Argument from free will

Contention that omniscience is incompatible with free will

Part of a series on

Atheism

Concepts

* Implicit and explicit atheism
* Naturalism
* Negative and positive atheism

History

* History of atheism
* Atheism during the Age of Enlightenment
* New Atheism

Society

* Atheist feminism
* Criticism of religion
* Demographics of atheism
* Discrimination against atheists
* Secular ethics
* Secularism
* Separation of church and state
* State atheism
* Atheism and religion

Arguments

Arguments for atheism

* Atheist's wager
* Creator of God
* Evil God challenge
* Fate of the unlearned
* Free will
* God of the gaps
* Hitchens's razor
* Incompatible properties
* Inconsistent revelation
* Nonbelief
* Occam's razor
* Omnipotence paradox
* Parody religion
* Poor design
* Problem of evil
* Problem of Hell
* Russell's teapot
* Theological noncognitivism

People

|  Lists of atheists

* Julian Baggini
* Mikhail Bakunin
* Mario Bunge
* Albert Camus
* Richard Dawkins
* Daniel Dennett
* Denis Diderot
* Ludwig Feuerbach
* A. C. Grayling
* Sam Harris
* Christopher Hitchens
* Baron d'Holbach
* Lawrence Krauss
* Michael Lou Martin
* Karl Marx
* Jean Meslier
* Friedrich Nietzsche
* Michel Onfray
* Bertrand Russell
* Peter Singer
* Victor J. Stenger

Books

* Atheism: The Case Against God
* Breaking the Spell
* De rerum natura
* The End of Faith
* The God Delusion
* God Is Not Great
* The System of Nature

Related stances

|  Irreligion

* Agnosticism
* Freethought
* Secular humanism

Atheism and religion

* Criticism of atheism
* LaVeyan Satanism
* Secular paganism
* Secular Buddhism

* Outline
* Category
* Philosophy portal
* WikiProject

* v
* t
* e

Part of a series on the

Philosophy of religion

Religious concepts

* Afterlife
* Apophatism
* Cataphatism
* Eschatology
* Enlightenment
* Intelligent design
* Liberation
* Miracle
* Mysticism
* Religious belief
* Reincarnation
* Religious faith
* Scripture (religious text)
* Soul
* Spirit
* Theological veto

God

|  Conceptions

* Anthropopathism
* Brahman
* Demiurge
* Divinely simple
* Form of the Good
* Holy Spirit
* Maltheist
* Occasionalism
* Pandeist
* Personal
* Process-theological
* Summum bonum
* Supreme Being
* Unmoved mover

Existence
|  Arguments for

* Beauty
* Christological
* Trilemma
* Resurrection
* Consciousness
* Cosmological
* Kalam cosmological
* Contingency
* Metaphysical
* Degree
* Desire
* Experience
* Existential choice
* Fine-tuned universe
* Knowledge
* Love
* Mathematics
* Miracles
* Morality
* Mystical idealism
* Natural-law
* Necessary existent
* Seddiqin
* Nyayakusumanjali
* Ontological
* Anselm
* Gödel
* Meinongian
* Modal
* Mulla Sadra
* Pascal's wager
* Reason
* Proper basis and Reformed epistemology
* Responses to the problem of evil
* Teleological
* Natural law
* Watchmaker
* Testimony
* Historical events
* Historical personages
* Trademark
* Transcendental

Arguments against

* 747 gambit
* Atheist's wager
* Creator of God
* Evil
* Evil God
* Fate of the unlearned
* Free will
* God of the gaps
* Hell
* Hitchens's razor
* Incompatible properties
* Inconsistency
* Nonbelief
* Noncognitivism
* Omnipotence paradox
* Poor design
* Russell's teapot

By religion

* Abrahamic
* Baháʼí
* Christianity
* Islam
* Judaism
* Mormonism
* Mandaeism
* Buddhism
* Hinduism
* Jainism
* Sikhism
* Wicca

