Quick argument against Free Agency

[_Kittens_and_Jesus]

God is Lord over free agency. If the following is true:

God >> Free Agency (God is infinitely more powerful than F.A.)

Then free agency is near zero at the level of God. In other words, there is no free agency in God because he knew Bob (bless his soul) would not make it back.

But mortals work on a different level where:

Mortal < Free Agency (free agency is more powerful than the mortals)

Under this condition, free agency exists.

But God is supposed to be omniscient and omnipotent which means He knew how his creation would turn out and had the power to make it turn out any way He wanted. He created the universe the way He did with the knowledge and power to make it any way He wanted. Our choices are made based upon our environment, genes, and experiences and all of those things were created by the will of God. Therefore God is the only one who has the ability to choose if He is omnipotent and omniscient.

[_Tarski]

I disagree.
Even in a universe with free agency, or anything of any sort for that matter, it will always be true that
either X or not X.

So what?The statement is still true if X is the statement that Joe will freely choose righteousness.

Either he will or he will not. How could anything of interest follow from this?

To me, any notion of determinism that is not vacuous or ill-conceived must say that material spatiotemporal conditions in the past determine such conditions in the future (in the spirit of differential equations).

But, the statement "X or not X" doesn't seem to me to be a material spatiotemporal condition at all. It isn't a condition of the past per se. To say that it is "true in the past" seems little more than a figure of speech. It is simply true. It is a tautology. It isn't indexed by time is it?

[_MrStakhanovite]

Even in a universe with free agency, or anything of any sort for that matter, it will always be true that either X or not X.

Not exactly, the LDS notion of Free Agency requires (in my opinion) is libertarianism, which has to deny that the future is not real. Some strands may claim that the past and present are real, or someone like William Lane Craig will say only the present is real.

So I think the honest Mormon has to deny that the disjunction is true, because it lacks a truth-maker, or what ever relation you want to make a proposition true.

[_Tarski]

Even in a universe with free agency, or anything of any sort for that matter, it will always be true that either X or not X.

Not exactly, the LDS notion of Free Agency requires (in my opinion) is libertarianism, which has to deny that the future is not real. Some strands may claim that the past and present are real, or someone like William Lane Craig will say only the present is real.

So I think the honest Mormon has to deny that the disjunction is true, because it lacks a truth-maker, or what ever relation you want to make a proposition true.

It doesn't matter. The statement "X or not X" is true under any and all circumstances.

If X is a meaningful and unambiguous statement (say about about my future actions), then either it is true or it is not.

The statement "the future is not real" is not totally clear. Do you mean it is not actual?

In any case, let us suppose that the future is not real in whatever sense you like. OK?

Now let X be the statement "Joe will choose to kill bill at noon exactly two years from today"

Now consider "X or not X".
Tell me a possible world where this statement would be false.

Even if the future never comes or is unreal, we would still have "not X". Even if Joe didn't exist it would still be true.

We are not claiming that we know X and we are not claiming that we know "not X".
But we do know "X or not X" since it is a tautology. (I am assuming that X is sufficiently clear to bear the burden of logical analysis,

For example, I wouldn't even bother wondering about the statement "Joe's love for his will wife is true love and will always be very strong".

The only problem is with the meaningfulness of X. If the statement has any degree of ambiguity, then maybe we are not safe proceeding with formal logic etc. In fact, I do believe that the main problem in these discussions is the difficulty in achieving sufficient conceptual clarity on the very notions of "choice", "free choice" "agency", "self-hood and identity" etc.

It may be counter-intuitive but it isn't so easy to explain the problem with the following:

"The universe ineluctably unfolded in such a way that Joe freely chose to kill Bill."

or

"Bill knew he would freely choose to kill Bill"

or

"It will certainly turn out that John will make at least one free choice".

Is there a direct logical contradiction in any of those? It would be boring to simply give a stipulative definition of "free" so as to exclude all of the above.

So again we are back to asking about the very meaning and conditions of "free choice" "or free action".

Frankly, if I find out that the universe is physically deterministic but that my actions are still best explained in terms of my having relevant reasons, considerations, thoughts and desires (supervening on brain states) and if there is no overt ordinary coercion such as the use of drugs, handcuffs, restraints, violence etc, then I am fine calling that freedom. I don't care if my freely choosing to spare Bill was in principle determined by the initial physical conditions of the universe.

