Jamie_L

The "free will defense" seems to often include statements like: in order for us to freely love god, we must have the ability to choose not to love him.

I (and others) have asked: couldn't we be give free will, but also have been made such that we were more likely than we are now to want to choose god and not sin? That is, it seems like we weren't just given free will, but we were made such that we had quite a weakness for temptation. Couldn't we have been made stronger, but still had a free choice?

The implied answer seems to be no. The implied answer, to me, seems that God had to make us flawed in order for us to have free will.

Well, if he made us flawed, why should we be held accountable for giving into those failings?

Analogy: I have the free will to cut off my own finger. I choose not to, because it would hurt, and I would not like it. But I still have the free will to do it, right? Why couldn't sin have been that way? Something we were free to do, but would almost never choose to? No, instead, its quite easy and tempting to sin. Isn't the nature of how we perceive sin God's doing, and not ours?

Hypothetically, of course, since there is no God.

Jamie

braces_for_impact

More circular logic apologies. Free will is bunk. God is claimed to be omniscient. Therefore he could create us with free will without the ability to choose evil. It doesn't make sense, it's a contradiction within a sentence, but an omniscient all powerful god could do it. If he could not, then he's not god, as god can do anything. I call these logical "parlor tricks". A good example is Homer Simpson

Jamie_L

Braces:

Yeah, I'm a full-fledged believer in the incompatibility of omniscient+omnipotent+human free will. However, I started this thread to take note of another problem I see even if you accept that God is capable of granting free will.

That problem is that free will doesn't seem to get around the problem of evil unless God made people with free will AND a significant leaning towards sin.

So, if we were intentionally made with a leaning towards sin, why should we be punished for it?

Jamie

Rusting Car Bumper

You are almost there.

There is the implied mistake of equating belief with freewill. That is, the freewill defense essentially says I am FREE to BELIEVE anything. That's not the case. For example, if you are free to believe anything then make yourself believe that you can fly by flapping your arms. Obviously you can't. You could go about flapping your arms or saying to people that you believe it but you most certainly could not make yourself believe it. You would merely be acting silly and telling lies.

Many things we call "beliefs" are not chosen. Likewise with god. I cannot believe in god for the same reason I cannot believe that I can flap my arms and fly. Why? Because there is nothing evidence to reason or my direct experience that either is true.

This puts the burden squarely back on the alleged god. Since he/she/it controls my experiences, so it is claimed, then he/she/it has the power to cause experiences which would then cause me to believe or not believe.

DC

christ-on-a-stick

I've stumped my fundy family members with pointing out that "free will" and "original sin" are completely contradictory, because the free will idea says that we have the ability to choose between good and evil and original sin doctrine teaches that we are born with sin nature and WILL sin. No choice. I asked plainly, "so does a human being have the FREE WILL to choose NEVER to sin, thereby not requiring salvation? How does one have free will to choose if one of the choices is not an option?"

Never got an answer for that one. Not holding my breath.

K

It's even worse than just being faulted and having a drive to sin. God apparently wants us to choose Him freely. So freely that he must hide Himself from us so as not to interfere with our free will.

So it seems to me that God created us with a faulted nature and a drive to sin - something He doesn't want us to do. Instead He would prefer us to choose Him as He demonstrates His love for us by hiding completely. By the way, if we don't choose Him, we'll be tortured for all eternity.

woodchuck

I don't even know why I'm attempting at getting in on this, but I know you guys love gettin all riled up by the fundy's.

Jamie, your finger analogy is interesting, but in my opinion it's not quite paralel- You used the act of cutting off a finger to equal choosing to love God. You choose not to cut off your finger because you are bound to the finger in the start, it is a part of who you are. You control your finger, your finger does not control you, nor does it have free will. You have the authority over your finger- your finger is your insturment.

On the contrary, God gives us the free choice between His authority and our own authority over ourselves. Let me use your analogy in a diferent way for my side of the story-

Imagine your finger has it's own will- it can make choices apart from you. It is a part of you and that is its purpose, but it has it's own free will. So your finger decides to randomly shove itself up into stray dogs butts as they pass you by. Your like "man, my finger wreaks because it always wants to be inside dog butts." so you decide to amputate it- and it wiggles around on the operating table a little while and then realizes that it could not live apart from you.