Theories of religion

* Acosmism
* Agnosticism
* Animism
* Antireligion
* Atheism
* Creationism
* Dharmism
* Deism
* Divine command theory
* Dualism
* Esotericism
* Exclusivism
* Existentialism
* atheist
* Christian
* Feminist
* Fundamentalism
* Gnosticism
* Henotheism
* Humanism
* Christian
* religious
* secular
* Inclusivism
* Monism
* Monotheism
* Mysticism
* Naturalism
* humanistic
* metaphysical
* religious
* New Age
* Nondualism
* Nontheism
* Pandeism
* Panentheism
* Pantheism
* Perennialism
* Polytheism
* Process
* Secular Shrine Theory
* Shendao shejiao
* Spiritualism
* Shamanism
* Taoic
* Theism
* Transcendentalism

Philosophers of religion

|  Ancient and medieval

* Anselm of Canterbury
* Augustine of Hippo
* Avicenna
* Averroes
* Boethius
* Gaudapada
* Al-Ghazali
* Gaunilo of Marmoutiers
* Pico della Mirandola
* Heraclitus
* King James VI and I
* Marcion of Sinope
* Maimonides
* Adi Shankara
* Thomas Aquinas
* William of Ockham

Early modern

* Augustin Calmet
* René Descartes
* Blaise Pascal
* Desiderius Erasmus
* Baruch Spinoza
* Nicolas Malebranche
* Gottfried W Leibniz
* William Wollaston
* Thomas Chubb
* David Hume
* Baron d'Holbach
* Immanuel Kant
* Johann G Herder

19th-century

* Friedrich Schleiermacher
* Karl C F Krause
* Georg W F Hegel
* Thomas Carlyle
* William Whewell
* Ludwig Feuerbach
* Søren Kierkegaard
* Karl Marx
* Albrecht Ritschl
* Afrikan Spir
* Usman dan Fodio
* Ernst Haeckel
* W K Clifford
* Friedrich Nietzsche
* Harald Høffding
* William James
* Vladimir Solovyov
* Ernst Troeltsch
* Rudolf Otto
* Lev Shestov
* Ernst Cassirer
* Joseph Maréchal

Contemporary

* George Santayana
* Bertrand Russell
* Martin Buber
* Sergei Bulgakov
* René Guénon
* Paul Tillich
* Karl Barth
* Pavel Florensky
* Emil Brunner
* Rudolf Bultmann
* Gabriel Marcel
* Reinhold Niebuhr

* Charles Hartshorne
* Mircea Eliade
* Frithjof Schuon
* J. L. Mackie
* Walter Kaufmann
* Martin Lings
* Peter Geach
* George I. Mavrodes
* William Alston
* Antony Flew
* Kurt Gödel
* Graham Oppy
* J. L. Schellenberg
* Paul Draper
* William L. Rowe
* Dewi Z Phillips
* Alvin Plantinga
* Anthony Kenny
* Nicholas Wolterstorff
* Richard Swinburne
* Robert Merrihew Adams
* Ravi Zacharias
* Peter van Inwagen
* Cornel West
* Loyal Rue
* Herman Philipse
* Kai Nielsen
* Jean-Luc Marion
* William Lane Craig
* Ali Akbar Rashad
* Yujin Nagasawa
* Alexander Pruss

Related topics

* Criticism of religion
* Ethics in religion
* Exegesis
* Faith and rationality
* History of religions
* Natural theology
* Religion and science
* Religious philosophy
* Theology

* v
* t
* e

The argument from free will, also called the paradox of free will or theological fatalism, contends that omniscience and free will are incompatible and that any conception of God that incorporates both properties is therefore inconceivable.[citation needed] See the various controversies over claims of God's omniscience, in particular the critical notion of foreknowledge.[1][2] These arguments are deeply concerned with the implications of predestination.

## Omniscience and free will

[edit]

If God made the game, its rules, and the players, then how can any player be free?

Some arguments against the existence of God focus on the supposed incoherence of humankind possessing free will and God's omniscience. These arguments are deeply concerned with the implications of predestination.

