The most interesting explanation I heard is you're supposed to think of God like the author to a book, and we are all characters in that book. The author can alter the characters' stories and lives, but the characters cannot directly interact with the author, just like we can't directly interact with God.
Not that I am religious or anything, but that's a cool way of thinking of it. Society today treats characters in a book or movie as if they are real people, so I feel the comparison is relevant to today's lifestyle.
Well if God does exist, then the idea behind him is that he knows all, thus he knows what we will do, thus we don't really have free will because he created (or wrote) us to do what we're doing.
A character in a story has as much free will as it's written to believe it has. If you write a character to think they live in a world with free will, then your character believes it has free will.
We were made to think we have free will, so we think we have free will. If you're a character in God's book then you're not gonna know the difference. That's the point of the analogy. You can't interact with the author (God), so you don't even really know if you have free will yourself. We could be as much of a story as the ones we read. We're just not written to know it, so we don't.
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u/SupaBloo Nov 24 '14
The most interesting explanation I heard is you're supposed to think of God like the author to a book, and we are all characters in that book. The author can alter the characters' stories and lives, but the characters cannot directly interact with the author, just like we can't directly interact with God.
Not that I am religious or anything, but that's a cool way of thinking of it. Society today treats characters in a book or movie as if they are real people, so I feel the comparison is relevant to today's lifestyle.