Does an Omniscient God contradict Free Will? Yes, a very age-old question, with many answers. The problem seemed to arise when we thought that if God knows what we will do or "choose" then it's metaphysically necessary for us to choose or do that, because what God knows IS true, thus it's true event A will happen if God knows it will. There's no Free Will because there's no chance that event A can NOT happen, in this view Free Will is just an illusion. But! Some Philosophers have objected by saying that God's knowledge is from or depends on our choice, it's formed by the choices we genuinely (freely?) make for ourselves, because God's omniscience is "logically simultaneous" with our choices. So God's knowledge doesn't write out history, history writes out God's knowledge. (By the way doesn't this make god a contingent being? Thus precluding God from "working" as an answer for the modal ontological and cosmological argument, since God is not a non-contingent being?) But I've never been convinced by...

First, I don't think it matters for the answer to your question whether the omniscient God is or is not the creator of the beings whose conduct He foresees. Thus suppose the rats are created not by God but by some fairy. God observes the rats and, knowing of each whether it is smart or dumb, foresees whether it will end up rewarded or punished. Can this new wrinkle in the story -- that the rats are created by some fairy rather than by God -- possibly make a difference to whether the rats have free will or not? I cannot see a reason for believing this. (To be sure, the wrinkle makes a difference to God's responsibility: if He creates dumb rats Himself, then he is actively responsible for the suffering they predictably undergo in the punishment zone. If He's merely an onlooker, then He is at most passively responsible insofar as He could but fails to protect the dumb rats from pain.) Second, I don't understand why there should be felt a tension between foreseeability by others and free will. The...

Can a nation have an official religion and be a democracy?

I would consider Norway and the UK to be examples of this. Here the fundamental equality of citizens is not seriously undermined because the role of the state religion is largely ceremonial. In other countries, of course, citizens who do not share the state religion suffer severe discrimination which can be grave enough to defeat, by itself, the claim that the state in question is democratic. It makes sense here to think of "being a democracy" as a matter of degree. Most of the states we call democracies fail fully to live up to democratic principles in one way or another. Having a state religion is a shortfall, but can be a relatively minor one if any resulting discrimination is not too severe.

In his answer to question 2275 (from Sep 7th 2008), Thomas Pogge wrote: “Most political leaders do not act well, morally, and in most cases this is because they are not moral persons, not serious about morality. To be serious about morality, one must try to integrate one’s considered moral judgments through more general moral principles into a coherent account of morally acceptable conduct; one must work out what this unified system of beliefs and commitments implies for one’s own life; and one must make a serious effort to honour these implications in one’s own conduct and judgments. Those who are not serious about morality typically do not act well, morally...” I am very interested in the notion of ‘moral seriousness’, and would be interested to know what the other panelists think about the nature of ‘being morally serious’, as opposed to that of merely ‘being moral’ – and whether they agree with Prof Pogge’s account. I would also be grateful if you – Prof Pogge – could elaborate on your previous...

Moral judgments are often distorted by self-interest. A morally serious person must try to combat this danger by thinking beyond the particular case. A very simple way of doing this is to contemplate analogous situations in which roles are reversed (the Golden Rule). By extending one's judgments to a larger set of cases and then aiming for a coherent way of judging these cases, one is beginning to do what I was asking. Philosophers may take this sort of exercise quite far and, as you surmise, I don't think that every morally serious person needs to do this. But a morally serious person will question her or his moral judgments in the ways I sketched, especially when they are "convenient", that is, in accordance with her/his own self-interest.

My question pertains to two common attributes given to God. Omniscience and omnipotence. If we use a definition of omniscience that includes knowledge of all future events (as most believers would today due to things like prophecy and revelation) then it follows that God knows all of his future actions with absolute certainty. If this is the case, then God's omniscience is compromised. For example, let's say God knows he is going to create a global flood "x" years in the future. If omniscience is perfect he MUST do that action and is powerless to do otherwise, lest he compromise his knowledge. If he does exercise his power and not flood the earth then he was previously wrong and his omniscience is compromised. Therefor no single entity can be all knowing and all powerful. Is this a good argument? I have never heard it used or refuted in a public debate/piece of literature.

It's an interesting idea, but I don't think it's quite compelling. Your argument assumes that God is in time in much the same way we take ourselves to be in time: experiencing only the present and acting only in the present. But, being omniscient, God would really be experiencing all times at once; and being omnipotent, he would be shaping the entire universe at once, from (temporal) beginning to (temporal) end or throughout an unbounded, infinite duration. An omniscient and omnipotent God engages in only one grand act of creation which is fully transparent to Him. Or so it might be said in response to your argument. Still, I believe your conclusion can be supported in another way. With regard to omniscience we might ask whether God can really know why He exists. We find this question raised, for example, in a little-known passage in Immanuel Kant's masterwork The Critique of Pure Reason : "We cannot put aside, andyet also cannot endure the thought, that a being, which werepresent to ourselves...

Couldn't we take the "ontological proof" of God's existence to prove that there are many God-like creatures? For instance, imagine a creature that has all thinkable perfections except for the fact that it has dirty fingernails. If existence is a perfection, then this creature must have this perfection, since one can both exist and have dirty fingernails. And so, if the ontological proof proves that God exists, then it proves that dirty fingernails-God exists too. Doesn't it?

