(In response to:How can you have freewill if God is omniscient? )
God knows that he is perfect and that his prediction will be correct so he does know 100% what you're going to do.
You are still making choices, God just knows what choices you're going to make before you make them. You could choose something different, but you're not going to.
I know my above analogy sucked, but I know if I ever had to make that decision I'd take the $100. The fact that i'm making a decision doesn't change that.
22 comments
If you are watching a single human being then, knowing everything, and you know his decisions are triggered by external events (because, to be able to know everything it all has to be deterministic), HOW AND WHY CAN YOU JUDGE HIM?!
If he came up with that answer by himself, it's fairly clever. The main argument people make to resolve free will and omniscience is to make a distinction between determinism and foreknowledge, which is what he appears to be doing.
So, your choices are predetermined, but you can still change them, but somehow you don't. And they are still choices.
Free will, though tempered with a certain amount of biological determinism (nothing is absolute in this world), can reasonably be said to exist. Omniscience is mathematically and physically nonsensical given a noninfinite value of the speed of light -- a truly omniscient being would have to be at least an order of magnitude more complex than the universe itself even in order to store and process all the information as it is in the universe just at this very moment. You're wading into much sketchier territory when you bring 13.5 billion years of past timeline and nobody-really-knows-how-much future timeline, and as long as instantaneous propagation of information is not possible (quantum entanglement doesn't count, as no one knows any useful way to use the effects, and in any case quantum effects happen on an unimaginably small scale anyway). Even then, information only travels within the universe at this universe's speed of light at the most, so barring some so-far-unseen mechanism for viewing the universe from outside the four-dimensional spacetime we know, *God couldn't know everything within the universe even if *God was capable of doing so.
I don’t know, the Bible itself doesn’t make a very good case for God’s omniscience. I mean, let’s just look at God’s “tests,” for example. If God was omniscient, He wouldn’t need to test anyone because he’d already know what the outcomes were. So, why did he test Abraham, Job, or Adam and Eve (no, there’s nothing you can say that will convince me that the Tree of Knowledge fiasco *wasn’t* a test, with God just conveniently leaving the two of them alone with the one thing that he told them not to touch)?
If God is omniscient, why did He feel so threatened by the Tower of Babel? If He knows everything that has happened and that will happen, then He’d know that people would go on to build more tall towers anyway. So, why did he feel the need to punish them?
For that matter
why has God punished anybody? If He knows everything that’s going to happen and is also omnipotent, why not just stop people from doing bad things before they do it? Why not just stop the snake from tempting Eve, stop David from killing Uriah and marrying Bathsheba, stop the entire populations of Sodom and Gomorrah from committing their sins, stop the Hebrews from building a golden calf, stop people from committing any of the ridiculous “sins” in the Old Testament that warrant the death penalty, etc.? If He’s omnipotent and omniscient and can be anywhere at once, why not try to stop sinful acts before they happen so that fewer people get hurt or killed?
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
To post a comment, you'll need to Sign in or Register . Making an account also allows you to claim credit for submitting quotes, and to vote on quotes and comments. You don't even need to give us your email address.