If God is the body, I am the finger, then I have a purpose in the body, but if I become useless then I am cut off.

You guys love me so much I can feel the love, I can feel the internet hugs and kisses all over me right now.

You also complain that God seemed to have created us with more of a will to sin. God should have limited us in some way to only want Him. God should have given us a free will to love only him. That itself seems contadictory.

I think the most fair thing to do would be to make a person just as able to love as he is able to hate, to have an equal ability within to be good as to be bad. This is what He has done as far as I can see. We can be mass murderers, we can be saints, we can be filanthropists, we can be be rapists, within each of us is a full potential to do very very very bad things, and also to do very very very good things.

You focus on the act of sinning, when the true matter is the sin principle inherited by Adam. Sin is seperation from God. Sinnnig is the free minded finger shoving itself in dog butts- sin is the rebellion within the fingers nature to not be in unity with the body it is connected to. Such a lovely analogy.

Adam had the ultimate free will, but your free will can imprison others after you. Your free will could be another persons involuntary suffering. We are products of Adams original free will when he and eve chose to disobey God. Christ on a stick, you have free will to sin, but you lost your free will to choose not to be in sin in Adam, but you have regained that free will in Christ. You need salvation from sin, not sins. You need forgiveness for sins, you need deliverance from sin. You can reject this or accept it, either way, at least you don't have to think about holding your breath.

If you want free will to be in the hands of man than you must accept that mans free will can take away your free will. In lowering your free will to the the individual, you are giving each individual a free will to use that will against the free will of another. On the other hand, if all of our free wills rest in God, they are united in Him and we will all always have free will without breeching the anyone elses free will. Free will that is freely given up to it's Creator is the only true freedom.

We are born in sin, so yes we are born flawed. We can go our entire life without sinning, but be full of sin all the while, though I dont know if anyone has done it, it is hypothetically possible.

Free will is not freedom to believe, it is Freedom to accept authority. It is the freedom for the finger to allow the body control, instead of living under it's own rule. I have found that real freedom is only when I have surrendered all my freedom to Christ.

Also, it seems true to me that God has done a perfect job of stil making that free will equal at both ends. In all facets of life you can either choose to give God authority or perhaps give him the glory, or come up with a different answer. Believing in God fits reality, but you have the free will to create your own ideas, your own answers, and your own choice to put the puzzle together a different way than the designer pictured it. The result will never be near as good as it was intended though.

Many say that God hides. God is hiding eh? That's interesting that you say that- I hear that all the time on here... why is God hiding?????

Who is asking this? the ones most passionate about hiding God, the ones who desire to remove God from our culture, the ones who are so desperate to give self the control and put God in a grave.

This world hides God, because it has the free will to do so, and has excersized that choice with no restraint. We've kicked God out of our country and complained that he doesnt intervene when bad things happen. We push him away and then ask where he went.

The cool thing is that you can never really push him away from you, He remains in the same spot. But you can surround yourself with plenty of walls that will make it as hard as possible for Him to show you himself. And then create an entire website to celebrate it... Oh wait you already did.

The truth about free will is that its really useless until its handed back to God, and this what He wants us to realize. Man will never live in harmony as long as he posesses his own free will.

Well, thats enough of that. The woodchuck is out like a trout.
-eef

ManM

Jamie_L,

Have you considered that we are in the process of reaching this goal?

davidH

lol, yeah I've seen this arguement many times.

Rubbish. Where is the flaw? If you call freewill a flaw then I really pity you because that is what you are saying here.

Take for example a robot - you can program a robot to say to you "I love you" but is that going to make you feel any better? Of course not because the robot is only saying it because it has to say it.
However if AI (artifical intelligence) was given (robot has a mind of its own) and it said "I love you" then it means what it says because you never made it say that.
But that same AI can also choose to hate you, could go on the rampage killing everything etc.

You get the general idea from this example.

Where is the flaw if the robot chooses to love you? The flaw is rather with the robot that chooses to hate you and kill everything etc.

Hope this gets the idea across.

