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I deduce there could be these permutations of the universe.

Temporally, it is either bounded or unbounded.

If it is bounded, then it is possible God could exist to have created the universe. If God did create the universe, did God create the universe to have a fate?, and it and every event within that universe was predetermined by God. It would seem in this universe that Freewill is either comapatable with Gods predetermined universe or it is not.

However, if the universe is unbounded, then can it be argued that a God could not have created the universe because creation is temporal. If God could not have created the universe, then does the universe have no fate, and it has not been predetermined by a God. If the universe is not predetermined and has no beginning, then there is no particular event in time that determines the others. Is this therefore a strong argument for free will if this is the case?

So in summary, if we propose the universe to have no beginning, is that a guarantee that there is no God or creation, but however there is free will?

So can we only determine whether we have free will for certain, if we can determine that the universe is eternal?

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  • 1. how could you be "certain" (about anything), if god not existed? (#gotcha!;) 2. God is "never" "there" ((s)he ever exists! is NOT there;) 3. how can a limited ("thinking"/conscious) being distinguish between "real free will" and "fake free will"? (#this would be much better question with chance on a decent/practical answer)
    – xerx593
    Commented Jan 2 at 20:00
  • @xerx593 My proposition is that if the universe has a begining the future could be determined from that begining or it could be predetermined. If the universe had no beginning then it could not be predetermined. Determinism is a refutation of the idea of free will. However some say determinism is compatable with free will. However I'm asking if the universe is unbounded can you therfore be certain of free will as there could be no determinism if that was the case.
    – 8Mad0Manc8
    Commented Jan 2 at 20:08
  • a riddle: what is finite and(!) infinite, what has a beginning and no beginning?? (solution: (e.g.) a circle!?;)
    – xerx593
    Commented Jan 2 at 20:12
  • the (fine) difference between determinism and indeterminism is only relevant to an "omni-scient" being ...which i not am. but also the "common (actual) empiric-theoretic sense" is: the universe has a beginning (called "Big Bang") ...and the movement of big-small objects is "predestined"
    – xerx593
    Commented Jan 2 at 20:19
  • @xerx593 Yes it is a riddle wrapped up in an enigma wrapped up in a mystery, and your right a circle has no beginning or end, as does a mobius strip which has a higher dimension than a circle. Like the Bruce Lee icon on your profile :-)
    – 8Mad0Manc8
    Commented Jan 2 at 20:19

3 Answers 3

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Short answer

No. The universe can be bounded at either end of time, OR unbounded, and it could still be either deterministic or open in all four cases. Having an unbounded universe in time duration does not prevent determinism from being true.

And this is true of the universe whether it was created or not -- God is irrelevant to the argument you were making. A God out of time could create an unbounded universe, and make it deterministic.

Longer answer relative to God

There ARE relationships between God and freedom of will, where multiple of the possible God hypotheses, if they were true, remove the possibility of free will.

A God out of time, which is a classical Neo-Platonist concept of God, basically requires that this universe's future be known, by God, so there IS an explicit future. This concept of God requires determinism.

An all powerful God who is inside time, and is morally motivated to achieve perfection, would engage so effectively with the universe that nothing humans attempt to do on their limited power would be morally relevant. Humans might not be determined in this case, but their wills would be irrelevant.

We can also know that our universe has no Omniscient deity in it, because of how quantum wave functions operate. An omniscient God would be able to observe quantum states at all times, and this would mean that Quantum Mechanics would behave very differently from how it does. Our universe has no Omniscient God.

Longer answer relative to determinism

You appear to be assuming our universe is deterministic on its own. This is not the case. See this answer about physics: Deterministic or stochastic universe? Our universe is NOT deterministic.

