"All knowing"

Society Religion & Philosophy
61

Re: “All knowing”

Read At-Tahawiyya Aqeedah points:

21, 23, 27, 36, 43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 86, 88, 90, 91,

Aqidah Tahawiyya

Please read these and reflect …

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Re: "All knowing"

Exactly.

Actually, real scientists know that it cannot be validated because to validate it, research should be sampling living beings. However, non-living objects can be used as tools to conduct research but after all the sample should be living objects. And before attempting it, science should know what life is.

So the rest part is belief.

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Re: "All knowing"

Can easily be validated using negation.

If someone knows what is going to happen, and that does not happen, it means his foreknowledge was wrong.

If someone knows what is going to happen, and no force in the universe can change what he knows is going to happen (foreknowledge is always correct), then it simply means that it has been predetermined.

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Re: "All knowing"

Not relevant.

[QUOTE]

If someone knows what is going to happen, and no force in the universe can change what he knows is going to happen (foreknowledge is always correct), then it simply means that it has been predetermined.
[/QUOTE]

Bolded is an assumption. Not a fact.
can you bring me a case where someone knows what exactly going to happen?

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Re: "All knowing"

God, if you believe that.

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Re: "All knowing"

Is anything impossible with belief in divine?

added: so empirical validation is skipped?

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Re: “All knowing”

I am sorry. These are rather taking me away from believing, again. :frowning:

The statement:

He created them, and He knew everything that they would do before He created them.

contradicts with:

He ordered them to obey Him and forbade them to disobey Him.

Now, if He already knew some from His creations are going to disobey Him even before He created them and they don’t have a choice but to disobey him because " Everything happens according to His decree and will" and " Everything happens according to Allah’s will, knowledge, predestination and decree" why punish them for disobeying? Seems unfair :frowning:

I guess the key is “The exact nature of the decree is Allah’s secret in His creation”. So, if we believe that we will not know in this world essentially the reason all this mess is created in the first place, forget about the questions of “WHY”, then all seems fine.

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Re: "All knowing"

You think the 'empirical validation' is 'not relavant'. :D

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Re: "All knowing"

You said one who chooses, is the one responsible then whether he selects a silver coin or the paper currency or whatever, the outcome will be the same as that will be decided by Allah no matter what that kid selects. Then why give him 2 choices to begin with if the result will be same in both cases. Just to make him feel good that you got a choice. How can he choose , do you think he is actually choosing when the result is all same in both cases? & how can he be held responsible for a choice when there wasn’t any choice to begin with . That was just an illusion.

Allah do put us in difficult situations, we don’t get into them all by ourselves.Sometimes we try & try but things don’t work our way, why ? because they are working the way Allah want them to be. Is it difficult for Allah to make things work our way , NO, not at all but still they are not working our way. If they work our way then it will disturb this whole cycle we are in, there will be a chain reaction if you look at a bigger picture.

There was this episode of criminal minds where a person put 2 or may be 3 friends in a hole where they were given a sledge hammer with the option of killing each other & the one who lives will get the way out if I recall that correctly. Don’t get me wrong but all I am saying is sometimes we don’t have options & we will do harmful & sinful things which we shouldn’t but considering the bad environment we were exposed to & how weak human beings are, we will do such a thing then why we are responsible for that? Why put us in such a situation? Why make us soo weak?
I don’t know why all this, just to fill up the places in heaven & hell?

I just want answers, I used to think that we have free will but my experience so far says that we don't.

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Re: "All knowing"

you are resorting to an easy (irrelevant) part of validation :D

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Re: “All knowing”

Falsifiability - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It was the most relevant proof.

Anyways, you guys are avoiding the paradox.

If God knew I would be a bad person even before He created me, and I would be asking these annoying questions, and then God would go ahead and judge me for doing the bad things he already determined for me, and then put me in hell for that, I would think God as being unfair.

I would rather have a fair and just God than an ‘all knowing’ God. I’m out of here for now :smiley:

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Re: "All knowing"

Just to throw in something more for you people, to think about.

Shia beleive in aqeedah of Bada. Have heard different explanations of it, which goes something like this, God can change his will or destiny, accordingto his wish. They believe somethings are written in indelible ink (figuratively speaking) in Louh (or the book) while others can be erased and rewritten.

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Re: “All knowing”

@sceptic there is a very thoughtful poem of Iqbal on the issue. You can read it here with English translation.

Allama Iqbal Poetry

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Re: "All knowing"

Peace kakaballi

Validation means to show a real life example where:

Something is said to happen and where the opposite cannot happen

If you claim that to have foreknowledge mandates the opposite to free will all we need to do to disprove that is to show you a single example where it is possible to have foreknowledge without influencing outcome ... You cannot validate the claim that: Full knowledge of something denies influence ... in order to validate such a theory you will need to exhaust all possibility and that is impossible.

My statement of "no he cannot" is as much a criticism of ajazali's question as it is of your position ... Which is that such a statement that requires all possibilities to be known ... cannot be validated ... because I can say, where there is an except it applies to God.

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Re: "All knowing"

The ordering and forbidding is done out of instruction - This is Qadza of Allah (from His Judgment Attribute)
Creating is from the Al-Khaliq Attribute
Knowing everything is from the Al-'Aleem Attribute

The rules for understanding the Attributes is to understand them together ...

Knowing what I am going to do does not PREVENT Him from telling me what to do ... telling me what to do does not PREVENT Him from Knowing what I am going to do ... So for this reason it is NOT a contradiction. Why would God tell me what to do if He already Knows what I am going to do ... Is so I can then say on the Day of Judgment - Yes Allah (SWT) you told me what to do and I obeyed ... If people turn to Allah (SWT) and say you knew what I was going to do, but I didn't and I was not guided then punishing them would be unjust and Allah (SWT) is not unjust ... He is The Just, so He will not punish someone until they know what is expected from them and they still do not do it ... So He will Instruct people to obey and He Will forbid them from the haram so the Judgment and sentencing is Just ... I hope you understand how all these Attributes are working together.

