Refute or agree please.?

Question

Christianity believes that God is omniscient.
If God is omniscient, life is determined.
If life is determined, then there is no free will.
If there is no free will, then no one is morally responsible.
If no one is morally responsible for anything,
Then, Christianity believes that no one is morally responsible for the life of another human being.


People always say that where i am wrong is DETERMINISM = NO FREE WILL, my response to that is this,

God being omniscient means that he knows how it will end. he knows which of us will be accepted into heaven, and which of us will not, he knows what i am typing right now and what i will type in 10 minutes, 10 years from now, and so forth. We cannot do anything to change that, because if we did change it, God would also know, and if he didn't know he would no longer be omniscient. and if he is omniscient then everything is already determined by him, we cannot and will not ever be able to see the plan laid out for us, but it is there none the

**CONTINUATION**

we cannot and will not ever be able to see the plan laid out for us, but it is there none the less. We think we are in control of our own lives, thus having free will but this is merely an illusion. Therefore if God is omniscient then life is determined and if life is determined then there is no free will.

response to kathy and everyone else who says that we still have free choice.

Because we cannot see the master plan, how do you know that the choices you make are not controlled by God?

Answer 1

I disagree. Omniscience does not necessarily negate free will for the choice of one person is not directed by the knowledge of another, no matter the degree of the knowledge of the other person to that of the decision-maker. Free will by definition is the giving freedom for one to make his own decision. A negation of the free will, would therefore mean forcing a person to fo something that is not really what he wants or what he wills. Hence, God's omniscience does not negate our free will, for he does not make our decision for us. All the choices that we made, is what the choices that we wanted to make. Just like the writing of your question, and the my answering to it, and much the same your response to it. On the other hand, you do have a point that GOd has already determined everything that will come to pass and in essence we arrive in antinomial ideas. Our mind cannot fathom the contradiction of free will and Divine Providence but with God, it is not impossible to reconcile the two since He is omniscient after all.

Answer 2

If I program a computer to do certain tasks in a certain way, then walk away and leave it for 50 years, does that mean when I come back and find that the programming was faulty and all the tasks were either not done or done incorrectly, I can just blame it on the computer's free will?

See, this is where the Christian argument allowing the possibility of both omniscience and free will falls down. They neglect the fact that if you accept you were created by an omniscient god, then you have to accept that he made you as you are with foreknowledge of every single thought and action you will ever make. If he didn't want you to do the things you would, he could have made you differently so you do the things he does want you to do. If he doesn't make you differently, he has still chosen your path/destiny by failing to change you. Your god has chosen your path for you, simply giving you the illusion of free will.

Answer 3

An other attribute of God is Omnipotence. If God is Omnipotent, then he can give us free will, can't He?

Mark

Addendum:

We do not have free will to accept salvation. Salvation is a gift, freely given by God through his Holy Spirit. It is a gift of grace (un deserved love) that we receive as a result of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross.

While we can not chose salvation (again it is a work of the Spirit) we do have free will to reject it. This was evident when the first people, Adam and Eve, chose to defy God and eat the forbidden fruit. Free will is also evident when Lucifer and about 1/3 of the angels rebeled against God and were cast out of Paradise.

Had they not rebelled, mankind likely would have eventually screwed up anyway.

God created us, therefore all mankind has been CHOSEN by God, we are his; but just as we are our parents, we can also chose to rebell against them, even though their love for us remains. We can shun this love. That's free will.

Mark

Answer 4

Nice rationale, but erroneous just the same.

Just because God is aware that something will occur, say--25 years into a person's lifetime--does not automatically mean that he predestined it to occur. One does not equal the other. Or, in other words knowledge does not equal action.

God does not want or choose to interfere with our free will, because he wants us to choose him, to choose right thought and right action (morally speaking). A choice without free will, is no choice at all.

So God knows how something will turn out when you make the decision to do something. change your mind, he knows that too, but he didn't and doesn't make you change your mind.

On that subject, if God, who wants everyone to end up in heaven, has overridden free will and freedom of choice, why all of the infighting over does he exist or doesn't he? Or about why a good God did or didn't do something? He could easily just put everyone in heaven (or hell, if that was his choice), and have been done with it. End of story.

But he didn't do that. He gave us a choice--in all things. choose or reject him and his Son, choose or reject righteousness, choose or reject whatever we please. And the consequences or rewards will follow, based on what we choose.

Look at it this way:

If your 2 year old was making a beeline for the hot oven door, and you walked in just in time to see him reach out, you know what is going to happen. It won't be good. And unfortunately, you won't get to him in time to grab his little hand.

You call him, hoping to buy a second, to lure him away or distract him. But he looks up, then turns back to the oven door, and touches it. His fingers hurt, but no significant harm done, no damage; and you hope he has learned a valuable lesson.

Even though you knew what was about to happen, that didn't mean you predetermined it. Your baby happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. You showed up seconds too late.

So while God does know everything, what you do is up to you.

There is no get out of hell free cardholder master list. Your choices are yours, as will be the consequences.

God bless you.

Answer 5

Scratch the surface of the Christian God, and you'll find the Agnostic God. If they can't answer, the standard response is something along the lines of "God works in mysterious ways." or "Don't try to understand God."

This, of course, is a dodge, not an answer.

When a child in Darfur watches his mother being brutally raped and murdered, this is exactly what God wants to happen. Why? Because if God wanted anything else, what could possibly prevent that alternative from happening?

Digressing to man's free will is basically saying that Free Will > God's Will. Or, equivalently, that God doesn't exist.

Welcome to atheism. :)

Answer 6

how are you able to teach or disprove the life of an undetectable entity? Plato stated that all of us comprehend what we can teach, something we only have faith. it extremely is the inspiration for rigorous checking out, as properly as reproducibility and peer evaluation standards in the scientific approach. in case you practice those hassle-free approaches to religious concerns then the life of Deity(ies) would rank in the neither proved or disproved class. the reality we can not at recent teach/disprove some thing does not recommend that we are going to in no way be able with a view to do. because of the fact the burden of evidence is on the single making the assertion you could not supply as evidence the reality which you could not be proved incorrect, we can not teach or disprove no depend if there is life on different planets, that neither proves or disproves that there isn't. Logically, an analogous concept would practice the life/non-life of God.

Answer 7

I totally agree. And that is why I'm agnostic. If God created us, even though we have free will (which I define as our personality which makes our decisions), then he knows how we will act in every situation under implied conditions. And he knows we can do anything about it because that is the way we were made.

Do we have free will? Yes, in the fact that there is no divine intervention. I think you should just skip the no free will part and go to no one is morally responsible.

Answer 8

God said we have free will and then God says he knows what we're going to do.

Why would you disbelieve the first one instead of the last (just for the sake of argument)?

Someone ought to ask the latter question for once.

Do not assume that you can understand God or His way in any measureable amount. It's either have faith or don't.

Even if you never understand, you will still learn if you keep trying. Keep the questions coming but understand that humanity is limited, God is not.

Answer 9

I disagree.

You assume that we lowly humans have the ability to comprehend the power of God. A gnat is a million times more likely to understand Einstein's theory of relativity than we are to fully understand how and why God is and acts as He does. That is where faith comes in--"I don't fully understand, I can't prove, I don't fully see, but nonetheless I believe."

Answer 10

PHILIPPIANS 2 V 5-9
The attitude you should have is the one Christ Jesus had;
He always had the nature of God,but He did not think by force He should become equal with God.
Instead of this,of His own free will He gave up all He had,and
took the nature of a servant