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Anyone ever heard of the term "compatiblism"? There are other theories of the divine sovereignty/human responsibility issue that are being purported here...The Bible teaches both that God knows all, controls all, but yet humans are responsible for their actions. If you deny any of that, you deny significant portions of Scripture.
There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture, now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.
- Anonymous, Translated from the Arabic; W. Somerset Maugham, Sheppey (1933); John O’Hara, Appointment in Samarra (1934)
One of the Kings of Israel was told by a prophet that he was going to die. The King asked if the prophet would intercede for him to get God to delay his death. The prophet did and God changed what he had foreordained to do. Get it.
Then he lived 15 more years.
Some will say God knew ahead of Time that this would be requested of him. To me that is the same as writing it to happen.
If i foresaw the results of my creating life...all the sin and all the actions and all the souls where they would fall and then i cast the die and put into to play. Who could i blame for every action or sin that i foresaw? How could i deny any responsibility if not all for every action of every man when i foreknew and predetermined that they would do it. If i foreknew it I foreplanned it.
i have not heard of compatabilism. But i don't know how it can be true. i have rather believed the there is a glich in the english translations that makes our understanding the bibles specific teaching on foreknowledge and predestination squewed.
I think we think that if God knows everything, that he must know who will all be saved.
We also think that because he is not limited to time and space as we are that he must be able to travel far into the future and see all that is going to be and that without change.
Both these lines of thought i find erroneous and not in harmony with the vast proportion of scripture that leaves the future a unknown quality that is ever changing...apart from the items concerning heaven and hell and judgement. The variable is mans free will. It is our God like nature that makes puts us in a unique position. Angels can not be redeemed but man can. Whats the difference??? This difference is what makes our future so wonderful and so aweful.
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.
Our destinies are our own responsibilities.
i agree with you frank
our destinies are our own responsibility , that's what everyone should focus with in his life
omniscient subject will change nothing on your thoughts
someone can choose to obey his God (though God know his destiny)
someone else can choose to disobey his God (though God knows his distiny)
God knows what will you choose , but he dosn't force you to it , it's that simple , so focuse in choosing the right path , then thank God for leading you to it
it's silly for example to say that God knows that i will be in hell , so that i will disobey him
Ok, here's a basic stab at an argument for why we cannot be free if God is omniscient (I'm taking this from Cheguevara):
(1) IF God is omniscient, THEN we cannot choose to do something that god doesn't know we will choose to do.
(2) God is omniscient.
(3) Hence, we cannot choose to do something that God doesn't know we will choose to do.
Statement (2) is a fact, and I thank "Cheguevara" for admitting that it is a fact.
At first glance, however, his statements (1) and (3) appear to be ridiculously convoluted, betraying an unnaturally desperate desire to somehow find some way to baffle the straightforward fact of God's obvious existence, along with His factual attributes and activities.
The statements are reminiscent of a comedy routine in which two characters repeat over and over again, "I know that you know that I know..." "I know that you know that I know that you know..." Obviously, "Cheguevara" would do well to familiarize himself with Occam's Razor.
Even though the assertions in (1) and (3) cannot be taken seriously for the above reasons, still, I will offer a serious answer:
God's omniscience being perfectly compatible with man's free will can be understood very clearly with a concrete example. The example that I usually give involves the concept of a psychology experiment that is recorded onto a video-tape.
In the experiment, 10 test subjects are brought into a room, one at a time, and video-taped freely choosing between two buttons to press on a box set before them on the table. Some freely choose to press button Y, others freely choose to press button Z.
After the video-taping is completed, I watch it on my VCR at home, and I make note of the free choices made by each of the test subjects. Then, I invite some friends over who know nothing at all about the experiment, and I sit with them during a group viewing of the video-tape.
During the group viewing, my friends watch as each one of the test subjects, one by one, freely choose to press either button Y or button Z. They lack foreknowledge of these freely-chosen events, and there is no doubt that the events that they watch are indeed freely-chosen -- there was no pressure of any kind on any of the test subjects to choose one or the other -- they were free to choose however they pleased.
However, during the group viewing with my friends, I had perfect foreknowledge of each and every one of the test subjects' choices. My foreknowledge of the specific choices of each of the freely-choosing test subjects in the videotape does not change the fact that each and every one of them chose freely.
WARNING: If you are an atheist, it will be necessary to "free your mind" a little bit here as I advance this example to the next level. If you are unable to think freely, unable to free your mind from your atheistic prejudices, then it will probably be best for you to stop reading at this point, because the following facts will in that case confuse, frighten, and anger you.
Just as the mere fact that I have foreknowledge in the above example does not somehow invalidate the free choice of any of the test subjects observed in the group viewing, neither does God's foreknowledge of all of our choices somehow invalidate our free will. Just as the free will of each of the test subjects does not somehow invalidate my foreknowledge during the group viewing, neither does man's free will somehow invalidate God's foreknowledge.
In a sense, by viewing the events on a videotape, we artificially produce a state of false transcendence of time, the factual archetype of which (actual transcendence of time) is a natural state for God. In fact, each of my friends who watched the videotape gradually achieved this same state of false transcendence of time as they watched it.
However, their eventual gaining of the same perfect foreknowledge that I had still does not somehow invalidate the free choice of any of the test subjects, nor would the gaining of such foreknowledge by the whole world somehow invalidate it. Nor does the fact that the choices are each and every one a a result of free will somehow invalidate anyone's foreknowledge of the events on the videotape during future viewings -- each person who views the videotape is different from the people who have not yet viewed it, just as God is different from ordinary human beings, and it is this difference that is all-important in understanding this example.
This example plainly and irrefutably shows that the atheist's claim that God's foreknowledge and man's free will are somehow incompatible is an irrational and illogical assumption with no evidence to support it, as are all the wild claims of atheist dogma.
