God & Free will
There are two ways to prove that God has no free will. We are assuming the following properties about God:
| Omniscient |
all knowing |
| Omni Benevolent |
all loving; perfectly good |
| Omnipotent |
all powerful |
| Omni Present |
simultaneously present everywhere |
Morality
Out of the possible options in a situation, God always makes the best choice because he is benevolent. He cannot do something that is less moral than something else is. Therefore, in every situation, God only has one choice: The most moral one. It is easy to see that God itself does not have free will. It can make no choices; every moment in time for an omniscient-benevolent God only allows one action.
Knowledge
If a God is omniscient, he has no free will.
As soon as an omniscient being comes into existence it already knows every action it will make. In effect, God is an observer. An omniscient being has no free will, its entire future is set out and it has no choice but to follow its predestined path. To change its mind would be to contradict its knowledge about what actions it will take, therefore, omniscience is incompatible with free will.
An omniscient being cannot have free will. A benevolent God cannot have free will.
God is doubly denied his free will if he contains these properties. What is the point of saying that God is moral if it cannot choose to do anything bad? How can it be a moral being, if it has no choice? The answer is that God is not a moral being; it is a morally neutral being [if it exists].
Arguments
One common counter-argument goes like this: God knows what you are going to do, yes. However, he does not cause you to do it. He simply observes your actions. His prior knowledge does not cause you, to take that action.
A reasonable argument, but quite flawed. Let us say I use a time machine to travel forwards in time to next week. I write down all your actions on Friday in a book, seal the book and travel back again. I present you with the sealed book and tell you not to open it until the end of Friday. When you read it, you see that I had prior knowledge of all your actions. Did I remove your free will? NO, I simply observed.
I did not set in motion all the events leading up to your actions, from the creation of the universe. At the moment God created the universe, surely He knew all that would happen throughout it's entire history. If so, then He is directly responsible for all our actions, we have no more choice in what we do than a clockwork toy does. If not, then we are part of some huge experiment which God set in motion without the faintest idea of what would happen - he sits back and observes as people die in terrible wars and plagues, ticking off boxes on His clipboard and writing notes like some emotionless scientist.
Another counter-argument again flawed, God exists throughout all time, yes, but he does not actually know what action you will perform until you perform it. He knows what choices you might take, but not the precise one it self.
This is quite absurd. It limits God within time. God, who is supposed, be unlimited, existing outside of time, surely cannot be restricted by his own creation - time.
It also suggests that God's mind is filled with all the possible actions of all humans (and, presumably, all other life) throughout all of time. There is a portion of the mind of God devoted to whether or not I am going to pick my nose during every nanosecond of time, which possible objects your eyes could focus on at any particular instant and which possible routes, to the nearest billionth of a millimetre you could travel on your work way to work. There are an infinite number of possible actions that each one of us could perform during our lifetime. God cannot, by definition, know an infinite number of things. (For the same reason that he cannot make a rock to heavy for him to lift, or create a square circle; it is a logical impossibility; meaningless word play).
Try this, lift your hand into the air and then move it slowly in a circle. How many other possible motions can you make with your hand? Obviously, an infinite number (although many will look quite similar). It is impossible for you to make your hand follow that exact path through space again. There are an infinite number of ways you could wiggle a finger or waggle your head. There are an infinite number of values between 0.0 and 1.0 (you could keep dividing a number forever); there are an infinite number of angles within a circle; there are an infinite number of positions to place an apple on a table, or a star in space, or a toothbrush in your mouth. Does God know what all these are? If something is infinite, as are the possible motions of your hand, then it cannot be known completely. Therefore, omniscience itself is a logical impossibility. The idea of an omniscient being can be dismissed, quite literally, with a wave of the hand...
This could be countered by arguing that God only knows about all the big decisions you might consciously make, he is not concerned with finger wiggling and hand waving. Nevertheless, how does he decide in advance what he is going to have knowledge of and what is not important enough to know about? Wiggle your fingers now, did God know you were going to do that or not? Was it below his importance-threshold? The more you think about it, the more ridiculous it all becomes.
A third argument states that, God can know all your actions, but he chooses not to, to ensure that you have free will.
This is also absurd. God denies himself access to his own knowledge?!? The main problem with this argument is that it defines what God is, how he works, etc. How do you know that God does this? To use this argument is to state that you understand God's mind, which is supposed to incomprehensible to mere mortals. It is a true cop-out; it cannot be disproved and neatly solves the problem. However, it is up to the person using this argument to prove how they know God does this, not just use it because it neatly sorts things out.
If you truly believe that you have free will, then how can you state that God is truly omniscient? If God does not know what you are going to do, then He is no more omniscient than your great grand mother was.
Theists are quite happy to debate many aspects of their beliefs, but when it comes to free will, the mental barriers slam down into place. People get unreasonably upset and overly sensitive by this argument and simply refuse to discuss it any further. It is very odd. I can only suppose that it is because it exposes such a gaping hole in their deeply held beliefs that they simply refuse to let themselves think about it, because they know that their beliefs will not stand up in the face of this sort of simple logic.
As an afterthought, if God truly cannot see the future, for whatever reasons, then aren't all religious prophecies/predictions worthless? If even God does not know if it will come true, then what is the point of it? On the other hand, if God knows it is going to come true (e.g. a certain person will become King at a certain time) then how could the people involved avoid the outcome, where is their free will?
