MyGivenNameIsKeith
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- Oct 16, 2017
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Asking the same question in two threads using different words to justify your own perspective isn't fruitful. Some would call that itching ears."One of the biggest problems facing the traditional Christian believer is to explain how human beings can have free will given that God has perfect knowledge of the future. If God already knows what you are going to do tomorrow, then how can the decisions you make be free? It seems the only thing you can possibly do is what God already knows you are going to do – and if so, then you cannot have what philosophers call libertarian free will, the kind of freedom that most Christians, and in fact most people, believe human beings possess."
"Not all Christians face this dilemma. Calvinists avoid it by rejecting the traditional (libertarian) concept of free will, while so-called “open theists” reject the idea that God knows everything about the future. But for those in between these two extremes – which is the majority of believers – the problem remains."
"...But now here's the problem: if God cannot be wrong, then it is impossible for there to be alternatives to what he knows you are going to have. In other words, it's not merely that God knows that you are in fact going to have spaghetti, while other possibilities remain. Rather, since it is impossible for God to be wrong, it is also impossible for you to have anything else. Because for there to be another possibility is for there to be the possibility of God making a mistake."
"Another way of putting this is that, if you have free will, then you have the power to make God wrong – and that of course cannot be. God's foreknowledge – his perfect, infallible foreknowledge – is therefore incompatible with the kind of freedom that most Christians believe we have."
IS GOD'S FOREKNOWLEDGE COMPATIBLE WITH FREE WILL?
(NIV for clarification of said point)
2 Timothy 4:3 For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.
Again, as I answered in your other thread, you're attempting to knock God down a few pegs. You're denying that he is omnipotent and omniscient and that he gave us free will.
We all have a choice to choose God or not. He does not force us.
In Eden they were free to eat of any tree in the garden, even of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God commanded them not to, because the consequences would be death. Free will. They didn't listen. God was right. As always.
16 And the LORD God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”
If God the Father did not know everything about the future then when he shaped the world, did he not have you in mind? Did he not have the foreknowledge in making man and giving them free will that they would mess up from time to time and fall because they are not God? Did he not have foreknowledge that he would make a way to atone for us?
Yet you argue using spaghetti, or in conversations past, ice cream.
Do you not understand that you do not live by bread alone?
Why do you insist on your own understanding?
Are your ways higher than God's ways? Are you so holy that you have ascended higher than his throne? That your words are mightier than the Word that was made flesh? That your own words contain knowledge?
No. They do not.
The old adage I believe applies here...
If you love someone, set them free.
Are you not free? Are you not free to choose? Have you not learned that what God has said is true? Has he ever fallen short on fulfilling his promises?
God's foreknowledge does not rule out free will. Your free will at times deceives you into ruling out God's foreknowledge, which can never be taken away from him.
He knows where you want to go in your heart, he directs your steps to get there. If you are on the path to damnation, he will nudge you in the right way because he doesn't want you to perish. You can still choose to walk the path to damnation. As I said, you have free will. He has foreknowledge. They are not exclusive.
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