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I am religious and believe in free will

71 (27.7%)

I am religious and do not believe in free will

10 (3.9%)

I am not religious and believe in free will

114 (44.5%)

I am not religious and do not believe in free will

61 (23.8%)

Total Members Voted: 251

[NRDL]

Kay, if God's omniscient, and knows every possible choice we could make, and every possible parameter in which the many versions of ourself could exist, is free will still possible?

I guess it's kinda like a mouse in a maze with 3 pre-set doors, each door leading to individual unique passages.  The choices are limited, and the ones who set up the maze know all pre-set choices.  The difference between God and scientists in the maze scenario is that God's outside of time and all that, and can foresee/see/saw, all of your choices, not just the one you perceived yourself making.

[Egan_BW]

How can you wrong a thing when said thing is directly responsible for literally everything.

He told you not to do something.

Then you did the thing.

I think it's fairly clear how.

I did do such a thing (while I might protest that I was adequately told not to beforehand, that is not the pertinent point). However, I am just a purely predictable part crafted by it, so in a way, it also did it to itself.

[BorkBorkGoesTheCode]

How can you wrong a thing when said thing is directly responsible for literally everything.

He told you not to do something.

Then you did the thing.

I think it's fairly clear how.

Is obedience to a thing simply because the thing requires it good?

[Kot]

Psh. Just visit Jerusalem. That's worth 10 years of indulgence.

I am fairly sure Jerusalem is worth something else.

[TempAcc]

I take Rhoden's answer on this. Essentialy, free will is an achievement of humans, who have advanced enough to attain it, which puts humans above animals, who are still tied to instinct (but slowly advancing). Free will allows man to choose to sin, and since man chooses to sin, he must take responsibility and suffer from it. Evil and suffering is born from man's choices and actions, not God. The point of free will is that, once man actualy chooses to do good due to his own free will and works to become better, the merit of his actions is entirely his, and not just something God gave man, which in turn makes man more like God, IE something that can do anything but chooses good over evil out of its own free will.

In this sense, a good man is truly Godlike, not due to omnipotence or anything like that, but because he chooses to do good, even when he could totally do evil, and is rewarded for it. This reward does not come from God, but from the good that results from man's own good works. This is why good is an end unto itself, and not something you do expecting some reward from some external source apart from yourself and your actions.

[Harry Baldman]

Kay, if God's omniscient, and knows every possible choice we could make, and every possible parameter in which the many versions of ourself could exist, is free will still possible?

I guess it's kinda like a mouse in a maze with 3 pre-set doors, each door leading to individual unique passages.  The choices are limited, and the ones who set up the maze know all pre-set choices.  The difference between God and scientists in the maze scenario is that God's outside of time and all that, and can foresee/see/saw, all of your choices, not just the one you perceived yourself making.

Free will is in the eye of the beholder, the space where we have no great predictive ability. Humans have free will in relation to what humans can measure, as do all other animals. Even viruses, which aren't even organisms, can be said to have some degree of free will because a lot of their behavior is determined by random mutation and faulty replication. It's one of those things that clearly exists except in the hypothetical scenario where we are omniscient, which is physically impossible within our universe.

It is possible that God isn't omniscient and the purpose of creating reality for it is to find out something that it couldn't puzzle out a priori.

On the other hand, if God is omniscient (at least in regards to this universe), then that would imply that God already knows everything, and that reality has a different purpose than an interest in what the outcome will be. It is possible, then, that the ultimate outcome of reality doesn't really depend on any choice made. It could be that the intended purpose is to produce a known subset of individuals who made a particular choice (what that choice might be is unknown). Alternatively, it could be that no choice really matters in God's plan for reality. This isn't, say, a grand experiment that will grant God some superuniversal insight. Rather, it's just renewing a collection or baking a cake. A thing you do with fully predictable and trivial results that people with inferior perceptions read incredibly deeply into (such as the secret ingredient being God's love for His creations).

[Grim Portent]

I did like the SMBC comic in which god says the whole reason for creating the universe was so that humans could make cheese for him.

[Rolepgeek]

Sometimes I get the feeling that Omniscient in the biblical sense means all-seeing, rather than precisely all-knowing.

God doesn't know everything that will happen exactly, but He's big enough and powerful enough to shape the future such that He knows more or less what will happen, and prophecies will be prophecies, but He intentionally avoids 'looking' at individual futures whenever possible, so to speak, if He can 'know' everything from predictive analysis or what-have-you. From the standpoint of quantum mechanics, to observe is to set in stone. So if He observes the future, He can set in stone that it will happen, which of course destroys free will as applied to people.

Thus, God intentionally avoids looking at it, though he could, in order to allow free will. He may, in some cases, make vague predictions/use His 'peripheral vision' so to speak, when trying to reassure or inform people of their general futures, but if He were to see exactly what would happen for their entire life beforehand, He would be robbing them of their agency, so He only makes vague predictions and cryptic analyses, which has minimal effect on their ability to be free of His influence in that sense.

I don't know if any of that makes sense, but I think it would be an interesting take on it.


Also, God is Good and Good is God. There is no separation between the two in Judeo-Christianity. To do something because it is required of you if you want to be a good person is still doing something in order to be a good person.

I find myself rather annoyed at people who say that you can't be a good person, really, unless you're doing it for no other reason than to help someone else. I like helping people. But it smacks of a sort-of 'if you aren't as naturally good as us, you're not good at all'.  And that's not how good works. If you're being a dick about doing something nice, that's another thing altogether, though.

[Loud Whispers]

What is Judeo-Christianity

[Harry Baldman]

What is Judeo-Christianity

The Christian Faith of Judea, and perhaps also the Judean Christian Faith.

I don't know if any of that makes sense, but I think it would be an interesting take on it.

EDIT: I think setting something in stone by observing it may be one of those bits of quantum mechanics where the map is confused for the territory. Whether you observe something (with the possible exception of burglaries) or not does not really impede or affect its occurrence in the macro scale, does it? That's kind of the point of Schrodinger's Cat.

[Teneb]

What is Judeo-Christianity

The Christian Faith of Judea, and perhaps also the Judean Christian Faith.

I find it interesting that when people talk about the abrahamic faiths they often call them judeo-christian despite islam being there too, and a pretty big part of it.

[Harry Baldman]

I find it interesting that when people talk about the abrahamic faiths they often call them judeo-christian despite islam being there too, and a pretty big part of it.

Well, when you utilize Judaism to broaden your generalization (and thus appear more accurate) nobody who isn't a rabbi is going to get bent out of shape about it.

Besides, Judeo-Christian is more often applied to imagery and tradition, which makes sense in the context of Christian stuff, which is Christian and has roots in Judaism, with Islam having a minor if at all noticeable impact (we're not in the age of Chrislam yet).

[TD1]

What if the "antichrist" is simply a misspelling of the Islamochrist?

[Loud Whispers]

Obama?

[lemon10]

What is Judeo-Christianity

Judo-Christianity is the style of martial arts that Jesus used. It was immensely powerful, and granted him some of his mystical abilities, like the ability to turn water into wine and walk on water. 

I don't know if any of that makes sense, but I think it would be an interesting take on it.

The idea that god is potentially all knowing, but chooses not to be to preserve free will is pretty common. I'm not the biggest fan of it, since it does rather clash with the idea of prophecy and god seeing the future, but it is logically/ideologically sound as long as you are willing to discard the word omniscient to describe him.