if god created us and knows what were gonna do, is that not equivilent to me making my finger move with my brain. god being the brain people the fingers?

This has been well discussed in other threads. It is not necessarily true depending on the nature of time. Hypothetically, if God perceives time as we perceive the spatial dimensions, then some form of omnipotence is not incompatible with free will.

Think of it this way. If the definition of omnipotence includes knowing everything that will ever occur in the future (which most people say it does), then when god created the universe, he could write down a step-by-step script of your life, even though it won't happen until 6 to 10 thousand years (see what I did there?) in the future.

Now imagine this script exists. You wake up in the morning and have you decide between milk or orange juice. Yet somewhere, if an omnipotent god exists, thousands of years prior to your existence, the hypothetical script says orange juice or milk. So when you currently arrive at this choice, can we really say that it's a choice, considering there is only one path you will ever take?

Of course, how we define free will is important as well.

Try this thought experiment.

You and I both exist as we do now and I possess free will. My future actions are unknown to you and unknowable. Take these as givens. Now we change you so that time is no longer a unique dimension for you, but you are free to move in time as you do in the spacial dimensions. You now know all of my future actions, but I have not been changed at all so presumably my free will granted in the initial conditions is still intact.

I actually started this post on the other side, but have come around. Basically, if he created humans, and knows exactly what each human is going to do, that's no different than someone making a machine and knowing what it will do (except god would obviously know much more about it). Either way, I'm sure there's been a huge discussion on this already, so if I were in the time wasting mood, I'd google free will, omnipotence future and see what happened.

I completely disagree if the knowledge comes from an ability to observe your choices throughout time. Observation is not control.

I thought like that before I made that post. "If god just knows what you're going to do, that doesn't mean you don't have options it's just means of all these options he knows which you'll choose." But, if god created you, then from that moment he decided exactly what everyone was going to do. If he changed the creation in any way, there would be an entirely different reality. So in creating us, and knowing everything we're going to do, he chose what we were going to do at the moment of inception.

This discussion seems sort of pointless since it's probable we don't have free will, even without invoking an omnipotent god.

Why does it have to be the case that a god's decision to create a person (we'll pretend to operate on this premise) that therefore "he decided exactly what everyone was going to do"?. Human parents that have a baby don't get to choose every single second of the rest of that baby's life...it seems that your position is resting upon some pretty big assertions, and so far I see no reason to accept them.

Generally I'm with you 100% asdf, but I'm not so sure about this one, for a few reasons.

A. I'm not so sure we probably don't have free will, at least to the point of asserting it. I'm sure this topic has been hammered to death on the forum, but I'd definitely be interested in talking about it with you further. Perhaps a new thread?


B. Regardless of the probability of one side being wrong or not should not be grounds for declaring the discussion pointless. I think you and I would be up in arms pretty quick if, while arguing with a Christian over some specific delusion of his, some other Christian came by and say "this argument seems pointless since most of us believe in god, and god probably exists....". Wouldn't you agree?

Sure, I think a new thread would be interesting (even though, as you said, it's been hammered to death on this forum).


I agree, sort of. I'm just of the opinion that a naturally deterministic universe rules out omnipotence as a causal factor. With that being said, I'm all for discussing hypotheticals. As a quick tangent, I find it super annoying when you give a believer a hypothetical, and they won't indulge the thought experiment. I remember asking a creationist how would the discovery of alien life affect his religious beliefs, and all I could get, over and over again, is "There is no alien life."

If we know the bus schedule for the next 7 days does mean that the bus driver has no free will with respect to driving the bus?

You don't know he's going to be driving the bus, or how he's going to driving the bus. You can only give qualified probabilities.

Up for worst analogy of the year award?

