(December 14, 2016 at 11:42 pm)operator Wrote: I would like to have some theists explain to me how fate and free will can coexist?
When I was a Christian, this is how I had it worked out:
The future is not set in stone, and therefore even God cannot predict it in the way people traditionally think. But God can predict events in the future because he can influence how things will unfold. In other words, he cannot predict which tie I'll wear to work tomorrow but he can say that there will be an earthquake in a specific location because he has the power to cause it to happen. So he can predict the future, yet he does not know the future.
You can easily interpret the Bible to support this idea-- God predicts events and inspires confidence in his promises by making those events happen. We do this all the time-- we make plans and promise to carry them out. If you tell your child that you will pick them up from school at the end of the school day and you show up, you predicted the future! The confidence that God inspires is absolute, because while events might prevent you from following your plans there is nothing that can thwart God (well, aside from chariots of iron, but whatever).
Presto-- we have free will, and God can predict the future. There may be some overlap there, in that God's actions might affect our choices. But it's far more compatible than the idea that we have freedom to make choices but our choices are locked in, allowing God to see what happens before it happens. Where this went off the rails for me was in the case of Judas, whose free will would have to have been tampered with in order to turn him into a traitor for no other reason than to fulfill a prophecy. Was Judas a good man who was warped by God into becoming evil? Was he an evil man who was selected to represent Jesus for a while and preach the good news of the kingdom of God? Was he created and guided for the specific purpose of betraying Jesus? Judas doesn't fit into any of the models for free will without making God seem wicked.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
