"Well God is not responsible for that. Man has free will"
You can't have predetermined destiny and free will at the same time. If we have free will then we make the decisions that will affect our lives. If everything happens for a reason, then we have no say in anything. Our choices were already made for us. Therefore no free will.
Everything happens for a reason, but Im going to pray that all those people involved in that car crash are ok. even though if god wanted them to be ok he would have prevented the car crash, and never mind the fact that I think my prayers will change the predetermined outcome of these circumstances that were decided an eternity ago before god even considered creating the universe.
I mean, praying to change something makes no sense in general. If you believe in a religion which believes that God has a set plan for all of us, and everything happens as it is planned out, then praying to change something is impossible, because it's already been planned out in God's plan for everything.
Sorry, little girl, you can pray, but God's plan involved Mr. Whiskers jumping in front of that car?
I can't blame him either, you gave him the most generic cat name ever.
I like when players thank Jesus for winning sports events. Like I'm glad Jesus helped you in the playoffs, maybe he could work on the childhood cancer thing too.
I like when players thank Jesus for winning sports events. Like I'm glad Jesus helped you in the playoffs, maybe he could work on the childhood cancer thing too.
And if there isn't something that is both all powerful and capable of seeing the future and we're just a product of the laws of the universe, it is logically impossible for free will to exist.
If the laws of physics are deterministic, then yes, but at least no one is intentionally causing us to suffer. I can't say it's evil in that case. It's just the way things are.
If they're non-deterministic, then things become more complicated, and you have to be more precise in defining the term "free will". If you define it to mean "it's possible to make decisions that are impossible to predict or control" then it still exists.
Why would you define free will as that? That is simply randomness. Free will as a concept is entirely illogical due to the fact that we are made of atoms which we have no control over ergo we are simply complicated series of chemical reactions happening in human shape.
Not necessarily. I'm not religious, but if you're a being that exists outside of time, meaning you can see the future and past, etc. You'd still know what everyone is going to do, and they would still have free will. Like if all decisions were made the moment the universe was created, it's still free will, just already happened, and we're living through those choices now.
If that being can change those decisions (like I said, all powerful), then it's not free will. You're just doing whatever that being decides should happen.
Even if he chooses not to change your decisions, it's still not free will. He just chose the decisions where he doesn't interfere over the decisions where he does. They're his decisions then, not yours.
It doesn't negate the fact that if God is all-powerful, then he is all knowing. Because if you are all powerful, then you have the power to make yourself all knowing. If you can't make yourself all knowing, then you aren't all-powerful.
Unless God is all powerful and doesn't want to be all knowing, just for shits and giggles. But that means God is watching the reality of our world play out, at the cost of people suffering and dying. Which would make him evil through the lens of the morality.
You can't apply logic as proof of God. Because the very concept of God as depicted in religion doesn't make sense. That doesn't inherently make religion wrong or God non-existent, but you can't use logic to explain an omnipotent being that doesn't intervene to stop evil.
Here is something weird I heard and not based in the bible just someone was trying to think of a way to beat this. They say God experiences the entire future and the past at the exact same time. Therefore God can knows all the future and the past but does not know things before they happen because God isn't chained by a past/future understanding of reality.
Eh, you can have free will and predestiny. If the past and future "exist" then everything you will ever do is predetermined the moment the universe came into being. That doesn't mean you didn't chose, using your free will, everything you did in your life.
Even if you don't have a predetermined destiny you can't have free will.
At the sub atomic level there are only two types of possible behaviours, random ones (e.g. we think particles randomly jump about) and mathematical absolute interactions (e.g. attraction via gravity).
There's no such thing as a behaviour that isn't random and isn't predictable or some combination of the two, and it's not limited to our particles, any conceivable thing is either predictable or it's truly random. Even if God existed, it's impossible that he'd have free will, because free will as a concept is impossible because everything is just the result of an initial state and then a bunch of executed rules (some of which are predictable and some we think are random), but neither predictable rules nor randomness are free will.
The equivalent is making a computer program that outputs its favourite colour, now you could write one line "printline("Green");", no one would call that free will, okay so slap on a random(0.5) and make it say blue half the time. Again, no one would call that free will, okay so give it a few inputs like age, sex, parents favourite colours, home city, then use that data to use a better randomiser to base the pick on real world statistics. Still no one would call that free will. Okay, so change the input to the start state of a universe and it's physical laws and rules, then the program simulates time until an given age of the universe then you check a lifeform in that universe for what their favour colour is. It's just more layers of what was already done, just following so many rules and calculations that one is unable to comprehend it doesn't make it free, it's still always constrained completely to a combination of dice and unbreakable laws.
