Musings on Openness Theology, Part 4: Forecasting, Laplace's Demon, and Omniscience

Okay, the next few posts are going to get really technical. Sorry. I'm adding a lot of links so you can explore.

We've overviewed the basic tenets of openness theology. Specifically, right now God does not know the future. Either because the future doesn't exist (presentism) or because God doesn't know which timeline we humans will pick out of the infinity of timelines God holds in his mind (like Robert Frost's two roads in a wood only much, much more ramified).

Now the mechanism for these positions is human free will. That is, God, desiring true love and relationship, gave humans free will. By making us "free" God cannot predict what our choices will be. In some way God is epistemologically bounded by free will. In presentism (i.e., the future doesn't exist) free will limits God's ability to calculate the next moves of the universe (i.e., the future might not exist but given what is happening now God should be able to act like a weather forecaster with perfect knowledge). In the ramified timeline view, God has already calculated out all possible futures but cannot predict, due to free will, which branch in the road humans will choose.

This seems to be a great theological move. By positing free will we reap the following theological riches:

1. God's passability (God has emotions) and relationality

2. A theodic attenuation where human (and, for Gregory Boyd, demonic) freedom becomes much more implicated in evil/pain thus attenuating the theodic burden on God.

However, how tenable is free will? Should an entire theological position--something on which faith rests--be built atop one of the most controversial and notorious philosophical constructions in the history of human thought?

Doesn't seem like a wise idea to me.

I don't want to get into all the objections about free will but let me make a few psychological comments about its problems.

The main issue I'd like to talk about has to do with prediction and selfhood. First, you can't build a coherent self across time with free will. My choices today have to coherently flow out of who I am at this moment in time. If my next choice is radically free, so free that an omniscient God is 100% clueless about what I'll do next--then my personally disintegrates into a schizophrenic nightmare. I'm not just going to stand up, at random, and shoot my family. It's just not in the cards. My will isn't free. If anything, my will is tightly constrained, flowing through narrow channels. Channels we call "identity" and "selfhood."

A bit of personal observation makes this point. Even I, a lowly human, can predict my wife's reactions into the future. And she can, hopefully, predict mine. If we had free will we would wake up each morning facing a stranger. We'd be starting over each day. Free will is like a chalkboard that keeps getting erased. No history, no memory, no constraint. Rather, this moment of choice is radically open. Terrifyingly, horrifyingly, incoherently, and incomprehensibly open.

In short, the choices are not free. The future self flows out of the past self in a coherent fashion. The world isn't a causal kaleidoscope.

Thus, as I see it, when we speak about the "openness of the future" what we are really discussing are issues of prediction and forecasting. That is, even with presentism God should be able--because the future flows out of the past--to "weather forecast" (but for human relations; Asimov fans can think of Hari Seldon's psychohistory in the Foundation series).

Humans can forecast. We do it for the weather and we do it when we predict how friends, co-workers, and family members will react to things we say or do. And we pull this off quite well most of the time.

But human forecasts are not perfect. The future is open for us in that our forecasts can err. Further, our forecasts tend to get less accurate the farther we extend them into the future. And this goes for both meteorological and psychological forecasts. I can predict with almost 100% certainty that I will love my wife tomorrow. But what about in 50 years? Given divorce rates, people have been wrong about these forecasts. (Jana, baby, you know we'll still be in love 50 years from now! I'm in that academic mode you hate. Forgive me!)

The reason human forecasts err and fail to extend far into the future is largely due to measurement issues. We cannot measure with infinite precision all the meteorological variables needed to make perfect predictions. Rather than measuring the exact features of all the mico-variables (e.g., the location and speed of each and every water molecule) we deal with macro-level features: Barometric pressure, cold fronts, temperature, humidity. The same ideas apply to psychological prediction. I don't measure the exact features of my wife's mico-level variables (e.g., neurotransmitters, synaptic configurations and strength). Rather, I deal with macro-level features: Personality traits, likes, needs, habits, etc. Focusing on these macro-level features--meteorological or psychological--involves a lot of "rounding" (e.g., when measuring a board you don't measure with infinite precision, we round off) which makes the system potentially chaotic. That is, in physical systems with sensitive dependence upon initial conditions, small rounding/measurement errors cause the system to evolve in ways that diverge from short-term predictions (in fact, the Lorenz attractor, the first big breakthrough in chaos theory was a model of the weather).

The point is, prediction is related to information/measurement. Chaos theory tells us that in certain systems our epistemic limitations will limit our prediction. We will never we able to predict the weather (or people) because we'll never be able to measure the system with perfect precision; we'll always be "rounding."

But God is omniscient and should be able to measure with infinite precision. If so, God should be able to predict/forecast the future with infinite precision.

This ability to forecast the future was described by envisioned by Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1814. Specifically, Laplace speculated that if an intelligence COULD know all the relevant information in the world this intelligence would be able to predict/know the future:

"We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes."

This intelligent being is known as Laplace's demon. For Christians it simply looks like omniscience.

So here is the dilemma. Free will seems to be a non-starter. I offered some psychological critiques but there are others. But on the other end of the spectrum we have Laplace's demon and omniscience. Neither seems like good options.

Is there any way to move ahead?

Hmmmm.....