This doesn't bother me anymore that being told than the future will turn out one way or another.
I am tempted to say "I am destined to be free".

It is crazier imagine that nothing at all determines my actions (not even anything about me or my soul).

Edit: One last thought.
Suppose that when I act freely it is proceeded by an intention. Suppose that one millisecond before freely doing action F I know that I will take action (barring interference).

In other words, is an act only free if you never know what it will be even the instant before doing it? Must I be surprised by my action for it to be free?

[_Tobin]

Due to Einstein's theories, an observer far from us (or moving at relativistic speeds in relation to us) could potentially see everything that has ever happened or will happen on our planet. That would mean the past and future are fixed and there is no free agency.

[_quark]

It's time to stop kidding ourselves, folks. Even God doesn't know everything. Please consider for a moment that this might actually be a good thing.

[_brade]

If it is true that Bob would accept or reject the Gospel before he actually made the choice, then we cannot say Bob freely chose the Gospel, rather it was predetermined that he would and could not change it otherwise.

To what degree of probability was it known that Bob would accept or reject the Gospel?

I just disproved your argument. The problem is not that black and white arguments are wrong because of shades of grey, but that it's not a true black and white argument until the argument can be completely reduced; it's a question of resolution. While one can always give a correct answer, one may or may not have enough information to give THE correct answer.

BC, please read a bit more carefully. In this case it isn't a matter of probability. This is an argument against the compatibility of God knowing such future states of affairs (not merely having a really good idea of the probable outcome) and such things being a matter of libertarian choice.

If you want to say that God only has a really good idea of the probable outcome, go right ahead. But if that's your view you have to concede that God does not know the truth value of certain kinds of propositions about the future.

Edit: As a side note, I've had this conversation with lots of members over the years and most are unable to grasp the nuances of the problem. Most of them want to assert both that God does have infallible foreknowledge of their future choices and that their choices are of a libertarian sort, if they're sharp enough to realize that if those two things are true then something is wrong with our logic, they are happy to throw logic under the bus, but don't grasp the implications of that, because they happily use the same logical rules when, for example, they make choices at the supermarket.

[_Sethbag]

It would be like saying:

In the pre-existence it was true that in the future Bob Loblaw would flip a coin, and either it would come up heads or it would come up tails.

That is exactly what I'm saying. What this shows is that there is a future state of affairs, which implies some kind of determinism, which then makes the kind of incompatible free agency LDS theology needs hard to come by.

Is it that Bob Loblaw would flip a coin that is the future state of affairs you believe implies a kind of determinism, or the tautology that it would either come up heads or it would come up tails?

If it's the statement that Bob would someday flip a coin, then what do you think of the following?

"In the pre-existence it was true that in the future Bob Loblaw might flip a coin, and that if he did, either it could come up heads or it would come up tails."

If it was already determined that Bob would or would not accept the Gospel before Bob was even organized, much less passed through the veil, then his accountability disappears.

I'm not sure I can agree on this. If the circumstances of Bob's organization put him in a situation where he would have to confront accepting the Gospel or not, then the statement is more an acknowledgement of that.

I am probably still not understanding your main point. If I hold up a gun and put my finger on the trigger and say I am going to fire this bullet, and it will either hit my target, or it won't, are you saying that the future is already determined in some way?

[_brade]

I am probably still not understanding your main point. If I hold up a gun and put my finger on the trigger and say I am going to fire this bullet, and it will either hit my target, or it won't, are you saying that the future is already determined in some way?

The short version is that if there are facts right now about what you will do in the future, then you can't do otherwise. Being able to do otherwise is what it is to have free will (in the libertarian, and I'd argue LDS, sense). If you can't do otherwise, then you don't have freewill. So either there are facts about what you will do in the future and you don't have free will, or you have free will and there are no such facts. If there are no such facts, then God can't know what you will do, because there is nothing to be known.

Stak's argument is more sophisticated than this and, I think, avoids some complaints by using disjunctions, but the result ends up being the same.

[_EAllusion]

This argument seems already premised on determinism being true. It doesn't require there to be a future. It requires the future to be set such that you can make factual claims about it now.