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  • Can you explan your statement that a temparly unbounded universe can be deterministic? The reason I asked this question ignoring god, is that if the universe had no begining and possibly no end there would be no first event that determines every other event and nothing could temporally be predetermined?
    – 8Mad0Manc8
    Commented Jan 4 at 23:22
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    One need no first event for the rest of history to follow from an initial state. If the universe's stat AT ANY TIME were characterizable, and the principle of causation applied from that state, THEN one could establish determinism from that point on irrespective of what happened previously
    – Dcleve
    Commented Jan 4 at 23:45
  • Can the universe be stochastic and be incompatable with free will? To me, if a stochastic world ioriginated from the quantum world or the classical world, then our decisions and their consequences are out of the scope of freewill since the choice and outcome is random and has not been determined by our freewill ?
    – 8Mad0Manc8
    Commented Jan 5 at 0:35
  • @8Mad0Manc8 you are correct that stochiometry also is incompatible with free will. For free will to exist in our world, we must have a logic that is not limited to a determined/random dichotomy. Here is another answer on that. philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/95498/…
    – Dcleve
    Commented Jan 5 at 6:24
  • @Dcleve Yes, it's kinda like saying A and Not A is true. Free will could be compatible with a deterministic and a stochastic universe, or free will could be incompatible with a deterministic and a stochastic universe. It mentioned in your comment about logic. There is a logic that deals with the truth of contradictory propositions its called dialtheism, just thought I'd let you know on the chance you didn't already know.
    – 8Mad0Manc8
    Commented Jan 5 at 16:25
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The answer to that question likely relies on answers to questions that we don't have and likely never will have and in some regards we might even run out of even the concepts of what that means.

Like what is something that has no beginning? Everything that we can think of has a beginning. There are things that have begun so far in the past that we might have forgotten or never known it's beginnings and some things will last for so long that for the sake of a human life or even the life of humanity as a whole, they are "eternal", but what does it truly mean to have no beginning?

Because if you want to deduce something from that it's insufficient to think of something far back in time, but there truly must not have been a beginning.

Now there are some concepts without a beginning or end like for example a ring or circle. so if you stick to it's surface you can walk in either direction and you never find a place that looks like an origin and neither one that looks like an end. That being said the loop has been created and if you change your perspective and dare to leave the surface it has a beginning and an end. Even your move on the surface has a beginning and an end (the moment you touched it and the moment you stop doing so).

Even if you take the concept from the Neverending Story where a universe can have existed for billions of years despite the fact that you imagined it to exist just seconds ago, has a beginning, in fact it might have more than one, the moment it started "in Universe" and the moment the universe was created by thinking about it. Even if we say that "in universe" the universe had no origin, that is just something that we say but do we truly know what that means and what the consequences of that would be for that universe or is that just something that we ignore because we shift the narrative focus elsewhere?

So if we can't imagine what an unbounded universe would look like and how it came into existence how could we determine the consequences of that?

Also you can imagine toy examples of an infinite universe like ikd a tile pattern that repeats without end, which would be an example of a predictable or even predetermined universe. At the same time you could imagine more complex fractal structures or irrational numbers like π. It's infinite and yet never repeating so if i were to start at the xth spot of π and then progress from there would it be indeterministic because there's no pattern behind these numbers and little to work with in order to let you predict the next number or is it actually deterministic even predeterministic because the numbers in π are not actually random but you're following a sequence that had been known since the start of that thought experiment and that you could know if you leave the "in universe" point of view and make experiments with cycles and figure out the places of π and compare them to the sequence that you're given.

So even if you take something that has no end (is infinite) and forget that you started somewhere it could still be random or predetermined or be one and appear to be the other.

Likewise "god", "free will" and "the universe" are things that need careful definition. Because the idea of a universe implies that we all live in the same shared reality, while the idea of a god is of someone or something that is "supernatural" and that can bend and break the rules of reality, so to say something that is "outside" or "above"(=super) the reality. Which in turn is in conflict with the universe. Likewise if you define free will as something that is not tied to reality but that is truly free and can be a cause of itself, then that as well is a contradiction to the idea of a shared deterministic universe and would make you a god in itself. Or you could live in a universe of gods, but then all that this means is that there are no gods and that you just got the rules of reality wrong.

So as these word can intersect, contradict, coexist or whatever else, it's very necessary to give a strict definition of these in order to be able to answer the question and in most cases we simply know to little to do so.

Also there are different versions of a god. Like you could have a magic superwizard that is omnipresent, omniscient and allpowerful, but if you're only interested in the act of creation then "god" might be your lazy roommate who left food to rot in the fridge and thus "created" an entire universe for the bacteria atop of it. Which also creates different perspective of creation. Like is creation the assembly of parts? Is it the creation of parts? Is it the set up of the environment? Or is it the act of pushing the start button? Is it all or none of these?

Also does free will exist in the first place and how could free will, even the concept of it exist in a deterministic world?

Like suppose you're playing a computer game, then "the world" is created by some kind of "god" (game designer) but also it's created by you through your interaction with it because otherwise it's just a bunch of 1s and 0s and flickering light, it's really you that creates it. And you are limited in your abilities but you have "free will" in terms of what you want to do. But to have free will requires you to already have free will to begin with. So you kinda have to answer the question as to whether free will exists before you'd even enter that scenario.

