Free Will contradicts the idea of an Omniscient God

These are adjectives often applied to the christian god - he is all-powerful, unlimited in his ability, and knows all that can be known. We are often told that God knows all things throughout the entirety of time and space. Everything that can be known, he knows. Everything in the past, present and future is known to God. Fair enough. I wouldn't expect anything less from the Creator Of The Universe.

There's just one small problem...

Free Will. Religion teaches that God gave us free will, so that we may make our own decisions, decide our own futures, with no coercion from God. If we do good things or bad things it is entirely down to us, God just sits back and watches over us.

This makes no sense at all.
If God knows all things throughout time (as he must, if he is omniscient), then he knows every action I perform, every decision I make throughout my life, before I have done them. If God knows exactly what I am going to do on 10th July, 2030, then how can I do anything other than that?

God, however, being the Creator, had prior knowledge of your actions at the time of the Creation, billions of years ago. He set the universe in motion, knowing all that would happen throughout time.

Experiment

Do something, anything at all, that you don't think God could have possibly known you were going to do.

Can you do it? Can you surprise God?

If you can, then God is not omniscient - he is not all-knowing. And if he is not omniscient, then how can he be omnipotent - unlimited in his ability?

If you cannot, then how can you think you have free will? You cannot do anything other than that which God already knows you are going to do.

As an example, let's say you are walking down a corridor:
At the end of the corridor are two identical doors. Does God knowwhich door you will take? If he does, is it at all possible for you to take the other door? You have no choice in the matter, you have no free will.
If God does not know exactly which door you will take, then he quite simply is not omniscient.

Another example:
Does God know what I am going to eat for breakfast tomorrow?
I'll make it easy for Him : it could be either toast, cereal, porridge or nothing. Four options. Is it possible that God, who is infinitely powerful, in all places at once, having knowledge of all things, who created the space/time universe, who is utterly un-restrained by any physical laws and exists outside the space/time universe, does not know what I'm going to eat for breakfast in the morning?
How ridiculous is that? This omnipotent mega-being cannot accurately look 24 hours into my future? Think about it.

Fourteen billion years ago, God created the universe. At the instant of creation, God knew the precise details of every event during the entire history of the newly-created universe. He knew how the hydrogen would disperse, and eventually condense to form stars and galaxies. He knew which stars would go nova in order to create the elements that will form planets, and He knew which planets would form in orbits suitable to develop and sustain life. He knew how the moon would orbit the Earth, making tides and washing the beaches. He knew where and when the first self-replicating molecules would form, and when the first amphibians would step onto land. He knew about the rise and fall of the reptiles, dinosaurs, birds, mammals, flowering plants and all the other freak accidents that directed the genetic flow through the millions of generations of plants and animals - the meteor strikes, forest fires, plagues, floods and landslides. He knew exactly what would happen to every single one of your ancestors - who would be born, who would die, who would marry whom, and so on, until you appeared. He knew everything that would happen to you in your life - where you would go to school, your exam grades, what jobs you had, where you lived, why you decided to build a shelf, where you earned the money to buy the hammer, where you made marks on the wall to get the shelf nice and level. All these things He knew would come to be as he Created the universe, right up to the exact microsecond that the hammer hit your thumb. When He created it all, He did so sure in the knowledge that at a certain point in time, you would be swearing loudly and holding your thumb under the cold tap (as well as, of course, everything else happening in the universe at that time). God created the universe so that events would unfold in this exact manner. He could have made it so that you were never born, or so that humans never appeared. He could have made it so that every single thing happened differently, or everything was the same apart from your accident.

Either way, you have no free will in the matter. The universe was made in such a way that everything you do must necessarily happen. Assuming, of course, that an omniscient, infallible God is behind it all...

Arguments against

A reasonable argument, but quite flawed. Let's say I use a time-machine to travel forwards in time to next week. I write down all your actions on Thursday 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 Thursday. When you read it, you see that I had prior knowledge of all your actions. Did I remove your free will? NO, because 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 itself.

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 millimeter 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's a logical impossibility; meaningless word-play).

This might sound a little pedantic. But try this : lift your hand into the air - 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's not concerned with finger-wiggling and hand-waving. But 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. 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.

I have used this line of reasoning on several occasions when debating religion with theists, and the effect is quite suprising. 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 by this argument and simply refuse to discuss it any further. It's 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 completely worthless? If even God does not know if it will come true, then what's the point of it? Or, 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?

© Adrian Barnett 1998
Last updated - 13th September1998