Noted Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides described the conflict between divine omnipotence and his creation's person's free will, in traditional terms of good and evil actions, as follows:

> … "Does God know or does He not know that a certain individual will be good or bad? If thou sayest 'He knows', then it necessarily follows that the man is compelled to act as God knew beforehand how he would act, otherwise, God's knowledge would be imperfect.…"[3]

A "standard Anglican" theologian gave a similar description of Christian revelation:

> … Scripture hold before us two great counter-truths – first, God's absolute sovereignty (cp Rome. 9, 20ff.), and secondly, man's responsibility. Our intellects cannot reconcile them.[4]

A logical formulation of this argument might go as follows:[1]

1. God knows choice "C" that a human would claim to "make freely".
2. It is now necessary that C.
3. If it is now necessary that C, then C cannot be otherwise (this is the definition of “necessary”). That is, there are no actual "possibilities" due to predestination.
4. If you cannot do otherwise when you act, you do not act freely (Principle of Alternate Possibilities)
5. Therefore, when you do an act, you will not do it freely.

Norman Swartz, however, contends that the above arguments commit the modal fallacy. In particular, he asserts that these arguments assume that if C is true, it becomes necessary for C to be true, which is incorrect as C is contingent (see modal logic). Otherwise, one can argue that the future is set already regardless of his actions.[2]

Other means of reconciling God's omniscience with human free will have been proposed. Some have attempted to redefine or reconceptualize free will:

* God can know in advance what I will do, because free will is to be understood only as freedom from coercion, and anything further is an illusion. This is the move made by compatibilistic philosophies.
* The sovereignty (autonomy) of God, existing within a free agent, provides strong inner compulsions toward a course of action (calling), and the power of choice (election). The actions of a human are thus determined by a human acting on relatively strong or weak urges (both from God and the environment around them) and their own relative power to choose.[5]

A proposition first offered by Boethius[6] and later by Thomas Aquinas[note 1] and C. S. Lewis, suggests that God's perception of time is different, and that this is relevant to our understanding of our own free will. In his book Mere Christianity, Lewis argues that God is actually outside time and therefore does not "foresee" events, but rather simply observes them all at once. He explains:

> But suppose God is outside and above the Time-line. In that case, what we call "tomorrow" is visible to Him in just the same way as what we call "today". All the days are "Now" for Him. He does not remember you doing things yesterday, He simply sees you doing them: because, though you have lost yesterday, He has not. He does not "foresee" you doing things tomorrow, He simply sees you doing them: because, though tomorrow is not yet there for you, it is for Him. You never supposed that your actions at this moment were any less free because God knows what you are doing. Well, He knows your tomorrow's actions in just the same way - because He is already in tomorrow and can simply watch you. In a sense, He does not know your action till you have done it: but then the moment at which you have done it is already "Now" for Him.[7]

A common objection is to argue that Molinism, or the belief that God can know counterfactually the actions of his creations, is true. This has been used as an argument by Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig, amongst others.

## Free will argument for the nonexistence of God

[edit]

Dan Barker suggests that this can lead to a "Free will Argument for the Nonexistence of God"[8] on the grounds that God's omniscience is incompatible with God having free will and that if God does not have free will, God is not a personal being.

Theists generally agree that God is a personal being and that God is omniscient,[note 2] but there is some disagreement about whether "omniscient" means:

1. "knows everything that God chooses to know and that is logically possible to know"; or instead the slightly stronger:
2. "knows everything that is logically possible to know"[note 3]

These two terms are known as inherent and total omniscience, respectively.

## See also

[edit]

* Book of Life – Book used by God in Abrahamic religions
* Determinism
* List of paradoxes
* Molinism

## Notes

[edit]

1. ^ See also Divine Providence versus the concept of Fate
2. ^ see e.g. Richard Swinburne Does God Exist? of The Catechism of the Catholic Church
3. ^ see e.g. John Polkinghorne

## References

[edit]

