can we have free will if God knows everything?

Question

i can't reconcile the fact that i am told i have free will with the fact that i am told God knows everything. For example, i decided to send this email today, but presumably God knew yesterday or even from the moment i was born that today i would post this. Surely that means my actions were determined ? I have tried to listen to people explain it in school and in church but it seems to me that they are fundamentally irreconcilable concepts.

Answer 1

Free will is very interesting philosophically. I wouldn't worry about God since God is imaginary but trying to reconcile free will with determinism is fun. Basically, if you feel you have free will, you do - sometimes you just have to go with the pragmatic.

Answer 2

You were all given the gift of being able to make your own choices.

If you consider the Universe as being God, everything within the Universe is also God. Every time you do something, you know, and therefore, God knows.

Everything is made of energy (similar to a holodeck in Star-Trek), and technically, absolutely nothing really exists - other than pure energy/thought.

Causality: Your actions are neither set or known - each action determines a different outcome from an infinite number of potential possibilities.

The future is as yet unwritten - the Bible ran out in the year 2000 - Jesus will not Return.

Get ready for pure chaos for when the "believers" begin to doubt.
There will be Axe happy crazies, kids killing kids, brother killing sister, increasing random violence everywhere.

Armageddon is not the End of the World it is but the End of the Bible, and the spells that have been cast out from it for over 3000 years...

Answer 3

See the problem isn't what other people tell you about God because you yourself have to honestly search out the truth for yourself then you will know who God really is and you will know that it's a good thing that He knows all because then you can be open with yourself because that where the real issues of life are within you. the only way to be free is to have a relationship with the one and true living God and quit trying to fool yourself by thinking God is making you do anything because he doesn't but remeber you will be accountable for your own actions so step up to the plate and do what is right Choose God and you can't go wrong . Remeber I said choose God not religon then you will know the truth and it will set you free.

Answer 4

Yes. We do have free will. And God knows everything before it happens. Say for example someone is trying to decide between 5 different colleges. Before that person decides where to go God already knows where they will end up. This is a hard concept to grasp because our minds are finite. Think of it like this, if we did not have free will then everyone would believe in God from day 1. This is not the case so it proves that we have a choice.

Answer 5

They are irreconcileable differences. The fact you have a CHOICE doesn't change, god just would know which choice you make. But free will, the ability to make a choice independant of your current state and current perceptions, would be false.

I actually do deny the truth of free will. I see no reason to believe it. It's incompatible with science. The mind is a action of the brain. The brain is a biochemical system. As such, it is ruled by the laws of biology and chemistry. At any instant, it is in a specific state and receiving specific stimuli. Based on those stimuli, it's chemical processes will be effected in a deterministic way. In short, it's a turing complete machine -- a computer, in otherwords, no matter how complex of one it is.

Answer 6

Knowing your actions is not the same as determining your actions. What was the content of your e-mail? Was it something that would have been pleasing to God? If not then I am sure that God had nothing to do with you sending it, even if He knew ahead of time that you were going to do it. Being that God knows everything we do you must understand that means He knows all decisions we are going to make and the outcomes of each decision. You still have the free will to determine which decision you are going to make and how that decision plays out.

Think of it like GPS. When you put in coordinates for a destination the GPS can track you and tell you when you need to turn so you get to where you are going, but if you ever deviate from that path the GPS will adjust your path to get you back on track. God is the same way, our cosmic GPS if you will. He has a path for us to follow, but quite often we deviate from that path. We have a choice when we deviate, we can either keep going our own way or ask God for His help and He can readjust our course.

The point being is that God knows all of the choices and decisions we face as well as the consequence of each of those. So when you face a delima or something in your life that requires a choice you have many options as to how you are going to handle this and God knows each decision you can make and the outcome od each, where free will comes in is you have the decision as to which option you will take. As I said in the begining, knowing what your actions care going to be is not the same as making the decisions for you.

Answer 7

You are correct, Kemosabe. They are mutaully exclusive and cannot be reconciled... They shall feed you spoonfuls of shyte, but do not bite down on it...