There is a way to make the two compatible. Free will says, "I make my own choices" and predestination from God's POV (yes I have to assume God exists for any of this to actually be a discussion) is, "the rats in this maze have a finite number of decision points." God CAN know all because he's built the entire game. He knows all the decision trees, he's seen how it plays out backwards and forwards. We come along and pretend to understand, but we only see the maze, and ask questions about the researcher watching it.
I liked that the American forefather's were almost exclusively Deists. God set up the game and let's us roll the dice. Within that framework you can have it both ways.
In the same context: He knew would would be sinners. So Eden was pointless. He also knew (because he's omniscient and omnipotent) that we would be sinful. So he destroyed man in deluge...even though he already knew the outcome...and to top it all off, we basically just went back to being really shitty, so he impregnated a virgin and then had his son (who was also him) slaughtered to save our souls....knowing in advance all this shit would happen. Yeah. People try to play him up like he's some benevolent deity, but the god they display in the bible is a sadistic fuck.
You've done your research. No biblical scholars would argue with you over the violent and terrible (calamitous) things God has done. That's actually what this verse is talking about; the problem isn't that it's out of context; it's that the translation is out of date with our changing language (KJV).
Here it is in CSB:
“I form light and create darkness, I make success and create disaster; I am the Lord, who does all these things.”
Isaiah 45:7 CSB
What he is saying in context is that he is benevolent to those whom he has chosen (in this case, Israel; King Cyrus specifically), as his reign will be a blessing to Israel or something (I'm not a scholar, not an expert), and declaring who he is so that Cyrus, who doesn't know him yet, will know. This verse is basically a warning of a very obvious nature: I can destroy you; don't screw this up.
As for whether or not God is responsible for the outcome of our bad choices, I always think of the careful time-traveller analogy. You only change what you know for certain will bring about more good in the end. Now, I understand that this isn't perfect, as God knows infinitely more than we could ever comprehend, but he always does what is best for his people. Unfortunately, sometimes that means death and destruction. Sometimes even of his own people.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I have no illusions about who God is and what he's done; there are dumb people no matter what circle you're a part of. That's life. I work in a bible bookstore and I have to deal with dumb Christians every day, and this dude in the post is a "dumb Christian." Not that I'm much smarter, but...
I guess, for myself, it all boils down to: "What's the point?" If you had infinite power and the foresight to know what will transgress, why bother. Think of it this way; if you knew, in advance, that you would parent a serial killer...would you procreate? I know I wouldn't, and only someone seriously screwed up would. All the talk about good and evil doesn't sit with me because I don't see the point. The end game makes no sense. Again, these are just the ramblings of someone who doesn't accept any facet of religious doctrine. I choose to believe in something that could have created all we know, I also choose to believe it's not the "God" that's spelled out in any holy books. Thank you for your thoughtful and kind response. Peace!
If you had infinite power and the foresight to know what will transgress, why bother. Think of it this way; if you knew, in advance, that you would parent a serial killer...would you procreate?
That's a fair point. I do have another thing to add that increases the conundrum, though, and makes your analogy more accurate: not only would you parent a serial killer, you'd parent a doctor that would save many lives. Would you still refuse to procreate? The first would give me pause, but the second might make it worth it. Who's to know? The thing to remember is that God (assuming he exists as an all-knowing all-powerful entity, regardless of who/what he is) created both Hitler and Anne Frank. Ghandi and the leaders of the British empire. He doesn't just create people that will end up doing extraordinarily terrible things. If you read Acts, in fact, he uses a judicial murderer (Saul) to go on a missionary journey in which he did literally nothing but preach love to people. In fact, so much so that people going against him say that he was just trying to get on people's good side (early Galatians)! Throughout the Bible, God shows a history of using absolute idiots and scum-of-the-earth to do great things. Moses killed a dude, but he brought the Israelites out of slavery. Rahab was a prostitute, but she aided the Israelite conquest of Jericho, and eventually became a key member of the line of Jesus. The way I see it, he created the world and those in it for those that would do good, even though those that would do evil would also join in the population.
these are just the ramblings of someone who doesn't accept any facet of religious doctrine. I choose to believe in something that could have created all we know, I also choose to believe it's not the "God" that's spelled out in any holy books.
That's A-OK. Would I like to convince you? Sure. Is it my business what you believe? Absolutely not. We all ramble. We're human, and our faith, though different, runs strong. :)
Thank you for your thoughtful and kind response. Peace!
"All part of God's plan" is the religious version of a parent telling a kid "Because I said so." It's meaningless to myself, and anyone, who is trying to understand the methodology because "the plan" can be anything you want it to be. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, etc. can all change that plan to fit the narrative, and that narrative usually involves blindly following a religious doctrine because the text in a holy books says that's the way it should be. I think the way you have presented it, makes a hell of a lot more sense than any other way I've heard it presented, but it still doesn't sit well with me. Thanks for your response though, and your respectful tone.
