Yeah, I’m going with, “I have to believe something exists before I have the capability of living it.”
If the visible God told us to do whatever we wanted and then headed off to the pub to drink beer and eat tacos, I doubt that would impact free will much.
If he started bossing us around, that probably would. Of course, he could just use his mind control to force us to exert free will, right? I mean, being omnipotent and all.
Carrying the logic to a (ridiculous) end, all punishments and rewards remove free will. Why would a sane person choose to kill a person knowing that they will likely go to prison or be executed? And parents shoudn’t praise their children for being well-behaved. Children should want to be good for goodness sake, not because they will be rewarded and not for fear of punishment.
I’m not a Christian and I don’t really care, but it’s easy to fanwank the answer to that (e.g. god knew it would work out OK in those particular instances).
I think you are supposed to get to know Jesus by accepting him into your heart or something. Maybe through prayer? It never worked for me. But the point is they are separate choices, and different Christians value them differently. There is a style of Christianity that is all about ‘God’s love’, and much less about being righteous or avoiding punishment for bad deeds.
‘Choosing to love’ comes I think from M. Scott Peck. I don’t know how common it is in Christian thought, but I like it. It means you can act in loving ways, or have love as a guideline, or goal, even if you don’t feel it right this second. It’s useful if you are having an argument with someone, for example. It’s a different perspective on love as something that you do rather than something that you feel. I don’t really know how it works in relation to god. There is a whole thing about cultivating a personal relationship with God, which (I’m assuming) is the background for that quote.
Well that would be “god works in mysterious ways”, but with the added bonus of inconsistency:
God can’t reveal himself to you because that would take away your free will. But he can reveal himself to other people, because…reasons. Only God knows.
There’s a difference between being open to the possibility of being in love, and choosing to be in love with a specific person / entity. However, this isn’t a tangent I really want to explore (I got enough of that watching Interstellar), so I won’t contest this any more.
What is “free will”?
A more nuanced debate would be: Can this god calibrate his miracles to have just the desired effect and no more? More specifically: Can he work just enough very visible miracles, of just the right degree of miraculousness, to convince us all beyond any doubt that he exists, yet not to such a level as to intimidate and cow us into submission?
If so, then a reasonable person could know with certainly of his existence and have a good glimpse of his awesome power, yet not be compelled to fall madly in love with this god. The choice to love god of one’s own free will would be preserved.
So why hasn’t any god that we know of done that?
ETA: Or, consider another sobering possibility: The “Many Worlds” quantum theory might be right. Every time a quantum “decision” takes place, the whole universe bifurcates into two (or more) universes. This happens a whole lot. That is keeping god very very VERY busy, creating all those universes. Can you even imagine how busy this would keep even a whole pantheon of gods? No wonder he doesn’t have any time left to pay any more attention to little old us.
I’m choosing to ignore this.
If God’s miracles were crazy enough, I could see how they wouldn’t elicit love necessarily. Let’s say that for the last six thousand years, there’s been a day dedicated to miracles. God does a bunch of wondrous tricks–things that are so crazy they couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than his handiwork. Like one of God’s favorite miracles is to write “Happy Miracle Day!” in the sky in every town and city, using all the flying birds and insects on the planet. It’s an irrefutable miracle. On one Miracle Day, Sprite flowed out of every faucet. On another Miracle Day (circa 1983), God reanimated all the buried bodies in the cemetaries throughout the world and made them dance to Thriller.
These miracles would astound and excite us. But would they elicit love? Bread and circuses might even elicit hate, I would think. You’re telling me that God can make Sprite flow out of every damn faucet, but he/she can’t stop cancer or hunger or hurricanes? What an attention-whoring dick!
These kind of miracles also wouldn’t make very many people afraid. God would be seen as an entity with a healthy sense of humor as opposed to a wrathful being who wants to send you to hell.
Lost in these kinds of discussions is always the unanswered question: What’s so fucking great about free will that god allows all this suffering just so he won’t contaminate ours?
Offer me a choice between permanent heaven, bliss, and happiness forever through god’s mind control and suffering, free will, and choice and I will choose happiness 100 times out of 100, maybe even more.
Free will is religion’s excuse for god not meddling in man’s affairs, except oops! He did it already, thousands of years ago, conveniently before cameras were invented!
The first thing I would say to a religionist trying to give me that excuse is fuck your free will, I want to be happy, and so do, I suspect, you and everyone else. There are people being tortured to death right now, babies dying, suffering on unimaginable levels. Free will is not worth all that. No one has ever articulated why free will is better than permanent, eternal, happiness. No one.
YogSosoth, I don’t believe in God or free will, mind you. But I don’t understand why God would bother creating human beings with no free will. What would be the point of watching and judging a bunch of automatons who have no control over their actions?
And what would be the point of rewarding some of the automatons with heaven and some with hell? Does it make sense to punish an evil robot?
So it seems to me that free will is central to Christianity not because it frees God’ of responsibility, but because it gives meaning to our existence, both here and thereafter.
I’m serious. This entire thread is predicated on the assumption that free will is a valid concept. If it isn’t, then it may be like asking the question, “Would the presence of a god prevent a square circle?” All explanations of free-will that I’ve heard are either inconsequential, or not logically or scientifically valid. I don’t want to assume the OP definition so I’m waiting on someone to give me a concept.
