Question on heaven...

[King Flevance]

So there really is no free will. Just puppets on a string...

Yes there is free will in that statement. God can see what you will do before you do it, but what you do still remains your choice. Destiny is chosen by the individual, God can look at but will not force you to change your destiny.

 

[Mathilda]

@ Puglover and King Flevance - Poppyco...
Unless you don't believe in god as the creator.
If you believe in him as a creator and you believe that he knows beforehand what choices you'll make, that leaves absolutely no room for free will.

 

[Eran of Arcadia]

Anal only?

Your definition of virginity is obviously different from mine . . .

Anyway, to answer Mathilda, consider the following scenario:

Let's say we have free will. Now let's say someone invents a time machine that can go into the past. Let's say that the me of the future reads a history book that describes what you did on a certain day in the past. Now imagine that I go back in time to before that event and tell the me of that time what you did. I will thus know what you are going to do before you do it. Do you still have free will?

The point is, we can have free will, and God can still know what we are going to do before we do it, if He exists outside of time.

 

[Mathilda]

Nice try Eran, but do you believe in god as a creator?

 

[Eran of Arcadia]

Nice try Eran, but do you believe in God as a creator?

Yes, although as it happens I don't believe God has foreknowledge as we understand it. I believe He knows what we can do, and the consequences for every decision we make, but not the exact decision we make. I mentioned the above scenario as there was someone in another thread who admitted that it would allow for free will, but not a God with foreknowledge (even though they work out the same).

 

[Sidhe]

Your definition of virginity is obviously different from mine . . .

Anyway, to answer Mathilda, consider the following scenario:

Let's say we have free will. Now let's say someone invents a time machine that can go into the past. Let's say that the me of the future reads a history book that describes what you did on a certain day in the past. Now imagine that I go back in time to before that event and tell the me of that time what you did. I will thus know what you are going to do before you do it. Do you still have free will?

The point is, we can have free will, and God can still know what we are going to do before we do it, if He exists outside of time.

No this isn't free will, God already knows our future, short of direct intervention, even if he is timeless he can't change our future unless he robs us of freewill, and every time he changes us he still knows precisely what we are going to do, I've explained this all before although the idea that God is timeless wasn't in their last time, although it matters not, it is an illusion of free will at best. It is predestination by definition. Look at google this it's an interesting topic, but be warned no one has yet resolved the omniscience and freewill question? And they have tried believe me.

 

[King Flevance]

I believe God is the creator. I believe before he created you, he knew what life your were going to live. But he made you anyways knowing you would spit in his face as was the fate of humans. He gave you free will to do so if you were that set in it. But he decided he would try to influence your decision. God has made himself known to me in my life. I choose to follow him. At anytime I can stop, go kill a few babies, shoot a preist, pledge my allegiance to satan and start taking shots at the Chritian faith.

EDIT: The last sentence above is not a shot at anyone.

However, I choose not to do this. Once I have made my decision to follow Him he knows my destiny - time "alters" so to speak - and he is updated. However, I believe there is 1 truth to existance. All the other small truths fit in to 1 that is of Grand scale. This 1 truth is only a fraction of God Himself. It would be like his finger or something.

Anyways because of this 1 truth time is an illusion, not free will. We exist in Kuros or whatever it was reffered to earlier. We are unable to comprehend it all at once so God put us in an alternate demension with time to be able to take in a little at a time. Our true selves exist in the "all-time" But our souls have been sent here to learn and choose a path. The 1 truth is the "all-time". There we have lived our entire life upon creation. (in under a fraction of a second) We have already made every decision we will ever make. You have written your destiny already as I have mine. So I guess in a way you are actually - at this moment - a slave to your own free will. You're just living it out so that you can comprehend it.


He will make Himself known to all to try and help influence the path of the righteous but only if given an oppurtunity by said person. If you never allow His existace to prove itself, you have used your free will to ignore Him.

 

[puglover]

@ Puglover and King Flevance - Poppyco...
Unless you don't believe in god as the creator.
If you believe in him as a creator and you believe that he knows beforehand what choices you'll make, that leaves absolutely no room for free will.

Not if you believe that since he is timeless, that necessitates that he operates on a different plane of time than we do. In other words, while we have a "past" "present" and "future", all is "present" for him.

 

[Mathilda]

However you try to exlain away time it still leaves god knowing at the moment he creates life (if that's what you believe), at the moment the sperm enters the egg, what choices that person will make. Or would make if it got to live. Know it to the extent to be able to pass judgment there and then. At the moment the sperm enters the egg.
And that's free will?

 

[Eran of Arcadia]

Like I said, I don't believe that God does that. I mentioned the time travel analogy because someone accepted it as preserving free will, but not God. Although if God perceives time differently from us, for Him there is no "moment the sperm meets the egg"; all moments are one for Him.

