“God is omnipotent, therefore free will cannot exist”.
The idea expressed here is that if God knows our future, then our free will is in question since Gods knowing it implies we cannot deviate from it – that our life runs on the rails of which the entire track is visible to God. This post isn’t about free will or God as much as it is about using knowledge of something which exists in a domain we don’t have to access to, in order to make inferences about the domain we do have access to, in this case – of using things we think we know about God (his domain) to make inferences about our domain.
The universe can be thought of as our domain. Within this universe exist people, planets, the laws of nature and our concept of time, physics and all our understanding. Everything we know. If we consider our universe as a self-contained domain, then we can imagine God existing outside of that domain; God isn’t contained or constrained within our universe.
We cannot grok that which is beyond our domain (our universe). We cannot know anything about either:
a.) the nature of God / Gods domain, or
b.) how God does what he does.
The arrow of causation points from left to right – from Gods domain to the Human domain. God takes action and we perceive it a certain way. But from those perceptions we can make no inferences about God or the nature of our own universe.
“And God said: Let there be light!”
We don’t know how God created reality by speaking it into being. But we wouldn’t infer from that act of creation that we can speak matter into being, or that speaking and voices have anything to do with the creation of universes. We have an understanding that God exists in a domain we don’t have access to, and thus to expect God to operate within the laws of our domain would seem entirely unreasonable.
If God is some hyperdimensional being who created our universe from the outside – it stands to reason that such a being can have knowledge of our future which doesn’t violate our notions of time & causality & free will, because the tools God has at his disposal are beyond our understanding – they are not of our domain.
You can’t logic your way with God
IF GOD KNOWS THE FUTURE; THEN THERE IS NO FREE WILL
or rather:
IF X; THEN Y
We’re observing some action or knowledge of God (X) in our domain and attempting to understand it in terms of human logic when in fact the only way we can truthfully construct that expression is:
X
Which is to say we can only state our observation (X) at face value: God can know the future, God created our reality etc. So long as God exists in a higher-level domain to ours and is understood to be unconstrained by our domain, we can make no conclusions or inferences whatsoever about God or our domain based on our observation (X).
The moment we attempt to construe IF;THEN statements from our observations or knowledge of God – we’re making statements about what God is capable of & doing so in terms of our understanding of the world – we’re compartmentalizing God and making him fit into our box of understanding. We also inadvertently attempt at pointing the arrow from our domain towards God ie., we’re making claims about God that conform to our false inferences; we’re saying: “God can only know the future by invoking some power that denies us free will.”
Gods being able to know the future can exist quite comfortably alongside free will so long as we acknowledge the domain distinctness. The moment we make inferences about our domain based upon some quality or act of God, we essentially relocate God from his domain into our domain and it’s easier to advocate dogma & accept false inferences when God and his abilities are contained in a domain we’re familiar with.
We cannot infer anything about a being who resides beyond our domain, and we cannot infer anything about our domain by observing God and what he does in our domain. We cannot use knowledge of God to create assumptions about God or our reality. The topic of free will (or indeed any other topic specific to our domain) needs to be evaluated and discussed using the tools and methods of our domain.
“…to (inf)err is human; to forgive, divine”
pixels trees and sprites 