I’m using the same definition that appears in the dictionary.
I don’t think you must believe in free will to participate in the debate. I am not a believer in it, and yet I acknowledge that there are situations that allow one’s will to be “freer” than in other situations. A visible God that vaporizers sinners with laser beams shooting out of its eyeballs would be much more coercive (and thus “constraining”) than a visible God that presents itself as a singing and dancing tea kettle. In a world dominated by the latter, I’d expect people to make a wide range of choices. In the former, I’d expect to find a population where people’s choices are much more limited (to sin or not to sin) and predictable (“not to sin” wins again!). In neither of those worlds is there free will. But there are differences in degrees of freedom.
Have you ever played with toys? Ever had Army Men or Legos fight a battle with each other? Was it pointless because they had no minds, or was it fun because you can imagine they did?
Do you watch movies? Do you root for the bad guy to get his comeuppance, knowing he’s just an actor playing a character? Stories have value in and of themselves. Do you walk out of every movie, turn off every TV show with a dismissive “That’s fake”?
I think people who quibble about human life being meaningless are fooling themselves or trying to take the easiest, most well-traveled path. We’ve been down this road before, who cares if there is no free will? There is value to the beings that live out that life. We are happy and sad, we experience joy and loss. We get angry, we become happy. Would all that be pointless if, at the end of your life, god pops up and tells you “Hey, I’m real. Believe in me and I’ll reward you with heaven.” Would you dismiss that, and your whole life, and say nothing, or spite him and refuse to believe him because he’s taken some nebulous choice away from you?
And think about what you’re saying. Why would one choice that can be made at the very end of your life be the only weight given to your free will? What about the million decisions you were free to make from birth to death? Don’t those count? If god gave you a choice at the end of your life, so what? You still have free will, you just can’t believe something that’s not reality. Are you bereft of free will because you cannot unbelieve that a rock exists? Would you be more free if we only hinted at rocks and you can choose to believe they exist or not? Why are you marginalizing free will into one choice?
I believe if god exists, he gets some joy in watching us do our things just like we can watch an ant farm and experience joy and wonder. It doesn’t need a point, that’s the thing most religious people can’t fathom: life, the universe, everything doesn’t need a point. What if he just felt like creating us one day? Is that so terrible to consider? Life’s pointless, god mae no meaning in our existence, we just exist. So what?
The people who claim that free will gives meaning to life substitute their own meaning, their own beliefs, onto everyone and try to use that to justify their religion. Its laughable. My life has meaning to me because I want it to have meaning. I don’t really care if that belief is because a god made me believe it. I’m happy to believe it, and again it doesn’t matter to me if that happiness is something a god told me I should feel. Its utterly pointless to think about why when we cannot know. So you can bet that I do think these people are making crap up about meaning. A life with no free will, limited free will, or completely free will until the point of death has a lot of meaning. I prefer one. And yeah, it frees god of his responsibility to help mankind. Except he already has interfered so all that is pointless
But there’s value to that, isn’t there?
You are not defending the definition you provided. The definition you provided is a will not constrained by necessity or fate. This means that a person would have an element of randomness to their decision-making unconstrained by deterministic variables.
I don’t disagree with your argument itself. You would expect people to behave in a wider arrange of ways without such a dominant variable like god at play. If you define “freer” in the sense that B.F. Skinner described it, then it makes perfect sense. People feel free when they are able to do want to do, and feel coerced when they aren’t able to. I just don’t think the concept of free will is what you’re talking about.
I would say that God does reveal himself, but does it on His (& Her) own terms, not ours. The ‘invisibility’ comes more from our separation from Him, us being our own god and us bowing down to worship other gods that blinds us.
As for if seeing God will deny us free will, as you pointed out in scripture no it does not prevent that. Johan is a great example knowing what God wanted him to do and going the opposite way. God had to force Johan to comply and Johan was still pissed about it in the end.
Do you mean Jonah?
It’s so different a topic, I would think it needs its own thread, rather than highjacking this one.
Free Will makes perfectly good sense in a theological context. Christianity has a very exact meaning for it. It is totally valid to ask the question in the OP, as a theological question.
(Okay, actually, even Christianity is divided over certain details regarding Free Will. Some Christians hold that anyone can turn to Christ, beg forgiveness, and receive salvation. But others hold that God chooses whom to save and whom to damn, and that we can do nothing to advance our own salvation: this is the doctrine of the “Elect.” But, again, even though the overall religion has differing ideas on this and other points, the terms are well defined and make sense.)
Ok, lets be accurate here. It’s not a strictly for or against position of the OP, but to say it’s “so different a topic” is not true at all. The entire OP rests directly on the assumption of free-will. Regardless, let’s leave it to the moderators to decide these kind of things.
You’ve provided no explanation for why or how it makes perfectly good sense other than stating that it does.
Again, you only go as far as asserting they make sense without actually demonstrating your reasoning or providing evidence.
And there goes the God must provide free will argument. However the better example is the golden calf - Israel got their asses saved by God, saw him in a cloud leading them, and had a leader chatting with God. And they still disobeyed.
Some Christians don’t seem to read much of the Bible, do they?