Why God doesn't stop satan?

[R00tKiT]

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.

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.