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There is no free will if God is omniscient


MannyPaquio

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If God knew yesterday I was going to drink coca- cola today, then I have no free will to decide that.

Your thoughts?

I think that Mormon doctrine would argue that your free will has not been compromised because of God's omniscience. You are still free to drink that Coke or not drink that Coke. Rather, because God is omniscient, he knows the will of your heart, and knows what that will will lead you to do...namely, drink that Coca-Cola. He is not making you drink it, he just knows you so well that he knows that when presented with the option, you will drink it.

Anyway, that's my best guess...

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If God knew yesterday I was going to drink coca- cola today, then I have no free will to decide that.

Your thoughts?

Non-Sequitor. God Knowing you are going to make a specific choice in the future has no baring on what choice you are actually going to make.

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Non-Sequitor. God Knowing you are going to make a specific choice in the future has no baring on what choice you are actually going to make.

If God knows you will make a specific choice in the future, then the choice God knows you're going to make is the choice you're actually going to make. That doesn't mean that God causes you're choice, and that, therefore, God frustrates your free agency. It does however mean that you are not free in the sense of being able to do otherwise. If by "God Knowing you are going to make a specific choice in the future has no baring on what choice you are actually going to make" [sic] you mean that God's knowledge doesn't cause you to lose free will, then you're right. But that doesn't help settle the issue, since it can be true that God doesn't cause the loss of free will, and true that agents don't have free will.

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God could not justly withold the Celestial Kingdom from someone who had no choice in how they acted.

Therefore we have free will.

And if what the OP said is true, then that means that if we have free will, then God does not know the future.

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Only if we accept his interpretation as correct.

That's right. You might take the view that people have free will in the sense of being able to do otherwise and God knows with certainty what people will do in the future. That's a difficult line to defend, even if you appeal to some very odd conceptions of time (or timelessness, as it were).

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If God knows you will make a specific choice in the future, then the choice God knows you're going to make is the choice you're actually going to make. That doesn't mean that God causes you're choice, and that, therefore, God frustrates your free agency. It does however mean that you are not free in the sense of being able to do otherwise. If by "God Knowing you are going to make a specific choice in the future has no baring on what choice you are actually going to make" [sic] you mean that God's knowledge doesn't cause you to lose free will, then you're right. But that doesn't help settle the issue, since it can be true that God doesn't cause the loss of free will, and true that agents don't have free will.

Something to think about... "What about when God becomes a slider?"

We see him shuffling the deck of several Alternate realities before finally making the Choice and Revealing it to his servants the Prophets.

Amos 7

1 Thus hath the Lord God shewed unto me; and, behold, he formed grasshoppers in the beginning of the shooting up of the latter growth; and, lo, it was the latter growth after the king

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Non-Sequitor. God Knowing you are going to make a specific choice in the future has no baring on what choice you are actually going to make.

It's not a non-sequitur.

While your statement is (hypothetically) true, free will is NOT concerned with the person's view of reality and what they think they can and can't do. It deals with the ultimate state of reality. If there is a god in this reality who KNOWS everything that you will do (while you have the freedom to choose from your own point of view), the fact that He knows what you will choose negates your free will.

You are no longer making choices, but rather you're carrying out the motions since everything is predetermined by His knowledge.

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You are no longer making choices, but rather you're carrying out the motions since everything is predetermined by His knowledge.

I look at God's foreknowledge as seeing past, present and future on a continuum. The reason he knows what we will do is because we have already done it in the future and he has seen that part of the line. It's easier to understand if you are a fan of Dr. Who.

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It's not a non-sequitur.

While your statement is (hypothetically) true, free will is NOT concerned with the person's view of reality and what they think they can and can't do. It deals with the ultimate state of reality. If there is a god in this reality who KNOWS everything that you will do (while you have the freedom to choose from your own point of view), the fact that He knows what you will choose negates your free will.

You are no longer making choices, but rather you're carrying out the motions since everything is predetermined by His knowledge.

See Amos 7 Above.

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God drinks Coke ??????

I am pretty sure that Catholic doctrine is that he drinks Mountain-dew.

G-d drinks Dr. Pepper with His Chicken-in-a-Basket takeout order from Maddox.

Everybody knows that.

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I think that Mormon doctrine would argue that your free will has not been compromised because of God's omniscience. You are still free to drink that Coke or not drink that Coke. Rather, because God is omniscient, he knows the will of your heart, and knows what that will will lead you to do...namely, drink that Coca-Cola. He is not making you drink it, he just knows you so well that he knows that when presented with the option, you will drink it.

Not only that, he knows everything you could possibly do under any possible set of conditions that could ever possibly be faced past, present and future. So if you were to give Him a quiz today on whether you would drink Coca-Cola tomorrow, He would assess everything about you and affecting you and derive the correct answer. But He wouldn't tell you until you did it (or not), for He would not want to manipulate or influence your decision (after all, it's your quiz and He's honest), and then after you did it (or not), you would need Him to inform you that He had the correct answer, because you really don't know what you're going to do from one moment to the next. But you might not think He's telling the truth, so you would have to get God to agree to trade places (just overnight) to test yourself.

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