Don't Play With Fire, Unless You Can Handle Getting Burned

So, I had a few beers, and was thinking... (Uh Oh, here we go again)

What if what the great dark ages philosopher Boethius was right?

Thoughts Follow:

             If someone knows that something is going to happen, thet it must be true that it is going to happen because you can’t know something that is false.  You can’t know that 1 + 1 equals thre for example, because 1 + 1 does not equal 3.  But if it’s true that something is going to happen, then it cannot possibly not happen.  So, if it must happen, if it’s unavoidable, then no one is free to prevent it from happening.  The price of omniscience is therefore freedom.

             Although Boethius thought that the apparent conflict could be avoied if god existed outside of time, the great protestant reformer, and founder of the presybeterian church, John Calvin thought that it was precisely because god existed outside of time that no one can change their destiny.  He writes:

         “when we attribute foreknowledge to God, we mean that all thing have ever been, and perpetually remain,
          before    His eyes, so that to His knowledge nothing is future or past, but all things are present”

             While some may object, that just because God knows what choices ypou will make, he doesn’t make those choices for you.  That may well be true, but it’s completely irrelevant to the whole argument because you are only free to do something if you may also refrain from doing it in the first place,.  If your doing something is inevitable, which it must be in the existence of an omniscient being, then your doing it must not be a free act.

             I think that a better argument for the presence of God may be the following.  To be omnipotent is not to be able to do anything at all, but rater to be able to do anything that it is possible to do.  As Thomas Aquinas put it, “Whatever implies contradiction does not come with the scope of divine omnipotence because it cannot have the aspect of possibility.  Hence it is better to say that such things cannot be done, rather than that God cannot do them.”  For example God cannot make a round square because such a thing is logicall impossible>  nothing can be both round and not round at the same time.  But that does not impugn His omnipotence because an omnipotent being can only be expected to do what is logically possible.

             Similar considerations must therefore apply to the nothion of omniscience.  An omniscient being is not one who knows everything, but rather one who knows everything that it’s logically possible to know.

             Knowing the future has an air of paradox because it seems to violate the principle that an effect cannot preced its cause.  We can see something only after it has happened, future events however, have not yet happened, sop seeing a future event seems to imply both that it has and has not yet come to pass.

            There are other ways to know the future than to see it, however.  Suppose you drop a glass of liquid.  You know, before it hits the ground, that it will spill.  Your foreknowledge is not the result of any psychic power, but rather of your knowledge of natural laws.  You know that whenever an object is released close to the earth’s surface it will fall to the ground.  Because natural objects follow natural laws, foreknowledgfe must exist in some limited capacity.  This reinforces the concept of only logical foreknowledge being within the realm of possibility.

 I’m done for the night 
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Nevermind I lie, and after all of that toughtful commentary, all i have to ask is one question.  What's the point of boidy hair, I mean seriously we all have indoor heating don't we?  Seriously, we need to figure out a cure for this.  Especially those nasty people with back hair, or just really nast hari in general.  Seriously.

 

Okay now I'm done

 

Posted by: hitokiriyuki at August 09, 2005 18:29 | link | comments
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