And even if the world had no beginning, you'd still have a beginning in this world and that would be the worlds beginning. So you would be the god who created that world despite it being someone else who put all the necessary parts into place.

TL;DR no you like can't deduce that because the existence of a starting point does not necessitate a predetermined universe... but that's still an educated guess as long as we still don't know all the answers, which we likely never will.

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Whether the universe is deterministic (events are completely determined by previously existing causes) is independent* from whether any being created the universe.

In theory: A creator could've created a deterministic universe. A creator could've created a non-deterministic universe. A deterministic universe could exist without a creator. A non-deterministic universe could exist without a creator.

(And let's not get into discussion of cosmological arguments.)

There's one important caveat, however: a being who knows everything that will happen necessitates a type of determinism (if not in the physical sense, then at least in the philosophical sense). This is true by definition, as knowing what would happen requires that only one thing can happen. This also corresponds to common conceptions of a god. You could potentially get around this by merely saying that a god knows everything that's possible, but one can't reasonably describe that as "all-knowing" (as people commonly say), as their knowledge would be quite limited if human decisions aren't determined. Some have attempted to say that God exists outside of time, but if they have access to the entire (linear) timeline, they still know what would happen from outside of time, so that doesn't solve the problem (and kind of undermines their own agency within that timeline, unless they're free to change the timeline as they wish, but that still doesn't wouldn't give humans agency).

But what about "free will"?

I was just talking about determinism above, but where does free will come in?

  • Some might say free will is inherently non-deterministic, and there are varying levels of how confidently such people conclude that free will exists merely in response to feeling like they have free will (whatever that means) or in response to the existence of quantum mechanics (which isn't necessarily even non-deterministic, but even being as generous as possible, the probabilistic behaviour of independent atomic particles wouldn't get you all that close to anything resembling meaningful human agency under pretty much any interpretation of quantum mechanics). Some also assert that free will exists for supernatural reasons (with dubious justification).

  • I'd say "free will" is nonsensical, contrary to our lived experience (of people behaving quite consistently in certain scenarios, correlations between environmental factors and behaviour, and people sometimes doing things that they themselves don't want to do... which is far more justification than what free will proponents seem to offer). It can't conceivably be said to exist, regardless of whether determinism is true. The only other mechanism aside from determinism we can conceive of is randomness, and that couldn't reasonably be said to be any form of agency. That's not to say it's impossible for free will to exist, just that we can't be justified in believing that it does, given our current state of knowledge.

  • Others (compatibilists) might say that free will can or does exist even if determinism is true, which I'd argue is just a semantic distinction from rejecting free will.

An infinite universe means there's free will?

No, I wouldn't say so.

"There is no particular event in time that determines the others" - this is a very narrow definition of determinism (I'd say it's more about whether one worldstate is guaranteed to follow from the previous, not whether there's a single ultimate worldstate). But either way, this doesn't say much about whether your thoughts and actions are merely a result of your biology and environment, which is what I'd say the question of free will is ultimately about.

So the above statement could be true, even if free will doesn't exist.

I should also point out that someone might also posit some static starting state or a cause that caused itself through non-linear time. I don't find those idea too compelling, but I just want to highlight that there not being a god would not necessarily mean that the universe is infinite. There being a god might also not necessarily mean that the universe is not infinite, if they are outside of time.

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  • So your saying determinism could be compatable with free will and no free will, and indeterminism is compatible with free will and with no freewill in theory. Thanks for the exhaustive logic however my question was positing that it could only be resolved by determining if the universe is temporarlly infinite If it was finite God, or not, the universe could be deterministic, however if the universe is infinite no God could have created it and there must be free will if no prior event determines a succesive one. :-) I'm sorry if I didn't express my ideas clearly.
    – 8Mad0Manc8
    Commented Jan 2 at 18:54
  • @8Mad0Manc8 I added a section to my answer to address that.
    – NotThatGuy
    Commented Jan 2 at 19:32
  • I do not know If God exists but if your God is atemporal that means it is out of time and is not bound by our temporal rules. However i find it hard. However, I could possibly concede that God could exist without a temporal beginning of the universe, because there is always the question of what comes before God or is God an atemporal uncaused entity that exists beside our universe and is as uncreated as is the universe.
    – 8Mad0Manc8
    Commented Jan 2 at 19:59

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