Furthermore, if God knows my life ahead of time, and my life is predetermined, then what exactly is the point of prayer? I mean, if I am diagnosed with terminal cancer, why pray? God has convicted me to a early grave...so whats praying going to do for me? Make him change his mind? Rewrite his book that my life is allegedly written into?? These concepts cannot go together - they do not make any sense at all.

Lets take the example above mine..... God knows everything but I still have free will. So, if the Book states that I am destined to be killed in prison ala Jeffrey Dahlmer, how EXACTLY do I have free will? Because, if I freely choose to NOT commit murders, then I shouldnt end up in prison where I can be gang raped and brutalized......but if that is my destiny, then I am NOT Free to choose anything.
Furthermore, with that type of thinking, I could tell you that Hitler is an angel - after all, God knew those Jews were destined to die, so Hitler was really doing God's work in killing those millions of Jews.

Now we know that aint right, but what else can one conclude when they are fed the lie of free will AND predestination?

Answer 8

The way you pose the question assumes that God experiences time the same way we do - that he was 'born' N years ago and will live to be 'X' years old. Or that God is wearing a watch that reads '2PM on August 29th, 2006 AD'.

If God exists outside of our perception of time, then there is no such conflict. Because God doesn't exist in the same time-dimension as us, he didn't know you would write the email 'from the moment you were born'. Perhaps God doesn't percieve time at all - he just knows all and percieves all in one unitary moment. ?(?)

The best illustration I can come up with is one of us reading a novel. We can read the book over and over, jump backwards or forwards to any page of the book, etc. The characters in the book experience time in one 'dimension' (the plot), while we experience time in another 'dimension' (the real world). So we can know that snape kills dumbledore on page 606, but that doesn't influence or constrain snape's decision.

(It's just an illustration, not meant to literally describe our relation to God or anything)

Answer 9

God supply us loose will so we are able to love him. If he did no longer supply us loose will and controlled each and everything we do then how do we adore something. we've the liberty to declare specific or no to what God needs individuals. specific God is all-powerful and isn't any longer restricted to what we call time. besides in case you homicide some one it would not unavoidably propose you will Hell while you're fairly sorry and repent for what you have finished and settle for the present of God's grace then you definately are able to journey the heavenly reward that he has for us. learn Paul interior the bible he did many stuff that have been against God and he replaced to grow to be between the main suitable saints and wrote lots of the epistles interior the Bible. King David is yet another great occasion of a few guy or woman who grow to be no longer all that stable yet he enjoyed God.

Answer 10

This apparent paradox is a result of our inability to even come close to comprehending God. We fall into the trap of believing He has abilities that exceed human ones, but we can not comprehend infinite ability. Some choose (of their own free will) to deny the possibility of infinite ability and only envision a being with superhuman powers. We simply can not believe that God can observe and influence every minute bit of mass/energy that has ever existed and ever will exist throughout all of the universe.

I find the Bible to be as much at fault as anything else in this dilemma. So many times is states that God became "angry" at men's actions. Bunk! Anger implies that God did not know beforehand. If you must assign a human emotion to God's reaction, it should be resigned or sad. Yes, like the example above of the hungry children and the room full of food, God knew Adam and Eve would eat from the tree of knowledge for they were, as He created them, starving for knowledge in a universe full of it just ripe for the picking.

Answer 11

If you knew on a certain day at a certain time that you would witness a suicide and that all your efforts to convince them to seek council, to just have a good cry, to get angry, anything but kill themselves would be frustrated, does that make you guilty of murder?

Of course not! In the same way, God is trying to reach us, to get us to accept His love and provision. Just because He knows what and when you will, doesn't mean He isn't doing His part. He gave us free will, which means He won't interfere in our decision, even when we are self destructing. But you can believe He will be trying to reach you the whole time. If you want Him, you only have to ask Him and He will come into your life. If you don't want Him, no matter what He does, you will reject Him. So He does the gentle, continual knocking at the door of your heart.