If we hadn't the ability to choose evil then there is no such thing as free will. Rather we would be like the robot that we had programed. You could say that God could have created us with a choice of good things to do - but that would be like programming the robot with multiple sentances....it would bring you no joy at all.
Joy is seeing a robot love you out of its own choice.
Saying that God is omnipotent and so he could do it is also wrong - God would have had to make evil the same as good ie. No difference for this to be so. Since God himself loves good and hates evil how could he contradict his justice and make wrong the same as right?
That's like saying that because God is all powerful he should be able to let everyone into heaven no matter what they have done....But God is just, holy and can't stand sin - he can't make something and in doing so contradict himself and so sin...

There is no problem. Adam and Eve were in the middle - good to the left and evil to the right.
They saw God's goodness and leaned toward him. Satan was the one who tempted Adam and Eve - it was he who made them lean over to the right.
Firstly he shed doubtand then prompted action.
Note here, he didn't make them sin - but made sin look attractive to them.

Adam and Eve had a choice they could have said "No, that's wrong God said we shouldn't" and leave. - Couldn't they? Yes.

But they decided to sin by disobeying God. They choose to sin.
God comes along and adam blames Eve and Eve blames Satan. Sin has consequences and Adam and Eve are put out of the garden and the Earth begins to change.

Your family should know this. Freewill in the beginning was with perfect man, man without sin who sinned and became imperfect as he let sin into the world, that pefect man had the choice to remain perfect for as long as he existed since no sin was in him when he came to be.But he sinned and in doing so became imperfect.

That man's offspring were also imperfect for how could the perfect come from imperfect?

We still have freewill but are all imperfect with sin that we inherit because Adam sinned. I have freewill to chose between good and evil, but the sin that I inherit from Adam in me being imperfect, causes me to lean towards sin. That's why the apostle Paul said "I war against my body and make it my slave."
That was why God had to die for us - if there was any chance of us being perfect by being good (like Islam teaches - more good than bad) then Jesus wouldn't have had to die for us. But Jesus died for us inorder to make a way that we might be saved.

No, now we don't have the freewill to choose whether or not to sin in the sense for us to remain sinless for all our lives.

But we do have the freewill to choose whether or not we sin - but that is not going to get us to heaven because we are born imperfect through Adam's sin.

Here the arguement comes in that Adam is to blame since he has damed the whole human race to an eternity without God. So how can we be blamed because of what Adam did - it's not our fault is it?
We live with the consequences of actions of other people that affect us. If Sadam pushes the button that launches a nuclear missle - we are all affected. Life isn't fair, God couldn't stop Sadam from firing a missile because Sadam has free will - with Sadam's freewill he has chosen to do something that will affect all of us.
It is the same with Adam.

But the excuse that it is not our fault and we can do nothing about it is no longer there. There is a way out of sin and into heaven and the choice is there to be made. No one makes you not chose it, and noone forces you to make it.

There is no excuse - you can't blame God for sending you to hell when God offers you a gift of freedom from sin and life with him. God has done everything now it's up to each one of us to make the discission.

That's why Jesus came, we have to believe in him because he was perfect and took our punishment when he died.
Now freewill comes into play again - you are free to accept what Jesus did and trust in him to save you. Or you are free to reject him. The choice is yours only because God will never force you to accept him - he cannot.

You will find him if you look for him with all your heart - (from the Bible).
It might be worth thinking about this now.
God did reveal himself to humans 2000 years ago when Jesus came - humans recorded what happened. How is it God's fault if you will not believe what was recorded?
If God revealed himself and you were the disciples how would you let the rest of the world know what had happened? And imagine that you witnessed everything the disciples did - what would people's reaction be to your telling them, and what would people in future generations think about what you had written?

Bearing the above in mind, look at the quote below.

It is all your choice - I'm not the one that will be affected whether you reject Jesus or not, only you will be.
You don't know what lies after death but you comfort yourselves by - and the Bible puts it in 2 Timothy 4v3
..gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.

Put yourself in the disciples' places, if you did witness everything about Jesus - do you think people would be skeptical when you told them - even though you knew it to be true?

It is a truth worth pondering over.

Ab_Normal

I don't understand why their decision had to affect every person born since.