Can a Timeless Omniscient Being Allow for Self-Will?
Question: is an omniscience omnibelevolent god compatible with free will?
I am not going to use the term free-will because it has an unexpectedly technical definition which not quite coherent, so I will use self-will to mean that we choose what we want to do.
What does it mean to say that God is outside of time? How does one that is inside of time relate the Gods-eye point of view outside of time? Can God have complete knowledge of what we will do in the future, and then at the same time can we have self-will? It is an ancient question about the tradeoff between will and religion.
Setting
Premise 1: Assume an omniscient God who transcends time and has infallible knowledge of everything.
Premise 2: Assume Mark, a mortal human, can choose either A or B. Prior to making his choice, he is genuinely free to choose either A or B.
Premise 3: On Tuesday, Mark will make a choice between A and B.
Question: As of Monday, is one of the following statements true while the other is not true?
- God knows Mark's choice on Tuesday will be A.
- God knows Mark's choice on Tuesday will be B.
Let's just stop there. What does it mean to ask about God's state of mind at a particular time, on a particular day? If God is completely outside of time, then it might might have more than one value at the same time. Let's borrow from quantum mechanics, and say that at any given point in time, a being out of time might have any number of statuses superpositioned together. Let that sink in.
Universe and Creator
I find it helpful to think of God creating the universe in the same way that a programmer creates a simulation world. I am not saying that the universe is a simulation, but I am saying that the relationship between a creator god and the universe they create, is the same as the relationship between a programmer and the simulation they make. To make discussion easier, I will name the programmer "God". And she is a woman (simply to fight the stereotype of all programmers being male).
The programmer God creates the simulated universe out of nothing. One moment there is no simulated universe, and the next moment there is. It is nothing short of creation. Within the simulation there is a time, but that has no relation to the time that God lives in. The simulation might take 10 hours to model a minute or it is might take a minute to model ten hours. The time within the simulation has nothing to do with the time outside the simulation. God is truly outside of the time of the simulation.
Say then that God runs the simulation to Monday and then forward to Tuesday. At that point he sees that Mark makes the choice of A. God then sets the simulation BACK to Monday. Now we are in the situation that God knows (when the simulation is on Monday) perfectly that Mark will choose A on Tuesday. There is no limitation to Mark's self will.
Superposition
From the point of view of Mark, what does Mark see as the knowledge of the programmer? Well that is hard to describe, because simulation of Monday ran once when the programmer did not know anything, and then Monday ran again with the programmer knowing the future.
The programmer's knowledge of the future matters only if the programmer manipulates the simulation. If the programmer tweaks the simulation on Monday, he does so with the knowledge of both the past and the future of the simulation. If that tweak changes Mark's choice to be something unexpected, the simulation can be wound back once again to Monday, and the programmer now knowing the new future. This can be done as many times as necessary until it is the case that on Monday the programmer really does know the future.
Within the simulation, Mark experiences Monday with all possibilities simultaneously: there is a Monday where the God did not know the future, a Monday where God knew Mark would choose A and a Monday where God knew that Mark would choose B.
You might say that from Mark's point of view, God knew all three things simultaneously, in a kind of superposition. That is probably the best way that a being withing the simulation can understand a being that is outside of time: God's knowledge is actually a superposition of all possible futures, that superposition collapsing to single value when the future becomes the present.
Multiple Worlds
The Multiple Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics predicts something similar to this. God's knowledge is a superposition of two different futures. The difference is that when Mark makes the choice, the universe splits into two: one universe where Mark chooses A, and one where he chooses B. God, similarly splits, with half always knowing that Mark would choose A, and the other half always knowing that Mark would choose B. It turns out the Mark makes both choices, and God knew about both choices all along. All possible universes, with all possible choices, and all possible tweaks from God, are then played out in parallel. This is a fun concept to contemplate, however it is probably completely inaccurate with regards to real quantum mechanics so lets just leave it there.
Tapestry
Another way to view the relationship is that God sees the entire history of the universe laid out like a tapestry, with the future to the right, and the past to the left, and now is a vertical line between them. God is able to "see" Tuesday and Monday simultaneously.
Still we imagine that God experiences a different kind of time: god-time. God looks at Tuesday, and then decides to make a tweak to Monday. That tweak might change the whole future. He glances over at Tuesday, decides he does not like the result of that tweak, so he adjusts Monday again, further altering the future in simulation time.
If God is actively making modifications to the tapestry, then God does so with more or less full knowledge of both the future and the past. Another way to say this is if God feels her knowledge of the future is not complete enough, God can run the simulation forward and gain perfect knowledge of the future, before making any tweak at any time.
If the tweak to Monday does not have the intended effect in the future, God can make another tweak to Monday, and see how that effects the future. Using knowledge of the future, God can make as many tweaks to the present until satisfied. Another way to say this is when God makes the final adjustment to Monday, it is done with a complete knowledge that the future will turn out exactly as expected.
Is Mark Free?
