whether it is a miracle. That is as long as we are dealing with an event involving many people. A prediction regarding a single individual is harder, although comprehensive psychological information can provide tools for such a prediction as well.
I didn’t understand what God’s motivation was to predict that the people would go up to the Land and continue clinging to His Torah.
After all, only now He had seen what a stiff-necked people this was in the wilderness.
So what did God see here that made Him think it was close to 100% that this would come true?
It makes about as much sense as you predicting that a die which has the number "4" on five of its faces and the number "2" on one face would, over a billion throws, come up with an equal distribution of "4" and "2".