Hashem's Foreknowledge and Free Will - Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb

What’s said in this shiur

The opening of this shiur, in Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb’s own words — taken from the captions, so names and Hebrew terms may be approximate.

Yesterday we were talking about free will and I mentioned that freedom is freedom from freedom from outside compulsion causation. The question is sometimes asks asked does Hashem have free will? And here I think it in order to answer it in a a instructive way or meaningful way I have to be very careful to way I have to be very careful to distinguish between free will and free choice. Free will I'm not going back on what I said. Free will means that it's free from external compulsion. Free choice means I could have done something else. I chose one thing but in the very same circumstances at the same time I could have chosen something else. Those two might not be Those two might not be uh always accompanying one another. Now when you apply it to a um I think they come apart. Freedom from external compulsion. Freedom from external causation. Wow. Hashem has that in spades. Nothing causes Hashem. Nothing manipulates Hashem. Nothing forces Hashem. Nothing pushes Hashem. That's a no-brainer. It's beyond belief. But it doesn't follow necessarily that he could have done otherwise because there might be something internal to Hashem that limits his choices. So for example, I think I've never come across anyone who denies this, but I have no literature. I think everyone I've seen ever agrees that it's not possible for Hashem not possible for Hashem to do evil. God's goodness is a part of his perfection and it's a necessary quality of him. Not just accidental that he's good. He might have been bad. It's necessary that he's good. That being the case in some sense, God can't do evil. So when he does good, at least sometimes

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1. 0:02Yesterday we were talking about free will and I mentioned that freedom is freedom from freedom…
2. 4:13and that means how could there then be free will for a human being. If freedom…
3. 8:26in a an essay called in one of its editions there are several editions in one…
4. 12:32determined by God's will since his will is running everything. So he's got to with his…
5. 16:40Is that really possible for you to do something that would contradict God's knowledge? Isn't God's…
6. 20:43that imaginary world like? Well, in that imaginary world, yesterday, God knew I was going to…
7. 24:59okay but now also he's above our world he's the creator of our world so he…
8. 29:05and he describes one school of Arabic philosophy as holding the position that god knows everything…
9. 33:12between two things that we want we want to believe. One is that we have free…
10. 37:19like anything that we know. So all our words and all our concepts don't apply to…

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