Free will

Free will is the philosophical doctrine that holds that we have the power to choose our own deeds. As typically used, the phrase has both objective and subjective connotations, in the former case indicating the performance of an action by an agent that is unconditioned by any antecedent factors, and in the latter case the agent's perception that the action was incepted under his own volition. The principle has religious, psychological and scientific implications. In the religious realm, free will implies that an omnipotent divinity does not assert its power over our will. For psychology, it implies that we are able to control (and thus may be held accountable for) our own actions. In the scientific realm, free will implies that the body, which is the agent of our actions, is not wholly determined by physical causality. Several logically independent questions may be asked about free will.

Determinism versus indeterminism
Determinism holds that each state of affairs is entirely necessitated (determined) by the states of affairs that preceded it, an extension of cause and effect, as well as the laws of nature that govern it. Indeterminism holds this proposition to be incorrect, and that there are events which are not entirely determined by previous states of affairs. The idea of determinism is sometimes illustrated by the story of Laplace's demon, who knows all the facts about the past and present and all the natural laws that govern our world, and uses this knowledge to foresee the future, down to every detail.

Some philosophers hold that determinism is at odds with free will. This is the doctrine of incompatibilism. Incompatibilists generally claim that a person acts freely (has free will) only in cases where the person is the sole originating cause of the act and the person genuinely could have done otherwise. This kind of free will is (allegedly) incompatible with determinism since, if determinism is true and all states of affairs are fully determined by the past (including events that preceded our births), then every choice we make would ultimately be determined by prior events that were not under our control. In the case that the past conditions (but does not determine) our potential responses, this creates problems with the stipulation that the agent be the sole originating cause of the free act. Our choices would be just one outcome amongst multiple possibilities, all of which are ultimate determined by the past; even if the agent arguably exerts the will freely in choosing amongst the available options, they are not the sole originating cause of the action.

"Hard determinists", such as d'Holbach, are those incompatibilists who accept determinism and reject free will. "Libertarians", such as Thomas Reid, Peter van Inwagen, and Robert Kane are those incompatibilists who accept free will, deny determinism, and instead believe that indeterminism is true. (This kind of libertarianism should not be confused with the political position of the same name, and is thus sometimes known as voluntarism for this very reason.)

Other philosophers hold that determinism is compatible with free will. These "compatibilists", such as Hobbes, generally claim that a person acts freely only in the case where the person willed the act and the person could (hypothetically) have done otherwise if the person had decided to. In articulating this crucial proviso, Hume writes, "this hypothetical liberty is universally allowed to belong to every one who is not a prisoner and in chains". Compatibilists often point to clearcut cases of someone's free will being denied &mdash; rape, murder, theft, and so on. The key to these cases is not that the past is determining the future, but that the aggressor is overriding the victim's desires and preferences about his or her own actions. The aggressor is coercing the victim and, according to compatibilists, this is what nullifies free will. In other words, determinism does not matter; what matters is that our choices are the results of our own desires and preferences, and are not overridden by some external (or even internal) force. To be a compatibilist, one need not endorse any particular conception of free will (one need only deny that determinism is at odds with free will), but the positions canvassed here are typical of compatibilism.

Furthermore, it is often held that the phrase "free will" is, as Hobbes put it, "absurd speech", because freedom is a power defined in terms of the will, which is a thing&mdash;and so the will is not the sort of thing that could be free or unfree. John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding stated that to call will "free" is to commit oneself to a categorical fallacy:


 * Whether man's will be free or no? [T]he question itself is altogether improper; and it is as insignificant to ask whether man's will be free, as to ask whether his sleep be swift, or his virtue square: liberty being as little applicable to the will, as swiftness of motion is to sleep, or squareness to virtue. Every one would laugh at the absurdity of such a question as either of these: because it is obvious that the modifications of motion belong not to sleep, nor the difference of figure to virtue; and when one well considers it, I think he will as plainly perceive that liberty, which is but a power, belongs only to agents, and cannot be an attribute or modification of the will, which is also but a power. (Chapter XXI, Paragraph 14}

Locke states that when one declares the will to be free it is assumed that "freedom" is an adjective that may be ascribed to a power - "will" - when it is a power itself, and thus may only be properly ascribed to an agent. Thus, freedom is one power, and will another, "For, who is it that sees not that powers belong only to agents, and are attributes only of substances, and not of powers themselves?" (Chapter XXI, Paragraph 16). Therefore, the will may not, according to Locke, be called free, unless it is demonstrated that the will might be a substance or an agent.

