And what might that argument sound like? If a particular Christian philosopher starts with the assumption that God is omniscient, then how is that reconciled with human autonomy?
If, in a polity where abortion is illegal, Jane chooses freely to abort her unborn baby and Jack chooses freely to report her to the authorities, how is this in sync with an all knowing God?
Would not an all knowing God be cognizant of their behaviors as an inherent manifestation of His being omniscient itself?
What then is your own sense of “reality” here in response to something like this?
So sometimes you use the definition of terms out of ‘every dictionary in the world’ and sometimes you use definitions that you came up with personally. Do you see how this is a problem? When it suits your argument, you use a dictionary definition. When it doesn’t suit your argument, you’re just has happy to make one up.
And anyway, you didn’t address my point: It doesn’t matter what YOU think about free will, the example of free will is sufficient to show that a creator of the universe need not have created all causes and effects.
The same way as an argument beginning with omipotence, I would imagine. Philosophers who believe in libertarian free will tend to refer to omnipotence as ‘having the maximal degree of power’ - the most power any Being can have. Omniscience would be having the maximal degree of knowledge. So for example, maybe God doesn’t know what it’s like to be a bat, because as Nagel pointed out, it’s impossible for anything but a bat to know. Philosophers will argue about whether or not knowing the future imposes on being’s free will. Plantinga wrote quite a bit about the interaction between devine foreknowledge and free will. plato.stanford.edu/entries/free- … knowledge/
So you could argue that God simply doesn’t know what free creatures will do, as a consequence of him giving them free will. Or you could argue that God does know what free creatures will do, but this doesn’t make them any less free.
You could also distinguish between different types of knowledge: I.e., I “know” that Ecmandu will reply to my posts with a bunch of incoherent nonsense, claims of personal greatness, and non-sequitors. I don’t know it in the same way as I know I have 10 fingers or that a + b = b +a, but I’m still right. If you take God’s knowledge of our future actions to be of the same type as we can predict the actions of people we are well acquainted with, and magnify it by the degree of God’s wisdom, then you have a situation where God becomes the ‘perfect predictor’, but that doesn’t impact our free will any more than my prediction that you’ll continue to post on this forum impacts yours.
That does not address or interact with what I said. Even if God was “the ultimate effect” (whatever that means, you made it up) that wouldn’t mean God creates all effects. Under molonism, as you described it, he patently does not- the idea that God doesn’t create all effects is the whole point of molonism. Molonism is an example of why your argument fails. It’s not even the only one.
You’re making the classic mistake of holding Ecmandu to what Ecmandu said in the past. He doesn’t, and neither should you. It’s best to imagine that every time Ecmandu posts, he shoots himself in the head, and a new, equally crazy person takes his seat at the computer. This person then carries on the conversation without reading back more than one or two posts.
None of this addresses my point either. You’re just trying to convince us that you aren’t as incoherent as you seem, without actually talking about the subject at hand. I don’t give a shit how smart and amazing you are: if your intelligence is the sort of intelligence that prevents you from clearly expressing an idea, you may as well be mentally retarded as far as I’m concerned.
Now, do you have anything useful to say about free will, causation, and how it obliterates your argument, or are you all done with that?
You’ve haven’t made one point, other than I’m a retard, in this entire thread, your “rebuttals” are throw away sentences that I have to stretch my mind to respond to, to pretend you are a participant in this thread.
Free will is defined as writing the constituents of your own thoughts and experiences …
I believe this definition, I modified it, but didn’t invent it.
If you want my personal belief, I don’t think we exist outside of space and time (if we did, that would be more devastating to you, not me).
I think free will evolves to the point that we, at a tipping point, mature to be able to write the constituents of our own thoughts and experiences.
You lost the debate on molonists, so don’t even bother.
It’s pretty obvious that nobody who actually believes in free will thinks that is how free will works. Ecmandu is just doing the one thing he knows to do: creating a stupid definition of a concept so he can easily disprove it. Have you ever seen an argument of his that doesn’t take the form of defining things in a ridiculous way so he can come to a ridiculous conclusion?
