(November 17, 2017 at 6:10 pm)LadyForCamus Wrote: Let me try this again. 😛
Firstly, I have no vested interest in complaining about either of those things, because I don't believe either actually exists. I am merely pointing out that even if I assume for the sake of the argument all of this is true, the narrative still doesn't make sense. God decided our lives for us the second he made the conscious decision to poof humanity into existence, despite seeing ahead of time how many of us would be damned. In what way then, are we free? And why, if we aren't truely free, should we deserve eternity in hell for making the wrong "choice"?
I'm not arguing in this discussion that we're free. I'm taking the lack of free will to its logical conclusion. If our every thought and action was predetermined in that second, then we don't actually exist in any meaningful sense.
An analogy would be a program mimicking human thoughts running through a computer. You could have the same kinds of things running through it as we experience, the joys, the sufferings - ponderings about how it came to be, complaints about its lot - everything. But, since this was all written in advance by another being, that computer is not a being itself. It has no right to only have happy thoughts. You could take the computer and toss it in a fire and no one would condemn you for so doing.
If you interpret omniscience such that it predetermines our every thought and precludes free will, then a person is no more than that computer program.