Or we could talk about Melissa Huckaby. Melissa is 28 and knows a little girl–just a baby, really–named Sandra Cantu, who is her daughter’s playmate. God is watching Melissa, as he watches everyone. He watches her as Melissa abducts, rapes, and murders this little girl. He does not strike Melissa down with a thunderbolt or a micrometeor or a stroke or even a charlie horse during this vicious crime, though he could, what with being omnipotent and all; though he supposedly cares about every falling sparrow. But he does nothing. He doesn’t send the archangel Gabriel down to save Sandra, or send any of his human worshippers to help. No, he just opens only sleepy eye, watches the rape and murder, shrugs, and goes back to sleep.
Or maybe he just doesn’t exist and thus cannot be criticized for not intervening, any more than Superman can.
I kind of hope it’s the latter, because otherwise God is evil.
Based on the first bolded section, Bob is not predictable - in the sense that God cannot know before Bob reaches a fork which path he will take. This presumes an unpredictable sort of free will, which incidentally implies that God isn’t really all that omnitient.
The second bolded section, however, is quite clear that Bob is predictable. As there are both “good” and “bad” ways for Bob to exit his decision tree, the ability to predict a “good” outcome explicitly means that some decisions are known in advance - which actually implies that all decisions are known in advance, because to know that Bob will make the right choice at fork 3455123b, you have to know he will get to that fork - which requires you to know all the decisions prior to it.
Free will that is neither deterministic nor nondeterministic nor any combination of the two is bullshit.
Either these people have free will, or they don’t. Either that means they can be predicted, or they can’t be. If they can’t be predicted, that’s fine, but then God isn’t really all that omnitient. If they can be predicted, and God is omnitient, then they still have free will even if God knows that they’re not going to do bad things, and if he only creates good people, they still have full non-technical non-bullshit free will.
If only God hadn’t placed the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden, along with the Serpent to [ddel]do his dirty work[/del] tempt Adam & Eve into disobeying him, and lied to A & E about the nature of the Tree in the first place. But it’s not God’s fault; a bigger God bullied him into it.
The more true love there is, the more God exists. God is omnipotent, and nothing is more powerful than God. Love, when it exists in purity, is the strongest force. I’m talking about Him becoming more powerful in this world. If everyone loved God, God would be able to show us the love He has for us in amazing ways you can’t even begin to imagine. Not everyone in this world loves God, so naturally, the Holy Spirit is being suppressed by the powers of Anti-Christ… although after the judgment (because God already won the fight and doesn’t need to train for any fight) Love will exist completely separated from hate because in the end Love will completely overpower Hate.
I have every reason to believe He exists, and so do millions of other people. I’m not just guessing God exists. I know He exists. I have no doubt. I’ve experienced true love, and I have come to recognize that there is no power or force or feeling greater than true love.
I know it’s paradoxical, but I’m not the one who made up these superpowers for God. The omniscience/free will paradox is something that people have noticed for a long time. If God knows everything before it happens, then he knows if people will be good or bad before he creates them. That means there has to be some level of “design,” no matter what. There has to be some kind of decision making process being employed by God as to what he will create, and that process involves perfect foreknowledge. He either has to consciously decide to create people who knows will choose evil or he’s not omniscient. Either that or he lacks the power NOT to create, which would mean he’s not omnipotent.
This is like saying it’s impossible to choose good. Do you agree there are people who freely choose good? Do those people have free will? Did God know they were going to do that before he created them?
If you answered yes to all those questions then you can’t say it’s impossible for God to create people he knows will freely choose good. If it’s possible for God to create people he knows will freely choose good, then it’s possible for God to create ONLY those people. Why does it stop being free will for any one of them just because all the others are freely choosing good?
God does not interfere with freewill. This is why God created Heaven and Hell as eternal rewards… so those who rape and murder innocent children have a place to rot while the child escapes such an awful cruel world… a world that would’ve been the death of her anyway… and gives her a peaceful rest. Who is to say that God won’t allow her soul to be reincarnated into another body? People of all ages die each and every day… from natural and unnatural and horrible reasons… THAT’S LIFE… but God doesn’t sleep through it and just shrug it off. He will judge each soul for each choice it made in life and will reward that soul with either Heaven or Hell.
God is merciful, forgiving, loving, patient, kind… but people have to make the choices to be like God… and if they don’t make that choice God won’t usually stop them… but He is the supreme Judge of all human souls… and what He doesn’t deal with with a bolt of lightning He will deal with with the flames of Hell.
No… I’m saying God’s love and power would be magnified in the lives of those who choose to be like God… thus making His power greater in this world. If more people wanted to be like God it wouldn’t surprise me at all if He started sending lightning bolts down to strike dead those who do awful things to children.
Isn’t that pretty much theistic religion in a nutshell? The western religious concept of free will isn’t really free will. True free will would mean that you would still get the same consequences either way. Once you introduce reward and punishment into the equation, you have coercion. A coerced choice for good is not freely chosen.
Lacunae Quell, a brief question. Let’s say I came upon Melissa Huckaby as she was just beginning to rape and murder the little girl. I see the child being assaulted, but not yet so grievously injured that she is doomed to die. Now I’m willing to bet that I’m a good deal bigger than Melissa, and I could probably have saved the baby from that fate. Would it be a sin for me not to intervene?
Yes, he does, and there is scriptural proof of this:
Your god found it useful to put the Hebrews through tribulation, so he forced Pharaoh to hold them in bondage. That is not consistent with your claims that god never interferes with free will.
Then, logically, there is a finite amount of human souls, and upon the time that the number of those souls runs out, there can be no pregnancy, since any new human would have no soul, they already having all been incarnated. This also posits a rather worrying interference of God upon free will, since it would mean that until all souls are incarnated, no human may decide to kill us all, or otherwise provide for a situation wherein new humans are not born.
Moreover, there’s the problem that other humans interfere with human free will. If babies are killed (as they are), then they don’t get to choose between good and evil, having no conception of it. All those who have died before understanding good and evil have failed in that - and unless you believe in reincarnation, that’s the only chance. So humans go without choosing between good and evil all the time.
And this is working on a more personal decision, but I would argue that a “pure” soul and that soul born into a human body and sin is not the same person. To punish the actions of that soul based on the behaviour of a similar, yet different, person, doesn’t really seem all that just to me. And beyond that, if it is God that selects us to be born, our souls incarnated, then that sin is partially his fault. And if he know what choices we will make - good or bad - then he must take partial blame for the actions of the bad, just as he does the actions of the good. And that’s not even getting into the unnecessariness of it all - if God already knows what choices we will make, then incarnation is the difference between knowing that a rapist will elect to rape if given the chance, and allowing that rape to actually occur, causing harm to the victim.
Well, for there to be precisely as many births as there are pre-created souls, the extinction of man needs to be precisely on cue. If the species makes it that far God can just kill everyone, but for that to happen, the human ability to make the free-willed choice to nuke the planet into sheet glass has to be curtailed somehow.
In regards to free will, I think CS Lewis sums it up quite nicely, in his book ‘The Problem of Pain’
In a similar vein, in Mathematics, we have the concept of infinity. Nothing is bigger than infinity. Well, what about infinity+1? Is infinity+1 > infinity? No. They are both infinity and all you’ve done is just some nonsensical arithmetic.