No free will in heaven, or God is a meanie

[RavenCat13]

Just to get my feet wet, let’s look at the assumptions:
Assumptions:

The “God” I’m speaking of is specifically the God of conventional Christianity.

[With this one, define “Conventional Christianity”. D’you mean as in the rabid bible thumpers of the Illinois wheat belt, the polipreachers of Dixie, or are you talking aboutt esoteric Christianity that never left the Sub-Saharan African savvanahs?
Face it, using the term ‘conventional Christianity’ is like calling any black in America “Afrtican American.”

It’s a label, and a poorly constructed one at that.]

God is omnipotent; He can do or create anything that is logically possible.

God is also omniscient; He knows everything, and knows exactly how the future will play out right down to the placement of each individual quark at each instant.

[Okay… and hat’s your point?]
God can create humans in any logically possible forms, with any logically possible personalities. He could, if He chose, create humans as full-grown adults with fully intact memories of childhoods that never happened, for example.

[This too, is true, but why wouldn’t God want ‘new people’? Heck, if I had a planetful of semiintelligent hairless apes, I’d want 'em to hump just so’s they wouldn’t look at the lesser animals having fun and get pissy realizing they’ve missed out on somethingand ruin a perfectly good planet with stupid inventions… oh. we DO have sex and do that as well. Ah well… next…]

Free will is a blessed gift to humans from God. The fact that humans were created with free will is seen as evidence that God is not a meanie toward humans.

[Check Genesis: Man got Free Will 'cause we were stupid. Same reason I got drunk last night, but I knew at first I’d be drinking.
Originally, according to the Text, man didn’t have free will; that was a gift granted by the Tree of Knowledge, which we weren’t supposed to eat from (but got suckered into doing anyway). After God realized we’d f*ck#d up, Adam & Eve got the boot, plus, Eve got stuck with the whole painful childbirth, put up w/Adam’s s#it, etc., Adam had to get a 9 to 5 (no more happy sheep 4 him!), put up w/Eve’s s#it, etc…]

Free will is the cause of sin. Without free will, God’s creations would not sin.

[sigh. Hate to sound like Clinton, but define sin. Remember, it’s a sin to kill, but all men have killed in the name of God for centuries. Man goes to war by his own free will, but war is considered a noble cause if you stick some priest or other god-icon out front and say you’re doing it all for Him. WTF, yo?]

No human soul ever sins once it gets into Heaven. Ever. Not for all eternity. Not even after trillions of years when all the stars in all the galaxies have burned themselves out. Never.

[If there’s nothing to come back to, WHY COME BACK AT ALL?]

Also, to refute the ‘problem of evil’ question:
0. god created all things.
[okay, no argument there… carry on…]

1. god is all-loving and all-powerful.
   [okay, so far, so good…]
2. an all-loving being would prevent evil when he could.
   [Whoa, Thomas! Here we have a HUMAN solution to a situation you shouldn’t tinker with - assuming an ‘all loving’ Creator woudn’t let us piss up a rope if we’re too stupid not to do it based on GP. God’s gotta make sure everything’s mitochondria is working at peak performance universewide - should you make the Creator of all watch you change your dirty undies EVERY day?
   If you need that much damn monitoring, get yourself incarcerated and go on suicide watch.
3. an all-powerful being could stop evil when he wanted to.
   [Who says God don’t try? ever have a “I shouldn’t be here” feeling when you’r eabout to do something stupid? I like to think that’s God giving me a personal heads up on a bad situation… and that hunch is normally right.]
4. evil exists in god’s creation
   [Without a negative, what can you define positive as? Get real, this is the way the system works. WE’RE supposed to be God’s Hands on Earth, so, get off your a$$ and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!]

Libertarian, I dunno on that whole ‘train analogy’ thing. Would it work if all that time you were looking for trains, you shoulda just gone upside and caught a bus?

Think about it for a sec, and get back to me.

I’m done. Time for lunch.

[Liberal]

RavenCat13 wrote:

Libertarian, I dunno on that whole ‘train analogy’ thing. Would it work if all that time you were looking for trains, you shoulda just gone upside and caught a bus?

Why, that’s exactly what I did!

[sub]Welcome to Straight Dope Great Debates. You might want to practice your formatting a bit in the ATMB forum.[/sub]

[Mothchunks]

*Originally posted by Czarcasm *
**Correct me if I’m wrong, but God is morally perfect only because he is the one who determines what morals are, therefore whatever he does is automatically moral. Even if he does something that if done by us is obviously immoral, it becomes moral only because he is the one committing the act. In my opinion this makes God amoral, in that he is outside any established moral precepts. **

Essential to the question, And so far not successfully rebutted, I might add.

