Interestingly, I recently got into a debate with a theist on YouTube who claimed that, "...God is love." I countered this by pointing out God's crimes against humanity in the Bible. I also argued that if God was truly omnipotent, omnibenevolent and omniscient, as defined by mainstream Christianity, nothing evil could ever befall humanity. He ignored the salient points of my argument and posted several Bible quotes, "proving" that God allowed Satan to hold sway over the earth. When I pointed out that he had basically ignored everything I said, he actually had the gall to ask me what he had ignored, stating also that atheists were non-believers because they are ignorant. At that point, I abandoned the debate. You can't reason with someone who is not guided by reason.

I don't think it's the case that the faithful aren't guided by reason, so much as they're incapable of adequately communicating it, and have a clear motivation to engage in pious prattle.

The omnigod belief, for example, isn't a belief about what god is, but what a god should be. The faithful think that a god should be those things, because...and this is where reason exists but is rarely ever produced...if god's weren't all those things, we'd be in a pretty rough spot. An ominscient and omnipotent torturer is something that nothing could do anything about. An omnipotent omnibenevolent simpleton with no idea of the future consequences of it's massively powerful actions would be a disaster. An omniscient omibenevolent but omni-impotent god would be useless.

God exists as a functionary in a transactional relationship humanity asserts over reality. We want something from it, it wants something from us, and we describe it as the kind of thing which can effect the trade. It has all knowledge and every ability required to effect that trade, and is motivated by it's warm feelings towards humanity to effect that trade, and this puts us in a privileged bargaining position. Your "god is love" believers...they're lonely.

(June 10, 2021 at 6:02 am)Fake Messiah Wrote:

(June 8, 2021 at 9:12 pm)Klorophyll Wrote: Foreknoweldge doesn't contradict free will. You actually didn't even try to prove that beyond simple assertion. It's not my problem that this is too hard for you to understand - which further proves that theology is not for everyone.

Like you, theology is not for you because, according to this theologian, you chose Satan instead of God.

I am not an expert in theology either, or even remotely close. But at least I don't claim stuff about free will I am unable to prove....

Of course WLC will consider Islam to be Satan's religion. In this same debate with Hitchens, he acknowledges he admires monotheism in Islam, but rejects it simply becaust it doesn't agree with christians about Jesus. But again how can anyone agree with christians about Jesus, God sacrificing himself then resuscitating himself to save humanity from their sins towards this same God isn't an idea that should be taken seriously.

(June 10, 2021 at 8:29 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Foreknowledge is a textbook failure condition for free will.  If the future can be known, by anything, even if no one and no thing possesses that knowledge, then there can be no free will.

Your example of a replay of a football match is perfect.  Nothing to do with you making them do anything, and everything to do with their inability to do anything else.  Do any of the objects in that replay have a choice to do something else?  OFC not.  If foreknowledge is even possible, then we're something like water believing we chose to flow downhill, convinced that our lack of knowledge of the future amounted to a free will we do not possess.  God, you see, can just skip to the end and watch the replay.  It's all, already, done.  From the first moment to the last moment.  Now, I don't see why this would be an issue for your god.  So what if it breaks a few of it's toys and was always going to break a few of it's toys?  It doesn't exactly respect human life, after all.

Which brings us round to why god doesn't stop satan.  Because he doesn't want to.  Because satan does gods will.  Or, maybe, god can watch our replay, but he can't watch his own.  He cant stop satan because he has no choice in the matter.  No free will.  Maybe god is water flowing downhill as well?  Perhaps the terrible state of the world and terrible state of human beings, as you see it, was the inevitable product of having been created by a force which contained all this evil but had no will or ability to change it?  Any world it created would look like our world and there was never anything that this god could do about it.  Gods god watches the replay in disgust, knowing the end, and is determined to burn this god forever.  And over again, so on and so forth, with that gods god's god, ad infinitum.

You say, "Do any of the objects in that replay have a choice to do something else?  OFC not". Well, at the moment just before scoring the goal, the player did have the choice of kicking the ball toward some arbitrary target other than the goal. It seems to me that whether someone has a choice or not depends on the time parameter. If a thief tells the police he doesn't have the choice to do anything other than stealing, it's clear that there is a problem with his use of the word choice, namely, it's too late to speak about choice.

The problem is that the deity is supposedly outside of time. The deity knows beforehand what choices will be made at each moment by every individual capable of free will, I don't see what's contradictory about that. Yes, from the deity's POV, these individuals look like they don't have any other choice than to follow the exact sequence of choices already known by the deity, but this is simply a misleading use of the word choice, because it drops the time parameter and speaks about choice as if it was some eternal object, or to put it another way, the word choice has an expiration date, past this date, it becomes undefined because of its very definition . Another, probably more telling, example, is that of a father who knows with certainty that his daughter will pick a chocolate ice cream instead of a vanilla's, again, he didn't really force his daughter to do anything, he simply knows her well enough, his daughter was nevertheless able to make a choice at some moment, but past this moment, the word choice/free will ceases to have meaning.

And about whether the deity itself has free will or not, I actually don't think it has free will, but -as you mentioned- it doesn't seem to be a problem. An entity with omni properties doesn't need free will to second guess itself or make decisions; We only make decisions because we have limited information or limited resources. Optimization/economics/Game theory all deal with individuals with limited time and resources, the deity is free of all these constraints.