The question also arises whether any caused act may be free or whether any uncaused act may be willed, leaving free will as oxymoronic. Some compatibilists argue that this alleged lack of grounding for the concept of "free will" is at least partly responsible for the perception of a contradiction between determinism and liberty. Also, from a compatibilist point of view the use of "free will" in an incompatibilist sense may be regarded as loaded language.

An interesting way out of this dilemma was proposed by Friedrich Schiller (in his Aesthetic Education of Man) and elaborated by Rudolf Steiner (in his Philosophy of Freedom. Both of these philosophers suggest that our will is initially unfree, and is so whether we act on the basis of ethical or moral principles (wholly rationally) or as we are driven by the force of our natural desires and drives (wholly naturally). Schiller suggests that the solution is found in a playful balance between these two extremes of rational principle and bodily desires. When we can playfully move between various motives or impulses we are free to discover what Steiner calls moral imaginations, or situation-dependent realizations of our higher intentions. Freedom is thus not a natural state, but it can be attained through the activity of self-reflective yet playful consciousness.

Moral responsibility
We generally hold people responsible for their actions, and will say that they deserve praise or blame for what they do. However, many believe moral responsibility to require free will, in other words, the ability to do otherwise. Thus, another important issue is whether we are ever morally responsible, and if so, in what sense.

Incompatibilists tend to think that determinism is at odds with moral responsibility. After all, how can one hold someone responsible for an action that could be predicted from the beginning of time? Hard determinists say "So much the worse for moral responsibility!" and discard the concept &mdash; Clarence Darrow famously used this argument to defend the murderers Leopold and Loeb &mdash; while, conversely, libertarians say "So much the worse for determinism!" This issue appears to be the heart of the dispute between hard determinists and compatibilists; hard determinists are forced to accept that we often have "free will" in the compatibilist sense, but they deny that this sense of free will truly matters &mdash; that it can ground moral responsibility. Just because an agent's choices are uncoerced, hard determinists claim, does not change the fact that determinism robs the agent of responsibility.

Compatibilists often argue that, on the contrary, determinism is a prerequisite for moral responsibility &mdash; you can't hold someone responsible unless his actions were determined by something (this argument can be traced to Hume and was also used by the anarchist William Godwin). After all, if indeterminism is true, then those events that are not determined are random. How can one blame or praise someone for performing an action that just spontaneously popped into his nervous system? Instead, they argue, one needs to show how the action stemmed from the person's desires and preferences &mdash; the person's character &mdash; before one starts holding the person morally responsible. Libertarians sometimes reply that undetermined actions are not random at all, and that they result from a substantive will whose decisions are undetermined. This argument is widely considered unsatisfactory, for it just pushes the problem back a step, and further, it involves some very mysterious metaphysics. See Ex nihilo nihil fit

St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Romans addresses the question of moral responsibility as follows: "Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?" (Romans 9:21). In this view, we can still be dishonoured for our acts even though they were ultimately completely determined by God.

A similar view has it that our moral culpability lies in our character. That is, a person with the character of a murderer has no choice other than murder, but can still be punished because it is right to punish those of bad character.

