BadBadBad

Believing 2+2=4 and simultaneously believing that 2+2=5 is doublespeak. Pointing out that your beliefs don't add up isn't a personal attack.

The Bible clearly says that we are predestined. It clearly says we have a choice. It never says God predestines you based upon his foreknowledge of your free will choices. Many many people have pointed out on this board the paradox of that claim. The point is that you can't be predestined and have free will to change your destiny. It's a pretty simple concept. Believing that you are predestined and that you have free will is doublespeak. Can you offer any other defense other than crying about personal attacks?

We don't claim this. The Bible claims this. The Bible says we are pre-destined from the beginning of time for salvation or damnation, and who are we as mere humans to question God. Predestination is clearly illogical, and even you recognize that.


What an admission! Yes, I agree. Your beliefs with respect to religion are illogical. Very much so. You're trying to make logical arguments to defend admittedly illogical beliefs. We're not buying it.

You are one more christian I've met that has spouted this God predestines you based upon your free will choices nonsense. Are you just repeating the mantra of others? Is there a Biblical basis for your beliefs, and are you willing to provide it? How exactly did you arrive at your conclusions about free will? You know just because someone in the sixties, as I understand it, came up with this nifty story on Free Will doesn't mean it makes sense. Just because you or anyone else can come up with a story doesn't make it true. If you want to believe 2+2=5, that's fine. Just don't come to mathematicians and offer arguments to prove it's true, and even if you do, try to do a better job than just to repeat over and over that 2+2=5.

I ate Pascal's Wafer

You keep saying this, but you haven't substantiated it yet. How is it that humans are not God's robots? How do you know that we are not acting within the parameters we are designed to do? How an an omniscient entity create another entity which can choose its own parameters?

Your objection to my analogy is that we have free will. However, you haven't yet substantiated that objection. Unless you can demonstrate that humans are any different than robots (other than complexity), the analogy stands.

I don't agree with that assertion, but then again I don't believe an omniscient deity created everything either. If an omniscient deity did create the world, then it logically follows that whatever decisions we do make are just illusions.

That's fine. However, that's not what I was getting at. You decided to declare that I'm wrong, so I'm going to hold you to that declaration. I don't mind that you have your own opinions about this stuff. I do mind that you decide to declare my own arguments wrong without providing any logically sound reasons as to why it's wrong. I give you my reasons for thinking that an omniscient entity cannot create free will, and even illustrate the point with an analogy. Then you try to show that my analogy is flawed by assuming the truth of what you are trying to prove.

In other words, don't say (or imply) that I'm wrong unless you can back it up.

-Nick

emotional

brettc,

I'm not a Christian. Not all theists are Christians.

emotional

How do you know the sun is shining? Can you prove it? Can it not be just an illusion? See where your logic leads? We know the sun is shining, and we know we have decisional free will, and we don't have to prove those things. I know that I can send my hand to type "cat" or to type "dog", and these are things I decide, and that's that, I don't have to prove it. It's axiomatic.



No, it doesn't follow. Can you explain why it does? Because, for the life of me, I don't understand why God's omniscience would mean our decisions are just illusions. A) God knows everything, B) We decide to do things. Where's the contradiction? It's like saying A) The sky is blue, B) The grass is green, and saying there's a contradiction.



That isn't fair. I hold that everyone who says there is no life after death is wrong, but I can't prove it logically or evidentially. I can argue that someone is wrong without being able to prove it.

In other words you're effectively shutting me up. I can't back up my point. All I can do is assert: A) God must be omniscient, else He wouldn't be God, B) We have decisional free will regardless, because we know we can decide upon our actions. Point A is an EoG topic. Point B is an assumption that things are actually as we perceive them; if decisional free will is an illusion, maybe the whole world is, and then you've gone the way of solipsism and maya.

BadBadBad

So you decided one day you didn't like the way christians described their so called God, so you made up your own? So you can come here then and argue that God gives us free will. That God created the earth 15 billion years ago (ie your first post in this thread). That there's no Hell. That you get 72 virgins when you go to heaven. That God is the IPU and he has pink hair. That the world will come to an end in September 13, 2013. That the antichrist has been born. Jesus is alive. Jesus never lived. Jesus died for our sins. Basically, you could tell us virtually anything with the same pious authority common to christians. The problem is though is that there is just absolutely no basis for it other than your personal opinion, and frankly, talk is cheap.

emotional

Ah, how convenient it would be if I were a Christian... there would be a clear, recognised set of beliefs to attack. I just don't make life easy by choosing a belief of my own, do I?



Christianity is a satanic religion. It dooms the majority of mankind to eternal sadistic torture. There's no way I could accept such a religion. Christianity is a blasphemy against God. I refuse to believe God keeps an eternal torture chamber for mankind.