As God makes tweaks to the universe, it might affect on Mark. Mark is after all part of the universe. Elsewhere I show that self-will is determined, yet it is determined by the part of the universe that is Mark. There is no question that Mark determines his own actions.
God can still manipulate Mark's choices. For example, on Tuesday Mark chooses to eat Cherry Garcia ice cream. God might then change the universe, swapping the ice cream available to be Rocky Road. Because Mark does not like Rocky Road, Mark will choose not to eat any ice cream at all.
Mark makes his own choice in every case, but God can then manipulate Mark's choice by manipulating the situation that Mark is in.
We are forced to conclude that within the simulation Mark determines his own actions as freely as he ever was. Mark is in fact an agent in the simulation. But God can manipulate choices by placing him in different situations. We have no control over our situations. You can't eat Cherry Garcia when the only ice cream available is Rocky Road.
This puts Mark in a strange ethical position from God's point of view. Mark is responsible to make the best choice, but the best choice might still be a very bad choice.
This is one of the the problems with translating "timeless" into "timeful". Mark might still be situationally free to make choices, but a timeless God would always be able to manipulate the situations.
Jadaism and Christianity and Religion
Armed with this understanding of what a timeless God really means, let's consider some of the myths of the most common religions.
Consider Noah's Flood
If God created humans, the descendants of Adam, that then turned bad and needed to be completely drowned, then God had a complete full knowledge that they would turn bad when they were created. A God outside of time could simply go back to the time of creation, and make humans better, or change the situation of the world. God could continue to change the initial conditions so that the "bad human" scenario no longer resulted.
Given a timeless God, one must conclude that God created the universe will full and complete knowledge that those descendants of Adam would have to be drowned. You can not save God by blaming the free will of the people to go bad. If Noah was somehow good, while Adam was bad, God could simply keep tweaking the universe until Adam was good in the same way that Noah turned out to be. With a timeless God, humans that go bad must be blamed on God.
What if there is no way to create a perfect Adam? What if the progress of the universe between Adam and Noah was necessary to create humans that could be good. This has the implication that God did not create mankind in a final form. It implies that mankind itself can not be created, but that mankind must evolve through the trials of the universe, and that creation itself depends on this evolution. That is in direct contradiction to the claim that God created the universe at a point in time.
The second problem with the idea that humans had to evolve between Adam and Noah is that you have to throw omni-benevolence out the window. God is clearly sacrificing all those people drowned in the flood for the purpose of producing Noah. God does not give a tinker's dam for those people drowned in the process of producing a good Noah. God's love is not for people, but instead for the idea that he can create a universe with good people in it -- after some process of hit or miss.
Consider Original Sin
If God tells Adam "don't eat the fruit of this tree" he does so with full knowledge that Adam will eat from the tree. If God didn't like that, she could roll the simulation back, make a change, and run it again. A timeless God gives tacit approval to everything that happens in the universe.
Maybe God sees Adam eating the fruit, but in that also sees the opportunity to romp across earth as Jesus for 33 years, and decides that the Jesus experience is worth it. Therefor, God is tacitly deciding that eating the fruit is OK. Eating the fruit can not be "bad" because God decided that eating the fruit was the best possible outcome. Or putting it a different way: if God wanted Adam to not eat the fruit she could take the simulation back to before the event and maybe, for example, move the tree to the other side of the Earth.
Holocaust
Think of any event in history that would normally be identified as "evil" and you have to ask the question: why did a timeless God allow that to persist? A God with even a modicum of care for the human beings involved would surely try some other paths. For every evil event in history, one has to assume that there was no better alternative possible.
Pangloss
This analysis brings us to the oddly panglossian conclusion that the existence of a timeless benevolent God would mean we live the best of all possible universes. If there was a possibility for a better universe -- according to the assessment of God -- then God could change the universe so that it was that way. Because God is outside of time, there is no bad occurrence that must be tolerated. Since all improvements can be made, there is no improvement that has not been made, therefor we live in the best of all possible universes.
I am not rejecting the pangloss conclusions merely because the universe doesn't seem to me to be best possible. That would be the fallacy of incredulity. The best possible universe might still have some very disagreeable things in it. I am saying that every decision by every agent within that universe has been found to be acceptable in some way by God. No better action is possible.
Conclusions
Alternatively we might use this as a reason to conclude there is no God that exists outside of time to make the universe the best possible. This is just the universe that happened. That is actually a most reasonable conclusion.
Any God existing outside of time would be able to go back and perfect any universe. If there was a timeless God, we would have to conclude that everything, including this document, is the best that it could be.
Another conclusion is that if a timeless God does not go back and perfect the universe, that lazy God does not really care about anything in the universe. Thus benevolence is not a feature of such a God.
It is even possible to conclude that there is an evil God who created the universe on purpose to torture the beings within it, but that strikes me as not credible: why go to the bother of creating a universe just to torture the inhabitants? I don't see any motivation for that.
No, I am afraid the only reasonable conclusion is that that a benevolent timeless God can not possibly exist.