A business venture can be incorporated or given the legal fiction of personhood. This model may be an apt analogy for the individual person, who can also be seen as a legal fiction. There is no stable core elements that do not undergo changes over time yet the whole, the person, is considered the same from birth to death. Thus Stanley Williams age 52 was executed for a crime committed by Stanley Williams age 28. Thus the corporate self can be rewarded and punished legally, whether it be a business or a living being. The question of free will need not enter into this, as the issue is not freedom, but the impact upon other agents. A corporation makes decisions based on the decisions of the people who make up the corporation, a human being makes its decisions based on the decision processes of groups of cells.

Compatibilist theories and the could-have-done-otherwise principle
Many claim that, in order for a choice to be free in any sense that matters, it must be true that the agent could have done otherwise. They take this principle &mdash; van Inwagen calls it the "principle of alternate possibilities" &mdash; to be a necessary condition for freedom. The philosopher of ideas Isaiah Berlin made much the same point.

The claim is that, for example, if a criminal puts a machine in Bob's brain that makes him kill a stranger, his action was not free, for Bob couldn't have done otherwise. Incompatibilists often appeal to this principle to show that determinism cannot be reconciled with free will. "If a decision is completely determined by the past," they ask, "how could the agent have decided to do something else?" Compatibilists often reply that what's important is not simply that the agent could have done otherwise, but that the agent could have done otherwise if he or she had wanted to. Moreover, some compatibilists, such as Harry Frankfurt or Daniel Dennett, argue that there are stark cases where, even though the agent couldn't have done otherwise, the agent's choice was still free: what if Bob really wanted to kill the stranger and the machine in Bob's brain would only kick in if Bob lost his nerve? If Bob went through with it on his own, surely the act would be free. Incompatibilists claim that the problem with this idea is that what Bob "wanted" was determined before Bob was conceived. In Elbow Room, Dennett presents an argument for a compatibilist theory of free will. He elaborated further in the 2003 book Freedom Evolves. The basic reasoning is that, if we do not consider God (or an infinitely powerful demon) or time travel, then through chaos and pseudo-randomness or quantum randomness, the future is ill-defined for all finite beings. The only well-defined concepts are "expectations". Thus, the ability to do "otherwise" only makes sense when dealing with expectations, and not with some unknown and unknowable future. Since we certainly have the ability to do differently from what anyone expects, free will can exist.

The philosopher John Locke also took the view that determinism was irrelevant. He believed, however, the defining feature of free will to be that we are free so long as we have the ability to postpone a decision long enough to reflect upon the consequences of a choice.

More sophisticated analyses of compatibilist free will have been offered, as have other critiques.

William James, both philosopher and psychologist, gave the label soft determinism to the position nowadays known as compatibilism, and complained that soft determinist formulations were "a quagmire of evasion under which the real issue of fact has been entirely smothered." But James' own views were somewhat ambivalent. While he believed in free will on "ethical grounds," he believed there was no evidence for it on scientific or psychological grounds.

Moreover, he didn't believe in incompatibilism as formulated above, i.e. he didn't believe that the indeterminism of human actions was a requirement of moral responsibility. In his classic work Pragmatism, (1907) he wrote that, "Instinct and utility between them can safely be trusted to carry on the social business of punishment and praise" regardless of metaphysical theories. But he did believe that indeterminism is important as a "doctrine of relief" -- it allows for the view that, although the world may be in many respects a bad place, it may through our actions become a better one. Determinism, he argued, undermines that meliorism.

The science of free will
Throughout the history of science, attempts have been made to answer the question of free will using scientific principles. Early scientific thought often pictured the universe as deterministic, and some thinkers believed that it was simply a matter of gathering sufficient information to be able to predict future events with perfect accuracy. This encourages us to see free will as an illusion. Modern science is a mixture of deterministic and stochastic theories. For example, atomic decay occurs with predictable probability, but it is not possible even in theory to tell whether a particular atom will decay. Quantum mechanics only predicts observations in terms of probabilities.

The leading contemporary philosopher who has capitalized on the success of quantum mechanics and chaos theory in order to defend incompatibilist freedom is Robert Kane, in The Significance of Free Will and several other writings.

