Just the whole concept of “free will”. That’s all, no biggie. 
if god is all knowing, then there can be no free will. because regardless of what it seems you are choosing to do with your life, the all knowing god already knew that it was going to happen.
And after all this time looks who makes a guest appearance but ME!!! No no no, don’t welcome me back yet guys I am jsut really bored tonight however i might be slowly coming back as school’s startingagain and I’m going ot need to get my brain going for forensics leauge again. Okay, the reason I started this thread was to get rid of the aweful stupid silly notion that frighter jsut spouted out! Not necissarily to prove free will.
Ultimacyandlaw so far has gotten the closest to my view that i was hoping someone else would articulate w/o my helping:
Look at life as a road with endless forks and paths and different choices. God knows all your choices at any time, he knows the results of EACH CHOICE and the paths that they’d lead to (kinda like alternate realities if you’d chosen one way instead of the other). He does know your heart and what you’re most likely to choose, but he leaves the choosing up to you.
I believe that people are predestined to do something (or have a few different destinies to choose from as one shouldn’t be bound to one goal in life) to fill fulfilled in life, that doesn’t mean you HAVE to do it. Doing it would be the thing to actualize your potential in life though. And Ultimacyandlaw said it very well: If we do not act responsible now and at least START, we will never get to the point of destination we have.
You see? It’s our own choice to reach our predestined spot. We have to choose to get there ourselves.
P.S. If you want a really flimsy arguement:
If there was no such thing as free will and we were really all God’s little puppets then why would he be allowing us to argue this. How could there be two sides to an issue is we didn’t have the free will to make up our minds on our own?
your then essentially saying that he does not know the future. are you saying that god cannot know that in 200 years im going to have a living relative that is going to go to paris in the spring? if god only knows of my intentions in any situation by knowing my heart he would have no way of knowing that. the only way he could know that is by knowing how all actions are going ot react with all other things and know that because of thoes reactions and the subsequent reactions things are going to turn out a specific way. THAT is determination.
If your want to be technical about it sure. Everything is determinded inasmuch as the laws of physics allow. It’s predeterminded that one connot jump off of a skyscraper, flap his arms, and fly away.
The paths and results of actions are INFINATE, if you are chooseing between and infinate set of end I wouldn’t call that determination. Because God is infinate and all knowing of course he knows all the paths and ends but you’re free to choose where you go. All things aren’t going to turn out a specific way, there are too many variables, so many that we can’t even comprehend.
You are saying that God knowing that something in the future is going to happen for sure is predestining it. I agree. To preserve our free will God chooses not to know. He could choose to know, but then of course we would loose our free will on whatever descision that was and blah blah ablah… I have to go. You guys can carry that ttrain of thought.
choose not to know? well thats irrelevent, weather or not he admits to himself that free will does not exist does not change the fact that it exists. and if he DOES choose not to know then obvious that he did know it.
One argument for the existence of God is:
Every event has a cause
The universe has a beginning
All beginnings involve an event
This implies that the beginning of the universe involved an event
Therefore the beginning of the universe had a cause
The universe had a cause
But if every event has a cause then free will is negated as god chooses the cause and all our lives follow pre-determined paths.
Logical Fallacy #1
Logical Fallacy # 2
This statement in itself suggests an infinite loop of events. Yes? So there never was an original cause. For what is the first number in the count to infinity? There isn’t one. Leading me to believe that there is no reasonable explanation to suggest the God concept is a necessary one.
However, according to the discussion at hand, God is the basis for the question. In the case that God created the heavens and the earth, made man, and designed each specific facet of each individual human, as well as the specific environment in which they would come into the world, it only seems fair to assume that our lifes have been determined by God’s workmanship. We would be no more than God’s puppets in his grande play of the universe. Free will? I don’t see any room for it.
Why should the fact that God (or anyone else) knows what you are going to do, diminish your freedom?
Suppose I know that you are not now going to stand up and do a strip-tease while singing the Star Spangled Banner. Does that somehow prevent you from doing just that? Or force you not to do that?
Now, of course, if, just to show I was wrong, you do get up and do a strip-tease while singing the Star Spangled Banner, then all that would show is that I did not know you would not do that in the first place. I only thought I knew it.
So, why should my knowing (or God’s knowing) have anything to do with whether you will or will not do something?[/i]
because in order for god to know in advance what you will do, it must be pre-destined that you were going to do it. otherwise it could happen otherwise, and if it could happen otherwise then how could god know with absolute certainty what you were going to do?
Yep.
Yep. Nope.
I just told ja.
I couldn’t agree with our anonymous guest more.
Kant couldn’t even reconcile the two. His way of getting around the God-free-will problem was to say that the decisions of rational agents (operating strictly according to the moral law) somehow exist outside of time and are therefore free. At the same time, however, the action is performed in time and is thus predetermined by natural (Newtonian) forces. He only went this far though–leaving the huge problem of how one’s choice outside of time could actually cause events inside time. The only solution is to say that rational agents have some godlike power over nature such that we can actually influence the first cause (at the beginning of time) to eventually effect the freely chosen action. And from there we just get weird. The First Cause in this case can be neither omnipotent nor omnicient because both his knowledge of and sovereignty over events are manipulated by rational agents. Besides, this delves way too far into a messy metaphysics that can never be proven.
Of course, the universe is weird to begin with, and things like quantum physics seem to leave some hope for a theory of free will. But hope for an omnicient God alongside it, I’m sorry to say, is pushin it.
It’s sad but true: if man is, God (the traditional Western God at least) is not.
Why do you say that?
Again, I refer you to our anonymous guest.
It is interesting to me that you find the two concepts Free Will and God to be contradictory, because for me, personally, I cannot believe in Free Will because I cannot believe in God.
Free Will: The power of making free choices that are unconstrained by external circumstances or by an agency such as fate or divine will.
Based on that definition, external circumstances include both nature and nurture since none of us can decide our genetics or our own upbringing. However, I believe that all the choices I make are based on either nature or nurture. For example, the reason I dislike milk is a combination of inheriting the trait for lactose intolerance and the fact that my family does not drink a lot of milk, therefore decreasing the production of the enzyme in my body that digests lactose.
To answer your question, if God (I mean the Judeo-Christian God) exists then free-will exists. Otherwise it is meaningless for people to choose not to sin, since God has already determined what you will do. God did not create robots. Rather, he gave people a choice…you can eat the apple and leave Eden, or you can choose to obey me and stay in earthly paradise…God was constantly giving his people choices, letting them decide whether or not to obeyhim. He let humans kill Jesus, his only son. He let people decide whether to repent or to continue with their lives. He did not program them all to go to heaven.
This is not an argument for the existence of God.
Have you heard of Ockhams Razor?
This is not an argument for the existence of God.
Have you heard of Ockhams Razor?
Well, I have. In fact, I keep it in my AIM profile…
Do not multiply entities beyond neccesity. (keep it simple)
So? What, exactly, does that have to do with the Cosmological argument for God?
The easy answer is that God is the first cause. It’s limiting God to the definition of “creator”, but this is proving existence, not nature of God.
How is saying that God was the first cause proof of the existence of God?
'Cause just because.
Something had to turn the ignition to start the engine for the race towards infinity.
What’s easier than saying that the creator did this, something that exists outside causality?
Occam’s razor is good for the …
Oh why am I arguing with an anonymous poster.