Q&A: Knowledge and Free Choice
Knowledge and Free Choice
Question
I’m currently studying the Guide for the Perplexed, and I’m in Part III, in the chapters on providence. Maimonides speaks there about the view of certain people who, because they see that “the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper,” attribute lack of knowledge to God, thereby turning a deficiency of conduct (what Maimonides calls neglect or disregard) into a deficiency in God’s very essence.
I won’t get into the details here that the very fact that those who attribute neglect to God, and from there arrive at lack of knowledge, shows that they haven’t read the writings of Rabbi Michael Abraham, who suggests that the ideal is simply that God not intervene, but rather that He wants a person to be dependent on his own choices (and as far as I myself understood from a straightforward reading, this is also Maimonides’ view).
I’m asking a different question. After all, in the trilogy, and more generally in your interpretation, we assumed regarding knowledge and free choice that based on a conceptual and logical analysis of the problem, it necessarily follows that God does not know a person’s choices. Isn’t that exactly the same problem?
Answer
I didn’t understand the question. What is the same as what?
Discussion on Answer
I don’t understand the question. Are you against arguments? One of the arguments is that if some claim leads to a contradiction or to something unreasonable, then it is not true. You don’t agree with that? What exactly is the question here?
Just as according to Maimonides in Part III, chapter 16, he speaks about people who had a difficulty, and so they denied knowledge to God, so too with free choice and knowledge.
Because there is either free choice or knowledge, we decide that God does not know.