The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

by William Egginton

God can know every move and every decision I will ever make, and yet still I can choose freely. In other words, that we can imagine a being who isn’t constrained by having to live from one moment to the next is utterly irrelevant to what in fact happens in time. Some things happen purely by necessity; some things result from different degrees of choice. Whether we presume that all our decisions from now to our deaths are determined because God sees all of existence, all that happened, is happening, and will happen, in one eternal instant, or whether we presume that all our decisions from now to our deaths are determined because they stem from physical processes subject to the laws of mechanical causality, amounts to the same thing. But here’s the crucial point: because they implicitly avoid the limitations of time, neither presumption undermines free choice.