Like physicists, biologists have also frequently addressed the question of free will. One of the most heated debates of biology is that of "nature versus nurture". How important are genetics and biology in human behaviour compared to culture and environment? Genetic studies have identified many specific genetic factors that affect the personality of the individual, from obvious cases such as Down syndrome to more subtle effects such as a statistical predisposition towards schizophrenia. However, it is not certain that environmental determination is less threatening to free will than genetic determination. The latest analysis of the human genome shows it to have only about 20,000 genes. These genes, and the reconsidered intron genetic material, and the newly-described MiRNA allow a level of molecular complexity analogous to the complexity of human behavior. Desmond Morris and other evolutionary anthropologists have studied the relationship between behavior and natural selection in humans and other primates. The synthesis of these two fields of inquiry is that human genetics may be sufficiently complex to explain behavioral tendencies, and that (evolutionarily advantageous) environmental factors such as parental behavior and cultural standards modulate these genetic factors. Neither of these phenomena, genetic complexity nor advantageous cultural behaviors, require free will to explain human behavior.

It has also become possible to study the living brain and researchers can now watch the decision-making "machinery" at work. A seminal experiment in this field was conducted by Benjamin Libet in the 1980s, wherein he asked subjects to choose a random moment to flick their wrist while he watched the associated activity in their brains. Libet found that the unconscious brain activity leading up to the conscious decision by the subject to flick his or her wrist began approximately half a second before the subject consciously decided to move. This build up of electrical charge has come to be called readiness potential. Libet's findings suggest that decisions made by a subject are actually first being made on a subconscious level and only afterward being translated into a "conscious decision", and that the subject's belief that it occurred at the behest of their will was only due to their retrospective perspective on the event. However, Libet still finds room in his model for free will, in the notion of the power of veto: according to this model, unconscious impulses to perform a volitional act are open to suppression by the conscious efforts of the subject. It should be noted that this does not mean that Libet believes unconsciously impelled actions require the ratification of consciousness, but rather that consciousness retains the power to, as it were, deny the actualisation of unconscious impulses.

A related experiment performed later by Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone involved asking subjects to choose at random which of their hands to move. He found that by stimulating different hemispheres of the brain using magnetic fields it was possible to strongly influence which hand the subject picked. Normally right-handed people would choose to move their right hand 60% of the time, for example, but when the right hemisphere was stimulated they would instead choose their left hand 80% of the time (recall that the right hemisphere of the brain is responsible for the left side of the body, and the left hemisphere for the right). Despite the external influence on their decision-making, the subjects continued to report that they believed their choice of hand had been made freely. Libet himself (e.g. Libet, 2003: 'Can Conscious Experience affect brain Activity? ', Journal of Consciousness Studies 10, nr. 12, pp 24 - 28), however, does not interpret his experiment as evidence of the inefficacy of conscious free will &mdash; he points out that although the tendency to press a button may be building up for 500 milliseconds, the conscious will retains a right to veto that action in the last few milliseconds. A good comparison made is with a golfer, who may swing the club several times before striking the ball. In this view, the action simply gets, as it were, a rubber stamp of approval at the last millisecond. Also, for planning tomorrow's activities or those in an hour millisecond offsets are insignificant.

Neurology and psychiatry
There are several brain-related disorders that might be termed free will disorders: In obsessive-compulsive disorder a patient may feel an overwhelming urge, e.g., to wash his hands many times a day, and he will recognize the desire as his desire although out of his control. In Tourette's and related syndromes patients will involuntarily make movements (tics) and utterances. In alien hand syndrome (also called Dr. Strangelove syndrome, after the popular film) the patient's limb will make meaningful acts without the intention of the subject.

Determinism and emergent behaviour
In emergentist or generative philosophy of cognitive sciences and evolutionary psychology, free will is the generation of infinite behaviour from the interaction of finite-deterministic set of rules and parameters. Thus the unpredictability of the emerging behaviour from deterministic processes leads to a perception of free will, though free will as an ontological entity does not exist.

