Undivided Looking

Putting everything together, I have argued—using plausibility arguments, not strictly deductive proofs—that it is reasonable to believe in a metaphysically ultimate being, and that given the reality of Ethics or Consciousness, it is probable that it is more like a mind than like a set of equations.  More specifically, my arguments pointed to just one eternal God, existing necessarily, who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and good, who is the source of all other things, yet is distinct from them, and who appreciates mathematical beauty, conscious life, and ethical behavior.

Of course there are a lot of mysteries left in this view.  Even though God is supposed to be the explanation of all other things, we cannot predict, from this information alone, exactly which laws of physics God would select, nor whether he would intervene in the Universe thus created in other ways.  Not sharing the divine knowledge about what is best, we have to make additional stipulations about the world he has created, adding to the complexity of any specific Theistic worldview.

But then again, Naturalism by itself cannot tell us either (apart from experiment) which specific laws of nature to expect.  All views contain a certain amount of irreducible mystery.  The difference is that Naturalism hides or denies the mysteries, and pretends to solve problems that it cannot possibly really solve, while Theism puts them up-front and center and does the best it can to fit them into a consistent picture of the world.

It does not matter so much whether you are convinced that my conclusions have to be right.  Maybe there were several places in the argument where I selected one of two paths, but you think it was a toss-up, or that the other way was somewhat more plausible.  That's part of the hazards of armchair reasoning.  Personally I am primarily concerned with the arguments for Theism as a prelude to Christianity, which is founded on the Resurrection of Christ and the testimony of God's Spirit, not philosophical discourse.  But plausibility arguments still have their place.  If you are thirsting after goodness and beauty and meaning, and if you learn that there could well be a fountain capable of slaking that thirst, shouldn't this increase your incentive to search for it?

A purely intellectual philosophy can only get you so far.  Actual religion involves opening yourself up to the divine being, over a continued period of time, allowing God to get hold of you.  Any approach must be by his initiative rather than yours, but your attitude can determine whether or not you are receptive to his advances.  Without this, philosophy is sterile.  If it advances only to savoir, conceptual knowledge, it might as well have remained atheistic.  All of these philosophical arguments are only there to help you make further steps, to connaître or knowledge by acquaintance.  Arguing for the existence of the Good is one thing; tasting the reality of the Holy is another.

When that happens, the purely intellectual arguments—and the doubts which are a necessary corollary of any honest attempt to evaluate them—can be kicked aside like a ladder that has served its purpose, and replaced with something far better.

Having described briefly the bearing of both Ethics and Consciousness on the nature of the fundamental reality, let's ask whether the source of these things would really be the same thing as a god, to whom one could have a religious and/or personal relationship.  There are various half-way houses for people who see defects in the conventional materialistic narrative, but aren't willing to go “all the way”.

I've had people tell me that they believe there is “Something” out there, but not God.  This is about as vague of a worldview as can be conceived, but I assume from context that they are not merely asserting that there exists at least one object (such as a rock or a tree)—no, their “Something” is more transcendental than that, and is intended to fill a quasi-religious niche.  Whether through mystical experience, philosophical argument, or just wishful thinking, they feel that there is something numinous or spiritual about existence, but organized religion turns them off and they feel it must be something quite different from conventional religious concepts of God.

My Ph.D. advisor, Ted Jacobson, who considers himself an atheist, nevertheless tells me he thinks there is some type of “cosmic consciousness” in which we participate.  I guess the Universe is observing itself through us, or something like that.  But I feel that this view is getting dangerously close to Theism.

One of the recurring themes in this exploration is this: even if the existence of God cannot be proven conclusively by pure Reason, there are plenty of things which nonreligious people are motivated to believe in, which turn out on inspection to be dangerously close to Theism.  Universal laws, objective ethics, cosmic consciousness: all of them smell in certain respects like a certain Somebody.

