Thank you so much for responding so brilliantly and for pointing me to your columns. I cannot find how to access the following columns numbered 301+. It’s not clear from the menu where the columns are. I read 299. I read what you wrote below. And I disagree as follows:
The existence of knowledge “somewhere” (like a book in my library that time travelled from the future back to my present) does not remove my free will. If I never read the book, then the knowledge it contains does not cause my future behavior. I have free will because only my own choices are causative of my future actions. The fact that the knowledge exists does not preclude me from acting differently. In the multi-universe theory, the fact that someone knows what I will do in my universe does not preclude my theoretical ability to act in my universe the way it is recorded. That is the point made by Rabbi Almosnino. Do you insist that knowledge is causative? That makes no sense to me.
Thanks,

Hello.
The links I sent take you to particular columns. But those columns are on my website, and on the site itself all the columns and all my articles appear. The link to the site is down here below. You can go there, and on the main page you arrive at you’ll see different tabs at the top. You need to look under the “Writings” tab, and within that “Posts,” and in the list of columns get to wherever you want. In addition, there is also a Google search on the site that lets you search through all the material there.
In those columns I explained the issue. I make a hierarchy between the truth-value of a proposition, which certainly is not causative (that is the mistake of logical determinism), and information, which does have a causal value, and an actual cause (an event that causally determines the future). The information does not causally determine the result, but the existence of information about my future choice dictates the content of the choice in a non-causal way. It is simply that if I choose the opposite, we arrive at a logical contradiction. Seemingly this can be solved by the movie analogy — that the Holy One, blessed be He, watches a movie about the future in advance and knows its content, but this does not affect the consciousness of the one acting in the movie (this is what the Raavad meant in chapter 5, law 5 of the laws of repentance, “like the knowledge of astrologers”). But even so there is still a problem, and I demonstrate it through Newcomb’s paradox. This also appears in my book The Science of Freedom.

Michi,
My apologies again for my English. This is a long note.

I have read the 4 essays from the columns and I am humbled by your knowledge and clarity of thought. I admit that I don’t understand all of it in depth. Some of the terms are unfamiliar to me such as modal logic and the like. But I think I understand enough to pose some questions to your conclusion.

I first want to say that your conclusion does not bother me theologically at all. You have made a very good case why there is no contradiction to omnipotence if your assumptions stand up. There is also the idea of tzimtzum, where the Holy One, blessed be He, diminishes Himself to fit into our world. So it’s not that I find it impossible to conclude that the Holy One, blessed be He, doesn’t know what I will decide, but it’s just not the simplest answer given the assumptions of our tradition. The Mishnah in Pirkei Avot is usually understood in the sense of implying the contradiction. So the “Occam’s razor” approach is to assume that God does know but there is no contradiction with free will.

I think you basically agree with me, because you emphasize that you chose number 3 only because answer number 2 is completely wrong from a logical point of view. That 2 leads to an impossible contradiction based on Newcomb’s paradox and Osmo’s library book. You seem to concede that answer number 3 is a last resort, a “Sherlock Holmes conclusion.” So if I can show that answer 2 is not necessarily wrong, you should prefer it. It is only because you conclude that answer 2 is definitely wrong that you are forced to answer 3.

Answer 2 states that there is a different concept of time that applies to God. You “prove” that any way in which perfect knowledge exists “at the time” that I make my decision, the mere existence of that knowledge compels me to make the decision contained in that knowledge. You say that any explanation must be logical because our world has to make sense for us. Our world must be logical and conform to our laws of nature.

I think that your approach has two weaknesses:

1) You assume that the entire existence of God has to conform to our understanding

2) you assume that science is a settled discipline and that our current understanding of the boundaries of what is possible is missing nothing. We know based on experience that this has never been true, and Thomas Kuhn’s philosophy of science says that the essence of science is revolution from one generation to another.

First I want to explain point #1:

It is possible for knowledge to exist in the presence of the Holy One, blessed be He, and yet not in any way create the same contradiction as Newcomb’s paradox.

You write (column 299) (free translation by me): “Can we leave for ourselves logical contradictions on the premise that God is above logic and we can apply to Him a ‘unity of opposites’? But this is nonsense. We are not talking about God, but we are talking about us. We are being asked to believe in two tenets which are in logical contradiction with each other. So [because of logical contradiction] we cannot really believe in both simultaneously.”

I think that this dismissal is too general and imprecise.

Let’s focus instead on how to separate out contradictions in logic about our world, and contradictions posed by the infinite transcendent existence of God which is beyond our human capacity to understand. I agree with you that it is problematic to argue that logical contradictions should apply to our world. The way you frame the problem, the contradictions of divine knowledge and free will lie in our world, similar to Newcomb’s paradox. What I will argue here is that the contradictions only arise in God’s abode, and we are only meant to acknowledge that the combination of a finite world in contact with an infinite God is itself an acceptable contradiction that has no resolution. The logic applied to our world is intact. I will use time as the main center of the contradiction in this case.

God is transcendent. That means He has no form, no presence in our space-time. And yet here is the real contradiction: the whole earth is filled with His glory. How can God be both transcendent AND also inhabit our world? This is literally unfathomable, and this duality is a matter of faith. You cannot say that we have to understand the totality of how God works simply because He has contact with our world. The transcendent God inhabits (so to speak) a non-physical realm in which He spans all time. In this realm time has no meaning, and from our vantage point into the transcendent we call it His continuous present. In His continuous present, God only finds out what we do AFTER we do it in our world. But since He lives in the continuous present, that information is available to Him throughout His existence. There is no flow of time at all in the transcendent realm. There is time flow in our world, but that is decoupled from God’s realm.

