I think it’s fairly similar to quantum mechanics and the Schroedinger’s cat thought experiment. An observer does indeed know all the *possible *outcomes. An observer could also choose to lift the box and see the state of the cat, but can’t do so without influencing the *actual *outcome. So they leave it alone and all possibilities remain in play. Besides, no nobody wants to be the brunt of all the ensuing lame jokes if curiosity overwhelms him, and he opens the box to find a dead cat.
It’s not uncontrollable, but rather out of control.
My kids are out of control. But they are not uncontrollable. I could control them if I wanted to, but I choose not too.*
- Actually, not really. I do try to control them, but the little freaks are devious…
Bolding mine. I hope you see that you can’t have it both ways. Once you start excluding certain definitions, you can no longer correctly say that you’re arguing for any definition, because any means “excluding none.”
On the omnipotence issue: Let’s get away from God for a moment and talk about, oh, Superman–the movie version. Let’s suppose that he shuts himself up in the Fortress of Solitude and, in consultation with the tech he got from Jor-El, creates a serum that immunizes him against kryptonite, magic, and red sun radiation. After taking the serum he’s pretty much absolutely invulnerable, and being that he’s the only Kryptionian, he is now invincible. He can, if he chooses, enforce his will with complete impunity on the citizens of Metropolis.
Are the Metropolitans still free?
I say yes. Just because Superman can do this doesn’t mean he must do this, or that he will do this. Being free himself, and being ethically minded, he chooses not to become Dictator of Metropolis. He intervenes only to deal with threats to life & limb which mortals cannot handle themselves, but does not force Lois to leave her husband, or order Jimmy to stop annoying Perry White, or any number of other things.
God is in the same* boat. Desirous of the company of beings who are not mere extensions of himself, he can craft creatures with human intelligence and resolve never to interfere with their internal mental states. He can let those mental states evolve without interference from him, eventhough he has the ability at any time to change the status quo. But he doesn’t, because he’s interested in the process as much as the result.
*Even down to not existing! 
Nonsense. I can, and do, dismiss such dramatically limited definitions as not being really omniscient. 
If the God isn’t actually all-powerful in regard to knowledge, he doesn’t deserve the label “omniscient”. (You can try to slap the No True sGodsman fallacy on me for this, but I will counter with the “words actually have meanings” rebuttal. 
)
You’re mixing your analogies. The people of metropolis before Superman are definitely not uncontrollable, and, to take this back from the omnipotence analogy to the actual issue (which is omniscience), humans before god are definitely not unpredictable - which means they lack libertarian free will.
The conflct isn’t between omnipotence and free will; it’s between omniscience and free will. The fact that one can be controlled doesn’t mean that one will be, which allows freedom from coersion - but free will isn’t (typically portrayed as)about freedom from coersion. (If it was, very, very few humans would have it, just because other humans interfere with them.) Free will is (usually) about not being contstrained to a fixed path of future decisions and outcomes. It’s freedom from fate, if you will.
If god is able to know what we will choose in advance with certainty, that means that it is a certain knowable fact - which means that it isn’t in flux. Which means that if god is able to predict the future with certainty, we are constrained by fate, and lack (libertarian) free will.
Can God create a situation where he does not know the outcome in advance? A divine roll of the dice?
I say he can, because his omniscience is an extension of his omnipotence, not the other way around.
To suggest that he cannot puts a real limitation on his power. Even god cannot make a truly random number generator.
If he can create true randomness, he can create people who will act in a way he doesn’t foresee.
I’m not denying that words have meanings. I’m saying that a given word can have more than one meaning, and unless we come to an agreement as to the meaning of this word, we’re only talking around one another.
This is esepcially true of words that apply entirely abstract concepts. In such cases, it’s necessary to reach a consensus.
But I’m letting this go, because I’m only arguing theoretically. I don’t believe God’s omniscience has any affect on my free will, because i don’t believe God exists any more than Superman does.
(Except Thor. All hail the son of Jord!)