The atheist's blunt and unsupported insistence on this error does not reveal any logical incompatibility between the principles of foreknowledge and free will, nor does it reveal any shortcoming in either God's foreknowledge or man's free will. Rather, it reveals a mental handicap on the part of the atheist -- specifically, the intellectual incapacity to hold two different yet perfectly compatible concepts in his mind at one time, as the Theists are perfectly capable of doing.
It also betrays the atheist's intellectual inability to apprehend the principles of God's foreknowledge, man's free will, or both, as well as the obvious incompatibility of the atheist's irrational world-view with reality.
It's not that difficult to know who and what is God. That He is omniscient merely means that he has infinite wisdom. It doesn't mean that He knows what we're going to do from one minute to the next. It's not like God is micro-managing our lives.
The reason God gives us free wills, is like what one poster said, He doesn't want us to be puppets. He wants us to go to Him of our own accord, freely and willingly, if that is our desire.
And if you don't give a hoot about Him in this life... no doubt, many of you may change your mind once you move on to the next world. Living here on this earth isn't the end all. It's just the beginning of a long, long exciting adventure for our futures and what you believe now may not be what you will come to know when you get there.
"You saw me before I was born and scheduled each day of my life before I began to breathe. Every day was recorded in your book!" [Psalm 139:16]
So if Biblegod has scheduled every day of our lives, how can we make any free will decision that will change what Biblegod has planned for us? How do we make a free will decision that might change what is "recorded in his book"???
Statement (2) is a fact, and I thank "Cheguevara" for admitting that it is a fact.
At first glance, however, his statements (1) and (3) appear to be ridiculously convoluted, betraying an unnaturally desperate desire to somehow find some way to baffle the straightforward fact of God's obvious existence, along with His factual attributes and activities.
The statements are reminiscent of a comedy routine in which two characters repeat over and over again, "I know that you know that I know..." "I know that you know that I know that you know..." Obviously, "Cheguevara" would do well to familiarize himself with Occam's Razor.
Even though the assertions in (1) and (3) cannot be taken seriously for the above reasons, still, I will offer a serious answer:
God's omniscience being perfectly compatible with man's free will can be understood very clearly with a concrete example. The example that I usually give involves the concept of a psychology experiment that is recorded onto a video-tape.
In the experiment, 10 test subjects are brought into a room, one at a time, and video-taped freely choosing between two buttons to press on a box set before them on the table. Some freely choose to press button Y, others freely choose to press button Z.
After the video-taping is completed, I watch it on my VCR at home, and I make note of the free choices made by each of the test subjects. Then, I invite some friends over who know nothing at all about the experiment, and I sit with them during a group viewing of the video-tape.
During the group viewing, my friends watch as each one of the test subjects, one by one, freely choose to press either button Y or button Z. They lack foreknowledge of these freely-chosen events, and there is no doubt that the events that they watch are indeed freely-chosen -- there was no pressure of any kind on any of the test subjects to choose one or the other -- they were free to choose however they pleased.
However, during the group viewing with my friends, I had perfect foreknowledge of each and every one of the test subjects' choices. My foreknowledge of the specific choices of each of the freely-choosing test subjects in the videotape does not change the fact that each and every one of them chose freely.
WARNING: If you are an atheist, it will be necessary to "free your mind" a little bit here as I advance this example to the next level. If you are unable to think freely, unable to free your mind from your atheistic prejudices, then it will probably be best for you to stop reading at this point, because the following facts will in that case confuse, frighten, and anger you.
Just as the mere fact that I have foreknowledge in the above example does not somehow invalidate the free choice of any of the test subjects observed in the group viewing, neither does God's foreknowledge of all of our choices somehow invalidate our free will. Just as the free will of each of the test subjects does not somehow invalidate my foreknowledge during the group viewing, neither does man's free will somehow invalidate God's foreknowledge.
In a sense, by viewing the events on a videotape, we artificially produce a state of false transcendence of time, the factual archetype of which (actual transcendence of time) is a natural state for God. In fact, each of my friends who watched the videotape gradually achieved this same state of false transcendence of time as they watched it.
However, their eventual gaining of the same perfect foreknowledge that I had still does not somehow invalidate the free choice of any of the test subjects, nor would the gaining of such foreknowledge by the whole world somehow invalidate it. Nor does the fact that the choices are each and every one a a result of free will somehow invalidate anyone's foreknowledge of the events on the videotape during future viewings -- each person who views the videotape is different from the people who have not yet viewed it, just as God is different from ordinary human beings, and it is this difference that is all-important in understanding this example.
This example plainly and irrefutably shows that the atheist's claim that God's foreknowledge and man's free will are somehow incompatible is an irrational and illogical assumption with no evidence to support it, as are all the wild claims of atheist dogma.
The atheist's blunt and unsupported insistence on this error does not reveal any logical incompatibility between the principles of foreknowledge and free will, nor does it reveal any shortcoming in either God's foreknowledge or man's free will. Rather, it reveals a mental handicap on the part of the atheist -- specifically, the intellectual incapacity to hold two different yet perfectly compatible concepts in his mind at one time, as the Theists are perfectly capable of doing.
It also betrays the atheist's intellectual inability to apprehend the principles of God's foreknowledge, man's free will, or both, as well as the obvious incompatibility of the atheist's irrational world-view with reality.
Your whole premise is fatally flawed because you did not have foreknowledge of which buttons the subjects would push....You had already viewed them, so you had after knowledge if anything at all....Now if you could have predicted which buttons they would push before the experiment began, then I'd agree you would have foreknowledge....
I do agree though that if there is a god and he has foreknowledge that does not mean we lose our free will. We don't have this foreknowledge so we stumble along making our own choices.
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Concrete Example -- atheist total fail