[smiling_bandit]

the difference is only as academic as the topic of this thread. the difference is that quantum mechanics does NOT make room for free will. there is not something that is free.

Quantum mechanics simply allows for one possibility of chance. It may not neccesitate it, but allows for the option.

In any event, I don’t particularly put free will in the level of Quantum effects. I was arguing that more for lack of anything else to post in this rather esoteric thread.

[tracer]

Lib wrote:

Sometimes even Christians have to be reminded that when God speaks of freewill (or most anything else, for that matter) His concern is morality, not synapses. Even if every detail of the universe’s events were pinned down by action/reaction cause/effect Newtonian certainty, there would still be free moral agency (freewill).

To which I replied:

So you’re saying you don’t believe in predestination, Lib? You don’t believe that the future is fixed?

To which Lib replied:

No. Actually, I spelled out what I’m saying in quite some detail in this post, to which you did not respond.

I note that, although that rather lengthy post does talk about the amorality of atoms vs. the free will in the heart, it doesn’t address predestination.

Lib went on:

There is often a conflation between material events and moral decisions. It makes no difference to the latter whether the former are determined or not. Freewill — particularly in the context of heaven — is a spiritual issue, not a material one.

Okay, it sounds like what you’re saying here is that the future of the entire physical universe is predestined, but the future of what each individual thinks and feels and believes is not predestined. Is this an accurate assessment?

If so, then how does the way a man’s beliefs influence his actions factor into this picture? Say a man decides to believe, of his own non-predestined free will, that stepping on a crack will break his mother’s back. He then finds himself walking down the street, and as his foot comes down toward the pavement, he acts on his belief by moving his foot slightly so that it does not land on the crack. If he had not believed that stepping on the crack would break his mother’s back, he would not have altered the trajectory of his foot. His foot is made of atoms. His free-willed, non-predestined beliefs have altered the physical universe! His will has altered the atoms from what they would have done had his will been different! It is impossible to separate pre-destination (or the lack thereof) in the realm of belief from pre-destination (or the lack thereof) in the realm of the physical. If beliefs are not pre-destined, then the physical universe cannot be predestined either.

If what I said isn’t an accurate assessment, then I’d still like to know whether you believe all the future events in the physical universe are pre-destined or not, and if so, how human will can avoid being pre-destined if the atoms of the human body are pre-destined.

[tracer]

Let me rephrase that:

It sounds like you believe that it is possible for the physical universe to be pre-destined even if moral decisions are not.

[Polycarp]

Tracer, if I knew you well enough, I would be able to predict with some accuracy which flavor of ice cream out of a given selection of six flavors you would choose. But I’ve hardly mandated your choice – I’m simply capable of accurate prediction. (To be sure, since I’m finite and mortal and you’re something of a free spirit, you might well make a choice other than your usual favorite for variety or simply as a spur-of-the-moment whatthehell impulse.)

And certainly my watching you make the choice in the present does not mandate your free choice. It merely makes me an observer.

Now, two things enter into the question here. First, free will is not random – you make free choices, to be sure, but based on who you are. Fallible as I am, I can be almost positive that you would not choose mercaptan-flavor ice cream, even without knowing which of five other flavors you’d choose. Your free choices are based on who and what you are, your heredity and environment. But that does not discount the freedom you do have, to choose or fail to choose any given alternative.

Second, God’s perspective is eternal, not perpetual – i.e., he observes the entire space time continuum as a single coherent entity, without the passage of time. For him, “right now” is a concept that encompasses the Big Bang, the impact of the Chicxulub asteroid, Christ dying on the Cross, Ney leading the Old Guard at Waterloo, my typing this, you reading it some time later, the post Diogenes the Cynic will make in response to it that quotes a part of this post, the death in old age of my 6-year-old grandson, and the last sea of Earth evaporating as the Sun expands five billion years from now.

Which means that He does not “foresee” and therefore in some sense condition your actions, but sees them in exactly the same sense as I watch you pick out your ice cream.

So from one perspective, His, your choices are foreordained – in that He knows every choice you have ever made or will ever make, and has so structured the universe as to take your choices, and mine, and everyone else’s, into account. But from another one, your own, your choices are totally free.

This relates back to your OP – while it is quite possible to sin once admitted to Heaven, it’s not among the reasonable choices for you to make – your happiness being a given, else it would not be Heaven. It’s remotely possible to sin – but only in the sense that it is remotely possible for a mentally healthy, non-depressed, non-handicapped person not suffering from a terminal illness to commit suicide. It can be done, but nobody would choose to do it. (There may be grounds for self-sacrifice, but self-sacrifice != suicide, and the four restrictives I placed on the definition of the person eliminate all “reasonable” grounds for committing it, from despair to clinical depression to unwillingness to burden others with one’s care.)