When I was a child, I believed in God, because I was told to believe in God. I was taken to church and would sit at first in Sunday School and later in the main congregation. Listening to tales from the bible and the moral parables of the preacher.
As my mind began to develop its enquiring and inquisitive nature; questions started to form in my mind; one particular question, came from the fact that a preacher used the words:
You can't fool God, he knows what's going to happen before it happens?
So my question, or rather questions arising from this statement were; does God know everything that’s going to happen before it happens? And if so, what's the point of praying; seeing as everything is preordained?
Ricky Gervais put it rather eloquently at the end of one of his now legendary Golden Globe host appearances, when he simply said,
“I’d like to thank God – for making me an atheist.”
Therein lies the problem for an omnipotent, omniscient God, a God with those qualities did indeed make Ricky Gervais an atheist, along with me and countless billions down the ages.
Therefore God made Ricky and the rest of us non-believers for the rather specific purpose of burning in hell, which is the general belief of what’ll happen to Ricky et al in most religious circles.
I say the specific purpose, not to belittle Ricky’s achievements as an actor and comedian, whilst alive and well on this planet. But more to illustrate the fact that compared to how ever many decades Ricky does manage to entertain us before shuffling of this mortal coil. Those handful of decades, will pale into insignificance compared to the first quadrillion years of being tortured for not believing in a being that saw to it that you’d never believe in it.
Ah, but no my child, God shows you the path, but it is up to you to take it.
This is one of the apparently more sophisticated arguments against the dichotomy of omnipotence and free will, is that our lives are like a quantum particle before being observed. A myriad of exponentially increasing chances and opportunities. Each one of your potential decisions acting like a node for branches of chance and opportunity.
The Quantum Of God
So to put simply, your life is a never ending selection of choices laid out in front of you, some of these paths are wrong in the eyes of God and some are right and only the right ones will lead to heaven and Him, which ones you choose, are entirely up to you, you have; free will.
The problem with this ‘quantum choice’ theory apart from having to accept that free will happens in some sort of constrained (no matter how large) frame work, is that in order for time to continue and for you to move forward and make a decision at any given moment, there has to be a point of global collapse, whereby all possible decisions collide into a kind of, choice singularity when you finally make a decision.
If the quantum choice theory were true then God is the observer and even though God is aware of every single one of the infinite expanse of choices you might take, then for free will to truly exist there has to be a point where God simply doesn’t know which one or ones you’re going to take because you can decide to do something unforeseen.
Will he take crack today, or walk past that woman handing out leaflets about the church and change his life? Will she wake up and drink a bottle of vodka before lunch? Or will she decide to call her dying Aunt in Pennsylvania and receive an epiphany?
To take this point a little further imagine you were sitting next to God watching Jane’s Life on his magic TV, you’re watching live and events are in real time. God tells you that Jane is facing a pivotal moment in her life, she is either going to sneak out of her parents’ house and go and see that bad boy Joe, which will lead to a life of drug abuse and debauchery or she won’t and instead will meet the wholesome living Bill the very next day.
In this scenario you could ask God will she or won’t she and God might say I see all possibilities so yes and no, rather like a quantum superposition.
You accept this, however a femtosecond before she makes the decision, you reach out for the remote and pause (God has Tivo) and you say; “OK, there is no more time for anything else but one single thing to happen, she’s just about to make the decision; what's she going to do?"
Within this ‘quantum choice theory' God would have to say either; I don’t know, in which case God is fallible and doesn’t have as much control of the future as claimed. Or he would have to admit that he did in fact know (because he's always known and is responsible for time itself). In which case you could rightly claim that Jane had no choice in the matter and that her perceived free will is nothing but a magic trick..
If God truly doesn’t know the answer to these questions whilst gazing at the decision event horizon, then that relegates God to a small ‘g’ god and like the rest of us has no idea what’s going to happen from one moment to the next.
Enlightenment
However the God of mainstream religion has to know what’s going to happen, because God created time, to grossly oversimplify Einstein’s theory of special relativity; time is the measure of things happening, without things happening there is no time, things either happen slowly (relative to your own movement, gravity, etc.) or quickly, but they happen.
