In this clip Cy Kellett and apologist Joe Heschmeyer discuss the an argument against free will that claims to disprove Catholicism.
Transcript:
Caller: I am Catholic, but I’m on behalf of one of my brothers who is not Catholic. He’s atheist.
Cy: Gotcha.
Caller: And he always has this one argument that I just cannot combat. I am not sure how to go about talking about it. And I guess what he says is if God is omniscient, omnipotent, he knows all things. He’s all powerful. He knows the past, present, and future, right?
Cy: Yep.
Caller: That means he knows what’s going to happen. Like, he knows it’s going to happen by definition. He says the universe would be deterministic.
So then we would have no free will.
Joe: Yeah, that is a common objection. It doesn’t logically follow at all. Knowing what’s going to happen doesn’t mean that the person you know is going to do something doesn’t freely do it. Like, okay, the fact you might know, like, if I leave a diet Coke out in Cy’s office, he’s going to drink it. That doesn’t mean Cy doesn’t have free will. It might mean I know how Cy is going to use his free will.
Caller: Okay, so, okay, so then you come back saying something like, okay, yeah, if.
Joe: You watch, let’s say you record a sports game and then you watch it the next day, but you already saw the score, so you know how it’s going to turn out. Did the players still have free will?
Caller: This is true. Okay, I see what you’re saying there. He would probably come back saying like, okay, yeah, like, sure, they feel like they have free will in this, right? But like, again, like, say I watch a movie, right? And the person, like, he does their thing, he does what they do, then I watch it again, like, I know that they are going to do this. They can’t do something different, you know, than what they are already going to do.
Joe: This is where the recording kind of lags as an example. But that’s not because they don’t have free will. It’s because they’re literally not alive when you’re watching it again. Like you can watch an old-timey movie from 100 years ago. And so the issue isn’t that they’re like being forced against their will to do the show over again. It’s that you’re watching something that has already happened. So they’re not free to do something different because it’s in the past, but they were free when they did it to do the thing that they did.
Caller: Okay.
Joe: So even in that case, it’s not really deterministic. It’s just a case of the past is the past. Like, if you read a book about a past battle, you might know how the battle turns out. But that doesn’t mean that your reading the book forces the Spartans to behave as they did or whatever.
Caller: I see. Okay, that makes sense.
Cy: Starting to come together.
Caller: Yeah. I’m just trying to think of how I would go about making the argument for him in a way that, you know, he’d be able to.
Joe: Yeah. You know, an example I like to use from Greek mythology is Cassandra. So Cassandra was a doomed prophetess who knew the future, but no one listened to her. So she would try to warn them, and everyone just disregarded her warnings, and then they would do the things that caused the problem she was warning about. Now, her knowing what was going to happen didn’t limit their free will at all. Like, had they just listened, you know, like, it’s not a true story, obviously, but it shows that it isn’t. Like she’s forcing this event to happen. She doesn’t want the event to happen. Knowing about it doesn’t force its occurrence. This is a common kind of misconception.
And in the case of the way God knows things, it’s maybe worth pointing out that it’s not really that God knows the future in a knowledge sort of sense, like we would imagine or like would be true of, you know, Cassandra and the mythological example. It’s rather that God is outside of time, and so past, present, and future are all simultaneously present to him. So the whole notion of a before and after in terms of prediction, et cetera, is not real in the full sense. God is sort of standing back from temporality in a certain way and can see the whole thing, but each of the individual parts can still be free within that. Just because he can see how all of the parts fit together along all the centuries and everything else doesn’t mean that they’re not still free parts.
It can seem that way to us at a sort of intuitive level. But the minute you try to explain why it would be deterministic, I think it does fall apart because there’s too many counterexamples of us knowing something that’s going to happen, and it doesn’t control the outcome. You’re on a mountain and you see two cars going down the road and they’re going around a big curve. They don’t see each other. They’re going to crash into each other. Your knowledge isn’t forcing that to happen. Those cars could move out of the way, but you know from watching it that they’re not going to. That’s foreknowledge, but it’s not a deterministic sort of foreknowledge in the sense that you’re somehow forcing it to happen.
Caller: I like that example. I think I could work with that.
Cy: Steven, I want to give you a lot more to work with. We have a book by our colleague Trent Horn called *Answering Atheism* that will probably give you some more things to consider in these conversations with your brother. If you’d like it, just hang on the line. I have to take a break.
Right back with more *Why Aren’t You Catholic?* with Joe Heschmeyer on CATHOLIC ANSWERS Live.