As an illustration, the strategy board-games chess and more so Go are rigorously deterministic in their rules and parameters, expressed in terms of the positions of the pieces or entities in relation to other entities on the board. Yet, chess and Go with their strict rigour and rules, generate more moves and unpredictable behaviour than any other games in existence. By analogy, emergentists or generativists suggest that the experience of free will emerges from the interaction of finite rules and deterministic parameters that generate infinite and unpredictable behaviour.

Dynamical-evolutionary psychology, cellular automata and the generative sciences, model emergent processes of social behaviour on this philosophy, showing the perception of free will being external to causality as essentially a gift of ignorance or as a product of incomplete information.

In theology
The theological doctrine of divine foreknowledge is often alleged to be in conflict with free will. After all, if God knows exactly what will happen, right down to every choice one makes, how can one's choices be free? God's already true or timelessly true knowledge about one's choices seems to constrain one's freedom. This problem is related to the Aristotelian problem of the sea-battle: tomorrow there will or will not be a sea-battle. If there will be one, then it was true yesterday that there would be one. Then it would be necessary that the sea battle will occur. If there won't be one, then by similar reasoning, it is necessary that it won't occur. This means that the future, whatever it is, is completely fixed by past truths &mdash; true propositions about the future. (However, some philosophers hold that necessity and possibility are defined with respect to a given point in time and a given matrix of empirical circumstances, and so something that is merely possible from the perspective of one observer may be necessary from the perspective of an omniscient.) Some philosophers believe that free will is equivalent to having a soul, and thus that (at least some) animals do not have free will. Jewish philosophy stresses that free will is a product of the intrinsic human soul (neshama).

In Christian thought
In Christian theology, God is described as not only omniscient but omnipotent, which some people, but not most, (Christians and non-Christians alike) believe implies that not only has God always known what choices you will make tomorrow, but actually chose what you would choose. That is, they believe, by virtue of His foreknowledge He knows what will influence your choices, and by virtue of His omnipotence He controls those factors. This becomes especially important for the doctrines relating to salvation and predestination. Other branches, however, believe that while God is omnipotent and knows the choices that you will make, He still allows you to make the decisions, hence creating "free" will and making you responsible for your actions. This, however, does not make logical sense, because if one knows what you will do, you do not have a choice as to whether or not you do it.

Proponents of the opposing view would make the point that knowledge of a future happening is entirely different than causing the event to happen. The definition of predestination varies among Christians. Many hold that it does not imply that God chose certain people to receive salvation and the rest have no chance of salvation, but rather, He knows that not everyone will choose salvation, and He specifically knows who will and who won't. The Bible says of God, "...God our Savior, who wants all men to be saved  and to come to a knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2:3-4, NIV).

Free will is also a point of debate among both sides of the Christian communism theory. Because some Christians interpret the Bible as advocating that the ideal form of society is communism, opponents of this theory maintain that the establishment of a large-scale communist system would infringe upon the free will of individuals by denying them the freedom to make certain decisions for themselves. Christian communists adamantly oppose this by arguing that free will has and always will be limited to some extent by human laws.

In Calvinism
Calvinists embrace the idea that God chose who would be saved from before the creation. They quote Ephesians 1:4 "For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight." In its purist form, Calvinism is an extreme version of theological determinism. One of the strongest defenders of this theological point of view was the Puritan-American preacher and theologian Jonathan Edwards.

Edwards believed that indeterminism was incompatible with our dependence on God and hence with his sovereignty. He reasoned that if our responses to God's grace are contra-causally free, then our salvation depends partly on us and therefore God's sovereignty isn't "absolute and universal." Edward's book Freedom of the Will defends theological determinism. In this book, Edwards attempts to show that libertarianism is incoherent. For example, he argues that by &#8216;self-determination&#8217; the libertarian must mean either that one's actions including one's acts of willing are preceded by an act of free will or that one's acts of will lack sufficient causes. The first leads to an infinite regress while the second implies that acts of will happen accidentally and hence can't make someone "better or worse, any more than a tree is better than other trees because it oftener happens to be lit upon by a swan or nightingale; or a rock more vicious than other rocks, because rattlesnakes have happened oftener to crawl over it." (Freedom of the Will, 1754; Edwards 1957-, vol. 1, 327).