If I am to believe one or another of the mainstream religions, then I am to believe that God is responsible for all things that have happened are happening now and will ever happen, therefore the thought of a God not knowing what’s going to happen in someone’s life before it’s happened, creates a causal loop akin to Douglas Adams’ God disappearing in a puff of logic and God simply ceases to exist.
For the sake of clarity the argument goes thusly; if God creates the future, but doesn’t know what’s going to happen in a particular future, then God couldn’t have created that future. And if God isn’t aware of that future, then it’s not a stretch to believe that God isn’t aware of any future, therefore God couldn’t have created time, therefore, as religion describes it, there is no God.
This is the curse of the quantum God, knowing and not knowing at the same time, both omnipotent and impotent.
So what’s the problem you say? Why can’t there be a God who knows everything and still be like the Gods described to me in the main and smaller religions? Or even why can’t there be a God who doesn’t know everything but still exist as a God?
Well as far as the first example’s concerned, whereby an all knowing God is still mindful of how we behave and whether or not we believe in Him, as Ricky Gervais eloquently pointed out; doesn’t work. At best it points to a God playing with us like toys at worst it points to a seriously delusional and psychotic supreme being prone to mass genocide through not being happy with what he created in the first place.
The problem with the second question, whereby there’s a God that’s all powerful but not all seeing is that if that’s the case, then why bother? If God doesn’t know exactly what’s going to happen when he does his Godly things, then that make’s him no better than a stock market speculator.
“The thing is; I would answer your prayer for protection on this flight you’ve just boarded, but I had no idea
that the pilot was going to forget his heart medicine and get drunk just before take off, so um, yeah... fingers crossed.”
What about a God who just set things off and let’s them happen? As above a God like this would not be receiving prayers and wouldn’t give two hoots about the behaviour of a few billion of his creations in an insignificant corner of one of fifty billion galaxies.
This for me is the most likely scenario, of an unlikely scenario of a God existing. In an infinitely expanding universe, with an infinite amount of things happening, I have to leave one small possibility for a God. But an alien, indifferent God, that could well have sparked off time, but who in no way influences what’s happened before or what’s going to happen.
A God who if you pray to, won’t hear or care if it does a God who you can happily ignore and it will ignore you, a God who definitely won’t mind you saying; “there is no God.”
God I Am
I am like God and God like me! I am as large as God - he is as small as I. He can't above me, nor I, beneath him be. - Silesius 17th Century.*
Max Cady - Cape Fear
CryptoGee
What about a God who just set things off and does a hard-fork if things get out of hand?
Hahaha, lol; I suppose the Great Flood was a soft-fork :-D
CG
"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the LORD.
As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."
– Isaiah 55:8-9
Even if God were any of the things you don't like, He would still be God -- and therefore free to make his own rules.
For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” – Jeremiah 29:11
Pretty pointless to spin up straw man arguments about what God does and does not know and what he does and does not choose to control. We rebellious humans tend to act like children who can't understand why their mean parents won't let them eat a whole box of chocolates.
So why not start with the answers He has already given us:
In the beginning God created a perfect world with minimum rules and gave us free-will dominion over it. We rebelled (as He knew we would) and sent ourselves on a 7000 year detour during which history has allowed us to try and fail at every possible way of governing ourselves. During that time, in every generation, a very small remnant of humanity reached the desired end-state of freely choosing to do things God's Way. To those God gave the right to be adopted as "Children of God" and those are the ones He intends to keep at his final "harvest". The rest of the weeds are to be discarded as not useful. Do you have a moral problem with composting weeds?
He could have created obedient robots, but He wanted a family He could trust. Children that would choose Him of their own free will.
There. No need to speculate. God wanted to create free will beings to become members of his family. This current temporary universe is there only for that purpose. Its a simulated training ground and a test range where candidates are given the chance to figure things out, straighten up and fly right... or not.
Then God will press "reset" on the simulation and turn the renewed creation over to qualified family members who have proven under high pressure life-or-death conditions with woefully incomplete information, that they will choose Him rather than making up elaborate excuses about why they don't have to.
Pretty simple really.
