a question that has plagued the ages?

Question

how can we have free will if god know what is going to happen. are our lives already predestined to be or are we just a random collection of atoms and chemical processes. im sure religious people will say god has a plan for us. you missing the point of the question. the bible says we have free will but god knowing what is going to happen in my life would fundamentally mean that it has already happened and that i really dont have the choice to choose my path. Is it just an illusion that i do have any choice? and if so whats the point of living for anything? let the backlash begin

Answer 1

Blackacre has twisted Calvinism around to be something it's not, so let me give you a better synopsis.

Through the fall of Adam, the entire human race has a sin nature, which includes original sin so that even infants are born into it and stand condemned before the Lord. We are dead in our sins, therefore no one has the ability to look to God for salvation. We have the ability to make our own day-to-day decisions, but it doesn't matter what choices we make if we're all guilty anyway!

So yes, it's pretty clear that God & everyone else for that matter can "know what's going to happen", i.e. Hell. God didn't send us there through predestination, it's our own fault, nothing we do can ever, ever merit Heaven.

If you don't agree with me to this point, fine, just work with me. It is scriptural but I'm not going to jam bible verses down your throat, you can find plenty of apologetics sites that will do that. But assuming I'm right, how does man get to Heaven if he can't do so on his own, and he's so dead in his sins that he can't make a choice for Christ?

This should be obvious, but God Himself must intervene. And if He can intervene, I'm not saying He "pushes" us into a decision for Him. You can't push spiritually dead into anything. So, He chooses who He will enter into a relationship with.

And, if he can choose, then he can choose any time he wants. This explains predestination and foreknowledge (foreLOVING as interpreted by the Calvinist), choosing us in Him before the foundations of the world. It's not at all a knowing what we will do, we've already covered that. Neither are we "robots" unless you look at mankind as already robots for Satan. God just opens our eyes (the Bible says we RECEIVE Him, by the way, it never even implies a need for acceptance).

The thing is, if you haven't gone along with me at all on this, then we are left with the question you are asking, and you will never get a logical response from someone that tries to tell you we have free will and God is omnipotent, too. How can God know what's going to happen when free will, if it's truly free, by definition means that he cannot know for sure? What you are left with is nothing but fog on this issue, and doublespeak that keeps people confused and making things more difficult than they need to be.

Theological free will was deemed as heretical at the Synod of Dort nearly 400 years ago. Unfortunately, Arminianism, as it's called, has come back into vogue in recent times, and I find that Calvinism is very often misrepresented and maligned. It is an extremely humbling theology, as opposed to blackacre's presumption that it breeds a haughty attitude.

Answer 2

I just answer a question similar to this last night and this is what I said.
In my opinion(I am a very religious person) The fact that our destinies are already redesigned does not eliminate free-will.We have no knowledge of anything out side of instantaneous time. We live literally from instant to instant. So our decisions are made based on what we experience in the present, that's the only time we live in. We cannot in any situation argue that we would not have done so and so had it not been for this and that. Free is our will because we are free of any conscious knowledge of our predestined actions.
Imagine a man walking down a road. He comes to a fork in the road. The left bend is actually nonexistent but we have every right to choose that road,its just that we can't take it,our destiny is already written but we can ignorantly choose what we want to do and then inevitably do what we were designed to do. Are actions are essentially what we think and decide in ignorance to our destinies. Our thoughts are what count and we are punished or chastised according to them. That is our free will.

Answer 3

You have free will, if you don't know what choices you are going to make or how that those choices will effect you, then you must choose between them anyways. Just because God knows what you are going to choose doesn't mean that you didn't make the choice on your own. If I get the choice between $1 or $100 it is my free will which to choose, but everyone knows that any logical person would take the $100.

Answer 4

Its not that God knows what is going to happen. God simply knows all of the possible outcomes.

The deck is stacked in our favor. All roads lead back home to God eventually.

This is where free will comes in. We have an infinite number of choices available to us so we can procrastinate nearly for eternity if we so chose. Not understanding the idea of reincarnation make understanding this difficult. See things in the context of a single life time creates a situation where nothing seems to make any sense.

The moment you start to view things from the idea of multiple lives it suddenly all starts to make sense.

love and blessings Don

Answer 5

Calvanists got around the "predestination/ free will" conundrum in part by asserting that one lived a life on Earth to show others that they were of the "chosen". In other words: there was nothing anyone could do to change whether one was "chosen", but one displayed this "chosen" status by being "Christlike" on Earth. One, therefore, tried to live as if one was chosen; though being Calvinists, they already had made the intellectual assumption that they had been "chosen". Logically, however, it has many flaws.

Answer 6

I think perhaps that God limits his knowledge in order to give us freewill.

Though even if he did know ahead, that would not totally destory our free will. I mean he just knows the choice that we are going to make, but we can feely make that choice.

Yet again, I think God limits his foreknowledge. The Bible many times shows God suprised, or his breath taken away from him, when he sees what mankind has down with free will.

He is still has the ABILITY to be all-knowning he just limits that ability, in order to give us free will.

God can not do anything against his character.

Answer 7

I'm an aetheist but I am gonna go ahead and play the devils advocate for a second.

Why does one go see the movie "the Titanic"? we all know the ending.

So assuming god knows the end so to speak maybe we just need our turn on earth here to prove to ourselves our intrinsic worth. maybe god is like the parent who is saying "Go ahead, but dont say I didn't warn you!"

I honestly dont beleive in any of this but hey, since we are all throwing religious theory around I thought I would join in the fun!

Answer 8

If you have an omnipotent God you cannot have any free will, the two cannot coexist.