Non-Calvinist Christians attempt a reconciliation of the dual concepts of Predestination (determinism) and free will by pointing to the situation of God as Christ. In taking the form of a man, a necessary element of this process was that Jesus Christ lived the existence of a mortal. When Jesus was born he was not born with the omniscient power of God the Creator, but with the mind of a human child - yet he was still fully God. The precedent this creates is that God is able to abandon knowledge (or ignore knowledge) while still remaining God. Thus it is not inconceivable that although omniscience demands that God knows what the future holds for us, it is within his power to deny this knowledge in order to preserve our free will.

However, a reconciliation more compatible with non-Calvinist theology states that God is, in fact, not aware of future events, but rather, being eternal, He is outside time, and sees the past, present, and future as one whole creation. Consequently, it is not as though God would know that Jeffrey Dahmer (for example) would become guilty of homicide years prior to the event, but that He was aware of it from all eternity, viewing all time as a single present.

In Catholicism
Free will is important in the Catholic Church, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas being major early figures in the history of the concept. Catholic Christianity's emphasis on free will and grace is generally in contrast to the emphasis on predestination in Protestant Christianity (see the link to Catholic Encyclopedia below for more).

In Mormonism
Mormons or Latter-day Saints, believe that God has given all humans the gift of free will (agency) where the ultimate goal is to return to His presence. David O. McKay, former prophet and president of the Church, stated, "It is the purpose of the Lord that man become like him. In order for man to achieve this it was necessary for the Creator first to make him free." (In Conference Report, Apr. 1950, 32.)

As for the conflict between predestination and free will, Latter-day Saints believe that God foreordained men to particular stations in life in order to advance His plan to lead humanity back to His presence. These foreordinations were not unalterable decrees, but rather callings from God for man to perform specific missions in mortality. Men are ultimately responsible for their own destiny, through their faith and obedience to the commandments of God. "Free agency" therefore should not be interpreted to mean that actions are without consequences; "free" means that it is a gift from God and consequences must necessarily come as a result of choices made. Thus free agency and accountability are complementary and cannot be separated.

A major difference, and a key insight to Mormons' understanding of free agency (will), between mainstream Christians and Latter-day Saints involves the belief of a life before mortality. Latter-day Saints believe that before the earth was created, all mankind lived in a pre-existent life as spirit children (Hebrews 12:9) of God. Here God, their Father, nurtured, taught and provided means for their development, but never robbed them of their free agency (Doctrine and Covenants 29:35). In this pre-existing state they could learn, choose, grow or retrograde even as on earth. This preparation would allow them to later become the men and women of earth, to be further educated and tested in the schoolhouse of mortality in order to return to God's presence and become like Him. Thus the pre-existent life is believed to have been an infinitely long period of probation, progression, and schooling. Some of the spirit children of God, so exercised their agency and so conformed to God’s law as to become "noble and great"; these were foreordained before their mortal births to perform great missions for the Lord in this life (Abraham 3:22-28). But even these who were foreordained for greatness could fall and transgress the laws of God. Therefore, mortality is simply a state wherein progression and testing is continued from what began in the pre-existence. Without free agency, mortality would be useless.

In Jewish thought
The belief in Free will (Hebrew: bechirah chofshith בחירה חפשית, bechirah בחירה) is axiomatic in Jewish thought, and is closely linked with the concept of reward and punishment, based on the Torah itself: "I [God] have set before you life and death, blessing and curse: therefore choose life" (Deuteronomy 30:19). Free will is therefore discussed at length in Jewish philosophy, firstly as regards God's purpose in creation, and secondly as regards the closely related, resultant, paradox.