And if the Something really is a Somebody, then even when you are most alone, your life is a dialogue rather than a monologue.  One day, that seemingly impersonal brightness that hovers over existence, may suddenly manifest as a voice speaking to you, that knows your name.

Of course you cannot force God to reveal himself to you.  Any approach must be on his side.  In retrospect, it is clear to those chosen by God that nothing they did beforehand caused them to deserve or merit the experience of God.  It is gratis, an undeserved gift, which comes in spite of human resistance and even deliberate ignorance.

And yet that does not mean that preparation is unimportant.  The freedom of God is not an excuse for human laziness.  Even at the level of human experience, you cannot force somebody to fall in love with you, nor force yourself to fall in love with somebody else.  But you can be the sort of person to whom it happens more easily—fortune favors the prepared.  "Ask, and you will receive.  Seek, and you will find.  Knock, and the door will be opened to you."  It matters if you have a heart which is receptive to truth, and beauty, and ethical goodness.  Those who practice certain disciplines are more likely to find God, or rather more likely to be found by him.  These disciplines can include:

1. philosophy not as an intellectual game, but as a genuine search for truth that makes a difference to how you live your life,
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2. an attitude of attentive waiting, not forcing yourself to have spiritual experiences, yet being open to them when they occur, and choosing to remember and ponder them,
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3. diligently choosing to expose yourself to various religious communities and texts, in order to see whether any of them know something you don't, searching for serious truth and holiness rather than conformity to your personal prejudices,
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4. prayer: speaking to God and asking him to reveal himself to you, if he exists, in a way of his own choosing, and also to help you with whatever problems concern you,
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5. and most importantly, genuinely trying as best you can to be an ethical person who is open to serving, loving, and welcoming other people (note: if you feel you have succeeded, then your standards are probably much too low).

From the outside, it may appear that religious believers trick themselves into having religious experiences by a sort of self-hypnosis: that the preparation is what causes us to believe.  Presumably that is true for some.  Yet many of us on the inside know that the most earnest preparation can lead to seeming dryness and absence, and then at other times God breaks in on us in a completely unexpected, surprising, and perhaps even unwelcome way.

Perhaps Ted will have an unpleasant surprise at some point in the future, as St. Lewis did. The following excerpt is from Lewis' autobiography, Surprised by Joy.  We pick him up after he has already been led out of a materialistic form of Atheism into philosophical Idealism (a position similar to Pantheism) which he arrived at partly by means of Owen Barfield's “Argument from Reason” (which I do not myself accept as valid, by the way).  St. Lewis describes his conversion to Theism (not to Christianity, that came later) as follows:

I was now teaching philosophy (I suspect very badly) as well as English.  And my watered Hegelianism wouldn't serve for tutorial purposes.  A tutor must make things clear.  Now the Absolute cannot be made clear.  Do you mean Nobody-knows-what, or do you mean a superhuman mind and therefore (we may as well admit) a Person?  After all, did Hegel and Bradley and all the rest of them ever do more than add mystifications to the simple, workable, theistic idealism of Berkeley?  I thought not.  And didn't Berkeley's “God” do all the same work as the Absolute, with the added advantage that we had at least some notion of what we meant by Him?  I thought He did.  So I was driven back into something like Berkeleyism, but Berkeley with a few top dressings of my own.  I distinguished this philosophical “God” very sharply (or so I said) from “the God of popular religion.”  There was, I thought, no possibility of being in a personal relation with Him.  For I thought He projected us as a dramatist projects his characters, and I could no more “meet” Him, than Hamlet could meet Shakespeare.  I didn't call him “God” either; I called him “Spirit”.  One fights for one's remaining comforts.