1. ^ a b Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Foreknowledge and Free Will
2. ^ a b Swartz, Norman. "Foreknowledge and Free Will". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 26 August 2017.
3. ^ The Eight Chapters of Maimonides on Ethics (Semonah Perakhim), edited, annotated, and translated with an Introduction by Joseph I. Gorfinkle, pp. 99–100. (New York: AMS Press), 1966.
4. ^ Watt, William M. (April 1946). "Free Will and Predestination in Early Islam". The Muslim World. 36 (2): 124. doi:10.1111/j.1478-1913.1946.tb02093.x. hdl:1842/34371. Retrieved 19 June 2022.
5. ^ The Philosopher's Handbook, Stanley Rosen, ed., Random House Reference, New York, 2000.
6. ^ Consolatio Philosophiae, Boethius, book 5:4
7. ^ C. S. Lewis Mere Christianity Touchstone: New York, 1980 p. 149
8. ^ Barker, Dan (August 1997). "The Free will Argument for the Nonexistence of God". Freedom From Religion Foundation. Retrieved June 10, 2022.

## Further reading

[edit]

* Thomas Aquinas. Summa Contra Gentiles
* Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica I, Q. XIV, esp. Art. 13: "Whether the Knowledge of God is of Future Contingent Things?".
* Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Many editions.
* Hasker, William. God, Time, and Foreknowledge". Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.
* Molina, Luis de. On Divine Foreknowledge, trans. Alfred J. Freddoso. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.
* Plantinga, Alvin. "On Ockham's Way Out". Faith and Philosophy 3 (3): 235–269.
* Ockham, William. Predestination, God's Foreknowledge, and Future Contingents, trans. M.M. Adams and N. Kretzmann. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983.
* Zagzebski, Linda. "The Dilemma of Freedom an Foreknowledge". New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
* Luther, Martin: De servo arbitrio, in English: On the Bondage of the Will. In Latin and German 1525, in modern English: J.I. Packer and O. R. Johnston, trans. Old Tappan, New Jersey: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1957.

## External links

[edit]

* Foreknowledge and Free Will article in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
* Omniscience and Divine Foreknowledge article in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
* The Paradox of Free will – An online discussion
* Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica I, Q. XIV, Art. 13.

* v
* t
* e

Paradoxes

Philosophical|

* Analysis
* Buridan's bridge
* Dream argument
* Epicurean
* Fiction
* Fitch's knowability
* Free will
* Goodman's
* Hedonism
* Liberal
* Meno's
* Mere addition
* Moore's
* Newcomb's
* Nihilism
* Omnipotence
* Preface
* Rule-following
* Sorites
* Theseus' ship
* White horse
* Zeno's

Logical|

* Barber
* Berry
* Bhartrhari's
* Burali-Forti
* Court
* Crocodile
* Curry's
* Epimenides
* Free choice paradox
* Grelling–Nelson
* Kleene–Rosser
* Liar
* Card
* No-no
* Pinocchio
* Quine's
* Yablo's
* Opposite Day
* Paradoxes of set theory
* Richard's
* Russell's
* Socratic
* Hilbert's Hotel
* Temperature paradox
* Barbershop
* Catch-22
* Chicken or the egg
* Drinker
* Entailment
* Lottery
* Plato's beard
* Raven
* Ross's
* Unexpected hanging
* "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles"
* Heat death paradox
* Olbers's paradox

Economic|

* Allais
* Antitrust
* Arrow information
* Bertrand
* Braess'
* Competition
* Income and fertility
* Downs–Thomson
* Easterlin
* Edgeworth
* Ellsberg
* European
* Gibson's
* Giffen good
* Icarus
* Jevons
* Leontief
* Lerner
* Lucas
* Mandeville's
* Mayfield's
* Metzler
* Plenty
* Productivity
* Prosperity
* Scitovsky
* Service recovery
* St. Petersburg
* Thrift
* Toil
* Tullock
* Value

Decision theory|

* Abilene
* Apportionment
* Alabama
* New states
* Population
* Arrow's
* Buridan's ass
* Chainstore
* Condorcet's
* Decision-making
* Downs
* Ellsberg
* Fenno's
* Fredkin's
* Green
* Hedgehog's
* Inventor's
* Kavka's toxin puzzle
* Morton's fork
* Navigation
* Newcomb's
* Parrondo's
* Preparedness
* Prevention
* Prisoner's dilemma
* Tolerance
* Willpower

