NoClueboy wrote:
Free will is a topic of ethics. It has to do with freedom of moral choices.
I’ve been thinking of this along the lines of god being everywhere and everywhen. What you do now impacts what happens next. You have insufficient knowledge of the future to see how you free choice of action ripples outward. God on the other hand already has awareness of the future and knows what you chose. However because god is everywhen he also knows what you chose when you made the choice.
I’m going to sit down now, my head hurts.
Ah, yes. Omniscience vs. Free Will. That paradox has been around for quite a while already. There are some classic answers given.
One classic answer is that God does not exist linearlly as we do. As the Creator of time, He is outside of it. Thus, His watching an action can be akin to our watching an action from the future. For example, you have the ability to go back in time and observe (but not interact) with events. So you go to Ford’s Theatre in Washington D.C. on the night of April 14, 1865. You see Booth approach the presidential box. You know (because it’s historical fact) that Booth is going to shoot the president. Does that mean he didn’t have free will to do so? No. So, just as you (effectively outside of time) can still view Booth, and know what he’s going to do, and yet he still has free will, so too God can observe you “out of time,” know what you’re going to do and yet you still have free will.
I will acknowledge that the answer I gave below is not completely free of refutation. In the end, however, we are simply left with the paradox. In the end, I have to fall back on (I know you don’t want to hear it) the classic verse lo machshevosai machshevosaichem, v’lo darkeichem d’rachai (Isaiah 55:8) “My [God’s] thoughts are not like their [Man’s] thoughts and My ways are not like their ways.”
Zev Steinhardt
I don’t think any paradox exists.
It is only a paradox if you have these assumptions:
Base: God is Omniscient; he knows everything that is, was, can be, and will be.
Axiom 1) God created the Universe
Axiom 2) God created Free Will
Axiom 3) God’s creation of the universe occured in such a way as to force human beings down a certain path.
In other words: there is no paradox in the questi0n at hand, but a paradoxical pair of unstated axioms used to define God and His choices. One need not accept Axiom (3).
Assuming that God exists (which I do), I accept Axioms 1 and 2, but not 3. It would be the height of arrogance to assume that God could create life, the universe, and eveything and say that he gave us free will (well, if you believe as I do that God is percet goodness itself), but was unable to adequately provide for Free Will. That is where John Calvin got tripped up: he started with his assumptions, but rather than proceeding to their logical ends, he tried to define God. He tried to shoehorn God into his own preconceived conception.
Now, to bring the old “Is God really Good?” question into this debate, which has danced around it.
The problem here is not that people assume that God is infintely Good or not, but rather that they have preconceived notion of good: physical pleasure and absence of physical pain. However, as good is to most humans a nebulous concept. To God, it may well be otherwise. Moreover, merely being infintely good may not precuse Him having other goals than the immediate happiness of all life.
Oh, I thought the paradox ran along these lines:
1)God knows free will will lead to sin.
2)God gives man free will.
3)God punishes man for his sin.
I do not accept your axioms (1) or (3).
Actually wouldn’t the axioms be:
-
God know everything
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God gives man free will to create his future
Therefore God already knows every action (1) thereby making (2) irrelevant.
The problem is in thinking that the future prior to an action is the same as the future after the action. Why shouldn’t it be different?
and dynamic? Makes it more interetsing for god at least. 
(2) is a red herring. God gives man freedom to make moral decisions. Morality is unbounded by temporality.
Mine or Latro’s?
In any event, the real question is whether or not God is capable of allowing and has allowed CHaos into His creation: in the form of Mankind’s Free Will.
I believe he has.
So you’re saying that free will only exists for a subset of human actions and that it is constrained to be those actions that are arrived at through a moral choice?
The whole “I’ll take the long way home tonight” choice is NOT due to free will but a long complicated cause/effect chain that started long before I was born?
Why would free will be limited to only moral actions?
Grey, please reread that post and its context. It says nowhere that Free Will applies only to moral decisions. Those are the only ones that count, however. Ulimately, God probably doesn’t care if you have Rice or Bread with your meal.
Libertarian was saying that Axiom (2) is partly irrelvant as worded. The Future and the Past are all the same thing to God.
There is a difference between knowing and controlling. God may know what we are going to do, but He does not make us do it. Just as a parent may “know” when a child is going to fall, s/he does not stop the child from falling. Why? So the child will learn… S/he may warn the child, as God warns us in the Bible, but whether we heed the warning is up to us.