When we map God’s existence to OUR world, it is really an impossible exercise to map from the transcendent to the finite. We can say, as you do (in answer 3), that God only knows what we are going to do after we do it. But we can ALSO say that God’s knowledge is not confined by our clocks. Since God lives above and outside of time, He learns about our action AFTER we act on our time scale, but anything God learns at any time exists for all time in His realm. The knowledge came to Him after we did it, as measured on our clock. But in God’s realm there are no clocks. His knowledge does not enter our world but exists in His realm. When we map the results of God’s knowledge to our clocks, we have to say that His knowledge of our action always existed. But it only existed in God’s realm. This explanation is consistent with Maimonides’ language, as explained by Moshe Almosnino whom I already mentioned.

This has nothing to do with Newcomb’s paradox, because Newcomb constructs a case where the knowledge is available in our world and where the future in our world affects the past in our world (so too Osmo’s library book, which anyone can read). The prophet did something the day before my decision based on what he knew I was going to do in the future. That is not analogous to the “God’s realm” construct I have presented. Even though in God’s realm the knowledge of what I did is always available, it does not have any feedback loop to the past in OUR world before I “decided” it. God’s knowledge is outside of our world and does not contradict what is in our realm. As you said, future knowledge which is only learned after I do something does not affect the past.

I do not think it is correct to say that if the knowledge exists ANYWHERE — even in God’s realm — that it prevents our free will. God’s realm is beyond our grasp and it should not be considered within a logical framework for the human mind to grasp. Grasping time in God’s abode is for us like the circular triangle which you point out makes no sense.

Now let me explain point #2:

Imagine a scientific discovery which creates a new breakthrough like quantum theory, the theory of relativity, or the Big Bang. Only this new breakthrough discloses a higher dimension which exists and which is superimposed on our four-dimensional space-time. If such a construct exists, then it is possible that even in our realm you might tolerate the contradictions which you claim are impossible. Knowledge can exist in this hyper-dimension, at the time of my decision, and not contradict my free will. The difference between this approach and my first approach is that in my first approach I had to argue for an otherworldly dimension of existence due to the transcendence of God. In this argument I am postulating that over the next decades or centuries, another breakthrough could prove that such a construct is theoretically possible in our world and will be supported by some experimental result.

We accept the fact that quantum theory dictates that Schrödinger’s cat is both dead and alive before I open the box. Is this logical contradiction between knowledge and free will any more nonsensical? Is the wave-particle duality of light and elementary particles any less contradictory? Does it make logical sense? Is it rational that two twins can undergo different journeys and can meet again and the one who traveled to space can be many years younger? Yet in each case the science is incontrovertible that these contradictions are borne out by experiment. During the 19th century, all scientists had no idea how little of our world they really understood!

There are so many current scientific mysteries that have no explanation — the most mystifying are dark matter and dark energy. We don’t understand the nature of gravity. Other revolutionary theories are likely imminent if we are to explain these and other mysteries.

So, I am not convinced that the logical argument that you make today is necessarily stable. I suggest that you need to modify the certainty of the claim. It is correct that with today’s understanding of the dimensional realities of our universe, the existence of certain knowledge at a time precludes the falsification of that knowledge. But to claim that what is understood today will always be certain has not been borne out by the history of science. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions sets this pattern up as the paradigm for how to view current knowledge. It is firm but tentative.

Perhaps this argument is unconventional. But you claim that answer number 3 must be right because there is no other possibility. This is another possibility, not so far-fetched!

Thank you so much for taking the time to respond to my previous emails and for giving me such a rich and brilliant set of ideas to think about.

Best wishes,

Hello,
It’s a bit hard for me to discuss things at such long intervals, because I don’t remember the previous rounds.
A. I do not assume that our world must conform to the laws of nature. I argue that the Holy One, blessed be He, decided that He would act that way.
B. My whole point is that the problem of foreknowledge of a free choice is not connected to the laws of nature but to logic. I argued that God is necessarily subject to the laws of logic, but not to the laws of nature. And the reason for that is something you yourself agreed to at the beginning of your remarks.
C. Therefore all the discussions about changes in science (and you don’t need Kuhn for this) are irrelevant here.
D. If contradictions can exist in our faith regarding God, as you claim, then even if I believe that He exists I can at the same time believe that He does not exist. And that He is good and evil at once. And that He both knows and does not know the future at once. You are emptying your own faith of all content (as is well known in logic, from a contradiction one can derive any conclusion whatsoever). Faith is a state of our cognition, not of the Holy One, blessed be He, and at least we are subject to logic.
E. There is no problem at all in saying that the whole earth is filled with His glory and that He is transcendent. The Talmud itself explains this in Berakhot 5, comparing the Holy One, blessed be He, to the soul that fills the whole body. What fills the world is “His glory,” not He Himself. An emanation from Him, not Him.
F. I repeat once again that the fact that He is above time perhaps enables Him to obtain the information, but it does not solve the difficulty of how I choose independently if He knows the result in advance. I explained that these are two different questions.