Q1: How can we have free will if the creator knows everything that
will happen? Aren't we destined to act as he has predicted?
You might want to glance first at
my approach to paradoxes before we deal
with this problem.
What assumptions do we hold about the all-knowing-creator /
free-will paradox? One might be found in our tendency to treat
God like a human. I am suspicious of the idea that God acts
on his knowledge of the universe the same way we do.
Concept 2 points out that
that one observable fact is that God rarely if ever acts, and then
suggests that this is because the universe is exactly as it needs
to be. A perfect God could only create a perfect universe,
and then it would not need to be "adjusted".
Additionally, action on his part implies intention, decision, and
judgment - all which require a temporal environment. If God
lives in a timeless environment, then these concepts no longer make
sense - and God becomes less "human". If we can't conceive
of a being that does not decide, judge, and act, then it is our
lack of imagination instead of an accurate picture of God.
I ran into a similar paradox while working on these pages:
"how can a timeless being have a purpose?" Purpose
implies the desire to change something and change implies that this
being exists within a temporal dimension.
But if a the creator is timeless then how can the creator have a
purpose or a reason for our creation? Both of these paradoxes
may arise because we are not careful about defining the very
different realm a timeless creator must exist in, and then by mistake
we juxtapose temporal and non-temporal existence.
I think that the presence of a timeless being within a temporal
space like ours must appear as a constant; a "desire"
or "vision" or "instinct" that can influence our
decisions but never actually imparts a measurable force.
The creator's "knowledge" must then also take on a different
form. Humans use knowledge to change things, but often the more
we understand the less we need to change. The most impressive
solutions are usually the
simplest. If this is true then infinite knowledge implies a
total lack of action, which incidentally is indetectably
different from complete lack of knowledge (an expected result at the
edges of infinity). Interestingly
however, both of these extremes allow for complete
free will - because no one interferes with our activities.
Perhaps the invalid assumption that causes this
paradox is that the creator must "know" what we are going to
do in the same way that we know what we are going to do?
Trying to think in both a temporal and non-temporal reality
simultaneously really stretches my mind, but
I suspect the solution to this paradox surrounds the manner in
which knowledge is expressed in a non-temporal environment.
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