If God knows everything, how can there be free will?

[mp44god]

Title basically sums up my question. If the God of the bible (or any Abrahamic deity for that matter) is truly omnipotent, omnipresent and knows everything that will happen, then how can free will exist?

 

[Cheshire_Kat]

Do you have children?

Have you allowed them to make mistakes?

No?

Come back and talk when you have had them.

 

[Shrooms00087]

Generally a mistake is something you wish you didn't 'allow'; something you wish did not happen? How does bad things negate free will? Instead it seems you want God to have an immediate presence in this world, in this life. A super-being who will stop all the bad things from happening to you. It seems, then, that the question changes to "Does God have free-will?". What if you're a Buddhist and consider yourself a God of sorts? Capable of managing day to day interactions, capable of staying on the ground or jumping out of a airplane, from not doing drugs to doing drugs? Should bad trips forego experiencing mushrooms? You relatively know that by ingesting them you could interact with your environment in terrifying ways and to mitigate that you must manage risks vs rewards, you must cultivate your own relationship to your environment and the people around you. So too, I think, is the nature of free-will. Our ability to cultivate better experiences while managing risks. Conversely the monadic Otherness of the western God would be doing the same thing in the passive sense. He gives you a world with relative risks and relative rewards so that you cultivate the world you wish to see which means we have the freedom of our collective will to change our relationship to nature and to each other. Just as an interstate has rules for driving.

 

[Cheshire_Kat]

If you have seen your child do something that is not for their benefit and allow them to do so anyways you let them grow. You let them make their own mistakes so that they can learn on their own, not dictate how they should think or behave.

You hope that they will benefit more from the experience than dictate what you "want them to do", in other words.

I'm guessing that you have not had children and let them make their own mistakes otherwise you have already considered this.

What ever...

 

[wallywogs]

Free will just means you are on your own to make your own decisions and maybe or maybe not suffer the consequences. My understanding of GOD allows for free will. I think everyone's GOD or not is different. Remember nothing is something.

 

[swilow]

Do you have children?

Have you allowed them to make mistakes?

No?

Come back and talk when you have had them.

There's a touch of arrogance in creating an analogy with you as God. You've had children, and so you think you know the mind of God? Hmm.

If God is like a father, "letting" us make mistakes in the way you descrive with your children- pray tell, where is that free will stuff again? God knows the outcome. There can be nothing chosen. Everything is ordained. Is that the best God could do for us- give us the false impression that we are making our own choices, "allowing" us to make mistakes that He knew we would make?

That God is evil and insane IMO. Creating painfully self-aware people to suffer with the outcome decided well beforehand for a purpose never revealed to these beings but with an injunction to praise the Monster who created them.

That said, if our universe is deterministic- which it may not be- nothing happens without prior cause. With a universal eye, one could describe the past and future of every single particle. There is no space for free will in that type of universe. All events happen as a result of other events. Free will would have to magically circumvent the issue of causality. But you can definitely make mistakes.

 

[JGrimez]

You're anthropomorphizing God.

A human trying to understand God, is like a dog trying to understand algebra.

 

[swilow]

Nice use of the "god works in mysterious ways" clause.

The whole point of Jesus was anthropomorphising the deity wasn't it? If that's true, God wants to be understood by us.

 

[Cosmic Trigger]

There's a touch of arrogance in creating an analogy with you as God. You've had children, and so you think you know the mind of God? Hmm.

If God is like a father, "letting" us make mistakes in the way you descrive with your children- pray tell, where is that free will stuff again? God knows the outcome. There can be nothing chosen. Everything is ordained. Is that the best God could do for us- give us the false impression that we are making our own choices, "allowing" us to make mistakes that He knew we would make?

That God is evil and insane IMO. Creating painfully self-aware people to suffer with the outcome decided well beforehand for a purpose never revealed to these beings but with an injunction to praise the Monster who created them.

That said, if our universe is deterministic- which it may not be- nothing happens without prior cause. With a universal eye, one could describe the past and future of every single particle. There is no space for free will in that type of universe. All events happen as a result of other events. Free will would have to magically circumvent the issue of causality. But you can definitely make mistakes.

I've concluded if there is a supreme consciousness at least by logically surveying existence it seems to be somewhat evil and insane. Let's hope there isn't one then.

 

[JGrimez]

Nice use of the "god works in mysterious ways" clause.

The whole point of Jesus was anthropomorphising the deity wasn't it? If that's true, God wants to be understood by us.

The real point of Jesus was waking people out of a psychic slumber and having them realize that everyone has potential to achieve the same connection to "God" that he had.
Unfortunately sometimes the message gets twisted.
And we should definitely strive to understand God. I just think that there are some higher concepts that we may never fully grasp with our currently limited minds.

 

[Cheshire_Kat]

There's a touch of arrogance in creating an analogy with you as God. You've had children, and so you think you know the mind of God? Hmm.

If God is like a father, "letting" us make mistakes in the way you descrive with your children- pray tell, where is that free will stuff again? God knows the outcome. There can be nothing chosen. Everything is ordained. Is that the best God could do for us- give us the false impression that we are making our own choices, "allowing" us to make mistakes that He knew we would make?

That God is evil and insane IMO. Creating painfully self-aware people to suffer with the outcome decided well beforehand for a purpose never revealed to these beings but with an injunction to praise the Monster who created them.

That said, if our universe is deterministic- which it may not be- nothing happens without prior cause. With a universal eye, one could describe the past and future of every single particle. There is no space for free will in that type of universe. All events happen as a result of other events. Free will would have to magically circumvent the issue of causality. But you can definitely make mistakes.

Actually quite the opposite.

Parents regularly allow their children to make mistakes to that the children can can learn from their own mistakes. It's a basic parenting skill that's very human.

Now if we as mere humans allow free will then any being that is supposedly all knowing and powerful would be even more inclined to support free will. It is deterministic views that don't allow for free will that tend to be overly authoritarian.

 

[swilow]

Now if we as mere humans allow free will then any being that is supposedly all knowing and powerful would be even more inclined to support free will. It is deterministic views that don't allow for free will that tend to be overly authoritarian.

So you are extrapolating from your own human parenting behaviour, the behaviour of the creator of the entire universe? There are a host of assumptions that I would have to ignore for that to make sense.

For starters, allowing your children to make mistakes is not "allowing" their free will, it is simply not opposing their enactment of it. The free will is present whether you allow it the mistake or not. What you are saying is that you don't always intervene when an obvious error is going to be made, because making that error will benefit the child (so its not even really a mistake). You didn't create or control the capacity to for your children to make decisions, that is part of our biological inheritance. On the other hand, God is alleged to have created both our mistake-making capacity AND the very events that create these mistakes and then the punishment for the mistake.

I dunno, it just seems so unlikely to be true that I have effectively determined that is isn't.

A god that does not show itself to the universe is effectively the same as a god that doesn't exist, so it doesn't even really seem to matter.

I've concluded if there is a supreme consciousness at least by logically surveying existence it seems to be somewhat evil and insane. Let's hope there isn't one then.

I agree. But, like you, I don't think such a deity exists. Therefore, such an evil idea has been invented by humans for the purposes of social and should be rejected as a creation of evil intent, domination, violence and subjugation.

The real point of Jesus was waking people out of a psychic slumber and having them realize that everyone has potential to achieve the same connection to "God" that he had.

I'm not sure there is any evidence for that. We cannot rely on the gospels to tell us anything about the actual historical Jesus or his intentions. No contemporary accounts exist which confirm that he was pushing any particular ideology (that I know of). Most likely he was just one of many mystics and 'healers' of the time, and like others (John the Baptist) he was killed for agitating. He did this during the Passover when Jerusalem was over-crowded, very soon after the 'invasion' of the Romans- the Romans were known to treat dissenters with brutal execution, and it seems likely therefore that the Jesus person sought matrydom for whatever reason. Certainly, he got it and the world has never recovered.

I believe we'd probably be better off had Jesus never existed. I do not think his alleged message is unique or even especially challenging or revolutionary. It was adopted by so much of humanity because it seems like an easy ideology to shape to one's own ends.

 

[Cosmic Trigger]

We'd certainly be better off without most religions. I'm sure all the witches would agree lol.

 

[Cosmic Trigger]

We'd certainly be better off without most religions. I'm sure all the burnt witches would agree.

 

[Yourbaker]

The Jesus story makes a lot more sense if you realize it was after his death that the story was written and it was written from the perspective of a group of people steeped in the Jewish mythology so he had to take a role in their pantheon. Despite standing in opposition to the law that was the sum total of the Jewish beliefs he was re-written in as part of it. If he existed at all.

I'm not certain he existed in the time he was said to but I think the bulk of his teaching came from someone who had found some deep understanding of the human condition and a real compassion for humanity. By writing in a birth story that would fulfill the Jewish religions need for a savior not fathered by humans and a resurrection story they tried to make him fit the Jewish mythology. Sadly it makes God look like a schizophrenic and waters down any real teaching Jesus left behind.

The issue always becomes how well someone has studied and how far from their preconceived ideas were they willing to look.

There are a lot of tell tale misfits through out the books that people canonized and the other 40 or so books that missed the papal cut back in the day. I think it's humourus that people can't see that 1600 years ago we were a less educated society. The people that made these decisions would be barely educated by today's standards. Thoughtless reinforcement of the status quo by generations of lemmings doesn't make it more accurate.

I realize the religious community accept the bible on faith but my faith in humanities ability to record history accurately is a negative number. We not only don't we absolutely can not record history correctly. Fake news is not a new thing.

Imho the bible is an attempt to put the use of money and specifically interest into a religion. Jesus's teachings seem a lot more Hindu or Buddhist then anything old testament. I see the belief in money and the way we use it as a religion. The bible refers to money more often then it does almost any other subject yet it's impossible for money to be of any importance to a deity. I just can't unsee it now.

 

[swilow]

A problem I have with the gospels is how clearly biased towards absolving Rome and fingering the Jews they are. I get that they were written after the temples destruction at a point when Christianity needed to be propagated through the roman-conquerors world but it seems like an evident and disastrous distortion of facts. Evident because the Jews didn't execute via crucifixion and disastrous because the Jews have been punished ever since.

I cannot see much of spiritual value in those texts.

 

[Cosmic Trigger]

I think the Romans (catholic) created the bible to control a rebellious jewish nation bent on revolution. So they gave the christians a meek mild saviour who promised the reward in the next life instead of this one. How convenient. The Gnostic Christians who were IMO the true christians if there are any were either burned at the stake or driven out and destroyed in some other way. They would have laughed at the current bible.

 

[swilow]

Catholicism is probabaly the closest to open worship of evil that humans have come. Secrecy, oppression of truth, torture, war, domination, greed, constant obfuscation, needless ritual/mind control, nepotism, child abuse, the Holocaust. It has something for everyone.

By evil, I mean 'the notion of evil', not some kind of force or whatever. If ever I were to point at a metaphorical devil, it would be at the Catholic church. A monument to greed and our chimpanzee brains dressed in all the hypnotic garb of Power and Ritual.

I felt such a sense of satisfaction when I saw the church I went to as a child had been burnt down. I know that most practitioners are not evil people, but this place housed and protected a number of paedophile priests who have now eternally escaped justice.

 

[RDP89]

Yeah, it's definitely a complete contradiction. Much like "god" having a master plan for everyone, yet humans having free will, the two concepts are mutually exclusive.

 

[Cosmic Trigger]

Catholicism is probabaly the closest to open worship of evil that humans have come. Secrecy, oppression of truth, torture, war, domination, greed, constant obfuscation, needless ritual/mind control, nepotism, child abuse, the Holocaust. It has something for everyone.

By evil, I mean 'the notion of evil', not some kind of force or whatever. If ever I were to point at a metaphorical devil, it would be at the Catholic church. A monument to greed and our chimpanzee brains dressed in all the hypnotic garb of Power and Ritual.

I felt such a sense of satisfaction when I saw the church I went to as a child had been burnt down. I know that most practitioners are not evil people, but this place housed and protected a number of paedophile priests who have now eternally escaped justice.

Totally agree. Unfortunately the Protestants aren't really that far behind. The fear and ignorance that drives people to religions is very dangerous. It's the average person's weaknesses that make "evil" possible.