* List
* Category

* v
* t
* e

Philosophy of religion

Conceptions of God|

* Brahman
* Demiurge
* Divine simplicity
* Egoism
* God Speaks
* Holy Spirit
* Misotheism
* Pandeism
* Personal god
* Process theology
* Supreme Being
* Unmoved mover

God in|

* Abrahamic religions
* Buddhism
* Christianity
* Hinduism
* Islam
* Jainism
* Judaism
* Mormonism
* Sikhism
* Baháʼí Faith
* Wicca

Existence of God|

| For|

* Beauty
* Christological
* Trilemma
* Resurrection
* Consciousness
* Cosmological
* Kalam cosmological
* Contingency
* Metaphysical
* Degree
* Desire
* Experience
* Existential choice
* Fine-tuned universe
* Knowledge
* Love
* Mathematics
* Miracles
* Morality
* Mystical idealism
* Natural-law
* Necessary existent
* Seddiqin
* Nyayakusumanjali
* Ontological
* Anselm
* Gödel
* Meinongian
* Modal
* Mulla Sadra
* Pascal's wager
* Reason
* Proper basis and Reformed epistemology
* Responses to the problem of evil
* Teleological
* Natural law
* Watchmaker
* Testimony
* Historical events
* Historical personages
* Trademark
* Transcendental

|

Against|

* 747 gambit
* Atheist's Wager
* Evil
* Free will
* Hell
* Inconsistent revelations
* Nonbelief
* Noncognitivism
* Occam's razor
* Omnipotence
* Poor design
* Russell's teapot

Theology|

* Acosmism
* Agnosticism
* Animism
* Antireligion
* Atheism
* Creationism
* Dharmism
* Deism
* Demonology
* Divine command theory
* Dualism
* Esotericism
* Exclusivism
* Existentialism
* Christian
* Atheistic
* Feminist theology
* Thealogy
* Womanist theology
* Fideism
* Fundamentalism
* Gnosticism
* Henotheism
* Humanism
* Religious
* Secular
* Christian
* Inclusivism
* Theories about religions
* Monism
* Monotheism
* Mysticism
* Naturalism
* Metaphysical
* Religious
* Humanistic
* New Age
* Nondualism
* Nontheism
* Pandeism
* Panentheism
* Pantheism
* Perennialism
* Polytheism
* Possibilianism
* Process theology
* Religious skepticism
* Spiritualism
* Shamanism
* Taoic
* Theism
* Transcendentalism

Philosophers
of religion

(by date active)|

| Ancient and
medieval|

* Anselm of Canterbury
* Augustine of Hippo
* Avicenna
* Averroes
* Boethius
* Gaudapada
* Gaunilo of Marmoutiers
* Pico della Mirandola
* Heraclitus
* King James VI and I
* Marcion of Sinope
* Maimonides
* Adi Shankara
* Thomas Aquinas
* William of Ockham

|

Early modern|

* Augustin Calmet
* René Descartes
* Blaise Pascal
* Desiderius Erasmus
* Baruch Spinoza
* Nicolas Malebranche
* Gottfried W Leibniz
* William Wollaston
* Thomas Chubb
* David Hume
* Baron d'Holbach
* Immanuel Kant
* Johann G Herder

1800
1850|

* Friedrich Schleiermacher
* Karl C F Krause
* Georg W F Hegel

* Thomas Carlyle
* William Whewell
* Ludwig Feuerbach
* Søren Kierkegaard
* Karl Marx
* Albrecht Ritschl
* Afrikan Spir

1880
1900|

* Ernst Haeckel
* W K Clifford
* Friedrich Nietzsche
* Harald Høffding
* William James

* Vladimir Solovyov
* Ernst Troeltsch
* Rudolf Otto
* Lev Shestov
* Sergei Bulgakov
* Pavel Florensky
* Ernst Cassirer
* Joseph Maréchal

1920
postwar|

* George Santayana
* Bertrand Russell
* Martin Buber
* René Guénon
* Paul Tillich
* Karl Barth
* Emil Brunner
* Rudolf Bultmann
* Gabriel Marcel
* Reinhold Niebuhr

