Patrick Reany
30 October 2023
This post is a response to the YouTube video titled, "Why Christians can't explain free will."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pNd_sb-PIE
Prophet of Zod, 19 October 2023
From the video caption:
"Apologists love saying that atheists have no way to explain free will - which is strange,
because it's practically impossible to reconcile their concept of God with free will. If he
made everything knowing what would come of his act of creation, then not only are our fates
determined, but he decided what we would and wouldn't do before we ever existed. It's hard
if not impossible to resolve this problem. So for fun, today we'll watch Frank Turek try
to dance around it. His attempt will be similar to (though not identical to) those made by
other Christians. The reason is obvious: You can just declare God gives us free will, but
you can't explain HOW. Or at least I've never heard a Christian take the first step toward
actually explaining how."
The following is a print version of the basic question, as posed by Prophet of Zod:
So if God knows everything, then God already knows who's going to hell and who's going to
heaven before he even ever created him -- before he created the universe, before he created
Adam and Eve. So with this viewpoint, how could we all have free will at all if everything
is already determined?
I am not an apologist. I'm just a Christian. If some other believer or some apologist thinks
that he or she can explain free will, then go for it, but I can't. I'm not writing this to try
to explain free will. I am here to explain that God can foreknow without causally forcing events.
How? Beats me. The fact that I don't know how God does it, doesn't imply that God can't do it.
It's God who knows the future perfectly, not me.
I cannot explain most of the important things about life and the human condition, but there
is no logical contradiction here. The important point is to make a clear distinction between
"being causally determined" and "being foreknown," i.e., being epistemologically determined.
They are not the same thing.
I'll offer a thought experiment. Consider that I am an experimental physicist who routinely
uses a Stern-Gerlach apparatus to run electrons through it to run statistics on the accumulative
outcomes of many experiments. According to quantum mechanics, the outcome of any single
electron event is random, but the averages are 50-50 either up or down for the direction the
electron will exit the apparatus.
Now say that a spirit comes to me in the night and claims that he knows the outcome of the
first run of the experiment to be performed the next day. I play along (out of curiosity) and
am informed by the spirit that it will go down.
"How do yo know this?" I ask.
"I'm from the future when your experiment has already happened."
"Can you prove that?"
"You'll have to accept it on faith."
"Then you're cheating!" I accused the spirit.
"No. I haven't affected its outcome."
(OK, experiments are usually done with masses of particles, but this is doable in principle,
and, besides, this is just a thought experiment anyway.)
The next day, the first out come was done, and for the sake of argument, let's accept that
this was true foreknowledge given to me.
So, here's the distinction to be drawn: The electron came out of the apparatus in the down
direction by random -- that is, with no causal mechanics at work. So, from the causal viewpoint,
the outcome was acausal, or non-determined, ahead of time. But from the epistemological
standpoint, I knew the outcome ahead of time, and thus it was epistemologically determined.
That just means that I knew what the outcome would be, without me influencing the outcome.
PoZ is conflating two separate concepts:
To the first question, I have answered, No. To the second, I have answered, I don't
know. But I could counter with the question, "How does non-free will work?"
So, can I explain how God knows the end from the beginning, yet isn't forcing all our actions?
No, I sure can't. but the fact that I cannot explain something doesn't mean that that something
is not true.
I think that it can be a trap that apologist can fall into to believe that they must try to answer
all these difficult questions about the mysteries of the faith, especially when there may be a lack
of scriptural foundation to stand on. Sometimes it's okay just to say, "I don't know."
Who has the greater burden on this philosophical quandary: The believer or the nonbeliever. The
nonbeliever can accuse the believer of not being able to prove that the foreknowledge of God does
not imply causal determinism. On the other hand, the believer can accuse the nonbeliever of being
unable to prove that the foreknowledge of God does imply causal determinism. How would one
go about proving that? One would have to prove that it would be impossible not to be causally
determined. Well, good luck on that challenge.