Then I read Chesterton's Everlasting Man [online] and for the first time saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense.  Somehow I contrived not to be too badly shaken.  You will remember that I already thought Chesterton the most sensible man alive “apart from his Christianity”.  Now I veritably believe, I thought—I didn't of course say; words would have revealed the nonsense—that Christianity itself was very sensible “apart from its Christianity.”  But I hardly remember, for I had not long finished The Everlasting Man when something far more alarming happened to me.  Early in 1926 the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good.  “Rum thing”, he went on, “All that stuff of Frazer's about the Dying God.  Rum thing.  It almost looks as if it had really happened once.”  To understand the shattering impact of it, you would need to know the man (who has certainly never since showed any interest in Christianity).  If he, the cynic of cynics, the toughest of the tough, were not—as I would still have put it—“safe,” where could I turn?  Was there then no escape?

The odd thing was that, before God closed in on me, I was in fact offered what now appears as a moment of wholly free choice.  In a sense.  I was going up Headington Hill on the top of a bus.  Without words and (I think) almost without images, a fact about myself was somehow presented to me.  I became aware that I was holding something at bay, or shutting something out.  Or, if you like, that I was wearing some stiff clothing, like corsets, or a suit of armor, as if I were a lobster.  I felt myself being, there and then, given a free choice. I could open the door or keep it shut; I could unbuckle the armor or keep it on. Neither choice was presented as a duty; no threat or promise was attached to either, though I knew that to open the door or to take off the corslet meant the incalculable.  The choice appeared to be momentous but it was also strangely unemotional. I was moved by no desires or fears.  In a sense I was not moved by anything.  I chose to open, to unbuckle, to loosen the rein.  I say, “I chose,” yet it did not really seem possible to do the opposite.  On the other hand, I was aware of no motives.  You could argue that I was not really a free agent, but I am more inclined to think that this came nearer to being a perfectly free act than most that I have ever done.  Necessity may not be the opposite of freedom, and perhaps a man is the most free when, instead of producing motives, he could only say, “I am what I do”.  Then came the repercussion on the imaginative level. I felt as if I were a man of snow at long last beginning to melt.  The melting was starting in my back—drip-drip and presently trickle-trickle.  I rather disliked the feeling.

The fox had been discharged from the Hegelian Wood and was now running in the open, “with all the woe in the world”, bedraggled and weary, hounds barely a field behind.  And nearly everyone was now (one way or another) in the pack: Plato, Dante, MacDonald, Herbert, Barfield, Tolkien, Dyson, Joy itself.  Everyone and everything had joined the other side.  Even my own pupil Griffiths—now Dom Bede Griffiths—though not himself yet a believer, did his share.  Once, when he and Barfield were lunching in my room, I happened to refer to philosophy as “a subject”.  “It wasn't a subject to Plato”, said Barfield, “it was a way.”  The quiet but fervent agreement of Griffiths, and the quick glance of understanding between these two, revealed to me my own frivolity.  Enough had been thought, and said, and felt, and imagined.  It was about time that something should be done.

For of course there had long been an ethic (theoretically) attached to my Idealism.  I thought the business of us finite and half-unreal souls was to multiply the consciousness of Spirit by seeing the world from different positions while yet remaining qualitatively the same as Spirit; to be tied to a particular time and place and set of circumstances, yet there to will and think as Spirit itself does.  This was hard; for the very act whereby Spirit projected souls and a world gave those souls different and competitive interests, so that there was a continual temptation to selfishness.  But I thought each of us had it in his power to discount the emotional perspective produced by his own particular selfhood, just as we discount the optical perspective produced by our position in space.  To prefer my own happiness to my neighbor's was like thinking that the nearest telegraph post was really the largest.  The way to recover, and act upon, this universal and objective distinction was daily and hourly to remember our true nature, to reascend or return to that Spirit which, in so far as we really were at all, we sill were.  Yes; but now I felt I had better try to do it.  I faced at last (in MacDonald's words) “some thing to be neither more nor less nor other than done”.  An attempt at complete virtue must be made.

Really a young Atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully.  Dangers lie in wait on every side.  You must not do, you must not even try to do, the will of the Father unless you are prepared to “know of the doctrine”.  All my acts, desires, and thoughts were to be brought into harmony with universal Spirit.  For the first time I examined myself with a seriously practical purpose.  And what I found there appalled me; a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds.  My name was legion.