Okay. I will in an instant agree that free will is not compromised by any hamstrung definition of “omniscience” that does not imply that god has the capability to predict your actions if he wants to. In cases of so-called gods with these sorts of so-called omniscience, none of the arguments that free will is contradicted apply.
All hail the son of Jord!
I’m not thinking that bringing in the separate inherent contradiction between omnipotence and omniscience helps matters much. Yes, an omnipotent god can do things he can’t predict, and thus can’t be omniscient; and an omniscient god can’t do anything but that which he predicts, and thus isn’t omnipotent. So you can’t have a truly omnipotent omniscient god, ever. (Another way to state this is that if god is omniscient, it removes everyone’s free will, including his own - which limits his powers greatly.)
But, putting aside the inherent impossibility of such a thing for a moment, suppose that an omniscient omnipotent god did create a being or thing it couldn’t predict. Why, then, the being just turned itself into a non-omniscient version of itself. This is, of course, a legitimate ability for an omnipotent god; they can do anything not inherently impossible by definition, including removing their own powers.
But wait. If a non-predictable dice exists now, then could the God of twenty minutes ago predict that it would occur, and what its results when rolled would be, then? Apparently not. So God wasn’t omniscient then, either. Or ever. It appears that any diety with true omnipotence was never omniscient at any point.
Oh well, we already knew that omniscient omnipotence was a logically contradictory state. We shouldn’t be surprised to arrive at that conclusion through a second line of thought. It’s “can god create a rock so heavy he can’t lift it”, but with dice instead of rocks and predicting instead of lifting.
Yes it would be a sin if you didn’t intervene.
James 4:17–“Therefore to him that knows to do good, and does it not, to him it is sin”.
…and please don’t try to turn this around on God and say He sins for not doing good. Anything and everything that God does is good. God allows horrible things to happen, but God is not the cause or reason. God sees everything that happens and God will deal with the people who commit horrible crimes against His laws.
Concerning Melissa and this little girl… my mother and I were talking about this situation… and how horrible it was… and how awful it was that this little girl was deceived by someone she loved and trusted… and this Bible verse came into discussion…
Matthew 18:6–“But whoever shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea”.
How do you know God didn’t save Sandra? She might not be alive in this life anymore, but maybe Sandra served her purpose in life and is now at peace in the afterlife with God, or perhaps Sandra was destined to do great things and Satan wanted to stop her from doing so and used Melissa to do his bidding.
God allowed Melissa to become corrupt because it was her choice to do so. Everything she did was of her own volition… no one made her do anything. She makes her own choices. She could have been influenced and there could have been things that helped corrupt her, but she made her own choices.
So often many of you in these kinds of discussions always put the blame on God… but you forget that God has an enemy, and it is this enemy, the Satan, who influences people to become corrupt. Sin corrupts lives. God offers an escape from sin (not completely in this life… for example, I’m a Christian but there are still sins in my personal life, but I’m aware of them and God is always encouraging me to not do those things… for example, because we’re mostly all adults here… I sometimes look at porn… and that doesn’t make me less of a Christian and make God hate me… but it makes God displeased with me, and I want to be pleasing to God). God’s escape plan from sin is love.
I Peter 4:8–“And above all things have fervent love for one another, for “love will cover a multitude of sins” ".
Proverbs 10:12–“Hatred stirs up strife, But love covers all sins”.
…ok… the LORD hardened so and so’s heart…
I think those verses are more or less saying that whenever that person thought of God or considered God’s desires their hearts were hardened towards God… so that person is still making the freewill decision to hate God. God allowed their hearts to harden because those people had NO love for God.
God did not force Pharaoh to hold these people in bondage. God wanted Pharaoh to free His people. The more Pharaoh was told that God would do bad things if he didn’t free His people, the more Pharaoh’s heart was hardened towards God, and technically yes, God hardened Pharaoh’s heart… but it was Pharaoh who allowed his heart to be hardened from God.
