Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Omniscience voids Omnipotence in God's free will.

Omniscience voids Omnipotence in Free Will

(Note: The God in this, and future posts, is the God in Christian/Islam/Judaism tradition unless otherwise defined)

The issue is not about if you as an individual has free will, but rather if God Himself has free will. If he is All Powerful then he has to have a free will. He would have to have to power to act as he chooses, otherwise he is not all powerful.

However, if he is All Knowing then he already knows what decisions he will make. The problem is that if he is all powerful then he has the ability to change his mind but that implies that he was going to act differently before he changed his mind. Thus he is not all knowing as he did not know that he would change his mind later on.

The essence of this problem is that God himself cannot be all powerful and all knowing at the same time. This would seem to indicate that the people at the time wanted a God with all these wonderful attributes. Under intellectual criticism, however, this concept does not appear to hold.