crashtestdummy
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- Feb 18, 2010
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Unless this is purely a philosophical discussion, I think atheists have a significant burden to prove...that having knowledge itself is a prohibition to free-will.
I think it's a tricky statement to figure out: does knowledge of events mean that those events are predetermined?
I think the easy analogy is that of a time traveler (because, you know, who hasn't tried that). If a person is able to move forward in five years, see the future, and return back, they know what will happen (i.e. they have foreknowledge), but there is no reason to suppose that future is predetermined. Free will and time travel are not inherently incompatible.
Free will becomes far more difficult to defend in the presence of a deterministic universe. (There is no evidence such is the case, but follow me down the rabbit hole for a minute.) In that scenario, all events are inextricably linked and there is only one possible path all things in the universe will take. In such a case, a person (or some super-smart creature) can know all future events by properly understanding all present information.
Oddly enough, despite the fact that this is the most intuitive way to see the universe (we tend to see the world in terms of well-defined cause and effect), there's strong evidence that this isn't the case. It does appear that there are some truly random events that occur in the universe that are not controlled by hidden variables (see Bell's Inequalities). You can make a case for superdeterminism, but there ceases to be any practical (i.e. testable) sense of the idea at that point.
The last piece, then, is whether you define an omniscient God as more of the time traveler above, someone who can observe all events in all time frames simultaneously, or as the puzzle solver who can take in all the information in the universe in the present and understand all outcomes. At that point, I can't help you much more, as I can't give you any reason to suspect that one notion of God is superior to another.
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