Free will cannot exist at the same time as an omniscient, omnipotent being

[Thief]

free will doesn't exist, and its notion is useful only to priests, bourgeois and people who need some kind of sentimental "motivation" to do anything.

nothing moves without something to move it
and substance remains still until something does move it

so....substance is 'self' motivated?
beware the rocks in your drive way

otherwise......Spirit First

Someone had to be First

 

[dybmh]

As I understand it, the neurosciences have demonstrated the unlikelihood of free will. That's pretty much the end of the story, isn't it?

I have heard a little about this, but it could be something totally different. Can you help me with some leads towards further reading?

 

[The Reverend Bob]

When I was in seminary I was taught it was possible for there to be an all powerful all-knowing ever present God and free will because this God holds back or retreats apart of itself in order for others to be. I think Tolstoy was one of the first to postulate it at least to in a popular way

 

[dybmh]

When I was in seminary I was taught it was possible for there to be an all powerful all-knowing ever present God and free will because this God holds back or retreats apart of itself in order for others to be. I think Tolstoy was one of the first to postulate it at least to in a popular way

Since you brought it up, ( i mean this in the most polite and respectful way, seriously ) did this seminary ordain you as a Reverend "God Killer". Or did that happen later?

 

[The Reverend Bob]

Since you brought it up, ( i mean this in the most polite and respectful way, seriously ) did this seminary ordain you as a Reverend "God Killer". Or did that happen later?

Oh that happened later

 

[dybmh]

Oh that happened later

Someday, I want to hear that story...

Origin Story: Reverend God Killer....

Has a nice ring to it.

 

[Skwim]

When I was in seminary I was taught it was possible for there to be an all powerful all-knowing ever present God and free will because this God holds back or retreats apart of itself in order for others to be.

Kind of amazing what such people think up, and then try passing it off as some kind of truth.

.

 

[Dan Mellis]

Well thats like saying a rivers existence and shape is mechanically determined before its existence by laws of physics. I would say that neither understanding physics and by default the term god.

When ever there is a discussion that exists ex nihilo, out of nothing but fantasy, and has zero reference to nature well its talking about nature like we talk about bigfoot. Therefore how many bigfoots can dance on the head of a pun....? Do they have free will to dance?

I agree, its largely a pointless discussion to be hand if you dont believe in god, and if you,'re debating anything to do with god(s) its probably better to start at "prove there is such thing as a sort of divine being, then prove it can interact with our world, then prove its your divine being," but I don't think you change many minds that way. I prefer to point out the logical flaws in their "evidence" rather than dismiss it out of hand (usually).

Also, who's to say that a river's course isn't determined from the start of the universe? That's getting into the determinsim argument against free will (one which I think I lean towards), in that everything that happens was always going to happen due to the chain of events that led up to it.

 

[Dan Mellis]

As I understand it, the neurosciences have demonstrated the unlikelihood of free will. That's pretty much the end of the story, isn't it?

For the record, I'm not convinced free will exists either. However, it's a common get out of jail free card used to explain why crappy stuff happens if god is perfect.

 

[Dan Mellis]

Why isn't it possible that a Creator set this world up as a process intended to teach us to make moral progress? That would require the challenge of using free will, along with moral guidance (conscience) to overcome our immoral instincts. Then, having set it up, the Creator steps away and lets it run.

Nothing is wrong with that, but you'd have to accept that such a creator is not all-knowing. Otherwise, he didn't just let it run, because he knew exactly what would happen.

 

[Dan Mellis]

He freely created the universe

there was no one to stop Him

Fair point, a god could have free will. Does this mean you accept that we do not have free will? Because that raises a whole load of other questions about why we bother trying to get into heaven.

 

[Dan Mellis]

I lean to the notion that God......follows in presence WITH us

not much point in having books around
having read the conclusion before the event

So your god isn't all knowing?

 

[Dan Mellis]

When you say "responsible for," what do you mean?

If by "responsible for" you mean that according to this particular theology, the one-god is "responsible for" the creation of all things, that makes sense to me.

If by "responsible for" you mean can be held accountable for its actions, that... well... good luck with that? This sort of responsibility is something of a human construct projected by humans onto various aspects of reality. Humans decided to believe in "justice" and that others should be held "responsible for" their actions in some notion of "fairness" (in spite of the universe clearly not being fair). To assume that an omnimax entity even conceptualizes "consequences for its actions" in the same way humans do strikes me as erroneous from the gate.

FYI, I do not worship the god of classical monotheists, so I have no vested interest in presenting case arguments for it.

Good point, I mean responsible as in the causal agent, rather than the accountable one.

 

[Dan Mellis]

You mean this to be about the Mythic-literal interpretation of God as believed in by Christian Biblical literalists? That's a bad place to start as a sweeping argument regarding the existence of God. Why not elevate the understanding of God beyond that?


Allowing that God is "all knowing" in the sense that God is Awareness of all past, present, and future events because not being bound to "time's arrow" as a human, this does not mean that what we see as "bad" is not simply just the natural order of things, such as saying death is "bad", when death what gives rise to life.

To judge the whole of reality from the subjective, and cultural conditionings of human value systems is more problematic that the notion of God's omniscience. It's actually silliness.


Aside from Christian mythic-literal believers, I don't think the rest of the world sees God as killing humans because he gets "upset" with them.


Conclusion: The mythic-literal interpretation of Ultimate Reality they call God doesn't make rational sense. Therefore think about God differently than in those terms. Don't accept mythic-literal interpretations and anthropomorphic projects as how you understand God. I don't. In other words, evolve your understanding of God, or Divine Reality as I call it, to not be incompatible with and an enemy of reason.