Of course I could do nothing—I could not last one hour—without continual conscious recourse to what I called Spirit.  But the fine, philosophical distinction between this and what ordinary people call “prayer to God” breaks down as soon as you start doing it in earnest.  Idealism can be talked, and even felt; it cannot be lived.  It became patently absurd to go on thinking of “Spirit” as either ignorant of, or passive to, my approaches.  Even if my own philosophy were true, how could the initiative lie on my side?  My own analogy, as I now perceived, suggested the opposite: if Shakespeare and Hamlet could ever meet, it must be Shakespeare's doing.  Hamlet could initiate nothing.  Perhaps, even now, my Absolute Spirit still differed in some way from the God of religion.  The real issue was not there, or not yet, there.  The real terror was that if you seriously believed in even such a “God” or “Spirit” as I admitted, a wholly new situation developed.  As the dry bones shook and came together in that dreadful valley of Ezekiel's, so now a philosophical theorem, cerebrally entertained, began to stir and heave and throw off its grave-clothes, and stood upright and became a living presence.  I was to be allowed to play at philosophy no longer.  It might, as I say, still be true that my “Spirit” differed at some point from “the God of popular religion”.  My Adversary waived the point.  It sank into utter unimportance.  He would not argue about it.  He only said, “I am the Lord”; “I am that I am”; “I am”.

....You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet.  That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me.  In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

Next: Conclusion

It is not surprising that the Laws of Physics don't have anything to say about right and wrong, given that the world they describe is an abstraction from our own.  Physics describes the world in one aspect, as a pattern of interlocking relationships, but it doesn't tell us what are the actual entities in those relationships, and what their meaning and signficance is.

If there are any moral truths at all, then reality has to combine them with other facts in a unified way.  Physical truths and moral truths, considered in isolation, are just abstractions from the actual reality, but real situations contain elements of both.  Furthermore, since you can't derive an “Ought” statement from a a purely factual “Is” statement, the moral aspects of reality must be present in the fundamental principles of reality, whatever they are.  (Here I am using Hume's Is-Ought dictum in a manner which he would have thoroughly disapproved of!)  This type of argument is a form of the Argument from Ethics (also called the Moral Argument) for the existence of God.  It is similar to the Cosmological Argument except that it involves tracing back ethical reasons rather than physical causes.

Notice also that the concept of good is more fundamental than the concept of evil.  There is an asymmetry here.  In every situation where we identify something as evil, there is some good behind it which is perverted or threatened by that evil.  For example, if it is wrong to inflict unnecessary pain on a dog, that is because the dog is itself something good and valuable, so that something which harms it is an evil.  Existence, sensation, consciousness, will, and knowledge are all themselves inherently good and desirable things.  It is only when these things exist that evil can also exist, parasitically.

This lends support to something like the Platonic view of reality, in which all goodness is derivative from a fundamental type of goodness. Although aspects of a Kantian or Aristotelian outlook could be included as well, both men being theists after all.  (This “Platonic” view of Ethics should be distinguished from another idea attributed to Plato, that all abstract concepts correspond to their own “Platonic Form”.  Here I am only concerned only with the transcendent reality of goodness.)

But now observe that morality is at least a little bit like a mind, insofar as it approves or favors certain things, and disapproves or disfavors other things.  So a fundamental morality would have something analogous to will or desire, and in that respect it would be more like a mind than like an equation, as in Theism.

And indeed, if we are Monotheists, then it is not possible to have one Ultimate Fact, and a distinct Ultimate Goodness, as two separate and independent principles not joined together by any common tie.  They must be rooted in one and the same Ultimate Being.

Conversely, if we conclude for other reasons (e.g. the Argument from Consciousness) that the Ultimate Being is something like a mind, then this being's desires would be rooted in the fundamental nature of reality, and would therefore be objective in a way that our desires are not.  Such a being's desires would therefore potentially be capable of grounding morality, since there would be a notion of ought that transcends our own wishes and desires, and exists necessarily.