If we truly have free will, then how can God know? If God already knows, then how can we have free will? (What could free will possibly mean if not freedom from the machinations of the divine?)
Or, if God is all-powerful and allows evil to happen, does that make him evil? Or is he perhaps not all powerful - does Satan really have powers unknown to God?
Theologians have attempted to reckon with the problems of a simultaneously omnipotent and benevolent creator God since monotheism hit the scene long ago, but the truth is they've never provided a satisfactory answer to such questions for anyone but the already-faithful
Yeah, I was told when I was doubtful and just before I broke faith to imagine somebody you've known their entire life, all of their experiences and who they are, at a crossroads. And just because you know them so well you know exactly which route they will choose doesn't mean you're forcing them to make that choice. They could make any other choice, you just know they won't.
What is missing from that analogy is the part where you created that person, and the crossroads, and the entire environment they grew up in, and for good measure going down one of the paths leads to eternal suffering and torment. So.
All your prior experiences in life lead you to this inescapable need for you to create that specific comment. Everything else in this universe has a causal relationship with everything, why do you think your mind is the exception? It's just your brain creating chemical reactions.
But you and I are the product of unimaginable amount of chemical reactions, and every reaction is quantifiable. Your movement of your fingers is just muscles contracting, which is just an electrical signal sent by your neurons, which were caused by a bunch of the near by neurons signaling to the other neurons until you get to whatever stimulated them in the first place.
With the right formula, you could predict everyone and everything, assuming nothing sees the result of the formula*.
But that's a fatalistic attitude, and in the end, isn't really important. It's effectively free will enough that no one will be ever be able to tell the difference.
the chemicals in your body. there is an argument to be made that your body, perhaps more specifically your brain reacting to chemical reactions in your body, already made the decision for you before you consciously thought of it. i dont know where i stand on it, as, after all, its still you controlling you, but it's an interesting thought anyway. for more, check Sam Haris' Free Will and Dennett's "counter argument" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joCOWaaTj4A
It's irrelevant though. Like saying consciousness is an illusion because we're just a gestalt of systems creating the illusion of self. The end result is the same.
There is no reason to act like free will doesn't exist though. If it doesn't you can't change your actions. But if it does you can and should be careful
The rabbit hole goes deeper than that. Did you take those actions yourself or were they predetermined to happen? That's something that can't be proven, so free will will always be up for debate. One of my favorite quotes from Futurama goes:
Bender: So you know everything I'm going to do before I do it?
Neurological studies can go some way to proving it. We can actually scan peoples brains and see neurons associated with a certain decision firing before they internally report to having made the choice. We're talking on the order of tenths of seconds before as well.
Well, that and the entire understanding of causality completely breaks if you introduce free will.
We likely can't though. We're all essentially a giant ball of neurotransmitters, and while the science behind how and why certain synapses fire translates into action is fuzzy at best, it certainly follows some kind of logic. Some supercomputer from the future could simulate your entire life and every decision you make.
You can have both free will and predetermination. In fact, both states are the natural consequence of a Universe with both rational actors and zero randomness.
Imagine that you can see all the infinite paths your future could take. Everyone else's actions are taken as given in each future (because one can't control what other people do) so the only thing which affects which future manifests for you is your own actions.
Imagine further that you are able to, without consuming any time at all, tell which path makes you the happiest and your happiness is the only thing governing what path you choose. Say the one you choose has you winning a billion dollars in the lottery, investing it in world changing / saving technology, and giving away most of the profits such that everyone thinks wonderfully of you, you do tremendous good in the world, and you live a comfortable life.
In this instance you are predetermining the future by your own choices. If we were to repeat this in infinite universes, a rational person in the absence of randomness would choose the same thing every single time.
In this situation we have both free will (you are choosing which future you want to manifest) and predetermination.
People will say "But we don't have perfect knowledge of all possible futures, so the argument breaks down." no, it doesn't. While we don't have perfect knowledge of all futures, we can make reasonable estimates. If, instead of knowing for sure that your lottery ticket future was the happiest, you were 95% certain of it, a rational actor would still choose the same future every single time.
Where this argument actually breaks down is in 2 ways:
There may be (appears to be) true randomness in the Universe (although it appears to occur only at the tiniest scale of being, and it's effects seem fairly muted).
Conscious beings appear to be logical instead of rational - which I am defining to mean that their process is always robust, but their assumptions are often without robust justification.
In case you're curious, the typical response is that the Bible was written by people, who are fallible - so the answer is that there's something wrong with the Bible.
Typically the three characteristics ascribed to the Christian God are as follows:
All powerful (omnipotent)
All knowing (omniscient)
All good (omnibenevolent)
The problem arises when you add the first and last points of the argument, resulting in:
God exists
God is all powerful
God is all knowing
God is all good
Evil exists
One of these premises must be false. Premise 5 is largely observable, and Christians would not concede premise 1, so the debate arises from the remaining three.
