You seem to be hung up on the idea that divine omnipotence requires God to act. It doesn’t. God can have the ability to control everything and choose not to do so. He can choose to allow people to make their own choices without his interference. And that would be His will.
Assuming that God doesn’t exist, then you make decisions on your own. Accepted? The only difference from that and the existence of an omnipotent God who allows free will, is that He knows what your decisions are - even before you made them. But you still made the same decisons you would have made if God didn’t exist.
God could have created chaos - He could design a system in which He intentionally was not in control of everything and things happen randomly or at the will of others.
It isn’t that I don’t understand your point. I understand it. It’s that it contradicts itself. Either God knows exactly what’s going to happen and it’s all part of his plan, or we have free will. It can’t be both. And it isn’t. The most obvious example of this is in the book of Exodus, in which God hardens Pharaoh’s heart. Pharaoh didn’t choose to keep the Israelites slaves, he was going to release them. God changed Pharaoh’s mind for him. Free will? I don’t think so.
But, again, if he knows everything, he knows precisely what random things are going to happen and what everyone is going to choose. Which means that if he doesn’t tweak it then, it’s because he’s okay with it happening.
If you have perfect knowledge and perfect power, there is no such thing as things that are outside of your control.
Sure there are. You can have absolute power and choose not to use it. Having the ability to control everything doesn’t require you to control everything. In fact, if God had to control everything it would indicate We was not omnipotent - He would lack the power to stop using His power.
And God may be “okay” with the consequences of this. He may accept that allowing people the independance to make their own decisions is more important than ensuring that the correct decisions are always made. So He will allow wrong decisons to be made even though He knows better.
You have a button. You can either press it or not press it. If you don’t press it, X happens and you know it. If you do press it, Y happens and you know it. Press or don’t press–the result of the choice is utterly and completely known to you. There is no result of the pressing or of the not pressing that isn’t under your control. You chose it.
If God designed the whole shebang, and if God knows precisely what will happen as a result of all of his choices and decisions, if God either presses or doesn’t press the button, it’s all under his complete and utter control. There is no way around this. There is no way, with perfect knowledge, that any choice or non-choice or decision or non-decision or button pressing or non-pressing is neutral.
It’s as if theists want human actions to have consequences but want God’s actions to be free of consequences. If God has ever acted, or ever not acted, God knew precisely what the result of the action or inaction would be and made that result happen. There is no shunting off this responsibility on anyone else.
You are correct. That’s why Christianity does NOT say that God is the cause (or more specifically, the direct cause) of every single thing that happens. Quite the contrary; it teaches that human beings have free will and can therefore act in violation of what God desires.
So if we posit a God like the one you described, sure, free will would be meaningless. That’s not the God of Christianity though, nor is it the God of Judaism or Islam.
Okay, but that implies that God is either not omniscient, not omnipotent, or not omnibenevolent. Logically, there’s no way out of the conclusion that if what God wants is the best outcome (omnibenevolent), and He is able to effect whatever He wants (omnipotent), and He knows what consequences any action will have (omniscient), then He cannot allow any action to occur that is in violation of what He wants.
If you’re arguing that the Christian God is not simultaneously omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, then that takes care of the logical problem, but I don’t think it’s orthodox theology.
Again, I’m willing to accept that there might be some divine super-rational way in which this contradiction could be resolved, but in terms of ordinary human rationality, it’s inescapable.
Nope, that’s just noting that the very concept of “omnipotence” is paradoxical—it’s the old “If God is all-powerful, He can create a mountain too big even for Him to move, but if He’s all-powerful, then He can move it” paradox.
If God is omnipotent, then by definition He does control everything. To say that this in effect limits His power because He can’t avoid controlling everything doesn’t resolve your logical contradiction: it just adds a paradox on top of it.
Lord Ashtar, in what way is what I said fallacious? If you were a McCain supporter and you prayed for him to win, what other choices are there?
He didn’t win, therefore your prayer didn’t work, which is actually the ONLY choice. Because even if God wanted Obama to win, your prayer STILL didn’t work. And my question in the OP was specifically addressing those who specifically prayed for McCain to win. Not for some “Christian leader” generalized bullshit. I have seen several websites and news reports where people were specifically asking for people to pray for a McCain victory. NOT “divine guidance” and other somesuch, “let-me-off-the-hook-because-I-can-spin-it-how-I-want-because-it’s-as-general-and-vague-as-a-horoscope” type of prayer.
Seriously, though, if you feel my argument has a logical fallacy, please elaborate.
And why the hang up on God being omnipotent? He doesn’t even have to be omnipotent, just omniscient. As long as he always knows the outcome to everything, there cannot be free will.
Tomorrow, I have to go to work. I can either take the car or the bus. God already knows I am going to take the bus. (because he knows everything!) So, can I take the car? NOPE. Why? Because if I do, then God is wrong and he’s not omniscient. By extension, life is then pointless because before I was even born, he knew whether I was going to heaven or hell. Which means I cannot change it because then he’d be wrong again. And don’t tell me he can change his mind. Why? Because since he knows everything, he would already know what he’d change his mind to. He can change it a million times, but he will know what the final outcome would be. I don’t think people have thought through what it means to have an omniscient god.
Are those really the only two options? What if the Obama supporters prayed harder than the McCain supporters and God is up there tallying up the prayers the way we tally up the votes? If that were the case and there were more prayers in the Obama pile, does that mean that prayer does not work?
So, according to your example, if a million people prayed for the death of a baby and one person prayed for it to live, God would go with the people who prayed stronger and in more number?
So, if I pray, I have to make sure I pray more strongly and with more people behind me than people praying for a different outcome? Otherwise, that’s why I may not get the outcome I desire? Wouldn’t Occam’s razor just lead me to believe that prayer simple doesn’t work? Since I cannot possibly figure out how many people are praying like me and how strongly they are praying? Results would seem to follow random chance. Some people I pray for live, some people I pray for die. If I don’t pray, some live, if I don’t pray some die.
This is what the Skeptics Guide to the Universe website says:
“9. False Dichotomy: Arbitrarily reducing a set of many possibilities to only two. For example, evolution is not possible, therefore we must have been created (assumes these are the only two possibilities). This fallacy can also be used to oversimplify a continuum of variation to two black and white choices. For example, science and pseudoscience are not two discrete entities, but rather the methods and claims of all those who attempt to explain reality fall along a continuum from one extreme to the other.”
In my defense against this, I don’t think I arbitrarily came to two choices. If you prayed for a McCain win, there is no arguing that your prayer didn’t work because he obviously didn’t win. And if prayer only works when there are unknowable variables, that’s essentially the same as saying “it doesn’t work” to me.
I disagree. I can watch a movie I’ve watched before and know exactly what’s going to happen, but since I didn’t make the movie, I was never in control of what’s in it.
In contrast, God made the movie but his viewers keep saying it’s not his fault if he has Han making the Kessel run in 20 parsecs (or whatever the hell it was) because Han had free will!
I don’t think that’s neccesarily true. I know that in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue. I know that Obama won the 2008 election. That doesn’t mean that those events had to happen. Maybe our theoretical omnicient but not omnipotent being is like that. He knows everything that’s happened because to him, they already have happened.
I suppose a person who believes in both free will and in divine will would pray that God would reveal what He wants so that the prayer and other devout people would be able to choose to follow His will.