I read the question differently from Oliver. The questioner agrees that dirty fingernails are an imperfection, in fact, this is part of the point. We are to imagine a being that is all-perfect except for those dirty fingernails. Now if existence is a perfection, as the ontological argument assumes, then this imagined being has it. So it exists. (And never mind whether it's Divine or Divine-like, that's irrelevant to the point.) And likewise for all the other imaginable beings that are all-perfect except for one imperfection (other than non-existence) -- each of them also exists. And so do all the other imaginable beings that are all-perfect except for two imperfections (other than non-existence). And so on. So I think this is a nice reductio ad absurdum of the ontological argument for God's existence. If the ontological argument proves the existence of God, it also proves the existence of a vast number of other beings whose existence those interested in proving God's existence would have wanted to deny.

Should a political leader let his faith influence his decisions that he makes for the people he leads?

In a society where this faith is shared and influences political decisions in the direction of peace, justice, humanity, and equal citizenship, I see no problem. Problems arise when either of these two conditions are not satisfied. Faith can lead people to do terrible things, for instance torture and murder those with different religious beliefs. No one should let his or her faith exert such an influence. Rather, when one's religion seems to require conduct that seems wrong, then one ought to re-examine one's religion. This does not mean that one should abandon one's faith, though it may come to that in some cases. Another possible outcome is a reinterpretation of one's religion (for example, many Christian now understand that their faith did not really require the Inquisition). And one may also conclude, on reflection, that one's religion was right, after all, to require the conduct in question (as when Christians in Nazi Germany came to endorse their religious duty to engage in treasonable...

From a moral Christian point of view, I cannot understand the idea that we should punish anyone. In America, which is a highly Christian-dominated society, there is little resistance to capital punishment from the "right wing." My understanding is that Christians are not supposed to judge. God will judge everyone when their time comes. Isn't Christian morality about tolerance and acceptance, and not revenge? "Turning the other cheek?" "Love thy neighbor/enemy as thyself?" Are Christians simply turning a blind eye to this action?

There is indeed a tension between capital punishment and the teachings of Christ. One can ease this tension somewhat by highlighting the contribution of penal institutions to the protection of innocent people, who are safer when criminals are taken off the street and potential criminals deterred. This does not justify the death penalty, nor our kind of prisons in which inmates are routinely raped and abused, but it does help justify penal institutions of the kind we know from the more civilized states. I see much greater tensions between Christian teaching and many other policies we pursue, especially internationally. We pressure very poor countries to undertake “structural adjustment programs” -- cutting public funding and raising fees for basic education and health care -- so that they can better service their loans to our banks, which loans are often taken out by brutal dictators who use the money we lend them to buy the arms they needed to stay in power. We allow our banks to help such tyrants and...

The debate between science and religion has gone on for many years, and many people think that they must choose one or the other to believe. To me, it's a lot like trying to collide two trains on parallel tracks. If one chooses to believe in God, then that person can still believe in the big bang or evolution while believing that God created the universe, because religion explains what happens on a spiritual level, and science explains what happens on a physical level. The two run parallel. Using this as a way of thinking, can science contradict religion at all, and why has the debate between the two gone on for so long when this explanation reconciles them?

Your idea works fine on a certain modest understanding of religion. If religion were only about the Divine, perhaps with the additional thought that God created the universe, then no explanation given by science of anything in the universe could interfere with religion. Religions are typically not so modest, however. A typical religion may ascribe certain duties to human beings along with the freedom and responsibility to live up to these duties. And this can raise scientific (and philosophical!) doubts about whether human beings have the requisite freedom. In response, you might propose dividing human beings over your two levels: into a physical body (brain included) and a spirit or soul. But this proposal raises further puzzles about the relation between these two parts or components of human beings. If religion attributes some of what you do to your soul it may compete with scientific theories that attribute all your conduct and thinking to physical causes. If religion attributes nothing you...

I have recently become interested in the following philosophical idea, and am wondering if it carries much weight. It rests on the idea that there cannot be any such thing as 'religious evidence'. Any religious claim cannot be made without some sort of evidence - this may differ from what a scientist would term 'evidence' as it may involve the mere 'feeling of truth' rather than a demonstratable proof. However, here is the problem that currently interests me. For any religious claim to have some sort of weight, it must rest upon some sort of evidence. The nature of evidence in general is that it is either empirical or theoretical in form - however, the status of the latter is such that it allows for future empirical verification or falsification, and as such does not rule out testing. With evidence, we either demonstrate something to 'be the case' through example, or show how a method carries value. Let me bring in an example of a religious claim: "We look around and see an order and structure to the...

As I understand your argument, much of it depends on understanding the predicates religious and empirical as mutually exclusive. This allows you to infer that, if a claim is empirical, then it cannot be religious -- and that, if evidence is empirical, then it cannot be religious. If I wanted to argue against you, I would dispute that understanding and this inference. Since you are making an assertion about all religious claims, your opponent is free to present you with any one such claim as a counter-instance. So, let me give you the claim that the prayers of truly pious people are very often answered: What they pray for very often comes true, much more often than what less pious people pray for. I say that this is a religious claim. Now you ask me for evidence for this claim. To give you evidence, I ask you to join a group of people who together grade a randomly selected population of 2000 self-declared believers in terms of their piety. We do this by interviewing each of...