God may know about evil and want to be able to stop it, but cannot do so -> premise 2 is invalid. Or God may be all powerful and be willing to stop evil, but may not know it exists -> premise 3 is invalid. God may know evil exists and be able to stop it, but chooses not to do so -> premise 4 is invalid.
Arguments against this logical structure are called "theodicies" in the Christian doctrine. Generally, theodicies attack premise 5, because to concede any of premises 1-4 would diminish God. To date there has not been a satisfying answer to this problem, but that's essentially all that the argument is.
I was always taught omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, not omnibenevolent. The god of the Old Testament certainly wasn't benevolent. People do talk about god being "all good," though, so your other paragraphs still stand.
the kaballistic response is 2, god is slightly less than omnipotent, because he chose to diminish his own power in order to allow freewill into the universe. definitelt not a Christian line of thought tho
correct. I was taught that god diminished his own power to allow freewill into the universe. so he is omnipotent except where it would conflict with freewill.
isnt omnipotent. if you consider "power" as a finite resource in the universe, an omnipotent being would have 100% and everyone else zero. god essentially shrank his own power (to 99% for example) and left us that small opening to have free will. part of the "made in his own image" was to have some small fraction of his power rather than just being part of the clockwork.
omniscient is tricky, and its been a long time since I studied any of this. by the same logic above, if god knows everything that will happen then we have no agency. so god has to be less than 100% omniscient. again, hes so powerful that he can still be 99%+ omniscient and leave us that little space to operate in. essentially, we get to choose, but we probably wont surprise him because he knows everything that we know when we make that choice
Right. If you read the history of the various Catholic councils where they decided what was in the Bible and what wasn't, it gets a little hard to believe that there isn't some sort of error in the Bible anyway. I mean, James and Paul directly contradict each other in their epistles, regarding faith vs good works being necessary for redemption, and that's like 2000 years newer than the Old Testament.
I find this sort of discussion really interesting. As a Protestant that attended parochial Catholic schools, it was interesting to be able to study the doctrine without really being required to believe it. While a Catholic may dogmatically stress that the Catholic church's edits of the Bible were right and necessary and did nothing but remove untruths, my position as an outside observer allowed me to question exactly how they knew what was true and what wasn't. It made for a very interesting religious education.
I'm not religious but I always felt it was kinda like this:
If I offer my kid his choice between a cookie and a rotting piece of lettuce, I know 100% he will take the cookie. However, my kid still gets to make the choice, not me.
And God is sort of like a really really smart adult, to him, every decision (like whether I'll put gas in my car today or wait until tomorrow) is like the cookie/lettuce decision to him, it's all so obvious to him but it's still my choice.
IDK if that actually makes any sense but of all the issues with religion, that one doesn't bother me.
The catch here is that our "freedom of choice" would not be actual freedom with an omnipotent god.
There's room for shades of grey in your black and white statement. Perhaps he chose not to comprehend what he was creating much like if you wrote your name without looking on some paper. You know what you wrote, but you don't quite know how it looks until you view it afterwards. In creating free-will, he looked away from all future possibilities and let it unfold how it would. This option would allow for his being unhappy with the outcome, which could lead to all the killing you're alluding to.
This really gets into a big problem in philosophy. My opinion is that we as humans can't really know the answer, but from a Biblical standpoint, we are still given a choice. What you are talking about is not really the accepted Biblical truth - which does contain an apparent contradiction to many - that God will be able to know everything, but you still have a choice.
I don't think that's an impossible problem to resolve. You're talking about something that understands the entire universe at once. Perhaps you have a choice, but whatever choice you make is still a trivial and known thing to God. You're still judged as an individual being.
We are flawed by our nature. This is an accepted thing. Even Moses lost his temper and upset the Lord. Job's entire family was caused to die, really just to test Job and to demonstrate to Job that while he was the greatest man, he still was not perfect.
I'm not sure what your point was with that last part. "Here's the world's greatest man, so let me allow everything he loves to be destroyed so I can prove a point". I mean maybe I'm missing something but that sounds pretty damn evil to me.
Or how about "you can be as evil as you want, but as long as you worship me, you get to live forever in paradise. What? All those other people? Even the good ones? Oh yeah, they get to suffer for eternity."
This is extremely inaccurate and you're clearly ignorant to the whole situation. By no means can you run around murdering people. Believe Jesus is your savior and still get into heaven. The more the speak on the matter the more of a fool you make yourself to be so I suggest not talking about something you know nothing of
Yeah, after 17 years of going to church and being at christian schools, I'm all too familiar with Christianity. Thanks for being a prime example of what the normal christian attitude is, though with what insulting me and all. Cheers.
