religion- is there free will?

[Hooahguy]

this thread really is only for the religious folks out there, but atheists are welcomed to read and comment!

this question popped up in my mind today during my Jewish philosophy class.
we were discussing Immanuel Kant and how his question on prayer turned many away from it.
Kant's question was "if god knows everything, then he obviously knows what we want, so why do we have to ask through prayer?"
my teacher then presented Rabbi Issac Kook (a Jewish philosopher) and his answer to that question.
according to Kook, god knows what we want. but through prayer, we make ourselves worthy of receiving what we want.
that made a lot of sense to me.

then i began to ponder if there was free will, since if god knows all and what we are going to do, then we dont have free will. yes, its an age old debate.
i remember i had this debate 2 years ago, but i wasn't smart enough to really think about it.
what i came up with today is this.
we sorta have free will. its like a fork in the road. we have options of what we can do, but god knows what the consequences are depending on which path we take. but then again, that has a big hole in that theory, since if god knows all, he knows which road we are going to take.
im still divided on this issue and i spaced out in every class today thinking about it.


in addition, i learned something else to day- Pascals Wager.
this, IMO, is brilliant.
my teacher explained it like this: you have a steak. there is a 50% chance that it is poisoned. now, do you take that chance and eat it, or do you leave it alone? the obvious thing is that you leave it alone.
now, when you apply this to religion, you come to this:
if you think there is no god when there is, you go to hell when you die, or something like that. now, if you do believe in god when there is none, what happens when you die? nothing. you just die.
the safer of the 2 routes? id say the religion path is.

gee, i guess it is true that you learn more as you get older.

meanwhile, i think after today im going to devote my life to philosophy. it just makes so much sense....

[CountArach]

Allow me to paraphrase one of the two existential arguments that Sartre set up to defend the existence of free will.

First consider an alcoholic who is attempting to break the habit. He suffers from anxiety because inside him he knows that there is absolutely nothing that stops him from drinking except his own willpower. As such he is scared about what he might do, which leads to a fork in the road type situation where he can see two futures. One where his willpower is strong enough to resist temptation and one where it is not. That is the essence of free will - making that choice and having the power to do that.

Of course Sartre was an Atheist, so that is where that standpoint comes from.

if you think there is no god when there is, you go to hell when you die, or something like that. now, if you do believe in god when there is none, what happens when you die? nothing. you just die.

If the only reason you are following a religion is for your own good then are you truly a follower? Further, I am not going to constrain myself to the rules of a greater being I don't truly believe in.

[LittleGrizzly]

It is 'pascals wager' you refer too... theres a problems with it imo... theres has been far too many religions and a few of them state that worship of false idols is very bad (or the supposed followers burn or otherwise punish others as heretics)

As the great Homer once said "What if im worshipping the wrong god and pissing the real one of even more" (ok so so that's a very rough translation of what he said...)

The other as CA pointed out is believing just incase isn't really going to satisfy god... or the ones that have a hell place for bad people...

And my last reason would be if there is a god willing to reject people on the basis of my non belief then that is no god i wish to serve

Me and my friends have this joke about hell being were all the cool people, fun drugs and kick ass parties are... whereas heaven is something like the little old ladies clubs that some church congregations look like...

Onto the free will question, if there truely is a god who made us and can see all ends, then there is absolutely no free will, he knew we would be alive today, all of us, and things had to happen almost exactly how they happened for all of us to be here, think how easy it would have been for your parents or thier parents or thier parents and so on to have never met up in the first place, he is all knowing and he designed us

You could make the argument that god just knows what choice we will make with our own free will... but what do we use to make our decisions... our brains... our decision making is informed by nature and nurture, god essentially controls all nature, so that just leaves nurture, but if god knew what the first what was going to happen to the first living things capable of thinking, then he controlled thier nurture, and these things through the generations passed the nurture on until our parents nurtured us... so if god controls the nature and nurture of your decision making... he essentially controls your decision making...

