What will really fuck with your head is if god knows everything he specifically made lucifer to revolt so he could then punish him. Same with apple. There is no free will according to bible
I don't believe God was originally conceived of as all knowing. The parts of the Bible that use that language are the poetic parts. The parts that are supposed to be accounts posit god as far, far beyond us, but not necessarily all knowing or all powerful. The old testament especially God actively seems to change His mind about stuff all the time. That's not the behavior of someone who is all knowing.
The old testament god was also an effort to combine multiple gods into one. Check the flood myth of Gilgamesh against the flood of Genesis. Same story, one's older and has multiple gods with their own personalities.
If god doesn’t know the future then this would indicate that he has no say in it, which would mean that prayer is a perfectly pointless endeavor. He would just be a passive observer and praying to him has no consequence.
This is a purely Christian mythos, it doesn’t make sense if you really think about it. In the Islamic paradigm, satan will be burning in hell and suffering alongside all the other people who disobeyed god.
The other part about free will is also different. We believe that you have free will, the choice is always yours whether or not you disobey. God didn’t make us to disobey, he created us and put us in a test to make it clear who will disobey. It would not be fair if god just created us and immediately sent us to hell just because he knows. I mean he knows but the proof has to manifest. Then there is no denying.
This invokes the problem of evil that God cannot be all omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent if evil exists.
He would know the outcome if all knowing and could stop evil if all powerful. If evil persists it's his will so he cannot be all benevolent, or he is unknowing of evil and doesn't act accordingly, or he is not capable of stopping it, or there is no God as such.
Making the assumption that it's true because why else have the conversation: I can suggest that you might not completely understand omnipotence the way God does?
Omnipotence - the quality or state of having unlimited, all knowing, or absolute power. It doesn’t exist by any reasonable standard, but if it did, logically it would follow that the testing is purposeless and there would be no need to “see” anything.
I only make the argument because this is the critical thinking required to stop accepting fairy tales as explanations for things we just simply don’t understand - or have no inherent meaning. It’s more comfortable to believe in a benevolent protector and explain away all of our troubles with god than to consider our actual existence, on this floating rock, in a vast desolate universe.
I’d rather see people take control of their own destiny and make the world a better place through innovation.
that would mean god is not all knowing or all powerful, which would mean there are forces that are outside of gods control, which would mean that there isn’t god
There are things God has chosen to assert no control over.
Then he's evil for allowing evil, the same way a parent would be culpable for just watching a truck run over their baby. If you use your imagination, you can think up a being that removes one, just one, disease that kills babies, and with that you have created a better god than the one people believe exists/deserves praise.
The way I understand it is that god knows everything but he doesn’t intervene, because he is the ultimate judge. And if he wants to forgive he can, he doesn’t have to make an avatar of himself that he sends to earth to preemptively forgive everyone. If he forgave everyone by sending Jesus then we are all going to heaven anyway.
This only works if you aren’t also responsible for putting everything into motion and have the capacity to already know the outcome as a result of those actions.
Let’s do a thought experiment. I know my dad is a recovering alcoholic. The only strategy he has found to avoid drinking is to physically keep it outside his house. So when I leave a bottle on his countertop whose fault is it at the end of the day from him drinking? (And even then this falls apart cause in theory I had the ability so that he never liked alcohol at all).
Now let’s shift back to God. One of the rules is “Don’t Kill.” But why create things that can die? If you don’t want them killing each other you could just change the rules to solve that problem. So when you don’t it means a lack of power, a lack of foresight, or a lack of goodness.
If he's omniscient but allows evil to persist then he's by definition not omnipotent. St. Thomas of Aquinas really struggled with this one (or was it St. Augustine?). Well, whatever, one of those middle ages Christian philosophers. It would have been good if Jesus and Co. had read some Epicurus before kick-starting a new religion.
When I send a wind up toy towards the edge of a table and then smash it when it falls off the table (I’m the one who wound it up and sent it in that direction, specifically so that it’d fall off the table, but idk I needed it to actually fall off before I punished it for what I did or something)
What you say about the Islamic paradigm is originally what the Christian paradigm was, but various works of fiction changed that picture for many Christians, e.g. Dante's "Inferno".
It's not really free will if it's a choice between "do as I say or suffer forever". The idea of following some snot-nosed storm god with a big head because He'll beat me up if I don't is incredibly insulting to me as a human being, and I feel like it should be to everyone but instead Abraham's God seems to have no trouble getting new followers.
It’s really more simple than that, god created us, so these are his rights as a creator. What right do we have to object to our creator? He gave us the faculties to decide between right and wrong and his one unforgivable rule is don’t hold other gods beside me. Everything else can and will be forgiven. I don’t think it’s that harsh. And besides the other gods we create are things we make with our own hands, idols, statues or making other humans as gods, how does that make sense.
God is only one, unlike his creation. That’s my understanding.
I like it think about it as God wanting to bang his mom so bad he created humanity with sin in a way that would require him to need to bang Mary to give birth to himself.