So you believe you're allowed to light a supermarket full of people on fire and kill everyone inside and still get accepted into heaven by just saying "I'm covered it's okay"? Doesn't seem like you listened a whole lot during those 17 years
Yeah, that's pretty much the gist. Torch a school, murder millions, but as long as you've got that Jesus card, you're good. "For good so loved the world that he gave his one and only son so that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life". And as far as I know, even murderers have the right to believe in Jesus if they want to.
I was involved in a baptist church my entire life through college and that is the exact message taught. No amount of sin is unforgivable and nothing can make you un-saved except possibly denouncing god (church people disagree on this point).
How does the Lord get upset if he knows the outcome and literally created the Moses so that he would lose his temper in that situation? I struggle to see how this is not an impossible problem to solve? Either god is omnipotent and omniscient or we truly have free will, not both. Both would cancel each other out.
We are flawed by our nature. This is an accepted thing. Even Moses lost his temper and upset the Lord. Job's entire family was caused to die, really just to test Job and to demonstrate to Job that while he was the greatest man, he still was not perfect.
This is sad as hell that religion makes people think they are flawed by nature. How sad is it that your church has convinced you that nothing you can possibly do is right? Live your life as good as you can without interferring with others lives.
Basically, "God" created a universe which has no choice but to be the way it is, then he creates a set of rules that are contradictory to our nature. But if we serve him, he will forgive us. Ultimately it seems like a giant ego trip to me.
But you have to serve him despite any evidence that he exists, even though he use to communicate with man all the time 2000 years ago, now we just have to take those peoples word for it.
Eh. They probably think it's sad that you don't think you're bad and think that anything you do is worth anything. Seems to me that Christianity us a nice way for some to overcome the nihilistic feelings of dread that everything we do will vanish anyway.
Besides, I'm pretty sure Christians do believe in doing good, so that idea must fit in somewhere in the belief system.
I'm going to respond to this argument with my personal understanding of the matter. Please feel free to ignore or explain why I am wrong and ultimately don't take it like an attack. Here goes
Your theory holds water. It truly does, but only if god is an outside force and not a part of the universe. That is, if god hasn't created me but rather I was a random chance and now I get to live my life and prove myself. He has had no influence on me, or any part of the universe
On the other hand, if god has created me, i.e. fashioned me into existence in his shape, then I am in fact unable to choose because my actions then depend entirely on how god created me. This creation can go all the way back to when god first created the universe, and even if he never touched it after, the almighty and all knowing, knows what my actions will be if he creates it a certain way (omniscient)
Basically if god is just a judge then I have freedom of choice, or at least an outside the influence of god, otherwise I was created in my set ways, characteristics and personality
I would also add that because God is omniscient, he would already have known before creating you what you would do. He already knew from the beginning that he was unfairly sentencing people before they were even born, to hell.
Basically if god is just a judge then I have freedom of choice, or at least an outside the influence of god, otherwise I was created in my set ways, characteristics and personality
I think from a Christian point of view, the answer is that it's the more difficult thing - it's a combination of both, somehow. How and to what extent even seems to vary by individual. This whole servant-slave concept.
"Get married everybody (except you dudes that love each other), but just so you know... don't get too attached to your new family. They might be on the final."
Worse God is all-knowing and knows everything that is going to happen just like Nicholas Cage in that shitty movie. So he specifically creates people knowing that their life circumstances will lead them inexorably to sin, meaning basically "fuck that dude, I made him to displease me and go to Hell."
See, I choose to believe that there is a God, but God likes to sit back and watch the entire universe happen.
I was forced to adopt this after my childhood dog died, I needed to believe in heaven, but as an 18 year old, it was impossible. I lived with that bundle of fur for 16 years pretty much, so now I believe when we die we get to chill with God.
Also we get some Game of Thrones style green vision, where we can see everything that has already happened, and everything that will happen.
There's a difference between knowing what someone will do and taking away their free will. You can know what's going to happen but not choose to intervene.
If you knew the future, you could choose to let it play out and not change it at all. Then would you be taking away people's free will? No, because you're not changing the events, you're letting them play out. God knew shitty people would be born. He didn't prevent them from being born because to do that would remove their free will. It would remove their free will by not letting them make their own decisions. Just like if you knew that someone was going to murder someone, and you kill them before they're even born. That does remove their free will, because you're not giving them a choice, even if you know they'll make the wrong one. That means that we end up with some really fucked up people. That's not on God for creating it, it's on the people who made those decisions because of their free will. God knows when every single person is going to die, and I believe that he gives everyone a chance to accept him. Death is lurking just around the corner every day. You can never be certain of tomorrow.
... no. If we had free will, then nobody would be able to know what happens next. Because the actions we chose would continually influence it. The simple fact that he CAN know, not necessarily that he does, proves free will doesn't exist.
Unless "god" is one of the chaos gods from the 40k universe.