Which then leads into all kinds of confusing thinking about god purposfully making people disbelieve in him so he can punish people...

[Uesugi Kenshin]

My answer to your comment on atheism is that the risk of being religious when in fact there is no God/gods is that you will have potentially wasted much of your short life in the pursuit of paradise or whatever.

To be clear I say potentially because I am assuming if you are following religion for your own good you are not happy with going through the motions of religion, whereas if you are happy to do whatever your religion asks of you then that is something different.

I have some other thoughts on this, but unfortunately no time to fully develop them, maybe later.

[Strike For The South]

You have complete free will. YOU have to find God. God can not find YOU.

I would say as a Christian that Pascals wager is not truly believing. The whole point of having a relationship with God is that you can feel him with you. Believing to be on the safe side is the ultimate cop out.

There is always a disconnect with atheists (not saying yall aern't an ok lot) I do not believe to save my own skin. Thats is not truly believing. I can feel the Lord with me when I wake up and when I go to bed. My own skin has nothing to do with it.

[LittleGrizzly]

You have complete free will. YOU have to find God. God can not find YOU.

This goes against my nature and nurture point, though i guess if you say that finding god is something that happens independently of your thinking then that sidesteps my point...

But on your point, it is my brain.. my decision making that holds me back from believing... im pretty sure i would like to believe in a god... so you could say i want to find god in a way, but my brain does not allow it...

[Strike For The South]

This goes against my nature and nurture point, though i guess if you say that finding god is something that happens independently of your thinking, as that through nature and nurture is essecntially decided by god if he nows everything...

But on that point it is my brain.. my decision making that holds me back from believing... im pretty sure i would like to believe in a god... so you could say i want to find god in a way, but my brain does not allow it...

God is omnipotent but gives you the freedom to choose. I made a decision to be baptized because I felt God around me. I could've walked away at anytime.

Your brain does not allow because you let it. Not believing is a whole lot eaiser than having blind faith. Not saying Im somehow better than you. Im just saying that "my brain doesnt allow it" reasoning could be the same logic I use for not eating walnuts.

[Uesugi Kenshin]

You have complete free will. YOU have to find God. God can not find YOU.

I would say as a Christian that Pascals wager is not truly believing. The whole point of having a relationship with God is that you can feel him with you. Believing to be on the safe side is the ultimate cop out.

There is always a disconnect with atheists (not saying yall aern't an ok lot) I do not believe to save my own skin. Thats is not truly believing. I can feel the Lord with me when I wake up and when I go to bed. My own skin has nothing to do with it.

Strike I mean nothing of the sort. I was just trying to respond to the way he was responding to atheism.

The reason I am an atheist is because I just don't believe in a divine being of any sort, not because of a cost benefit analysis. And I believe truly religious people are exactly like me, except they believe in a divine being of some sort. It was this cost-benefit analysis approach to religion that he was bringing to the table which I was responding to, and the people practicing religion because of this better off some chance at paradise than none idea I wouldn't deem truly religious.

I hope that clears things up?

You're right though. There is a disconnect. I can't imagine how/why you believe there is a God, just like you probably can't actually understand how I believe there isn't one. It's just one of those funny things about people and life.

EDIT:
To address one of your points Strike I think it is probably easiest to be somewhat religious because sticking closely to a religion's doctrine and believing very strongly is I imagine somewhat difficult, and being an atheist and telling people that can also pose its difficulties, while being just religious enough to satisfy the vast majority of the population seems to be the "easiest" option.

Though really I haven't experienced any significant amount of prejudice, just a bit of proselytizing now and again.

[Strike For The South]

Uesugi I wasn't speaking to you directly I was talking more about the OP. Sorry.

I think you LG and me all agree to disagree. I don't think there is a point to try and convert any of us...or is there

[Andres]

If there's no free will, then [insert supreme being(s) of your choice] did a splendid job of hiding that for us, didn't he?

Why would you even bother to ask the question "is there free will"?

