If there is an all-knowing God who knows the future, then he knows I'm going to sneeze in 10 seconds. But if I do something to control my sneeze, then I have just changed the future. Does this mean there is not an all-knowing God who knows the future, because we have control over our future. This would suggest multiple futures and abolish the theory of God. Or is there some way for there to be multiple futures and an all-knowing God?

If there is an all-knowing God, and if you are able to control your sneeze, then the all-knowing God does not know that you are going to sneeze and does know that you are able to control your impulse to sneeze. Why doesn't God know that you are going to sneeze? Because it's not true that you are going to sneeze-- to the contrary, it's true that you are going to control your sneeze. Since it's impossible to know what is false, it's impossible for an all-knowing God to know that you are going to sneeze.

I once took a graduate course in education in which I was the only non-teacher. One day, I disagreed with something said by another student, and her response has always baffled me. She said: "Who are you? You can't question me until you've walked in my shoes." In other words, she felt that I was unqualified to question her, to cast doubt on anything she said. Who was I to say? Well of course her response was nonsense but how so? As a matter of logic or illogic, was her remark an example of an appeal to authority? She certainly felt that she was an authority.

I have such a visceral reaction to your fellow student’s comment. I just want to slap her on your behalf, which of course I’d never do, but I’d want to! But then I wonder what your comment was. Maybe she was just verbally slapping you, and while verbal slapping is no better than physical slapping, it is just as understandable. But let’s assume that what you said was perfectly reasonable. As a hypothetical example, let’s assume that you were respectfully questioning her view about how to handle disciplinary issues that arise in the classroom. And let’s take her claim not as a verbal slapping, but as a serious claim about the conditions under which you count as having the epistemic authority to question her. She claims that you can’t question her unless you walk in her shoes. Does this mean that you can’t ask her a question? Surely, she can’t mean this. So I suppose that she means that you are not epistemically permitted to doubt the truth of her judgment. And what does she mean by the...

Socrates said, "All I know is that I know nothing". What I'm trying to figure out is this: if I know NOTHING, how do I KNOW that I know nothing? It just goes round in circles thus becoming nothing more than a paradox. Would you agree?

Just to set the record straight. Some such claim is often attributed to Socrates on the basis of his remarks in Plato’s Apology (21a-e), but the claim that he actually makes is much less paradoxical. Socrates reports that his friend Chaerephon went to the oracle at Delphi to ask if any person was wiser than Socrates. The oracle apparently answered, no. After having cross-examined lots of people who had a reputation for wisdom and having discovered as a result that their reputation was undeserved, Socrates drew the following conclusion about the significance of the oracle’s answer: “I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know when I do not know” ( Ap . 21d-e).

Peter is right. Many have taken the Socrates of Plato’s early dialogues to be a skeptic at least with regard to knowledge of the most worthwhile things. My own view is that, at least as he’s represented in the Platonic dialogues, Socrates is not a skeptic. He did not believe that it was impossible to acquire such knowledge. In fact, he devotes his life to acquiring such knowledge. He simply believed that it was very difficult to acquire such knowledge and that no one that he had yet met had done so. How, then, might he respond to Alex’s worries that his position is paradoxical? He would first have to explain that he could be wiser than someone else without being in a cognitive state that would qualify as knowledge. He would then have to explain that when he speaks of knowledge of worthwhile things, he primarily has in mind knowledge of what things are most worthwhile, that is, what things are the most worthy goals to which we should devote our lives ( Ap . 29d-30b). On Socrates’ view,...

Why should I believe you?

You should not believe me unless I offer you, or you have independent access to, compelling reasons to do so. In fact, I think that you’ll find that, so far, most of the responsesthat have been posted to the questions on AskPhilosophers.org have notaimed at persuasion–at getting to you believe something. Instead, mostof us have described ways of thinking about particular philosophicalissues which we ourselves have found helpful or interesting. Certainquestions that used to be very puzzling now seem much less so once wenotice certain conceptual distinctions, certain ambiguities inlanguage, or certain tempting fallacies of reasoning. Equally,questions that initially seemed pretty straightforward can be shown tobe much more complex, and so much more puzzling, once we noticecounter-intuitive implications of the straightforward or common-senseanswers to these questions.

Fair enough, Alan. Based on my experience of human beings, the more sociableand cheerful attitude that you suggest seems appropriate as ageneral day-to-day attitude toward others. I’m generally not worriedthat people are lying to me. But I understood the question differently– not as directed to humanity in general, but at us in particular, the panelists on AskPhilosophers. I took the questionernot to be wondering whether we were lying but whether we knew what wewere talking about. There are a lot of people out there promisinganswers to life’s big questions, and skepticism seems to me to be aperfectly healthy response to these promises. It was for this reasonthat I tried to assure the questioner that we aren’t making any suchpromises.