(urth) Theism Supports Free Will Better than Materialism Does

[Jeffery Wilson clueland.com]

On 10/10/2014 8:27 AM, Norwood, Frederick Hudson wrote:
> Of course God has free will.  But not Moses, as far as I can tell.

I believe this is somewhat backwards. God's omnipotent, omniscient, and 
eternal character exclude any process of decision or choice-making on 
His part. He is changeless and perfect, so there is no change of mind 
possible or necessary, and being eternal this is always the case.

Ironically, this also means that people *do* have free will, as my 
friend Bill Stoddard explains it:

"Now, if physical reality is essentially deterministic—if each 
fundamental physical entity, based on its nature, state, and 
relationships, is capable of only one specific next state and one 
specific action—then human mental processes are deterministic too, and 
we don't have free will. But if physical reality is essentially 
indeterministic—if there are occasions when an entity can enter one of 
two or more next states, or perform one of two or more actions, and 
which comes next is not merely unpredictable but truly random—then that 
doesn't give us any more free will, either. Having our actions changed 
from time to time by the throw of a set of cosmic dice does not equate 
to our being free to choose among different actions, or to determine our 
own destiny; it amounts to our being at the mercy of chance. So in a 
physicalistic view, genuine free will doesn't seem to make much sense. 
It's hard even to describe what it would consist in.

"In theism, on the other hand, we have a model where God knows all of 
our actions, past, present, and future, in a single timeless instant of 
comprehension. In effect, the entire history of the cosmos is a vast 
simulation model that God is running—except that God has infinite 
computational capacity and does not need time to run the simulation. But 
God is also able to interpret the thoughts and feelings and choices that 
the simulated particles constitute, and thus to simultaneously know the 
cosmos as a story. And as an author, God can enter into the story and 
identify with its characters. The capacity to do so is, in Christian 
terms, the Holy Spirit. But every author has the experience of 
characters saying, 'No, I wouldn't do that thing, I would do the other 
thing.' And God, having complete control over the whole narrative, can 
rewrite it instantaneously to conform to our saying that—rewrite it not 
on the basis of physical determinism, but on the basis of the content of 
our thoughts and feelings and desires. God can, if necessary, look back 
to the big bang and adjust the place where one specific quark appears to 
give rise to a cosmic history in which we choose salvation or damnation; 
or, if you prefer indeterminism, God can decide which random particle 
motions will occur in our brains instant to instant for the same 
purpose. What we want miraculously but subtly changes the whole cosmos 
to enable us to be more fully the characters we are. Free will is the 
gift of the Holy Spirit."

-- 
Jeff Wilson - < jwilson at clueland.com >
A&M Texarkana Computational Intelligence Lab
< http://www.tamut.edu/cil >