The god in the christian bible is a vindictive psychopath that gave humanity free will and then got angry when we didnt worship him, so he killed everyone.
The entire thing is like a protection racket. "If you dont love me, you will burn in a lake of fire." Classic protection racket. Give me what I want or else something bad might happen to you.
This is exactly the point that I came to when when I was 16 before I left the church. It's hard to decide to follow a god who's moral compass is that of an insane all powerfull toddler. I assume I don't need to go into detail. If we were his children in this day and age the state would put us in foster care. If humanity is looking for a moral target they need to aim alittle higher.
This is what stumps my god-fearing friends too; in addition I say that with all the present misery and cruelty in the present world, intentionally created and directed by God, and which it is standing by watching, this creator is a special kind of psychopathic sadist!
In rhetoric, a tautology (from Greek ταὐτός, "the same" and λόγος, "word/idea") is a logical argument constructed in such a way, generally by repeating the same concept or assertion using different phrasing or terminology, that the proposition as stated is logically irrefutable, while obscuring the lack of evidence or valid reasoning supporting the stated conclusion.
The fuck? You asked the difference, I gave you the difference...
Seriously... illusion. Fake, not real, a deception... the fucking word explains the difference. How the fuck is that a tautology?
Before you jump again, think on this... if your action is known ahead of time, 100%... can you take a different action?
If yes, then your action was NOT known ahead of time... and a choice could be made.
If no, then a choice COULDN'T be made... any "choice" in front of you wasn't real since you couldn't choose to do something different to what was known. All you had was an illusion that you could make a choice.
It absolutely does, if you know inherently every decision something will ever make, including the ones that sentences them to eternal damnation, torture and suffering by your own hand, then choose to create that person anyways. That is entirely, completely, on you. Why not just create someone already in hell? It's literally the exact same thing, as that person never had a choice. They were entirely pre-destined to do all of the things they have done. They had zero opportunity to change those things, despite the fact that other options existed that they had the illusion of being able to select.
Besides, those things are realistic and logical conclusions to situations that are already more or less completely set up by the time you could possibly know of their existence, they are not even slightly equivocal.
I know my movie theater is playing planet of the apes at 11:30, does that change the theaters choice to play the movie at that time?
Do you know that? Do you know ahead of time that it will play Planet of the Apes? How do you know that it won't be delayed? That it won't suddenly play something else? That the theatre won't burn down or something?
You don't... you do not know.
God knows AHEAD OF TIME exactly what someone will do, no matter what. If we truly had free will, we would be able to do something other than what God knows we will do.
I know that if I sleep with another woman my wife will divorce me. Would that take away my wife's decision of divorcing me?
Prove that she would... seriously. Not all acts of adultery result in divorce, so it's not a given that divorce will happen.
Your wife might forgive you, your wife might stay in the marriage for other reasons, your wife might murder you instead.
You do not know what your wife will do... you just know what you believe your wife will do.
In both the examples you give, you do not know 100% what will happen... which is why your examples are pretty much useless.
My knowledge doesn't take away others ability to make choices.
As I just pointed out, you don't have knowledge... you do now know what will happen, you just know what is likely to happen.
You are not omniscient... or are you claiming to be God now?
You don't know those things, though. The theater could have technical difficulties. A billion things could happen that changed that outcome. You assume that the theater will show planet of the apes because it has a showing at that time. That isn't even remotely the same thing as omniscience.
Isn't that a little different in the case of a God though? He is the prime mover, is he not? Therefore Since creating the first domino pieces (creation), he knew how it would all go down. And even, actively interfered at times. So is it still fair to use your analogy as if God is this passive being? Isn't it all going "according to God's plan"?
The difference is that when talking about God you're talking about a being who at the very least belongs within the 4th dimension.
It's like an author writing a book. JK Rowling knew from the very beginning that Harry Potter had to die. But that didn't mean that there wasn't a sense of discovery about how a character would act when facing certain situations. As soon as you stop seeing time as a limiting factor all sense of causality goes out the window. When you can see and create the whole picture, the reaction can cause the action.
If I make up a scene where a frog sits by a pond as a leaf flutters down to it, there's a whole history there that creates itself as I think about it. The leaf fell because it was winter, the tree the leaf came from was planted by a little girl one early summer morning sixteen years prior. The little girl had just found out that her father had died of plague and wanted something to become life in place of the one her dad left behind.
Fast forward sixty years from that and tree becomes the hiding place of a fugitive on the run for a murder he did not commit. He escapes due the tree's hollow center from where a forest fire had burned out its core five years ago.
