IATIA,
Thank you for being so gracious. Honestly. I appreciate your civility.
I accept that you do not believe in foreknowledge. We are exploring the ramifications if God does exist and does have foreknowledge. So for the sake of this thread, God can know what we will do.
No. When you read a history book, you are reading about the past. That past is fixed. But being now fixed does not change the fact that what the people thought and did as their lives unfolded was done entirely according to their own free will as they lived. If you could go back in time and watch their lives unfold, you would see them thinking and making choices according to their own free will at the time. The fact that you know what they are going to do even before they know what they are going to do would not remove their free will in making their choices. Knowing the past does not change the nature of the past.
I do not at all concede that just because God knows the future we must therefore be living in the past. However, even if I am nothing more than my own history book, I am still a history of me thinking my own thoughts and making my own free will choices. Nothing you have said demands otherwise.
Here is what I do. I read message board posts. I copy them into Notepad. I write responses. I think about them and edit them for a few days to get them just right. Then I post them on the message board. When you are reading this it will be my thoughts from several days ago. When you read them will they have been written with no free will involved because I wrote them in the past? No.
Time is irrelevant.
Regards,
Shadow_Man
IATIA Wrote:Obviously you have misread.
Thank you for being so gracious. Honestly. I appreciate your civility.
IATIA Wrote:If we have free will, no one, not even your god, can know what will we do.
I accept that you do not believe in foreknowledge. We are exploring the ramifications if God does exist and does have foreknowledge. So for the sake of this thread, God can know what we will do.
IATIA Wrote:If the future is known, then it must exist and that makes us the past. If we are the past, then we have already done everything and made every choice that we can. This 'now' us is only aware of now and our 'past' us is only aware of that past. We are not the same. Effectively, there are gazillions of us, each aware of their present 'now'.
No. When you read a history book, you are reading about the past. That past is fixed. But being now fixed does not change the fact that what the people thought and did as their lives unfolded was done entirely according to their own free will as they lived. If you could go back in time and watch their lives unfold, you would see them thinking and making choices according to their own free will at the time. The fact that you know what they are going to do even before they know what they are going to do would not remove their free will in making their choices. Knowing the past does not change the nature of the past.
IATIA Wrote:You cannot have it both ways. Either we have free will and god does not know every choice that we will make or god does know every choice that we will make, because we have already made the choices and there is no free will.
I do not at all concede that just because God knows the future we must therefore be living in the past. However, even if I am nothing more than my own history book, I am still a history of me thinking my own thoughts and making my own free will choices. Nothing you have said demands otherwise.
Here is what I do. I read message board posts. I copy them into Notepad. I write responses. I think about them and edit them for a few days to get them just right. Then I post them on the message board. When you are reading this it will be my thoughts from several days ago. When you read them will they have been written with no free will involved because I wrote them in the past? No.
Time is irrelevant.
Regards,
Shadow_Man
