SimplyAtheistic

I know there have been debates over predestination before, but I would like to get some viewpoints on it. When I went to church a while back (not by choice) , our pastor decided to come into sunday school and attemp to explain a complex subject to the high school students. Now, he said in the bible, in mulitple places, that god says our lives are predetermined, and that "we may roll the dice but he decides how it falls". Now, my pastor also says that in the bible it states man has free will. This rang a bell in my head immediately. Anyways, my pastor went on and tried to explain it with compatibilitism or some bullshit term he made up. He basically said that god planned your life knowing what kind of person you would be. But that also got me wondering, because if he planned around your life, he really didn't plan it at all. In the bible it says he had a plan for every person and this world before we were born, and the very definition of a plan is to pre-determine events before they are put into action. Therefore he planned people's damnation into hell and their suffering in this world. There is no way around this, and my pastor talked in circles trying to explain it. At the end he said "We cannot understand god and we cannot understand this subject." I about jumped up and said "Then why the hell did you waste 45 minutes of our time and not say that in the first place?" Anyways, I am curious as to how christians dance around this subject.
Jake

SLD

Christians dance around so many contradictions, I suppose they won't have any problems dancing around this one either.


Of course somehow it just never convinces me and in fact the more tap dancing I see them do, the more un-christian I become.

SLD

Nowhere357

What this tells me is that the premises "god knows everything" and "people have free will" are mutually exclusive.

His conclusion "We cannot understand god" doesn't follow. What does follow is that either he has misinterpreted the bible, or that we do not have free will.

I liked your answer better, though.

MrFrosty

Ah, yes. The uber get-out clause of lameness once again: "God moves in mysterious ways."

The pastor's attempts at explaining the contradiction remind me of a post by somebody that suggested people believe what they want to believe. I wonder how prevalent this situation is with Christians who notice contradictions in the Bible but still hold to their faith. I mean, after all, it's better to keep following the faith when the supposed reward is so great, no?

Felstorm

OMG! someone found a flaw in the bible!?! ImPOSSIBLE!.

*incredulous look*

Proof of a huge flaw in the bible.

It was written. That is all you need for proof..

If an omnipotent god needed to have a bunch of ignorant humans write a book so we would know about him nowadays, proves case in point that god is not omnipotent and very likely does not exist.

Arikay

Yeah, quite often god, predestination, omnipotence, and freewill never get along together.

Quite often though, it doesnt seem that many christians have a grasp on what freewill means.

Like when people pray for a football team to win.
If god did answer their prays, he would be violating our freewill to make choices in the game. He would also be suggesting that one sides prayers were somehow better or more worthy than another sides.

Well, if you want to cause a ruccus, you could always ask why God is a Fuzzy bunny Murder.

Since god in his omni impetence knew he would flood the earth and kill all the inoccent animals in the proccess, yet he orded them to be fruitful and multiply anyway.

BadBadBad

This has been bugging me a lot lately too. I did a search on the Bible yesterday on the words believe and believing. Very interesting. Here you find many many of the verses compelling you to believe by choice and at the same time, you catch all the compelling verses that tell us God decides who will believe, who will understand God's word, who will be saved, and who will be shown mercy. Very interesting.

What you see really is that these folks were preaching a falsehood that their flock didn't believe. What you see is all their little mind games they tried to play to manipulate people into the fold. Believe and you'll get God's blessing. You'll be saved and spend eternity in Heaven. Don't believe, and you'll go to Hell. Those people that don't believe, well, God has predestined them to damnation. That's the only reason they don't believe, otherwise, they'd be right up here on the front row praying just like I am.

Think about it. Saying that it's possible to see into the future is incompatible with the concept to Free Will. Think of time as a zipper. As time progresses, history is layed down permanently in a fixed time line. All the infinite possible timelines are fixed as the future passes into the instant of the present immediately being fixed into history. If you say an omniscient God can see into the future, then God can see a single timeline into the future. That means there is only one possible future, ie predestination.

So which is it? Free Will which we can see with our own eyes, or is it predestination? If it's predestination, then why all the bother about whether or not to believe? Why all the bother about sin and redemption? Why have faith? The future is fixed, what difference does it make.

The preacher was honest that he can't understand it. He just didn't go far enough though. It' s clear you can't have both, and there isn't any reference to free will at all in the verses that define God's predestination, and there isn't any reference to predestination in the verses that compel you to choose faith. Every conversation I've had with christians on this, they want to add or delete words from these verses.

They're stuck with it though. This is the most important tenant of christianity. Salvation. Is it salvation through faith, works, or predestination? I have a better explanation. There is no God or life after death. The concept of christian salvation is just nonsense.

Mageth

Time Division Multiplexing. Y'see, god built a Free Will/God's Plan oscillator into the universe, with a period of a nanosecond or so. So you're free to do as you please in your time slots, but the god processor gets the rest to run the show.

Tarnaak

Here is an analogy for you all to show what free will is and how it works.
Post New Testament
You are in debt with a creditor. (Jesus for dying on the cross)
You have the free will to make payment or not (follow his example or not)
If you do follow, your debt will be paid in full (Rest in Heaven)
If you don't follow, your debt will always be in revolving account status. (No rest in a burning lake of fire)


Free will is defined by God, not Humans. What you may "think" of as free will is not the same as that of God the Almighty Creator of the Universe. We owe a debt to God for allowing us to live in what he created. Pay your respects, or face the music.

(hehe, cant wait for the reply to this:banghead: )

chiron64

The second quote is proof of the first. Why is it that every christian I've discussed this with cannot seem to understand that omniscience necessarily implies predetermination? If god knows your future, then it's determined. So, following your analogy, before you even existed, god knew whether you would pay your debt or not.