07-11-2023, 09:06 AM
(07-09-2023, 11:34 PM)Lucidus Wrote: The issue is that God knows the decision before it was made. When God chose to make this world instead of another, he also chose the decisions of this world as opposed to another. Our choices in any omniscient creation scenario would necessarily be contingent and unchangeable; bound by the creator's preferred reality.
Correct me if I'm wrong but this sounds like predestination doctrine which I wholeheartedly reject.
The idea that God has predetermined everything just doesn't sound logical to me.
You said "preferred reality" but I question this. I don't understand why allowing one thing to exist over another means you prefer that. Would one argue that having a cars gas tank close to empty is preferable to a full one? No, but people drive around with close to empty gas tanks all the time. Not because they prefer that but because they allow it to be a reality.
Sure, God is allowing us to choose to drive around with almost empty gas tanks, but I wouldn't say that's what he prefers simply because he allows it and knows omnicsiently that we will have an almost empty gas tank.
Quote:Keeping with your analogy --
God made a movie in which he purposely hired actors that he knew were terrible.
Once the movie comes out, he publicly condemns the actors for being terrible.
Then, he assigns himself to make a sequel using the same terrible actors he condemned.
However, this time, he tells the actors he will forgive them for doing what he hired them to do - be the terrible actors he knows they are - as long as they accept and worship his greatness as a movie maker; which will grant them eternal access to his entire filmography.
I'm being a bit playful with my version of your analogy, but only because I find the entire concept of original sin and sacrificial atonement to be completely devoid of any logical consistency and purposely absent any ontological responsibility.
See but again, the problem I have with the argument is in the bold. When you say "what he hired them to do" are you saying to sin? Or to have free will? Because yes, I would agree that he hired us to have free will (in a limited sense of course) but he did not hire us to sin. Now that might sound contradictory. How can God give us free will but also demand obedience?
Well as I mentioned in a separate post, complete free will is a fallacy. Complete free will can never exist because it is a paradox. So the next step is to limit it but still allow for some freedom. You can liken it to someone bending there arm. You have the free range of motion (free will) to bend your arm as far as you like, but at some point you have to stop before your arm painfully breaks.
My ultimate point being that free will is always going to have limits. It's just that obeying God has further restriction on your free will, but God still allows you to act freely within a set capacity.
Quote:Knowledge, in and of itself, doesn't beget an outcome; but omniscience does beget complete knowledge of the outcome.
Do you believe God could have created any world he wanted, or do you think there are limits to what worlds he can create? -- in terms of all logically possible and noncontradictory worlds, of course.
Yes, I believe could have excluding any contradictions.
Quote:If I created the exact scenario needed for the shooting to happen, having omniscient knowledge of what the shooter's decision would be, I am absolutely responsible if I did anything other than scrap that scenario so that it wouldn't occur.
The shooter, in that scenario, could not do anything other than what I knew he would do. The shooter's free will only exists to the extent he imagines it to be the case, because he can't escape omniscient knowledge and violate already known outcomes.
But I would argue that you only knew the shooter would do it because you have knowledge of the free choice they would make. Not that you have knowledge and that knowledge causes the free will action to take place. It isn't that the shooter can't escape the choice because God knows it will happen, but instead because that is ultimately the choice the shooter will make. Taking God out of all of this, are we all simply bound to fate and every choice we're making right now is unchangeable simply because it's part of the universes current time line?
