[quote]John S. wrote:
Beowolf wrote:
John S. wrote:
The way I was saying was think of it this way.
Man is free will(we can all agree on this), God wanted man to worship him not robots. Allow me to put it into another subject so you can see it that way.
Would you want to marry something that all you had to do was pull its string and it would say it loved you? thats pretty meaningless. But when you have someone with free will the ability to choose anyone else to love but they love you, that the best thing in the world right?
Thats the way man is to God. That is what I was trying to say in my first post.
God knows all. God knows exaclty what would happen to every human ever after he made Adam the way he did. He could have made Adam different. Therefore, everything that happens is God’s fault.
Or you could just be a deist.
You have a very broad view on this don’t you. I will repeat myself again, this time I will try and slow it down for you.
Free will means we have many choices.
God knows the outcome for each choice,
But its up for us to pick the right choice.
We are given the ability for the right choice every time, Its not Gods fault its ours for not choosing right.
[/quote]
I’m going to tackle a few things in one post.
Assume there exists a god, God, that is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, all-knowing, blah blah.
If God creates something, then, because he is all-knowing, knows EVERYTHING that will happen to it during its lifetime.
As an addendum to the list of properties of God, he is not removed from his own power. That is, he is all-knowing of the path that EVERYTHING will take, including his own. If he didn’t know everything he was going to do in the future, then he is not all-knowing, which contradicts the definition.
Then, when God creates a person, assumed to have free-will, God knows all the decisions that person will make. Therefore, at creation, God knows what a person will be judged as at the end of their lifetime.
Moreover, because he is omnipotent and set everything in motion, he CREATED that person, knowing everything that person would do, either for A(SOME) purpose(s) or NO purpose. Therefore, God intended the person to be that way.
This person can either go to Heaven, the everlasting nice place, or Hell, the everlasting bad place. Because God already knows where the person will go, then God created that person knowing where they will go. Thus, God sends people to Heaven or Hell not because of their choices, but because he made them to go to Heaven or Hell.
As to Free Will, imagine, for the moment, that the person is a dot traveling along a path, and that the path comes to a gate, where the person can either make the “Good” decision or the “Bad” decision (this is an oversimplification of decision making processes, but since hindsight is 20-20 and we’re observing the actions of an All-Knowing being, its fair to say that most decisions can be treated in this way), which then leads to another path with another gate, and so on and so forth until the end of the path has been reached, either in Heaven or Hell, depending on the number of good or bad decisions made.
As an All-Knowing being, God already know which gates the person will pass and which paths will be chosen. Then he can draw a line that traces the path of the person, and ignore the gates. Because God is All-Knowing, from his perspective, there is no free will, as he already made all the decisions when he created the person because he created the person to make those decisions.
But to the person, who makes the decisions and can not see the line to his destination, he has free will.
Obviously, an assumption was made incorrectly. Either God is not All-Knowing, or the person has no Free Will, or both, as the two are mutually exclusive.
-Gendou