From: utzoo!decvax!pur-ee!ecn-pa.scott Newsgroups: net.misc Title: Re: Silly beliefs about the future Article-I.D.: ecn-pa.273 Posted: Thu Jul 29 09:19:46 1982 Received: Fri Jul 30 04:43:02 1982 References: watmath.3120 There's a difference between predestination and foreknowledge. I personally don't see any incompatibility between having free choice and all of my future being known. If I were in a room with you and said, "In 45 seconds, someone is going to throw a rock through the window," and, if it actually happened, you would be at a loss to decide whether I had actually caused someone to throw the rock, or if I just knew somehow that it was going to happen. The place where a lot of people stumble in talking about the fixedness of the future is where they try to make implications about causality based on determinism. In other words, people try to say that if the entire future is in some sense fixed, i.e. it is possible to know (even though there may be no person who actually does know) what will happen during the entire future (whatever that is) then we can't really have free choice, because our choices are determined by what will happen in the future. Not necessarily so! If we were able to step outside of time and look at any event in the space-time continuum, then we would see what the results of future free choices will be. That doesn't mean that in doing so we have fixed those choices and removed the element of free will. (whew!) Scott Deerwester Purdue University Libraries