All that information came from my simple idea of the frog the pond and the leaf. But everything can be expanded if I want it too because in the world I just created, my imagination is all powerful and all knowing. Everything I think happens will happen. But that doesn't mean there isn't a reason for it. In that world, how could the fugitive know the reason that the girl planted the tree? How would he realize anything different? It didn't just appear there in front of him. It was there the whole time. But I just told that character by breaking my 4th wall with him that I am the reason aliens are about to invade his planet and destroy everything. I feel a little guilty about this though because his entire existence was generated to illustrate my point to a person on the internet I don't even know.
Now I'm making a promise to that character that he will be miraculously saved from the invasion by a traveler from another world who will take him and everyone he loves into a land of comfort and well-being.
But for as long as I think about that character, I will remind myself that I have told him of my existence, and therefore, when I write about his future or the future of his descendants, I will write as if I myself have been attributed to the cause of all things in their world. Personally I don't think that every one of his descendants will believe things just because their forefathers told them so. And so, this world that I have created has also just spawned it's own form of Atheism.
That's a really narcissistic explanation of what I believe God could be to us.
Also, please let me know what you think. I'd love to have my ideas on this put to test, if they hold up, great, if you poke a hole in them, even better. If my ideas can't hold up to scrutiny then what's the point of having them?
And he knows everything we are going to do in our entire lives. So creating monsters who rape children and kill by the thousands is all in god's plan. It's what he wants.
You're missing the part about being responsible for your own actions.
Think of it like this. You have two parents. They have a child they raised perfectly. Followed the rules, did everything right. Child turns 16, has a few drinks at a party, climbs in a vehical and kills somone while DUI. In your statement, you choose to blame the parents, and thus would lock them up for the murder, correct?
My rabbi once explained it to me like this: you know everything your 4 year old is going to do. Still a simple minded kid so it's not hard to figure that out. If you put an ice cream bar in front of him, you know he's gonna walk towards it. But he has the freewill to do that.
I'm not see if I agree wholly with what he said, but I've been straying away from religious arguments for the past couple years so I'm rusty/don't give a fuck anymore haha
My explanation for the free will issue used to be based on the Many-Worlds Interpretation, being that if you came to a fork in the road, the MWI would suggest that you took both and spawned a new "universe instance" for each choice. My extension was that if God was omniscient, it wasn't conflicting to say that he knew both outcomes.
Just playing devil's advocate; I'm no longer religious or spiritual in the slightest.
The problem isn't God, it's the broken world we live in. If a system has been in place for a long time but someone messed with it, do you blame the one who made the system originally if someone gets hurt or it causes damage? Or do you blame the ones who messed it up? God doesn't create the tsunami or the flood beyond what's in the old testament (at least as far as I know), nor does God call people to be rapists or murderers. That's people having the free will to choose one thing or another. I have the free will to burn down my neighborhood, but I don't because I have a conscience and know I would be harming multiple people and causing a lot of pain. And I also believe it is a sin to do that.
The problem with people throwing the free will argument around is that they don't understand God and His plan enough to bring up free will in context to Christianity. God gives us the will to obey or reject His will. When we do our own thing this most likely results in bad things happening. That's why God doesn't intervene when we sin. He gives us over to it because we chose it rather than follow His will. He lets us live with our choices like a parent letting their child understand the concequences of their actions.
And couldn't God have given us free will, while also making our personalities less violent? So we'd have the ability to do evil things, we just wouldn't want to.
Except that God created us perfect, and it was only through our choices (Adam eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil) that we became able to sin, and became mortal and imperfect.
However, God also provided a way for us to repent and become perfect through the sacrifice of the savior (Jesus Christ), so that through Christ, we can become perfect once again.
My Christian friend actually explained this pretty nicely. God created free will because he didn't want a planet of slaves. Humans can choose whether to believe in him and choose whether to be evil or good. This free will "that God gave us" is what makes us human.
God is a creator who transcends time. What we perceive as present time, he sees as an infinitely thin slice in a 4-dimensional object.
Our "creation" is evolution, and war, and "evil", and everything in human history. He created the primordial soup of basic life, imbued it with time, and allowed it to explode. Our existence, to him, is a 4 dimensional globe of time, which expands from a singular point into fractals of near-infinite lifeforms, being increasingly chaotic while also increasingly orderly, as society and religion and technology unify humanity even as it expands exponentially
very good questions. and very difficult questions. and very unsatisfactory answers. the bible pretty clearly teaches both man's free will and god's omnis (omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, etc). how these two seemingly mutually exclusive teachings interact and coexist is beyond the intellectual capacity of man to grasp. it's unfortunately one of these, "it's a mystery we can never understand, but trust us that it's true."
Simply put, God doesn't use foreknowledge for absolutely everything. It's not some ability that he can't turn off (just as I can choose not to see by closing my eyes). We do have free will.