The traditional teaching regarding the purpose of creation, particularly as influenced by Jewish mysticism, is that "This world is like a corridor to the World to Come" (Pirkei Avoth 4:16). "Man was created for the sole purpose of rejoicing in God, and deriving pleasure from the splendor of His Presence&#8230; The place where this joy may truly be derived is the World to Come, which was expressly created to provide for it; but the path to the object of our desires is this world..." (Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, Mesillat Yesharim, Ch.1). Free will is thus required by God's justice, &#8220;otherwise, Man would not be given or denied good for actions over which he had no control&#8221;. It is further understood that in order for Man to have true free choice, he must not only have inner free will, but also an environment in which a choice between obedience and disobedience exists. God thus created the world such that both good and evil can operate freely ; this is the meaning of the Rabbinic maxim, "All is in the hands of Heaven except the fear of Heaven" (Talmud, Berachot 33b).

In Rabbinic literature, there is much discussion as to the contradiction between God's omniscience and free will. The representative view is that "Everything is foreseen; yet freewill is given" (Rabbi Akiva, Pirkei Avoth 3:15). Based on this understanding, the problem is formally described as a paradox, beyond our understanding.


 * &#8220;The Holy One, Blessed Be He, knows everything that will happen before it has happened. So does He know whether a particular person will be righteous or wicked, or not? If He does know, then it will be impossible for that person not to be righteous. If He knows that he will be righteous but that it is possible for him to be wicked, then He does not know everything that He has created. ...[T]he Holy One, Blessed Be He, does not have any temperaments and is outside such realms, unlike people, whose selves and temperaments are two separate things. God and His temperaments are one, and God's existence is beyond the comprehension of Man&#8230; [Thus] we do not have the capabilities to comprehend how the Holy One, Blessed Be He, knows all creations and events. [Nevertheless] know without doubt that people do what they want without the Holy One, Blessed Be He, forcing or decreeing upon them to do so... It has been said because of this that a man is judged according to all his actions.&#8221; (Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Teshuva 5:5)

(The paradox is explained, but not resolved, by observing that God exists outside of time, and therefore, His knowledge of the future is exactly the same as His knowledge of the past and present. Just as His knowledge of the past does not interfere with man's free will, neither does His knowledge of the future . One analogy is that of Time travel: The time traveller, having returned from the future, knows in advance what x will do, but while he knows what x will do, that knowledge does not cause x to do so; x had free will, even while the time traveller had foreknowledge. This distinction, between foreknowledge and predestination, is in fact discussed by Maimonides' critic Abraham ibn Daud; see Hasagat HaRABaD ad loc.)

Although the above represents the majority view in Rabbinic thought, there are several major thinkers who resolve the paradox by explicitly excluding human action from divine foreknowledge. Both Saadia Gaon and Judah ha-Levi hold that "the decisions of man precede God's knowledge". Gersonides holds that God knows, beforehand, the choices open to each individual, but does not know which choice the individual, in his freedom, will make. Isaiah Horowitz takes the view that God cannot know which moral choices people will make, but that, nevertheless, this does not impair His perfection. See further discussion in the article on Gersonides.

The existence of free will, and the paradox above (as addressed by either approach), is closely linked to the concept of Tzimtzum. Tzimtzum entails the idea that God "constricted" his infinite essence, to allow for the existence of a "conceptual space" in which a finite, independent world could exist. This "constriction" made free will possible, and hence the potential to earn the World to Come. Further (according to the first approach), it is understood that the Free-will Omniscience paradox provides a temporal parallel to the paradox inherent within Tzimtzum. In granting free will, God has somehow "constricted" his foreknowledge, to allow for Man's independent action; He thus has foreknowledge and yet free will exists. In the case of Tzimtzum, God has "constricted" his essence to allow for Man's independent existence; He is thus immanent and yet transcendent.


 * See the related treatment of Negative theology, Divine simplicity and Divine Providence in Jewish thought, as well as Jewish principles of faith in general.