We now return to our regularly scheduled program where the weeds talk about how much they don't want the Gardner to exist.
Very interesting article! Some thoughts...
From a science point of view, is it possible to create the process of time that results in there being a future, without being able to know or predict what will happen in ghat future? I like to think in terms of computer simulations, since I have experience in the field of Artificial Life, having worked as a Software Engineer in an AI lab for several years. If i create a universe and set up the rules, and create agents which act independently according to their local knowledge, I can't predict what will happen in my universe in the next time tick. The processing going on in my universe is distributed and done in parallel, while I am one processor trying to access all the possible outcomes. I don't have enough time to do that math, so the best thing to do is just let the next time tick happen and see what my creation does. This is mentioned in that huge book on my book self, A New Kind of Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science
The point is, maybe God knows as much as anything/anybody could possibly know about the future, and it's not everything or maybe its not even anything. He would still be the supreme being, being able to do the most that any being possibly could. He might act/intervene however he wants, and not knowing exactly what the result of that might be, doesn't mean he can't do it. If he does anything, he is creating a different future than if he did nothing. For me, the simulator of universes, it is interesting and entertaining to do something and see what happens. :-)
From a religious point of view, from my understanding, Calvinism with its predestination says that God can play with us like toys or do anything he wants with us. Romans says, who are we to judge the potter? He can make his pots and throw some away and keep others. So it does seem that an entire denomination accepts this and still prays to God, assuming that they are among the elect.
I need a little help with this one. Assume, as above, that God isn't aware of that future or any future, due to it being impossible to be aware of the future. Why does the next step follow, that he couldn't have created time. That seems like a rule in the simulation/universe that could have been created, even without having the ability to know the state of the system at a future instant of time.
Deep deep discussion! I let my mind dwell on it for a bit and that's what I came up with. Just my thoughts, and I appreciate all points of view on all subjects, as long as we talk about ideas and don't attack each other personally. :-) Just a general thought from me to wrap up this way-too-long comment!
Wow! Really good comments, thanks; I like the parallels you draw with your simulated universe and your book is straight onto my reading list.
In the last point where you ask about how I reconcile the lack of God's knowledge of the future, as a sign that he hasn't made time.
I am saying so from religion's point of view, I'm trying to break down the statement God is all knowing, that statement on its own perhaps isn't enough. But when you add the term, God is all knowing and he created the universe, then that is saying that God created time.
As far as we're concerned there was no time before the universe, in the same way there was no time for lines of code in your universe, before the simulation began. You created time for your AI elements, so you are the creator of time, however you're not all knowing, so your AI have free will.
But unlike your universe, religion insists that; you can't fool God, and he is all knowing. So if God created time and knows the future, it is because as far as God is concerned, there is no future. The time he has created to him is omnipresent, therefore, the religious God, knows everything that can and will happen.
In that instance, we don't have free will, like trains on a track, we are at the Great Signaler's mercy, this directly contradicts religion and it has to.
The original progenitors of the main religions, whilst trying to assert their imaginary God's power, couldn't create a scenario whereby people can say; "It doesn't matter what I do, because it's all been planned out." In that matter, you won't have control, you'll have chaos.
So free will is an important component of organised religion; as is omniscience, because you can't have the flock, thinking they can hide things from God.
However, the two cannot coexist, free will cancels out omniscience and vice versa, so if religion insists on both states, then God does indeed, disappear in a puff of logic. :-)
CG
I love it!
Wow, a truely wonderful analysis. I enjoyed your logic flow and bits of humor sprinkled in to a more serious topic.
If you havent already seen it I highly recommend the film "Waking Life" that deals with all of the issues that your post brings up. You can find it on youtube
Thanks for that Anwen.
The film sounds interesting; I might check that out tonight, if not later this week, thanks.
CG
.. and 'Yes Man' makes light of this powerful idea of getting involved (as referenced by the choice theory) where the 'guru' convinces him to say "YES" when an opportunity presents itself. He of course, doesn't quite get the direction quite right, but along the way he figures out.
A forumla that @mousehouse1 reminded me of when referencing Casey Neistat.
Great piece @cryptogee. Amen brother ;)