Before anyone even tries to throw the Euthyphro dilemma at me, let me observe that this dilemma was introduced into philosophy by Plato, as an (indirect, Socratic) argument for Platonic Monotheism!  When Socrates asked whether good actions are pious because the gods love them, or whether the gods love them because they are pious, he was highlighting an absurdity in the idea that morality could be connected to the collective will of multiple, finite beings who (like us) are not the most fundamental entity in the Universe.  How the dilemma mutated into its current existence as a standard tool in the arsenal of Atheism, I don't know.  But if God IS the fundamental principle of goodness, then he neither commands it arbitrarily, nor is he beholden to any more fundamental ethical principle outside of himself.  God is the Good; indeed in a certain sense he is the only Good, all other goods being images or reflections of his splendor.

If this conclusion is correct, this forms a secondary argument against Pantheism, since the world, and we ourselves if we examine our consciences, contain much evil.  Freedom from immorality is thus a necessary (but not sufficient) condition to be divine.

Of course, the evils in the world are also a powerful prima facie argument against the idea that the world comes from a being that is essentially good.  This is the Argument from Evil. How could a good God produce a creation which has any evil in it at all, let alone the amount which we see?  This isn't the place for an extended theodicy, but I think something must be said here lest the Argument from Ethics be drained of all credibility whatsoever.

If we view God as merely an impersonal source, out of which goodness flows, like water from the tap or light from the sun, then perhaps the problem is insoluable.  But if God is conceived of as being like a mind, then he is allowed to use long-term planning: in particular he can allow evil so long as it contributes to the greater good.  So if there is some good which cannot be had without evil (e.g. if it turns out that suffering is the best way to build character—a thesis I find, with some regret, to be quite plausible) then God might be expected to allow the evil in question.

Secondly, the moral philosophy associated with the Platonic view is not quite so unconducive to the existence of evil as it is supposed.  I said above that God is the only Good; all other things are good only as they participate in his goodness.  That means that any created thing, not being God, could potentially be turned away from God and become evil.  For human beings in particular, the possible temptation to idolatry, seeking our final goodness in created things rather than in the (necessarily invisible) Creator, is built into the very nature of a world containing lesser goods, reflecting God's more perfect yet less accessible goodness.  Indeed, the better a created thing is, the more easily it can be turned into an idol.

God could, of course, act to prevent anything from “going bad” in this way, but since the whole point of Creation is to make a Universe which is, to some extent, independent from God, this would plausibly sabotage the artistic integrity of his work.  Even in the realm of fiction, few of us are interested in reading stories where nothing bad ever happens.

Finally, note that the existence of evil is part of the very premises of the Argument from Ethics!  When you indignantly condemn the evil in the world, are you appealing to real objective ethical truths or merely to your own personal private sensibilities?  If the world really contains evil, then it contains moral facts, and the Argument from Ethics says that the fundamental reality must be capable of grounding ethical truths.  Then who are you, O man, to think you know more about goodness than Reality itself does?

On the other hand, if you say it is merely your own subjective feeling about the world adapted to the needs of primate communites, then you undercut not only the Argument from Ethics but also the Argument from Evil along with it.  In that case, God is merely indulging his own personal preferences in creating a world with butterflies and mosquitos, cancer and laughter.  Then who are you, O ape, to judge Reality based on your own standard of right and wrong?

Next: Surprised by Something

The comments to my post about the Hard Problem of Consciousness have spiralled into a long conversation about the Problem of Evil, Free Will, and whether God is in time, and whether God knows the future.  I won't try to recap that discussion here (you can go read it yourself if you like), but instead to answer some questions about which were raised, which I had been postponing answering due to being busy with work and job interviews.

St. Steve asks:

How likely or unlikely is that there is something like free will? I read that most contemporary philosophers argue libertarianism, I have also seen that there is a point of view Compatibilist. What do you think is the most plausible?

