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Omniscience or not makes absolutely no difference in the fact that foreknowledge has no impact on our choices!!
Omniscience makes every difference. It's the whole crux of what we are discussing.
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Exactly... it's your choice if it's carried out or not.
Very well! Your god KNOWS that you will drink a coffee at 8pm tonight. Now go ahead and explain to me how you can choose not to..... and thereby prove gods knowledge of your actions to be wrong.
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But if you didn't change the plan? Would I now be able to say that you couldn't have changed because I knew it?
You are confusing knowing the plan with knowing the outcome of the plan. When you overhear my plan, do you KNOW that it will be carried out? No you don't..... and if I don't change my plan you still can't say I couldn't have changed my mind because unlike the Christian god you didn't KNOW the outcome.
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This is like saying that when I drive my car, it arrives at my known destination because of my thoughts alone.
what if everything is like a multiple choice question...that make free will an illusion..in that we can choose...but the one who makes the question picks which ways you can go
Very well! Your god KNOWS that you will drink a coffee at 8pm tonight. Now go ahead and explain to me how you can choose not to..... and thereby prove gods knowledge of your actions to be wrong.
even if some how you can change your fate of drinking that cup of coffee...god would have foreknowledge that you would change your fate of drinking that coffee...but does this mean he controls whether or not you drink the coffee....no i think not
but i do think if in the christian sense of god knowing how everything is going to play out he already knows who is going to hell and who is going to heaven..therefor making our existence pointless
.......but i do think if in the christian sense of god knowing how everything is going to play out he already knows who is going to hell and who is going to heaven..therefor making our existence pointless
My point exactly AT........so if he KNOWS that someone is going to hell, how can that someone become a Christian and become saved?....and what is the point of a benevolent deity deliberately creating a being that he knows is going to be tortured for eternity (allegedly)? What I'm trying to say in this thread is that IF the Christian god is omniscient then our lives are pre-determined and there is nothing that can be done to change the outcome.
but i do think if in the christian sense of god knowing how everything is going to play out he already knows who is going to hell and who is going to heaven..therefor making our existence pointless
That's one of the conundrums of Christianity that turned me away from it.
Not that I care about the "point" of our existence - I'm happy to believe that there is NOT one (other than what we make of our lives and what that means to us individually). Even as a Christian I had no need to figure out God's will. I felt that God knew how we would end up but that he did not know/care how we got there. Hence, we spend a lifetime going about our business and, essentially, carving out our own futures.
You can go 'round and 'round trying to perceive how a god might "know the future", etc. It's an unending philosophical question that cannot be answered. So it's not our existence that is pointless - but trying to assign meaning to it is, itself, pointless.
Maybe if I had been a more devoted Christian I would have spent my life trying to figure out this stuff. But I have better things to do and also I just don't believe that there is any predestination.
Of course I don't even believe there is a God but I'm still not convinced that we have free will. It could just be an illusion. If there was a God and he was as all knowing as everyone supposes he is then it would only make sense that he would know absolutely everything including what will happen to each and every one of us in the future. It kind of makes you wonder what the point would be in going through this whole exercise if it was already determined who was going to heaven and hell but that's just one of the mysteries of Christianity.
Well, I look at God and His all knowing this way...I have 4 children and nine grand children..I taught them about God, and right from wrong, and advised when they asked, Once they reached a certain age I allowed them to make their own choices about their lives..I did not interfere with their choices, even though there were a couple of "Doozies" that were clearly against what they had learned..But, I was always here, loving them, for all their mistakes, hoping they would change their minds and come back and tell me they had made a big mistake and were ready to change the course they had chosen............Not to mention that in my family the change usually involved me paying their debts
If a god knows the future with infallible certainty, then what this god knows will happen - there is no possibility for anything else to occur.
At the end of the corridor are two identical doors. Does god know which door you will take? If he does, is it at all possible for you to take the other door? You have no choice in the matter, you have no free will.
I think this is the crux of your argument, Cheguevara, and this is where I think it gets problematic. Your argument completely depends on what you mean by "possible," and what the scope of this term covers. For example, I think most of us can agree that, granted an omniscient God, if God knows X is going to happen, then there is no "possibility" that anything besides X is going to happen. If God KNOWS it, then it's TRUE, and it's going to happen.
But here is where it gets tricky (and a little background in modal logic might help to see the issue). We can't simply move from "it is necessarily true that if God knows X, then X is going to happen," to "if God knows X, then necessarily X is going to happen." In other words, God can know I'm going to eat the apple tonight, so I WILL eat the apple. But it doesn't follow that I CANNOT eat an orange instead. Even though I eat the apple, and God knows this, it can still be POSSIBLE for me to eat an orange. And this may even be part of God's knowledge--maybe God knows BOTH that I will eat the apple AND that it is possible for me to eat the orange. I think these statements are consistent, and that's why I think free will and God's omniscience are compatible.
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