Topics Religion

Question In first year philosophy, I posed a thought experiment involving breakfast cereal that challenges concepts of God. I have since come across it in other forms, but this was the form in which I posed it. It is this: If God is omniscient, and omnipotent then man cannot have free will. The reason is this: If I have a choice of breakfast cereals to eat for breakfast tomorrow morning then God cannot tell me today which breakfast cereal I will eat, because then I may choose to eat the other breakfast cereal just to make a point. Either God does not know, and so is not omniscient; God cannot tell me, and so is not omnipotent; or I do not have the freedom to choose! I would appreciate your thoughts on this.

Accepted:
November 17, 2005

Comments

Your reasoning is very clever, and actually enjoys a significant history in philosophy--and also has several philosophers even today persuaded. So you're in good company.

Despite the cleverness, however, I am not persuaded that your reasoning is actually correct. The issue gets into some technical issues involving what is known as modal logic (the logic of possibility and necessity), but I think I might be able to explain why I am not persuaded by your argument in an intuitive way. Consider: what would show that you did not have free will regarding the cereal would be evidence that you could not do otherwise than what God knows you will do. God's knowing what you will do, however, only seems to show that you will not do otherwise--it doesn't show that you cannot or could not do otherwise. There are plenty of things that are the way they are, but could be otherwise. So similarly, from the fact that God's knowledge of the future would settle the question of how things will be, I do not see at all that it settles the question of how things could be. Without some further evidence, then, about what is possible for you (or necessary), I am unconvinced that divine foreknowledge proves anything about free will. Similarly, I see no reason why God couldn't tell us something, knowing what our reactions would be--without proving anything about our freedom. Again, knowing what will be (and thus will not be otherwise) is not the same as knowing that it must be or cannot be otherwise. Without this extra step--and I don't know where you would get that extra step--I think the problem in your thought experiment dissolves.

(Perhaps this is related to one of Nick's points.) God's knowing what I will choose is compatible with my choice being free. What God might know is what I will freely choose. Perhaps your thought is that if God knows this ahead of time, then I don't have the freedom to choose otherwise. But why not? If talk of God's knowledge is a colorful way of talking about what future tense statement it would have been true to utter in the past (namely, something like "He will choose Raisin Bran tomorrow"), then why think that that constrains one's freedom? Why not say that the future tense statemement that might have been uttered yesterday would have been true precisely because you did (freely) choose the Raisin Bran today?

One last thing: if God does indeed know that you will choose the Raisin Bran and God tells you this, is it really possible for you to choose otherwise just to irritate God? Well, it sure seems possible, in the sense that the Special K is within arm's reach, etc. But it's not really: if God knows that you will choose the Raisin Bran, then it's true that you will choose the Raisin Bran, and so you will choose the Raisin Bran. (You might compare such cases to the Time Travel paradoxes elsewhere on this site: in particular, to the question whether, if you were to go back in time, you could kill your earlier self. You can construct the example in such a way that it sure seems as if you could -- but in fact, that's not going to happen, because it's not what did happen.)