We have free will just as surely as the sun is shining. If free will is an illusion, then so is this whole world. I mean decisional free will, of course, not metaphysical free will. See my posts above for the difference.



No, He created the universe 15 billion years ago. The age of the earth is about 4.5 billion years.



I believe there is a hell, though purgatorial, not eternal. Hell is where people who have been unkind to others go.



No, I am not a Muslim. The Islamic description of heaven as a porno palace is a gross desecration of it. Heaven is where people have awareness of the spiritual reality, including God.

There is a basis, only you won't accept it as a basis. I get my ideas about God and the afterlife from such sources as NDEs (which you will of course construe as hallucinations of the brain) and spirit-channelled books such as Spirit Teachings, and other sources. None of which you will, of course, accept as a sound basis for knowledge, being the materialist and sceptic that you are.

I can't prove my beliefs true, but they are true. You will accept the reality of God and the afterlife when you get there.

Jamie_L

Actually, you don't have to bring God into the equation at all to smash the concept of free will. I honestly feel like I have free will, just like everyone else does (well, most everybody). But when I stop and think deeply about it, I can't actually find room for it in the way things work, God or no God.

If God is omnipotent and omniscient, free will goes out the window - unless God created the universe at random, which goes against almost all concepts of God I know of.

If the universe follows natural laws, and we're basically just a bunch of matter and energy following those laws, then every event follows deterministically from the previous events, and I don't see much if any room for free will in there either. It may feel like free will, but we make our decision based on our mental make-up at the time, which is the product of our genetic make-up (beyond our control) and the events that shaped us (beyond our control). Is it really true that we could have made a different decision? Given the exact same circumstances, and the exact same mental make-up, wouldn't we make exactly the same choice every time? Is that free will?

"We have no choice but to believe in free will." - Unknown

Jamie

emotional

That's Deke's assertion from the start, and I still haven't fathomed it. I still can't understand why God's omniscience precludes decisional free will.



God created a fully-gifted creation - a creation with the power to self-organise (hence, evolution). The creation organises itself into entities which have varying degrees of decisional free will (we humans stand on the top of that scale).



Again: you are not free to decide whether the next plane you board will crash, or whether you will get well from your next fever, or other such cases of contingency. You are free to decide whether to send your hands on the keyboard to type "cat", or to walk around the block, or to jump 20 floors down. That's the difference between metaphysical free will (which I agree we don't have) and decisional free will (which I most vehemently argue we have).

Unless one is brain-damaged or severely handicapped, one has the ability to make decisions. Free will, in the personal, non-metaphysical sense, is the ability to make decisions. Most people have that. Every poster on these boards is proof of decisional free will - the ability to decide to type those words on the keyboard.

BadBadBad

Yes, you have quite a nice dodge going. Make up anything you want. Just assert that anything that comes out of your mouth is absolutely true. You can even admit that it's illogical, but still assure us with the piety equal to any Christian that it's absolutely true.

You've convinced me. You are the ultimate God guru, and I'm now convinced that of all the professed prophets and truth sayers throughout the history of mankind, you and only you are the true source of knowledge about God. Can you write down your beliefs into a Bible? We'll hold it sacred. We'll make you a saint. Sure would be a shame to just let all this knowledge about God you've aquired through your measely life die with you.

:notworthy :notworthy :notworthy




The only after life you're going to have is the rotting and decomposition of your body. You won't accept the reality of that, because you'll be dead.

agnawstick

Somewhat off topic, but can a humanist believe in free will? If the big bang exploded, isn't life just a math problem? If you understood the composition in all the matter, and knew where it would explode out to, and you understood the science of it all, is there nothing truly "random".

Isn't random in this sense, meaning too complicated for us to know? The butterfly flapping his wings in peking creating rain later in New York isn't random. Right equations, right ability to understand the phenomena and there is no randomness.

An infinitely powerful computer then theoretically could read minds and predict the future. It's just a matter of coalating the data, and understanding the causality of earlier relationships. I am not referring here to God per se, but an extremely advanced intelligence. Would anything we do now come as a surprise? Was it pre-ordained from the moment of explosion that I would be typing these words? If not, then why not. I have a problem with atheists and theists on this one. They really don't have a good answer for free will I believe. Logically, we don't have free will. Everything was either pre-ordained by the science and math in the multitude of equations following the big bang, or God knows what you are doing before you do it.

This is why I am agnostic. Free will is a gaping hole in both theism and atheism. Don't believe it exits in either philosophy if one is honest. Perhaps I am deluded, but if so I was predetermined to be so, so there isn't much I can do about that. I can't choose to be a nihilist, that choice was already made for me. My genetics, the way the wind gusts today, the connection of my synapses are all pre-determined. We just don't have the instruments to measure it.