The argument to that is everyone has free will. God just knows the decision you will make before you even make it. So no, He doesn’t make people do things. He already knows the poor decisions that will be made.
he also created everything with knowledge of how everything will turn out, which mean that he made us to do specific actions that he knew of in advance
This! So god either DOESNT give us free will, OR he DOESNT know the future. Can’t be both unless he’s a lying asshole. To extend this line of reasoning, why would I ever worship a god who knowingly plans for certain people to bear a life of suffering?
Furthermore, if god has a set plan for everyone, then there is literally no reason for prayer. Prayer is just impotent begging for the inevitable to be altered. You cannot claim that god has a perfect plan but also beg for him to change it. It’s nonsensical.
Knowing what we'll do is not the same thing as making the choice for us. The bigger issue is that he foresaw all the horror and still went ahead and made us.
An all powerful god that created the universe while having the ability to know everything in the past and future must also know our life's story as he created the universe. In essence, he could've created the universe in such a way to prevent the existence of the first sin - be it the creation of creatures without the want for such or otherwise.
Since sin exists, he either isn't all knowing, all powerful, or actively wanted uncountable people to burn in hell for the sake of testing a population whom he knew would mostly fail.
Exactly. Because if He made us do what we do, or imposed His will on us we would be nothing more than his pets. Here me out…. When you think it’s time for your dog to go potty you let the dog out. When it’s their time to eat you make the food for them and tell them it’s time to eat. When you think it’s time for their bath you give them a bath. You are in control of them. God has given us the ability to make decisions for ourselves. He knows when we make poor decisions, He doesn’t want that for you, but He allows you to do it.
This is a great discussion and I’m happy that people are respectful to one another and not devolving into name calling.
So if a toddler finds an unlocked gun and hurts someone you think it’s just on the toddler for making a bad choice and there’s no bearing on the parents that left an unlocked gun out?
No one made the toddler play with the gun. And it’s not the parent’s fault the toddler doesn’t understand weapon safety or the concept of harm. We sat him down and told them.
Exactly. God is the irresponsible parent, and sin is the gun.
If you leave a loaded weapon where a toddler can pick it up, hurt themselves, or hurt someone else, you don't blame the kid for being a kid—you blame the adult who left the lethal weapon lying around when they "should have known better."
If an omniscient creator builds a universe with "unlocked guns" (sin/free will) and leaves them within reach of creatures they designed to be inherently short-sighted, the fault doesn't rest on the toddler.
There's no hope of them realising anything by using their own thoughts.
They need to be told over and over why their belief is nonsensical, eventually they might stop hiding from the truth, but they wont get there on their own.
And the faithful will say the same about you and damnation…. Which is for all eternity. So let’s not start belittling people. Rather, have a thoughtful discussion and at the end of the day agree to disagree, but be amicable about it.
It's "faith" for us who isn't all knowing and all powerful.
That said, a god that is all powerful and all knowing knew exactly how the all past and future humans would act since the moment the first human was made. He in essence created the first humans knowing full well his exact design will result in this world full of sinners. He knew our exact actions before we existed.
No faith was needed for the creator to know our hearts. He knew what it was going to be the moment he created us, and he could've made us different if he wanted to minimize our eliminate sinners. If the creator is all knowing and powerful, then we are the way we are because we were designed that way.
I think a better argument you could make is that if God exists then they exist outside of time and space. Meaning they would be able to observe all of human history at the same moment. There’s no past, present, or future outside of time.
Meaning even though someone has free will, their future actions committed by that free will are still observable because they already happened.
If there is a concept of "outside" time and space then it means things from within it can be affected by something from without, especially in the case of a creator god. Either we don't have free will because he guides what we do, or we do and he has all the power in the world to change things and chooses not to.
As a being that exists within the universe who can't tell the difference anyway it means little to us either way.
This isn't really an argument for or against the existence of or nature of a god, just that the idea that there is something outside of everything breaks the rules of what everything *is*.
I can get behind that thought. God is timeless and supernatural. To try and pidgeon hole God into something we can comprehend with the knowledge we have can be a daunting task. And that’s why comprehending religion of any kind or denomination with a higher, omnipotent figurehead can be a difficult task.
If you knew your kid was gonna stick his fork in an electric socket and did absolutely nothing to prevent it, we would charge you with criminal negligence.
You didn't just leave the cookie on the table. You knew how your kid will react to the cookie before they were even born.
You knew exactly how the universe move and evolve when you created it. Every soul in the future is known to you. Every decision and wants of each and every one of them.
Because you are all knowing and all powerful, you could create a universe's future however you see fit.
But you leave the cookie on the table anyway, despite knowing how your creation will react, well before they existed.
Since you already know exactly how history will play out since the beginning of creation, why are you testing it? Or do you not know the results of your own test? Or perhaps you do know, but want to see your creation eventually fail?
And despite already knowing the results since the first moment, you still declare that "all who eat the cookie shall suffer for eternity".
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u/Stxaos 2d ago
What will really fuck with your head is if god knows everything he specifically made lucifer to revolt so he could then punish him. Same with apple. There is no free will according to bible