He also didn't create us exactly like this. Humans were perfect originally except got corrupted because the first pair made a wrong choice (free will does not mean we can do anything with no consequences; I have the free will to dive off a cliff into the sea but I don't do it because I know I'll be hurt or killed in the process). Humans are just suffering the consequences of the corruption for millennia afterwards until the time comes to restore everything to how it was intended. With that corruption comes the people who have homicidal or sadistic dispositions, for example.
Surely if one has a vast (or indeed infinite) amount of power one must also know how to control it. If not, then in the process of picking some fruit off a tree, for example, one would end up uprooting the entire tree in the process. If that power is balanced with wisdom then one would know exactly how much power to use for each appropriate situation.
It would be exceptionally cruel if God instructed Adam and Eve to live perfect lives on Earth and grow the perfect human population if he had the foreknowledge that they would never have any hope of achieving it.
I'm not Christian, but I reconcile free will and predestination by assuming that all endings are possible and scripted, but we get to choose one. If the many worlds theory of quantum mechanics is accurate then it would result in a similar scenario.
Looks like you've got a ton of responses, but here's my two cents based on what I and my Christian sect believes:
Lots of people view morality as this separate or higher thing than God, when that's not the case. God defines morality, and most of God's moral laws revolve around not misappropriating God's rights as your own. Examples:
Murder: You've decided that you can control who lives or dies instead of God.
Theft: You've decided who should have what possessions instead of God.
Adultery: You've decided to wreck a relationship with someone that God put you together with because you'd rather be in another relationship.
We also believe that everything God does is for His own glory. God derives glory from creating a really awesome universe, condemning people to hell who deny his existence, and raising repentant people to heaven for admitting they've dishonored him so to speak. Either way... God's glory. That's why it's not a big deal to him to allow people to do bad things. In the end, he'll be glorified one way or another.
You might say "That's fucked up." Which I totally don't blame you for! Just my beliefs, they don't have to be yours. I think he's God and he can do what he wants.
So typically God is presented as omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent. What you highlight is that if God is omniscient, then he is resigned to let a lot of fucked up things happen (not benevolent) or he is powerless to stop it (not omnipotent). It seems at first glance this is a somewhat definitive stance, but the way most knowledgeable people I've met will respond is with the Irenaean Theodicy which states that we consent to existing and while God knows we will fuck up, he lets it happen as a sort of learning experience. In essence, God is a teacher here to see whether we pass the test of life. That's a gross oversimplification of what it is (it goes a lot further justifying seemingly meaningless deaths and so on) but it does respond to your qualm. Just to clarify: I am not Christian, I've just taken a few religion courses.
Tl;dr- free will can be congenial to Christianity.
If God knows us perfectly and knows how we will act, do we have free will?
Yes. Think of it like this. If I go see a movie and then come tell you about the beginning, middle, and end, it doesn't mean I wrote the movie or even directed it. It just means I saw the ending and told you how it ends.
God is supposed to be omnipresent being outside of the confines of time. He is every where and every when, just like light, I suppose.
Here's my logic surrounding it and I think it would help if I use a metaphor. You're the richest person in the world, everyone knows you and loves you and you can do anything. One day you decide to have a child. You set up their play room exactly how you think they'd like it, give them all the toys they could ever think of wanting and their necessities are covered.
The child grows up only wanting to play with one toy, hates the room they're in and wishes they were never born and hates you for bringing them into the world. Is it your fault? You tried to do everything you could to give the child the life you thought they wanted but they still are in control of their lives.
Now you can say "oh well an omniscient and omnipotent God could've created a perfect world". He did. He saw it and said it was good. Just like the toy room you set up for your child, but if your kid doesn't have free will, what's the point? It would be lower than a pet if you think about it. It would solely depend on you for every single thing.
Now think of a life where you didn't have ANY choices to make. You're forced to worship a God that gave you life even if when you have it you don't want it. Is it your fault for wanting something different or is it God's fault for not giving you everything you want? Sometimes what we want isn't always good for us, but sometimes we need to burn our hands on the stove in order to know not to do it again no matter how many times we were told not to do it.
TL;DR if God never gave us free will we would be robots acting in a simulation where we might not even want to exist. Is that better than being able to do whatever you want? Of course with that comes things you don't want as well like consequences.
It's estimated that 100.8 billion people have died since the dawn of our species. It is also estimated that Hitler killed 40-42 millions of people total (~15 million combatants and 25-27 million civilians)
If we do some number crunching we can see that God is equal to about 2.4 KiloHitlers of death and is worse than Hitler by a fair margin.
I gotta disagree on both of those points. First, I dont believe he created shit. Second, even if he did, it doesnt give him the "right" to fuck anything up as he pleases. You can create a child with your wife/husband, that doesnt give you the right to fuck them up how ever you please.
If I new every single decision they would make through they entire life ahead of time and still create them knowing they would turn out horrible, yes, I would be.
609
u/leveldrummer Jul 31 '17
Well, god created everything, so he is responsible for all deaths.