It seems that those who support the libertarian free will are all dualistic, while a point of view is Compatibilist is a non-reductive materialism of mind.

What is your opinion on these views of free will?

"Libertarian Free Will" is the position that human beings (and maybe other entities) have the ability to make genuine decisions, which could have been otherwise, and that the causal responsibility for that decision is rightly attributed to that person.  Causal responsibility must of course be distinguished from moral responsibility, which requires additional factors, such as the person being aware of the consequences of their decision.

"Determinism" is the contrary position that everything we do is determined by certain factors outside of our control, such as God or the laws of physics or our genetic predispositions or whatever.  As you can see, there are both theological and materialistic versions of this idea.

"Compatibilism" is the compromise belief that although determinism is true, we nevertheless should be regarded as morally responsible for our actions, because we have a lesser, non-libertarian form of "free will".  In other words, even if it was inevitable that we did what we did, because we wanted to do it, and nobody put a gun to our heads, we are (in this view) still morally responsible.  ("Morally responsible for what purpose?", one might ask.  A human justice system may reasonably disregard these metaphysical issues, but responsibility before God, who sees everything, plausibly does depend on such things.)

Well, it seems to me that compatibilism is a namby-pamby watered-down use of the word free will.  When I say Free Will, I mean the full-blown libertarian kind!  Now let's ask if it exists.

The first consideration is experiential, somewhat along the lines for my argument for morality.  A lot of the time, it feels like we have free will, the ability to make choices and do otherwise than we did.  (In other cases, like sneezing, we feel like we had little choice about the matter.)  I think this is substantial prima facie evidence for the existence of Free Will, but it is not conclusive.  It is not a logical contradiction to feel like you have Free Will when you don't, the way it IS a logical contradiction to feel like you are Conscious when you are not.

Susan Blackmore claims that she no longer feels like she has free will, but this seems like self-hypnosis to bring her experiences in line with her philosophical beliefs.  (By the way, I highly recommend her book Conversations in Consciousness, in which she interviews many leading thinkers about what consciousness is.)

The second consideration is Science.  Now the laws of Classical Physics were deterministic, meaning that if you know all the positions and momenta of all the particles at one moment of time, you can deduce what happens at any other moment of time in the future or the past.  Since most people think they have very limited control over what happened before they were born, this served as a powerful argument against Free Will, at least for Materialists.  (A Dualist or an Idealist could of course evade the conclusion by denying that the laws of Classical Physics give a complete description of the world.)

Nowadays we know that Classical Physics is false.  Quantum Mechanics appears (at least for all practical purposes, leaving aside Many Worlds and other bizarre interpretations) to be nondeterministic.  The outcome of a given experiment can only be predicted statistically, in terms of probabilities.  Oddly, this has not resulted in much resurgence in a belief in Free Will, perhaps because it was under attack during the 20th century for other reasons, perhaps because the spotlight has moved on to neurological and psychological considerations.

On a more philosophical note, some might say, if chance determines what I do, that isn't any better than if something beyond my control does it.  How is it me acting if my decisions are just a roll of the cosmic dice? 

But I think this is based on a confusion.  Chance is not an entity any more than fate is an entity.  Suppose the laws of physics absolutely required a certain big rubber ball to knock over a glass of wine.  It would still be the ball that did it, not fate.  Similarly, if your decisions can only be predicted probabilistically, it is still you that does it.  The probability is just a measure of how likely you are to do it.

Another possible objection is that the brain is made out of parts.  Well before you get to the level where quantum physics is relevant, the parts are small enough that they cannot meaningfully be said to be conscious.  A neuron probably does not have mental states (and even if it did, it wouldn't be the same thing as our mind).  Certainly atoms have nothing like a mind, that we know of.  So even if the atomic motions involve indeterminism, it can't be credited to us; the atoms still control what we do.