The answer is obviously "yes" and if it's "no", then it is because of reasons beyond our comprehension and it makes no sense worrying about it.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

this thread really is only for the religious folks out there, but atheists are welcomed to read and comment!

this question popped up in my mind today during my Jewish philosophy class.
we were discussing Immanuel Kant and how his question on prayer turned many away from it.
Kant's question was "if god knows everything, then he obviously knows what we want, so why do we have to ask through prayer?"
my teacher then presented Rabbi Issac Kook (a Jewish philosopher) and his answer to that question.
according to Kook, god knows what we want. but through prayer, we make ourselves worthy of receiving what we want.
that made a lot of sense to me.

There is an alternative answer to this: That we have to ask before we get anything. This is not necesarely about worth, but has to do with a willingness to engage with God, rather than taking him for granted.

then i began to ponder if there was free will, since if god knows all and what we are going to do, then we dont have free will. yes, its an age old debate.
i remember i had this debate 2 years ago, but i wasn't smart enough to really think about it.
what i came up with today is this.
we sorta have free will. its like a fork in the road. we have options of what we can do, but god knows what the consequences are depending on which path we take. but then again, that has a big hole in that theory, since if god knows all, he knows which road we are going to take.
im still divided on this issue and i spaced out in every class today thinking about it.

Well, God is all knowing, all present, and all powerful. The arguement is favour of free will is that, because he is all powerful, God can change the future, therefore the path is not fixed, and he can also chose not to know our futures.

The first of these propositions states that God's power precludes him being limited in any way, save as he should chose to limit himself. Therefore, what he knows he can change, so that the future is not fixed. Ergo, we have free will. This does not mean that God cannot ordain a particular course, such as he did for Moses, but this is an extraordinary case which, if anything, supports the arguement of free will because it demonstrates God interfering with the natural order.

The second proposition, linked to the first, states that God (being all powerful) simply chooses not to know, and that since we exist in a termporal world this means that free will exists because the Almighty effectively decides our actions only after we take them, or put another way, he leaves us alone to make our own choices.

in addition, i learned something else to day- Pascals Wager.
this, IMO, is brilliant.
my teacher explained it like this: you have a steak. there is a 50% chance that it is poisoned. now, do you take that chance and eat it, or do you leave it alone? the obvious thing is that you leave it alone.
now, when you apply this to religion, you come to this:
if you think there is no god when there is, you go to hell when you die, or something like that. now, if you do believe in god when there is none, what happens when you die? nothing. you just die.
the safer of the 2 routes? id say the religion path is.

gee, i guess it is true that you learn more as you get older.

meanwhile, i think after today im going to devote my life to philosophy. it just makes so much sense....

This has been fairly well demonstrated to be an elaborate piece od sophistry. It requires a single, identifiable, God and one who does not demand sincere worship or love. Clearly, this applies to neither Christianity, Jewdaism, Islam, Hinduism or Sihkism.

[CBR]

my teacher explained it like this: you have a steak. there is a 50% chance that it is poisoned. now, do you take that chance and eat it, or do you leave it alone? the obvious thing is that you leave it alone.

And that is what makes Pascal's Wager totally flawed. Just because you have narrowed down things to just two options does not mean it is 50/50. I can win the big lottery or not but the chance of winning is not 50%. Your next steak could be poisoned but since most people manage to eat them without dying it is safe to assume it is not 50/50.

Just narrowing it down to just two options is a problem in itself as it assumes quite a lot: There could be multiple gods out there so which one to pick. Maybe there is a god but he does not care. Maybe there is a god but no afterlife.

Free will sounds nice but assumes that all are identical. A simple thing like genes and upbringing makes a specific choice easy for one person but very difficult if not outright impossible for another person. When it comes to believing in a god then some claim they can feel god or whatever. So what to do when you can't feel him?