If God was going to interfere with Pharaoh’s freewill, wouldn’t it have made more sense if God softened Pharaoh’s heart to set His people free?
…or…
The same sun that hardens the mud melts the butter.
If God sees that someone has no love for Him, or will never have a love for Him… God can allow that persons heart to become completely hardened towards Him, but only because that person made the choice not to love God and made the choice to always hate God no matter what.
…whatever the case may be… God didn’t interfere with Pharaoh’s freewill. Look at how many times God sent Moses to Pharaoh to plead for His people. God kept giving Pharaoh the chance to make the right choice, but Pharaoh decided in his heart that there was no God and that his god was the one to serve.
again… if God was interfering with Pharaoh’s freewill it would have made more sense for God to soften Pharaoh’s heart so that Pharaoh would do God’s will.
…
God cannot sin.
I wanted to fix the text I put in bold. God doesn’t do bad things. I meant God would punish Pharaoh if Pharaoh didn’t comply with God’s request.
Oh, come on. At least have a more realistic extinction scenario… like a large meteor on collision course with earth… and no… there is nothing we can actually do about something like that regardless of what the Discovery Channel and the movie “Armageddon” may suggest to give us hope that America and her allies have everything under control.
We can’t measure God’s ability. We have nothing to compare it to. God can do things we can’t because He also exists outside of time and space. He can do whatever He wants to do. If He wants to create an invisible pink unicorn then He will do it, and just because it’s invisible doesn’t mean it’s not pink.
No, I wasn’t saying that. For the record, I believe God is omniscient.
What you say is true. If God created a tree of knowledge of good and evil, obviously evil had to exist in the world… but man was a sinless creature… and the only way he could commit sin would be to know about it. Man was the pinnacle of God’s creation. Not lions, not pandas, not seahorses, certainly not monkeys… It didn’t matter that sin existed because mankind didn’t know about sin. So technically man’s ignorance of sin is what kept sin trapped in a sort of dormant state.
God knows Bob because He created Bob. God knows the path Bob will take because God lives outside of time and space God already knows the path Bob has chosen, of his own freewill, to take. God had to create this soul and allow it to live a human life so it could make it’s choice even though God knew the ending all along.
Does anyone else get tired of seeing this phrase? Look, either God exist somewhere or God exists nowhere. Either he exists during some set duration of time, or he doesn’t exist.
“He exists outside of Space and Time” is nothing more than a nonsense phrase used when all logical arguments about the existence of God have been exhausted-it means absolutely nothing until “outside space” has been found, and/or “outside time” has been observed.
God had no choice in the matter-even if God knows that Bob will cause much damage to himself and others, and will never repent, God cannot do anything about it-he cannot change the plan he created, even if it is for the obvious better?
By definition, due to the definition of sin being a failure to be in accordance with the will fo God? Or by character, that God would not do those things that are sinful?
Her being dead is a clue.
I don’t place any blame for Sandra’s murder on God, or Satan, for the same reason I don’t blame Superman & Lex Luthor.
First, free will is two words.
Secondly, it makes perfect sense for God to interfere with Pharaoh’s free will, as the Old Testament deity is evil. Most gods–at least those at the heads of their pantheons–are evil. Odin is probably least evil, because at least he admits it. (Ole one-eye sometimes traded under the name “Bolverk,” which means “evil doer.”
Yes it does. Invisible means “not perceptible to the sense of vision, regardless of the amount of light falling upon it.” Pink means “appearing very light red to the eye.” If an object becomes invisible, it by definition loses to the attribute of pinkness.
Freewill. I can use it how I so choose… even right down to the way I spell the f’ck’r.
But surely God, being omniscient, has infinite “ideas” for souls? I mean, before Bob’s soul was created God must have come up with the idea for Bob. And if God has to create the souls he thinks of, and he has infinite ideas, then there must be an infinite amount of human souls. Either that, or he does not have to create all souls he thinks of.
I notice you used your free will not to respond to the substantive points I made.