The Free Will Of Humans Essay, Research Paper
The Free Will Of Humans You said, to have free will, you need choices, each one being avoidable. Yes. OK, I know that omniscience is incompatible with free will if you have omniscience yourself, but how does that interfere with the free will of humans? All right, the infallible knowledge of the future by any being, it doesn’t matter who has it, implies that the future exists. Because it is known to exist. Yes. So, assuming you are referring to an omniscient creator of humans, and ignoring that impossibility, it means everything we, as humans do, every choice we make is known to happen before we even do it. We are predetermined? Very much. Who makes our choices then? OK, start at the beginning. As the legend is told, we were created by an omniscient being who gave us free will. To have free will, we need to have choices, each one being avoidable and they have to be made by us, nobody else. Reasonable explanation. Any choice that is made, has to be made at the time we do it ourselves, which is when we are conscious. Why? Choices have to be made by someone, or they are not choices or conscious decisions, and if we do not do them, and the action still exists, someone else did. OK. My point here is that if the choices were known before, say, we were born, then they already existed before we had the ability to have the choice. Fate decided our choices. Let’s say there is an omniscient being who created us with a fate not decided by her. I think I see what you mean. It still works out the same. If the fate wasn’t decided by her, then there must have been a point where she did not know the fate of us, hence contradicting her very omniscience. She knows everything, therefore she cannot be ignorant of the choices we make, before our fate is chosen. Fair enough, so who chose our fate? Isn’t it obvious? If you set out to create something knowing the infinite possibilities how it may be created, and you choose one in particular, then all fate was decided by you. You could have chosen to select another possibility, but you didn’t!
Very well. Free will also implies that we are independent individuals. To really have free will, nothing can restrict our ability to choose. If I choose to jump over a sky scraper, I can’t do it because of my nature. We are restricted by our environment. Yes. But, we can choose things that aren’t restricted to the environment. What? We choose to imagine anything we want to. We have the ability to choose to believe or not to believe, to love or not to love. So this implies that our mind’s free will is existing beyond our physical environment. Like I said before, the choice has already been known, hence made by something else before you made it yourself. OK, so what are the conditions for us to have free will with a creator? The conditions? Well, I know what condition the creator must not have – omniscience!! Very well. You said before that it doesn’t matter who has omniscience, we do not have free will. That is because our path is already set. There is no need to know who, or what made the choices, because we know it wasn’t us. What implications does this have? The implications are disastrous that omniscience and free will are impossible. Take your example, an omniscient creator who is supposed to give us free will. Some legends have it that the same creator exists as also omnibenevolent, omnipotent, all loving and perfectly just individual. How is it disastrous? The existence of evil and omnibenevolence. It would totally shatter this legend. I already have. I think you mean the Judaeo-Christian god. I’ll let you decide. In conclusion, omniscience and free will are impossible together. Omniscient creators cannot, by any means, grant free will to her creations. So, if someone you know holds this belief that we have free will by an omniscient creator, then you can, with all confidence, tell this person that they are mistaken.