Following on from AC1’s really stimulating post on the search for the “now” I thought i’d post a series of short articles on freedom and determinism within the context of Philosophy of Religion and ‘Eternalism‘.

Eternalism is a theory that models ‘time’ as a dimension in physics with a similar ontology to space. In other words there is no objective flow to time, no past, present and future, in the sense that future events are “aready here”. It is also called “Block Time/Universe” theory. Anyway I can’t do justice to the full theory in this short post so please follow the above link and wiki the term for more information.

This theory has implications for our views of free will, for if the future is “fixed” and unalterable in much the same way as the past is then the events we experience as being within “time” are to a degree determined.

By no means does this theory by itself imply a creator God, or posit any divinity at all. But this theory is compatible with a theistic/deistic eternalism. St Augustine apparently wrote about God being outside of time - a model that would suggest he views the universe as a “Block Universe”.

In this post I want to consider Liebniz’s (1646-1716) view. His view was that God was an eternal and infinite mind who saw and determined everything in the created order and who had chosen to make the world exactly as it is. This is not creationism by the way, the theory could/should fit with an evolutionary mechanism - indeed a theistic “Block Universe” theory would necessitate such a view. Looking at the world as a “whole” Liebniz argues that because one thing may be incompatible with or dependent upon another, a change in any one individual thing ion the world would require that everything else be changed as well. In other words, there may be a number of possible worlds, in which things are quite different from those we find in this one, but within this particular world, everything has to be as it is. In addition, since he believed that it would have been possible for God to have created any sort of world, he argued that - since God chose to create this one - it must be the best possible. There follow two things from this.

1- Within this word we cannot predict exactly what will happen, since we do not have God’s infinite mind and therefore cannot see the way everything works together. Therefore, not knwoing that we are completely determined, we actually experience ourselves as free. In other words (not Leibniz’s) freedom is not knowing all the reasons why you do what you do.

2- A world within which there is human free will, and in which ther can therefore be the evil and suffering that come from its misuse, is to be judged better than a world which lacks freedom but is free from its evils. He argued this on the grounds that a perfect God would create the best of all possible worlds.

But notive here that there is still a great difference between what is experienced (freedom) and what is actually the case (a world totally determined by the mind of God). How can these be related in such a way that the one does no undermind the other? Kant attempts to respond to this and I will save this for another post.

Thanks to Mel Thompson for the above ideas, extracted and adapted from his book “Religion and Science”.

Some things strike me about Liebniz’s form of eternalism/block universe theory. Particularly a radical re-evaluation of the problem of evil is required. God’s good is not our good. Or more accurately human concepts of good and evil are subjective and relative notions that arise from our being within space-time and our inabiity to process all the facts (all in the infinite sense).

It is also interesting to note that Leibniz influenced Einstein. He suggested (independent of Newtonian calculus) that “an object’s ability to do work was proportional to the square of its speed, rather than its speed alone” thus of course squaring an objects speed was a vital part of Einsteins thinking.