I certainly believe God is Reality, and I don't believe any of the views of God described above a literally true. They are mythologies and metaphors, ways for people depending on where they are at in understanding Divine Reality to attempt to think about God. You're apparently moving past the mythic-literal view. That's a good, positive first step to a greater understanding.

I agree, a literal interpretation of the bible is illogical. However, there is absolutely no reason to believe that it was written with any other intention than to be believed in a literal sense.

I agree that most people (gladly) don't believe that god commits genocide because he doesnt like humanity, however the book says that's exactly why he did it.

If not the bible, what possible basis is there for the christian god? Christians who aren't literal in their interpretation are arguably more blind than those who are.

 

[Dan Mellis]

In this case and considering how obvious these plain contradictions are, do you think that there might be something else behind the words? Assume intelligent human beings came up with all of this.

I don't assume particularly intelligent humans came up with all of this, or at least not humans who had the sort of critical thinking that we tend to have displayed since the advent of science and understanding of the world around us.

If the bible was meant to be a book of myths and parables, why wouldn't it make that clear from the outset? It would saved countless lives. Either way, I have an issue with it.

 

[Dan Mellis]

1. God can choose not to know what you are doing. That's His capability. Those in the final hell won't draw any attention from God. Omniscience means He can (an ability in the end) know whatever His will wants to know. At the same time, He also has the capability to choose not to know something His will doesn't want to know.

2. Freewill is to facilitate evil inevitably, God's plan is to allow evil to show up on earth such that they can be destroyed once and for all to secure a future eternity - Heaven. Earth is more like a filter securing an clean aquarium. Everything dirty will remain in the filter such that a clean aquarium can be achieved.

3. God knows everything before hand, but in order to lawfully destroy evil which is a result of freewill, God needs open witnessing. The analogy is, it's not good enough for a judge in court to know what a criminal did. Evidence needs to be presented openly in front of a jury for the criminal to be convicted.

That would be fine, but why would he create these ridiculous tests for his toys? Wouldnt it have made much more sense to create a world with no evil and not have to punish anyone? If what you're saying is true, your god created the world, put evil in it and gave it room to grow, even encouraged it by allowing free will and making it often feel good, and then consigns people to eternal torture for not being good.

Can you not see why such a god would be utterly contemptible and unworthy of any consideration? And why it makes more sense if it didn't exist?

 

[Dan Mellis]

You are correct @Dan Mellis . A truly omniscient and omnipotent creator cannot exist with free will in the subject matter of Its creation.
It would, by definition, know exactly how every quark and gluon in every neuron would influence every other in the minds of paupers and presidents in every civilization in the cosmos, 13 billion years after it started roiling all that energy (and matter?) back when It was creating the universe.

What’s gonna really cook your noodles is considering whether free will exists even in the absence of an omniscient God-being.
Seriously. If every neuronal connection and firing in your decision-making process is the result of a chemical reaction, and those are due to the motion of atoms and electrons; and at best those are influenced by the motion of magnetic fields, and gravity waves, ionic bonds, and/or photons zipping at you from 1 light-hour away for any decision you made in the last hour......then when in that (extraordinarily complex) chemical reaction did “human sentience” put its 2-cents into the process? And where in that process are you arbitrarily defining “human sentience”?

No I completely agree - I'm not convinced by the existence of free will regardless of the existence of a god... but free will is often used as a (poor) explaination for why hell was invented so attacking the idea from a theological standpoint is often a better route to take than a scientific one especially when the sort of literalists who believe in a completely all powerful/knowing god are more likely to treat scientific arguments with the same sort of disdain as the most arrogant of athiest would treat scriptural arguments for god.

 

[Dan Mellis]

Since the Bible teaches that God can Not lie then No, God is Not all powerful as stated ^ above - Titus 1:2; Hebrews 6:18
To already know would mean we are robots.
God did Not create creation to be automatons.
We all have our own voluntary will - Leviticus 1:3; 7:16; Exodus 35:21,29
Thus, we can all freely choose to obey or Not.
In the coming future there will be a great crowd of people coming through the great tribulation of Revelation 7:14,9.

As far as I know, the ability to lie doesn't bear any relevance the ability to create life... if god doesn't know what we will choose then he is not omniscient, which raises the question - if he isn't all powerful and isn't all knowing, why bother with him? Why not choose a more moral path, one not strewn with genocide and hate?

 

[Tumah]

... at least a being who is responsible for our creation.

I'll illustrate this in 3 points.

1. God apparently flooded the world because everyone was evil in their actions and thoughts

2. If god is all knowing, he knew how his creation was going to turn out and understood the consequences of his actions when creating this world

3. If god was all powerful, he could have created it in such a way that people weren't evil and he didn't need to kill them all.

If god knows how its all going to turn out and he knew every choice/thought you have before he created you, and he had the power to do it differently, it's only reasonable to assume that "free will" is an illusion of choice. If he already knows, then its already decided.

That is, if he existed.

I don't think you're describing an omnipotent being here, but one restricted by it's knowledge.
An omnipotent being should be able to create a world that's unaffected by it's foreknowledge, while still retaining it's omniscience to know what the final result will be.

In your example, every element that G-d introduces will shift the world either one way or the other and G-d knows exactly how it will be shifted, so He is essentially creating the outcome.
In my example, G-d can create elements that don't shift the world towards a particular direction, or creates elements in pairs with equal force, but G-d still knows what the outcome will be.

 

[Dan Mellis]

nothing moves without something to move it
and substance remains still until something does move it

so....substance is 'self' motivated?
beware the rocks in your drive way

otherwise......Spirit First

Someone had to be First

Do bacteria have free will and spirit? If not, what moves them?

Some'one' didn't have to be first. Neither did some'thing,' we just don't have the understanding about what came before the universe to make the assumption that amything came before.