That's a long winded way to acknowledge that the participants of a replay from any pov have no option to do another thing, don't you think? The mere possibility of foreknowledge, no matter who has it, and in fact even if no one and no thing has it, precludes free will. You're fixated on the idea of force, that the knower must somehow force the actor (and this is bad™, I guess, but I can't imagine why it would be or even why it would matter if it were bad, it's not exactly the worst thing you think god will do to lowly human worms...)- but that's not the case nor is it why foreknowledge precludes free will - therefore arguing that a father doesn't force his daughter or a god doesn't force humans is completely irrelevant. He simply needs to know, for a fact, that his daughter will do x. The possessor of foreknowledge doesn't have to instantiate this state of affairs himself or itself, it merely needs to be a competent observer of the true fact that some actor absolutely will do a specific thing and no other at some future point. It's just seeing what is true.

You can talk about choices all you like, but in a world where foreknowledge is possible, you never had any other option no matter what you chose. That would be the nature of your choices, and..as you seem to realize in the case of a god, no free will is necessary to make a decision. Nor, for that matter, in a daughter choosing this or that flavor of ice cream.

I have a question. As an earnest believer in a genuine theology, if there were some discrepancy between human notions and ideas like free will, and the asserted nature or abilities of god, what takes precedence? Is god not what you think it is, can;t do what you think it can do.....or are you not what you think you are, can't do what you think you can do?

Just for context, foreknowledge by any name, and prophecies specifically, are some of my favorite parts of any set of superstitions. I think we're actually getting something right when we assert them. That foreknowledge is possible. OFC a god could be a fortune teller, we think that people can be, too...and we might be right - even though that state of affairs is thorny for other ideas that are important to us. I don't possess foreknowledge of my daughters choices - not even what flavor of ice cream she'd pick at a given moment..but I'd like to, and I think there's probably some way or some ability that would or could allow me to figure it out- even if that meant that my darling girl is a bioautomatan.

Christians have a fun way of dealing with this concern. The notion that we're all going to do bad, and it isn't the doing of bad that damns us, but the disposition of our soul towards that bad we will do, have no choice but do. Christian free will is a religious term of art, as is...or so I gather from your comments, islamic free will.

(June 8, 2021 at 9:12 pm)Klorophyll Wrote: Foreknoweldge doesn't contradict free will. You actually didn't even try to prove that beyond simple assertion. It's not my problem that this is too hard for you to understand - which further proves that theology is not for everyone.

It's not hard for you though to watch a replay of a football match, I guess ? in which case you would know beforehand the results and in what minute the goals were scored, clearly you didn't force any player to do anything, nor did the entity with complete information and access to future events.

If you believe this god is omniscient and has foreknowledge that I will be going to hell at my experation date BEFORE my conception.

Do I have enough *free will* to change gods foreknowledge?

dingdingding. Can god be made to be wrong by human choices? Can a future fact be rendered untrue in present?

At work.

I thought it was because Satan had all the hookers and blow?

(June 10, 2021 at 10:26 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: That's a long winded way to acknowledge that the participants of a replay from any pov have no option to do another thing, don't you think?  The mere possibility of foreknowledge, no matter who has it, and in fact even if no one and no thing has it, precludes free will.  You're fixated on the idea of force, that the knower must somehow force the actor (and this is bad™, I guess, but I can't imagine why it would be or even why it would matter if it were bad, it's not exactly the worst thing you think god will do to lowly human worms...)- but that's not the case nor is it why foreknowledge precludes free will - therefore arguing that a father doesn't force his daughter or a god doesn't force humans is completely irrelevant.  He simply needs to know, for a fact, that his daughter will do x.  The possessor of foreknowledge doesn't have to instantiate this state of affairs himself or itself, it merely needs to be a competent observer of the true fact that some actor absolutely will do a specific thing and no other at some future point.   It's just seeing what is true.  

Well, in the case of God, he clearly instantiated everything, including our choices. My position is that what he instantiated is exactly what we end up doing with our own free will. If the deity instantiates a particular set of actions which isn't the same as those we decide by free will, then it does preclude free will, but there is no way to show that this is the actual state of affairs.

Foreknowledge is an absolute and eternal property of the deity, free will, on the other hand, as I said, really depends on time. I clearly don't have free will relatively to my past actions, but this is not the same as saying I never had free will about anything. 

As a sidenote, although I am no physicist, special relativity clearly shows that the past exists in the present of other reference frames. There is no privileged Present moment because it depends on the reference frame. Namely, there is no concept of time to order the events with.

We can see the Sun's past 8 minutes from our planet, if we have a far enough reference frame (let's call it A)  from which we can see the Earth, we could watch all human history unfold. So, relatively to A, what's happenng now on Earth is the future.

Although I still need to look this up, it seems that foreknowledge is technically possible if we can travel at the speed of light -there is nothing logically contradictory about this, we just need zero mass, photons already do this-. Now, for a deity, it's trivial to move between reference frames or even break the speed of light, and thus have foreknowledge and access what everyone will do throughout their lives, this doesn't seem to preclude free will.

If god has the ability to create any kind of world he wants from an infinite number of possibilities, including a world where I’m a saved theist instead of an atheist, and he chooses to create this world where I’m an atheist, then I’m literally being forced to his will. That’s the opposite of free will. The only one who has free will in that scenario is god.

(June 10, 2021 at 12:22 pm)LadyForCamus Wrote: If god has the ability to create any kind of world he wants from an infinite number of possibilities, including a world where I’m a saved theist instead of an atheist, and he chooses to create this world where I’m an atheist, then I’m literally being forced to his will. That’s the opposite of free will. The only one who has free will in that scenario is god.

True.  But perhaps God doesn't have free will either.