* Charles Hartshorne
* Mircea Eliade
* Frithjof Schuon
* J L Mackie
* Walter Kaufmann
* Martin Lings
* Peter Geach
* George I Mavrodes
* William Alston
* Antony Flew

1970
1990
2010|

* William L Rowe
* Dewi Z Phillips
* Alvin Plantinga
* Anthony Kenny
* Nicholas Wolterstorff
* Richard Swinburne
* Robert Merrihew Adams
* Ravi Zacharias
* Peter van Inwagen
* Daniel Dennett
* Loyal Rue
* Jean-Luc Marion
* William Lane Craig
* Ali Akbar Rashad

* Alexander Pruss

Related topics|

* Criticism of religion
* Desacralization of knowledge
* Ethics in religion
* Exegesis
* History of religion
* Religion
* Religious language
* Religious philosophy
* Relationship between religion and science
* Faith and rationality

* Portal
* Category

* v
* t
* e

Theology

Conceptions of God

| Theism|

| Forms|

*   * Deism
* Dystheism
* Henotheism
* Hermeticism
* Kathenotheism
* Nontheism
* Monolatry
* Monotheism
* Urmonotheismus
* Mysticism
* Panentheism
* Pandeism
* Pantheism
* Polydeism
* Polytheism
* Spiritualism
* Theistic finitism
* Theopanism

|

Concepts|

*   * Deity
* Divinity
* Gender of God and gods
* Goddess
* Numen

Singular god
theologies|

| By faith|

* Abrahamic religions
* Baháʼí Faith
* Judaism
* Christianity
* Islam
* Buddhism
* Hinduism
* Jainism
* Sikhism
* Tenrikyo
* Zoroastrianism

|

Concepts|

* Absolute
* Brahman
* Emanationism
* Logos
* Supreme Being

God as|

* Time
* Good (Ahura Mazda, Father of Greatness)

Trinitarianism|

* Athanasian Creed
* Comma Johanneum
* Consubstantiality
* Homoousian
* Homoiousian
* Hypostasis
* Perichoresis
* Shield of the Trinity
* Trinitarian formula
* Trinity
* Trinity of the Church Fathers
* Trinitarian universalism

Eschatology|

* Afterlife
* Apocalypticism
* Fate of the unlearned
* Fitra
* Heaven / Hell

| By religion|

* Buddhist
* Christian
* Hindu
* Islamic
* Jewish
* Taoist
* Zoroastrian

|

Feminist|

* Buddhism
* Christianity
* Hinduism
* Islam
* Judaism
* Mormonism
* Goddesses

Other concepts|

* Attributes of God in Christianity / in Islam
* Binitarianism
* Demiurge
* Divine simplicity
* Divine presence
* Egotheism
* Exotheology
* Hermeneutics
* Holocaust
* Godhead in Christianity
* Latter Day Saints
* Great Architect of the Universe
* Great Spirit
* Apophatic theology
* Olelbis
* Open theism
* Personal god
* Phenomenological definition
* Philo's view
* Process
* Tian
* Unmoved mover

Names of God in|

* Christianity
* Hinduism
* Islam
* Jainism
* Judaism

By faith

| Christian|

* History
* Outline
* Biblical canon
* Glossary
* Paterology
* Christology
* Pneumatology
* Cosmology
* Ecclesiology
* Eschatology
* Ethics
* Hamartiology
* Messianism
* Philosophy
* Political
* Practical
* Public
* Sophiology
* Soteriology

|

Hindu|

* Ayyavazhi theology
* Krishnology

Islamic|

* Oneness of God
* Prophets
* Holy Scriptures
* Angels
* Predestination
* Last Judgment

Jewish|

* Abrahamic prophecy
* Aggadah
* Denominations
* Kabbalah
* Philosophy

Pagan|

* Slavic Native Faith
* Wiccan

East Asian|

* Tenrikyo

Religion portal
*[v]: View this template
*[t]: Discuss this template
*[e]: Edit this template