Knowing a schedule is completely different from knowing the actual events that will occur. If you know, and I'm talking about absolute certainty (the kind that can only be achieved with omnipotence) that the bus will stop at X, Y, and Z, at times A, B, and C, then there is no possibility for the bus driver to do anything different (otherwise, you would have known that alternative set of places and times. The difference here is you're comparing knowing plans, or potential events, whereas omnipotence by definition includes knowledge of the actual events as they will happen.

Cognitive dissonance at work

I'll start a new thread by the way.

See, I thought about that too. If you're to approach the idea of our world from the "Omnipotent, all powerful, ever knowing" view of a god, I think all your concerns become non factors. Scientists can create a fish, they can then put that fish in a bowl with food and other things. They can understand the complete limitations of that fish, and even if the fish has a kid, it's once again in a controlled environment. What seem like endless choices to us are probably, if we're to pretend a god exists, very few choices to it.

If it created the first human, then right at that moment based on what he decided that human would be, he wove the entire history of life on this planet. If he had changed anything there would have been a completely different result. In the end, how he chose to create the very first humans would dictate the entire future of the creature.

Honestly, I can see both sides of this debate, and it's an abstract thing that's hard to argue, but that's my stance on it.

But you are taking the general and applying it to the specific. Sure, we can get into a whole Butterfly Effect thing here, but there's a huge difference between being in a controled environment and be able to make a free decision. Sure, if god created the first person changed the course of history (or whatever) but free will deals with the millions of specific decisions and actions an individual makes.

You know what, I think you've changed my mind asdf. Typing up my free will post helped me really think about it and come to more fully understand it, and I tend to agree with you. If, as a determinist, I'm going to say that true free will does not exist, is it fair/right to point to the theist and say "Haha! You know this thing that you think you have, well you can't have it and have your belief in a god be true. And what about me? Oh well, well, I don't think we have it anyways, for actual rational reasons"

Like I said, it's hard to argue something like this. My basic argument is that a god would be so powerful that there's a vast difference between a controlled environment created by us and one created by it.

The point is even if we knew with certitude what the bus driver will do, our knowing it doesn't necessarily mean that the driver is constrained in what he does. We can be prescient about someone without restricting their free will.

You still aren't understanding the point...Imagine if at this exact moment, I magically gained omnipotent powers and wrote down on a piece of paper what you would eat for breakfast tomorrow. When the moment arrives tomorrow when you choose what you eat, whatever you "choose" I could then show you the piece of paper that was written the night before. How can you say you made a choice, implying that you had multiple options, when you can only ever eat what I had written down hours before you did...

Are you guys sure you're talking about "omnipotence" (all-powerful) and not "omniscience" (all-knowing)?

Anyway, there's a lot that's loaded into "choose" and "possible" that makes this conversation much deeper than what you guys are seeing. Let's just take "possible."

Let's take a quantum particle that has two states. At this moment in time, it's in a superposition that gives it a 50% probability to be in each state. We would say that at this time T0 it's "possible" that when we observe this particle that it could be observed in either state. Now let's run time forward to some time T1 when we've observed the particle. Now run time backwards again. Is it true that at time T0 it's "possible" that the particle could be observed in either state? Time is playing a peculiar role here, and it's not as simple to resolve as you might think it is.

Hmm doesn't omnipotence imply omniscience.

Sorry I am confused a bit here. If we flip a coin and run time forward then back, we agree that the result will be 100% consistent right? I don't think I am hearing what you are saying, possibly you could simplify, perhaps give a different example?

Are you playing the angle that "quantum particles" show true randomness therefore true randomness exists. Soooo (pause) deep breath (release pause) if we play time then pause rewind then re-play time it would be different?

only if you have not realized that you are asking to move the finger, and it is then moved for you.

If you are saying you did nothing in particular to actively constrain his actions then by definition he had free will to do what he wanted. It leaves open the possibility that both omniscience and free wcould occur. How could this ever be? One way is that the breakfast eater freely decides the previous evening to eat bagels for breakfast. The omnscient being read his mind and predicts he will eat bagels. Thus his prediction is correct and at the same time the eater retains free will.