CBR

[rasoforos]

then i began to ponder if there was free will, since if god knows all and what we are going to do, then we dont have free will. yes, its an age old debate.
i remember i had this debate 2 years ago, but i wasn't smart enough to really think about it.
what i came up with today is this.
we sorta have free will. its like a fork in the road. we have options of what we can do, but god knows what the consequences are depending on which path we take. but then again, that has a big hole in that theory, since if god knows all, he knows which road we are going to take.
im still divided on this issue and i spaced out in every class today thinking about it.

You have posed one of the questions that a religious person should ignore all his life...

There is no good answer that will allow space for omnipotence and free will. You either go for lesser gods or atheism or accept you have no will.

Of course Monotheism relies on its followers ignoring its basic logical flaws under the 'God is beyond our mere human logic'. Apart from genocides, infanticides and religious murder, this 'mantra' also covers your question.

[Strike For The South]

Edit: I'll take it lying down. I've done it for 4 years why should anything change?

[Reenk Roink]

You have posed one of the questions that a religious person should ignore all his life...

On the contrary, many, and I mean many religious people have absolutely loved posing this question, thinking about it, writing about it, and arguing about it. Some religious people have argued it is very important to answer this question straight up to get the correct dogma and such.

There is no good answer that will allow space for omnipotence and free will. You either go for lesser gods or atheism or accept you have no will.

Well there are certainly answers. Whether they are "good" is a matter of opinion or not. Also, forget the religious aspect of the will debate entirely. It is quite difficult to argue for a "good" theory of free will, omnipotent god or not.

Your "time traveling" omnipotent god has one problem though. Even as an all knowing observer, he knows that you're going to do long before you were even born, so him doing nothing, thus condemning you to hell or heaven, is already a choise he made "for" you.

To put it differently, if a friend is going to jump from a bridge and you don't know it, then its a tragedy. But if you do know about it, but doesn't act, then you're indirectly making a choise for your friend.

While the above isn't touching on the free will concept, the next part does. For you to know that tragedy in advance as an observer, your friend is already following a pre-determined path, decided by his surroundings, body, mind and past. The omninpotent god already knew this and always known it.

He might limit his knowledge so that the last time he truely touched the world (Big Bang I guess), he wouldn't forsee the consequences in an omnipotent way, but then he cannot use his omnipotence ever again for humanity to remain thier free will. Thus he is no longer omnipotent, even if he was.

Or to put it short, if god has omnipotence, then humanity cannot have a free will. And if humanity have a free will, then no god can have omnipotence.

Well, as mentioned before, I don't really see any problem with predestination in any sense (it's not like secular versions of this question have any better arguments against determinism, specifically hard determinism - determinism is just too strong like Superman), but the bridge analogy is not one I really like. I'm certainly not making any choice for my friend if I knew he would jump off a bridge. Even if I knew I could stop him.

[Rhyfelwyr]

Everyone has 'will'. It's what makes them a human being. I don't know why people feel that 'will' needs to be totally free.

From a Christian perspective, the doctrine of predestination is difficult to refute. From an atheist perspective, I don't think free will could be said to truly exist either, one eletric signal flickering through your brain inevitably leads to another etc.

Maybe this need everyone feels to believe they have a 'free will' is because of this western belief in individuality. I'm not arguing that people lack a 'will', but it will never be a truly 'free will'. Just because God knows someone will chose a certain path does not mean that they did not 'will' to do it.

[rasoforos]

On the contrary, many, and I mean many religious people have absolutely loved posing this question, thinking about it, writing about it, and arguing about it. Some religious people have argued it is very important to answer this question straight up to get the correct dogma and such.

I meant it in a good way. It takes a lot of mental 'balls' to ponder about that sort of thing. It is much easier to just ignore such difficult questions*. Not only he did not ignore it but he allowed us to comment something so serious to him. Certainly some people have found their answer and they are happy with their belief and stronger within it, others probably lost theirs because of it.

The opinion that there is no good answer is of course subjective. I am not trying to be dogmatic. It is just my 2 cents.