At one time this reductionistic argument bothered me quite a bit.  However, behind this argument is a strange double-standard.  We are to be sufficiently identified with our atoms that we have no identity above and beyond them.  And yet, not so identified with them that if the atoms act freely, we act freely.  A strict materialist would have to say: I am the atoms I am made out of, and therefore there can be no question of them controlling me as if they I were something else.  (On the other hand, if I am something else in addition, who is to say that this something else cannot act in the world?)

Again, the reductionistic argument basically supposes that parts are the only things that are really real, and wholes are just meaningless arrangements of parts which have no real identity or status.  But clearly my whole self does exist; what's more it has the rather surprising property of consciousness, which I would not have predicted from the parts alone.  If wholes are sufficiently real that they can be conscious, why can't they be real enough to act freely?

Indeed, if the reductionists are right that the whole is identical to its parts, it is equally true (since identity is a symmetric relation) that the parts are identical to the whole.  So their behavior is determined by what I do.  Thus even a Materialist could perhaps believe in Free Will.

Clearly this is a deep problem, and not one that can be easily resolved by a superficial appeal to Science or Logic.  My reflections here are intended to produce aporia, the type of confusion induced by listening to Socrates, who was the wisest of men because at least he knew he didn't know.  And, in the absence of knowledge, he fell back on myths about the gods, to explain the moral convictions that were the foundation of his entire project.  Those who have read Plato will know what I am talking about.

So at the end of the day, I fall back on my religion for deciding what to believe about Free Will.  The fact that God—who knows our inmost being—relates to us as if we were morally responsible creatures who can make real choices, is for me the most decisive indication that we really are.  (Of course, the Bible also talks about divine predestination.  I believe these passages also describe an important truth, one that is also important to my religious experience.  Even if we cannot easily reconcile all of these truths with our puny brains!)

St. Luke P writes:

I appreciate your affirmation of free will and it sounds like you think it is important. I think that it is essential for moral responsibility. Furthermore, free will must be more than a set of counterfactuals about what we would do.(I know this is not your view) Indeed, such a set of counterfactuals could describe a computer which has no free will at all. Rather, to have free will we must truly have "the ability to do otherwise" in these situations. I am blameworthy for giving into temptation in virtue of the fact that it was morally wrong to do so and I had the ability to do otherwise.

Now you say that foreknowledge is not at odds with free will but I think it must be with respect to this kind of free will. If I could genuinely choose X or Y then there must be no "fact of the matter", as you say, about which I will choose. Will implies must.

I understand that you affirm the B theory of time. This is where I think there is a real conflict with free will. The B theory implies that all time is equally real and that the future exists. If the future does exist, as described by the B theory, then all of the facts of the matter are fixed and unchangeable.

Thanks for your comment.  I like your phrasing that "The B theory implies all time is equally real and that the future exists", because it avoids the common pitfall of saying that all times exist "now", which true only if we use the word "now" metaphorically.  (To say that all places exist equally, is different from saying that all places exist here.  On the B theory, the word "now" functions similarly to the word "here".)

But I don't agree at all that free will requires there to be no fact of the matter about what we choose.  The only way there could be no fact of the matter, is if the choice isn't made at all, which is the opposite of free will!

There is a fact of the matter about whether I chose to marry my wife St. Nicole, and an observer can know that fact with certainty, but that does not make the decision retroactively unfree.  I cannot now change this decision, but my past self could have done otherwise.

When you say "fixed and unchangeable" this equivocates between two meanings of the word fixed.  The facts of existence are fixed in the sense that they are definitely real and have a precise nature.  In that sense, our choices are fixed.  But that is compatible with saying that there are other possible outcomes, which could have existed instead.

And of course, if our future decisions are real, then God can know them in advance.  (See here for a general solution to most supposed paradoxes involving Divine Omniscience.)

Added Later: Note that, in Quantum Mechanics, it is also true that "if you know all the positions and momenta of all the particles at one moment of time, you can deduce what happens at any other moment of time in the future or the past".  That's because the first part of the sentence is impossible, by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle!