I thought it deserved its own thread.

My opinion on this is that, as God is supposedly omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient, a plan that emcompasses all creation has no room for free will. It's has to be going as planned because God is omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient (unless the plan is for things not to go as planned), otherwise it negates one or more of the three.

Thoughts, opinions, explanations, anything? All welcome!

genius!!!
that way no matter what happens YOU CANT BE WRONG!
ITS LIKE A GET OUT OF JAIL FREE CARD! EXCELLENT!!




good grief.

Umm, what?

Am I going to have to turn to your sig?

I always thought of it this way, free will can survive and God can be omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. I strongly believe in free will, God gave us this power and he can take it away just as quickly. Thus making him omnipotent. Next I like to look at our free will as a giant spider web. We start off in the middle and from there we have millions of strings that we can go along that will eventually lead us to the end of our road, or in the webs case to whatever it is propping itself up on. We are about the size of a small bug, so it is almost impossible to tell where the little strings will lead up to, but God is like the size of a human, he can see where all of our decisions will lead up to. We still have the ability to choose and God still has his all knowing ability. And as for the people who will say, well that doesn't mean he has the ability to tell which path we are going to choose, I say sure he does. If you are able to know how a person thinks then it is pretty easy to tell which path they are going to go in.

Thats my opinion though. This debate has been going on for centuries though.

Just a thought.
An all knowing position would not have any personal challenges But an omnipotent God has the ability to accomplish anything why would He not challenge Himself by adding randomness to His creation purely for the entertainment/experimental factor.
I once new an elderly man that built grandfather clocks who shared with me that he added extra unneeded components to make the clocks more interesting and unique.
As Christian I believe that God became a mortal man in Jesus to truly experience what a man feels and experiences in his lifetime. I believe He did this for Himself as much as He did it for the salvation of mankind.
I as a Christian believe that the qualities in man are somewhat a reflection of the creator (His Image) and therefore humor and curiosity are as much apart of the Creator as the creation. Which certainly give you a different perspective on things?
Initial creation itself was an event that was completed, finished, done on the sixth day. Like a precision time piece once it was completed it was designed to run continuously. the manner that it runs now is pro-creation of all species. And as God is not limited to time itself I believe the 6 days of creation was a metaphor for mans understanding of measure and more for the understanding of order of creation.

Irish

the bible teaches there is no free will

http://www.vexen.co.uk/religion/christiani...ewill.html#Misc

Psalm 139
Several Christian friends have told me how much they like 139. It imagines a God who knows exactly what is in us: He knows what I am going to say, "even before a word is on my tongue." He wrote down my whole life in His book, "all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed."

Have you ever heard of the ability called percognition?

See: Precognition

The ability to forsee the future would also indirectly give you the ability to olan ahead or even change it to your herts desire. Does that mean that you are simply seeing ahead of the others and that those peoples actions are predetermined just because you know how they will choose?

Couldn't we rather say that you are able to see which random events have come into alignment and which direction that alignment will take?

Knowing the future does not under any circumstance mean that we are living predestined lives at every second of our existence. The future is unwritten and as such there is no way we can say that we don't have free will.

Imagine a good friend of yours who knows you quite well. She overhears someone asking you a question. She knows how you will answer, does that mean she is predetermining what you will say? Does her knowing how you will respond take free will from you in any way?

Knowing people as God knows them doesn't leave any room for doubt in relation to "how" and "what" you will "say" and "do" given a certain circumstance. God simply knows how a person will react, he could intervene and change the course of events you create in your decisions but he doesn't (most times).

Does this mean he forced you in any way to make that choice or that decision? How does this contradict free will?

So, in terms of the spider web analogy, we're the spider, the web is the plan, and God is the observer, but still has the power and the foresight to influence us. Have I got that right?



Wait, if God is omnipotent, nothing would present a challenge, so how was adding a randomness factor to humans a challenge? I can understand the clockmaker's analogy though But if God was omnipresent and omniscient, God would already know what a human feels and experiences, and as some people around here are fond of pointing out, the sacrifice was supposedly for God to change God's own laws. Considering those two, there really was no point of Jesus' crucifiction. Unless I've left something out of the equation? Hmm, qualities of men reflecting on God's own nature... That does cast a different light on the picture, but then how to determine which qualities do/do not reflect on God? Not all human qualities are good. And I don't understand how an omniscient being can feel curiosity. Curiosity, I believe, is an interest in the unknown?



Yes, my understanding is that the bible does not condone free will. Hence this thread.



Hmm... I must admit, I have not considered precognition in relation to this. Time to think on it and see how it fits in here...



But as God is the creator, knowing how people will react in certain situations is much like building a machine and knowing how it will react in a certain situation. Then it would appear that free will is only an illusion.


Thanks for all the replies, I hope to see more

Yes he has the power and the foresight to influence us but the real question would be "Does he use the power he has in that way?"

My idea from what I've read says no, except in unique and special circumstances and when he does we usually call it a miracle.



No it wasn't to change his own laws but rather to fulfill them to the letter.

Do we all have the same qualities as human beings? Do you know people who aren't curious, who don't have a curious bone in their bodies (so to speak)? I do.

You are doing something called anthromorphisizing. Taking human qualities and aspects and applying them in your outlook of who God is. Things don't work that way, fortunately for us. Imagine if God was a cheat or a sadist, things would go pretty badly for us. The little boy with a magnifying glass and alot of ants to crisp, comes to mind...



Where exactly do you see this? Maybe your interpretation is coloured by your preconcieved ideas on the subject... because I have not found one verse that states that we don't have free will.



The ability and Gods omniscient nature are the same or we could say that precognition in humans is a shadow of what God does. in no circumstance does this affect peoples free will.



You may know how it works and you may even have built it but do you actually control it? Try driving a car without your hands on the steering wheel...

Free will vs omniscience is indeed a classic debate. The classic answer to this question is that omniscience means that God knows everything that it is possible in principle to know just as omnipotence means that God can do anything that is possible in principle to do. For omnipotence this means that God cannot do paradoxes such as creating a stone so heavy he cannot lift it or creating a square circle because a paradox is in principle an impossibility. For omniscience this means that God cannot know the future because it is impossible in principle to know something that has not yet happened.

I would expand upon this classic angle as follows. God possesses an infinite deity intelligence. Having such an intelligence allows God to analyze the possibilities for any particular event and subsequently make a determination of the probable outcome such that the probability would approach 100 percent. Having said that, since we possess the gift of free will given to us by God, we can and do prevent that probability from reaching 100 percent.

I think this is an excellent answer to the question but it is still not completely accurate. Further study and comtemplation has led me to understand that God possesses a unique perspective which does indeed allow him to know the future with 100% accuracy. God exists outside of time and space. He can view the entirety of time and space at whatever point he chooses. We, on the other hand, are inside of time and space and must experience existence linearly. Here is an analogy which may help you visualize this concept.

Imagine you have a video camera and you follow a particular person around for his entire life. You see when and what he eats, whom he dates, when he trips over a curb, etc. Now imagine you have the ability to travel in time to any point of that person's life. You see him walking toward the curb and you KNOW he is going to trip. You see him look at the menu and you KNOW he is going to order a cheeseburger, medium well with ketchup. Does your knowing what he is going to do negate his choices at those moments in time? No, of course it doesn't. It only means you have already seen what he is going to do because you witnessed it and you can refer to the recording of his entire life. God, being existential and outside of time and space is able to look at creation like we would look at a DVD. He knows what we are going to do because we have already done it! We just don't know it yet because we are experiencing those events linearly instead of seeing them all at once like God sees them.

Ah. But, if God does have a divine plan and intends to fulfill it, then it would mean that God does indeed use that power. If God has the power and the foresight to influence us in order to fulfill the plan, why would its fulfillment be left up to free will of humans who haven't the faintest notion of its designs?



But, if as Irish said human nature reflects on God's own nature, then it only makes sense to anthromorphisize God. Doesn't it?



http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum...t&p=1288257

That seems to indicate we don't have free will...



But there's still an uncertainty factor because we don't know what exactly would happen when we drive without using the steering wheel. There'd be an accident for sure, but we don't know when, where or how. Surely there's no uncertainty for an omniscient deity? If we scripted it and knew exactly what would happen, then the car is only doing as planned and things are still in the hand of the director.

Ugh, this is a hard one to wrap one's mind around...

Thanks for your patience, Jor-el, you're awesome



But if God's omniscience is limited to what's in principle and cannot do paradoxes because they are impossible, that would mean God isn't really omniscient and omnipotent at all! And if free will has a chance of preventing the fulfillment of God's divine plan, why would God would allow it? Surely the greatest plan of all would not be left up to chance?



So, free will exists only to us and not to God? That reminds me of a line from the Matrix. To paraphrase, all our decisions have already been made, what we gotta do is understand it. That still means free will is an illusion, doesn't it?

By the way, I see that was your first post. Welcome to Unexplained-Mysteries Kogiah

I think alot of you are confusing free will with knowledge. Simply because God knows our exact next moves doesn't mean we don't have free will. It's like me knowing how my sister is going to respond when I make fun of her, simply because I know what she will do doesn't remove her free will. And Good post by Kogiah .

God can do paradoxes, like making squares circles, but what God can't do are things that pits his own perfection against itself. Here's an example, God heating a burrito so hot that he can't eat is comparable to saying that if the fastest man in the universe really was the fastest man, he could outrun himself, and because he can't, he's really not the fastest man, because someone is just as fast as him (again--pitting a perfect power against itself, except this example illuminates how incoherent the argument really is).

No it wouldn't. It only means that you aren't using the proper definition of the words "omniscient" and "omnipotent". Let's take "omnipotent" as an example. Most people would probably say that being omnipotent means that God can do anything, but that's not what the word means. "Omnipotent" means all-powerful. Being all-powerful means that you can utilize all the power that is capable of being used so that anything that can be done, you can do. It does not imply doing the impossible or the paradoxical, only the ability to do anything that is possible to do.



The answer is that our free will is an integral part of God's plans. It is my understanding that God does indeed have a plan for each of our lives, but our free will choices frequently cause God to revise those plans. This is not a slight on God's planning skills at all because he already knew beforehand that he would have to revise those plans and that was part of the plan! His plans are designed to maximize our spiritual growth. If we deviate from those plans, he just comes up with a new revised plan which would maximize our spiritual growth should we choose to follow the new plan on our new path.



No, free will does not exist only to us. If you're looking from an outside of time and space perspective as I described in my previous post, you could say that all our decisions have already been made but you would also see that the decisions were made by us. From the perspective inside of time and space, we see that all our decisions have not been made because we haven't made them yet. Or perhaps more precisely, our linear-progressing consciousness has not yet encountered the temporal point at which we made those decisions.

It does indeed take quite a bit of effort to wrap your mind around the concept of God existing outside of time and space, infinite and eternal, but once you finally grasp even a tiny bit of those concepts so many other things are put into proper perspective and God's plans and visions start becoming more clear. It is at once both awe-inspiring and completely humbling.



Thanks for the welcome. I just found this place yesterday and so far it seems pretty interesting. I think I'll stick around for a bit.