 

[King Flevance]

However you try to exlain away time it still leaves god knowing at the moment he creates life (if that's what you believe), at the moment the sperm enters the egg, what choices that person will make. Or would make if it got to live. Know it to the extent to be able to pass judgment there and then. At the moment the sperm enters the egg.
And that's free will?

yes, the soul was given the oppurtunity to make choices even in your example.

 

[Mathilda]

I believe God is the creator. I believe before he created you, he knew what life your were going to live.
...

Once I have made my decision to follow Him he knows my destiny - time "alters" so to speak - and he is updated.

....

He will make Himself known to all to try and help influence the path of the righteous but only if given an oppurtunity by said person.

To recap -
1) God created me - made me what I am.
2) He knew that the me he made would choose NO.
3) I had the chance to choose YES or NO anyway, despite of him making me so that he knew that I would choose NO.
4) He tried to influence me to choose YES, even he though he had made me so that I would choose NO.

Did I miss something?

 

[King Flevance]

To recap -
1) God created me - made me what I am.
2) He knew that the me he made would choose NO.
3) I had the chance to choose YES or NO anyway, despite of him making me so that he knew that I would choose NO.
4) He tried to influence me to choose YES, even he though he had made me so that I would choose NO.

Did I miss something?

Wrong order:

1+3) God created you and you had the chance to choose YES or NO, despite of him making you. He knew you would choose NO. All humans did.
4) He did not try to influence you unless you seeked His guidance. If you didn't seek Him, he will not interfere and let you choose NO. He put Jesus down here for people that would seek Him and choose YES.
2) He knew that the "you" He made would choose NO.

 

[Mathilda]

How is the order relevant to god which lives outside of time?

 

[King Flevance]

Order is irrelevant in Heaven. On earth order gives us a process of happening, or relevance. The order they were initially put in made it appear to be running in circles. I merely put them in an order to show the... train of logic (for lack of better term) used and to merge 1+3 to show where free will takes place.

So yes it all happened at the same time. But everyone is just as important as the next. I did not initially put them in order. I put them in order of relevance to show the precise reasoning behind them. The order only comes in if trying to understand the concept through the idea of time.

EDIT: Bolded part is the reason God gave us time anyways.

 

[civ2]

puglover
I still can't understand WHAT was your question???
Please, explain it normally!

About free will.
We have it and yet God knows what we'll do.
That's the "illogical" thing we have in our lives.
But "logic" is also a creation.
All attempts to explain how it works would be lacking something because we don't know how God "thinks".
Oh, and God didn't create us WITH CHOICES ALREADY MADE - He rather created our lives - but not our choices.
May sound weird - but that's how it is.
"Everything is in the hands of Heaven - except for the Fear of Heaven" - which means our free will in essense.

Mathilda
Reincarnation ONLY into other people - basically to "replay" the wrong-choice situation and improve it.

 

[Eran of Arcadia]

I think that as we exist within the flow of time, we could not comprehend a being outside of it; it may be possible that such a being knows what we are going to do beforehand, without denying us free will; but as temporal beings, we cannot wrap our heads around the idea.

 

[El_Machinae]

We almost can. Yesterday, El_Mac had freewill. But the El_Mac of today (or the more complete picture of the 4D El_Mac) has good knowledge of what decisions yesterday's El_Mac would make.

The 4D El_Mac has perfect knowledge of the 3D El_Mac, while he still has free will ...

 

[Veritass]

What if there was a place that was not really a place? What if this place existed outside of space as we know it, so when we are here we understand we are not there, but when we are there we cannot even relate to the question of "where" here is? What if that place existed outside of time as we know it, so when we were in this time, we could relate to being there "before" and "after" here, but when we were there, we could not relate to "when" we were here? What if while you were there you experienced a oneness with the universe that transcended any knowing or any emotional state that was relatable to humans?

What if you had a glimpse or a memory of this place as a human, and tried to describe it to another human? What words would you use? Would it come out sounding a lot like the descriptions of "heaven" that we use now?

 

[Sidhe]

Well personally if your going to include God I prefer the more mainstream physics idea that the future doesn't exist until you create it, thus we cannot travel forward to a time that has yet to come to pass, that way you have another sort of free will, and God knows little of what will happen in absolute certainty,what he does know though is every probabilistic event and every events likely outcome, and you down to the core of each sub atomic particle and even how all those would behave in conjunciton with everything in the universe, this in itslef would make God appear to know what you will do and what would happen and in reality he would be right 99.99999% of the time but because of the inherent chaotic nature of matter, and the inefability even to God he could never be 100% sure. Almost omnipotent at least seemingly having no direct knowledge of the future, but not quite.