If God already has my life planned-out, can I really exercise Free-will?

Question

The bible says God already has our life planned, so isn't "what's going to happen, going to happen anyway?"

Answer 1

Understand that GOD is within you. So your free will itself is the part of the plan.

Do you have control over all the circumstances in your life. NO. But you do have control on the choices you make.

So the choices you make, make you. And what makes you is all in the plan.

Answer 2

God is beyond our understanding. Seriously, if we as humans had the ability to have full knowledge of God downloaded into our brains our heads would explode. With that said-

God is all knowing. He knows the end result of EVERY SINGLE CHOICE we could make. every yes/no answer, etc. Because of this he

A- knows everything that could possibly happen, and thus is all knowing,

B- is able to come up with a great map of how we can acheive the very best results in our life.

because of this, it is best to pray for God to help you do as HE wills, to stay on the path HE chooses. Because that way you will live the best life. If you pray for stuff that you want based on your own understanding, you risk going onto one of those alternate roads.

free will the the ability to make all of those choices. God allows us to do it because He's awesome and really cool and everyone would be bored miserable if we didn't, and there would be no good or bad, because both of these can only exist when choices are made. It's like the difference between being forced to say, live in your favorite city, versus choosing it. When you choose something you know what you're missing, and so can enjoy it more.

anyway, i'm off my soap box

Answer 3

One of the deepest elements of God's omniscience is that not only does He know everything in existence, but that He knows all possibilities.

He knows how an individual would use his free-will, even if the decision were never made.


We can define the *concept* of something as everything true about that thing for all time - all that is ever true about it.

Now Lucifer fell through his own free will to become the devil.

Lucifer's fall is part of the concept of Lucifer.

Now God would know that concept, even if Lucifer were never created and hence could not fall.

God would have known what Lucifer would have done anyhow.

And this in spite of the fact that God did not make Lucifer fall but that the choice came from Lucifer himself, so it was his sole responsibility.


Now abstracting from creation, God can see all possible choices that all possible free beings would make in all possible universes or realms of reality.

So God, in seeing everything that everyone would do in every conceivable circumstance, creates a universe and a history around that.

So if every life and all of history is mapped out by God, the free will decisions that every being makes are essential ingredients to that.


It is a paradox - we are free, yet God determines everything.

That is resolved in His omniscience and His eternal vision that sees all of reality for all time in an instantaneous now.




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Answer 4

The Bible does not say that God already has your life planned out. It says that he knows you intimately and that if you trust him, he will direct your paths. The Bible clearly teaches that we have free will to make wise or unwise decisions.

For example, God wanted to bring the Children of Israel into the "Promised Land." That was his plan. They chose to be disobedient and ended up wandering in the desert for 40 years. God eventually took the Israelites into the Promised Land, but pretty much all of those original people had died off by that time. They had free will to do as God wanted or not, and ultimately God accomplished his plan.

Answer 5

The theological doctrine of divine foreknowledge is often alleged to be in conflict with free will. After all, if God knows exactly what will happen, right down to every choice one makes, the status of choices as free is called into question. If God had timelessly true knowledge about one's choices, this would seem to constrain one's freedom. This problem is related to the Aristotelian problem of the sea battle: tomorrow there will or will not be a sea battle. If there will be one, then it seems that it was true yesterday that there would be one. Then it would be necessary that the sea battle will occur. If there won't be one, then by similar reasoning, it is necessary that it won't occur.[82] This means that the future, whatever it is, is completely fixed by past truths—true propositions about the future.

However, some philosophers follow William of Ockham in holding that necessity and possibility are defined with respect to a given point in time and a given matrix of empirical circumstances, and so something that is merely possible from the perspective of one observer may be necessary from the perspective of an omniscient.[83] Some philosophers follow Philo of Alexandria in holding that free will is a feature of a human's soul, and thus that animals lack free will.[84]

Jewish philosophy stresses that free will is a product of the intrinsic human soul, using the word neshama (from the Hebrew root nshm or נשמ meaning "breath"), but the ability to make a free choice is through Yechida (from Hebrew word "yechid", singular), the part of the soul which is united with God, the only being that is not hindered by or dependent on cause and effect (thus, freedom of will does not belong to the realm of the physical reality, and inability of natural philosophy to account for it is expected). In Islam the theological issue is not usually how to reconcile free will with God's foreknowledge, but with God's jabr, or divine commanding power. al-Ash'ari developed an "acquisition" or "dual-agency" form of compatibilism, in which human free will and divine jabr were both asserted, and which became a cornerstone of the dominant Ash'ari position.[85] The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard claimed that divine omnipotence cannot be separated from divine goodness.[86] As a truly omnipotent and good being, God could create beings with true freedom over God. Furthermore, God would voluntarily do so because "the greatest good ... which can be done for a being, greater than anything else that one can do for it, is to be truly free." Alvin Plantinga's "free will defense" is a contemporary expansion of this theme, adding how God, free will, and evil are consistent

Answer 6

I am Rational Spirituality,

Some people have their lives planned out more than others, and there is always an element of free will. It certainly makes sense to think about what one does, and do to others only what they would want to have done to themselves in similar circumstances. In such a case one cannot go wrong.

God can see into the future, that is why he knows what you will do, but that does not mean that you do not have a free will, or full responsibility for everything that you do.

You may read more on the above in "Rational Spirituality" on the Dhaxem website.

Answer 7

There's more than one way to skin a cat.

I'm not sure here, but I think the Bible says something more along the lines of God has a purpose for you. There are multiple ways to achieve that purpose, you may even fail or succeed, and not know it until you go meet him (hopefully at some far off time.)

But you do have free will.

Answer 8

God has predistined all things because your choices are predictible. You only have a sense of free will while in the level of Law. Karma,cause and effect once you meet a saint an receive baptism into spirit you will experience unconditional love an live on a level of Grace, doing the will of God, no longer a sinner living in duality.

Answer 9

Good question, of course you'll get the free will answers. I'll try to make sense of it. Maybe what was meant was that God had a plan for you, and gave you free will. You either follow his plan or use your free will to stray from it. That does bring us to another question, if he knew you were gonna stray from his plan, are you sinining, will he forgive you? Religion is nothing but a headache.

Answer 10

The Bible doesn't say that God has your life planned, it states that He knows it. Big difference. Since God lives outside of time, He can know without choosing to influence.