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Re: "All knowing"

Here is a quick test ...

For those who are complaining - that since God Knows everything then He has not given them free will ... and that for them is cause to deny God ... So if that is the case then their disbelief is from God ... and to prove that God is not Real then all they need to do is to believe in God and repent to demonstrate that they do have free will and they can change their ways from their own decisions and they are not governed by God, but this change needs to happen in their own hearts. But then to believe in God they will no longer be able to deny Him ... so the position they have taken up is itself a contradiction.

If on the other hand they believe they have free will and there is no Qadr of Allah (SWT) then make a claim to delay death or change the course of the sun.

Empirical evidence suggests both are true ...

If they believe in God, but want to say that their Qadr makes them disobey God ... then they are saying that God wants them to disobey Him ... which is unfounded. God only asks from us that what is possible within our ability.

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Re: “All knowing”

because he already decreed they don’t do it even if told what was the right thing to do!

Not unfounded. According to your concepts, God has already decreed that I would disobey Him.
Here from your own link:

  1. Everything happens according to Allah’s will, knowledge, predestination and decree.

=========

One doesn’t have to deny the existence of God. I am just questioning all the fiasco around ‘day of judgement’ if everything has already been decreed.

I do something really really terrible. There are only two possibilities:

  1. God did not per-determine me to do it. I had a choice to do or not to do it.
  2. God had already decreed that I would do that terrible thing.

Punishing me in case 1 seems fair, but punishing me in case 2 is unfair. I didn’t have a choice but to do that terrible thing!

God decreed that a man be a king in Russia. God also decreed before even his birth that he would be a merciless butcher who would kill thousands of innocent people. God is going to judge him for his evil deeds. He had no choice but to commit those crimes. How can I believe God is just and fair?

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Re: “All knowing”

Thanks for this link :slight_smile:

I am sorry but, just because you say it is most relevant doesnt make it one.

I have all the reasons to avoid it, because it is based on something that is yet to (cannot) be validated. And, on top of it, you are questioning it as a believer.

All i am asking is if you cannot validate yourself just bring some real scientist’s work which proves that determinism involving human being actions can be validated empirically.

What I learnt from the link you mentioned is, first part of your post #63 is ok and is falsifiable deductively. But that part is not required.
Second part is relevant but, you are not producing a single instance to prove you case true there. My point is, claim of ‘foreknowledge implies predetermination’ is not verifiable, and you are not proving it otherwise. Remember, you said there it can be validated using negation.

I being a programmer myself know whenever I write a program it is predetermined and implies ‘foreknowledge’. It is a weak example as foreknowledge in this case is associated with non-living objects but, you still can assume that I would know the behavior of my program in ‘all’ condition, because I have developed it myself. Now note the point of uncertainty, I don’t know when my program would crash, I cannot write a program that would work well in ‘all’ environments exhaustively, and so on.

So I believe in God.

Problem with your reasoning is, you are arguing between believers and disbelievers positions and you switch the stance when countered. As a believer your paradox implies ‘contradiction’ for you, and on behalf of disbeliever your paradox is based on assumption. Now, you sort out your position and select one you like to continue argue with. You should choose one, either you can ask the question as believer or on the behalf of disbeliever, both should be argued differently and distinctively. This is wrong approach which is followed in this thread.

This is based on you assumption that foreknowledge implies predetermination.

This way you are undermining the God. Not all knowing implies not all powerful, not all powerful implies that there must be something more powerful than God or equally powerful as God, which is contradiction.

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Re: "All knowing"

The main point is that Allah is not unjust and He doesn't 'judge' a person beyond its scope of free will. How do we know this? We know this since animals, demented persons, children, people who are forced to do something or things imposed on them cutting their free will are not be held accountable be Allah.
A Carnivorous animal may kill a man but it does it out of instinct (danger or hunger) and it has no rational mechanism to think and restrain itself. similarly, a person who is not in his senses (demented) cannot be held accountable. A person is judged only for the level and extent of free will he exercises. In the holy Quran,

Allah has said "“If your Lord had so willed, all who are on the earth would surely have believed, all of them. Would you, then, force people until they become believers?” ( the Qur’an, Jonah, 10:99).

When He doesn't want His word be accepted with force how can He judge someone who has been programmed to do such and such acts.

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Re: "All knowing"

Then perhaps our definitions of relevance do not match. We leave it there.

A believer cannot question? The way 'believers' patronize those who question the beliefs makes me less of a believer though.

If you program a software where objects in the software behave in a way that you determined at the inception, would it be fair to judge their behavior at the 'end' of execution the program?

There is a whole spectrum of beliefs among 'believer and disbelievers'. My 'beliefs' if you will, can be summarized in post #55. Why force someone to choose sides? I am not questioning existance of God. I am questioning the qualities of the God that people attribute to Him.

No. Foreknowledge of things that CANNOT BE CHANGED NO MATTER WHAT implies predetermination. If you call it assumption, that's your option. If God;

  1. knows everything that is going to happen, and
  2. those things cannot be changed whatever you do,

it simply means someone (most probably God) has predetermined them. If they were not predetermined, they could be changed.

I am not 'undermining' God. I am simply saying that what has not yet happened does not exist and God not knowing something that doesn't exist is not a big deal.

Still avoiding the question: Is it fair to punish me for something I do that I was already decreed to do even before my birth and I had no choice but to do it?