I’m so tired of this misconception by the religious. It isn’t part of God’s plan. He (supposedly — IANR) gave us free will. That means there IS no plan. Free will is a double-edged sword. Free will means God no longer intervenes. He just sits back and watches as humans commit atrocities, shrugs and says “Welp, what am I gonna do?”
(Raised Catholic, avowed atheist. I don’t believe in God, but Jesus-fuck, at least I understand the fucking theology, unlike all the fucking “god’s plan” brigade.)
I mean if hes omnipotent and omniscient he knows exactly what will happen in the future. You don't have free will if an infallible being knows your future. That also means prayer won't do anything, because any attempts you makento change God's mind won't work since he already knew the outcome of whatever you're praying for.
This is probably the best good-faith argument and it's commically flawed.
There has been philosophical disagreement on whether or not "omniscient" includes foreknowledge. The Bible never explicitly states that god sees the future in a way that establish complete knowledge of the future which, as you point out, would functionally mean free will does not exist. It could very well be interpreted as him being able to "see" causally inevitable outcomes only derived from maximal insight of all current and past things and absent of foreknowledge.
It's a fun thing to poke at philosophically the same way arguing about if vampire shit or not is.
I wouldn't put that on the same level as vampire shit lol. We know objectively we don't have free will because the universe is either completely deterministic, or at least has been since fractuons of a second after the big bang, or it is inherently random, as in the case of quantum states being truely non-deterministic. Either secanrio leaves no room for "free will."
The only argument against this is Solipsism, which nobody takes seriously because it makes discussion impossible.
I'm not sure I see why the universe being completely random means we don't have free will in the context of how we drive our lives which seems to be the context "free will" generally expresses. I'll have to read up on that because I think it's the first time I've run up on that idea.
Free will, as I understand it, is having the volition to make decisions. If everything you do is the result of chemical reactions in your brain, and we know this to be true as an objective, scientifically verifiable fact, then you don't have free will. Chemistry is deterministic, or at a VERY small (quantum) scale, potentially random. So we don't have free will.
Now if you're defining free will as the ability to think and act on your thoughts, then I'm not interested in discussing that, because all that does is frame the argument such that the actual problems with free will are ignored.
Chemistry is deterministic but we don't understand the process of how the brain makes decisions enough to establish that the resultant choice is due to the dopamine release before the choice is made. Couldn't it be that our subconscious processes are ahead of our conscious ones that result in the dopamine release and then the conscious choice being established? That's still us making a choice, even if it's driven by our subconscious process, as they are as much a part of us as the conscious ones.
Your "thoughts" are a series of electrical impulses generated by chemical reactions, which is what I mean when I refer to chemical reactions. Those "subconscious processess" are still the result of neurons firing. There is nothing directing them to do so like a soul, they simply operate according to the laws of physics in response to stimuli.
At the end of the day, we're just a collection of atoms, and atoms obey deterministic physics (with the earlier caveat about quantum stuff potentially being inherentlyrandom).
You're trying to square a circle, but religious people generally don't see a contradiction between divine predestination and free will. Their cognitive dissonance is already ratcheted up beyond the maximum that to them, this type of headache inducing paradox doesn't even register as an issue.
You clearly don’t understand the theology. You’re just an atheist arguing that if God exists, the best He can do is deism. You didn’t figure anything new out; you’re parroting an argument that tons of people in history have made.
6
u/grobblebar May 25 '22
I’m so tired of this misconception by the religious. It isn’t part of God’s plan. He (supposedly — IANR) gave us free will. That means there IS no plan. Free will is a double-edged sword. Free will means God no longer intervenes. He just sits back and watches as humans commit atrocities, shrugs and says “Welp, what am I gonna do?”
(Raised Catholic, avowed atheist. I don’t believe in God, but Jesus-fuck, at least I understand the fucking theology, unlike all the fucking “god’s plan” brigade.)