Do you have free will? I bet you think you do. After all, we are continuously making decisions about things and choosing what to do and how to act. We are obviously in complete control of ourselves. Anyone who says we have no free will is just another doom-and-gloom Calvinist, right? Free will must exist, right?
Wrong.
How can I say that we don't have free will? Since this is a theological post, let's assume you believe in God (if you don't I'll get to you in a minute.) You probably believe the following things about him: God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-seeing. God is a great big fellow who knows everything about everything, and even knows what's going to happen to anyone at any time. I've never met a believer in God who would think that God could be surprised at anything. It's obvious: he's God, so he knows everything about everything.
Since God knows everything about everything, and since he knows what we are going to do before we do it, how can we have free will? If an all-knowing being knows what you're going to do before you do it, then you don't really have a choice, do you? How can we actually choose anything that we do if God knows what we're going to do anyway? There is no "choice" involved here; you do as God says but you think it's your idea because you have been given the illusion of control.
Some people say, "Well, God made us and then gave us free will." This is possible, but if God gave us actual, true, unconstrained free will, then our ideas about God are wrong. If we have free will, then God will not know what we are up to; we could surprise him, which means that he doesn't know everything. And if God doesn't know everything, then he's obviously not all-powerful, which basically means that anyone who believes in God and believes in free will is delusional.
Now for the scientists. Studies have recently shown that the part of the brain responsible for rationalizing and thinking doesn't act until after we have made a decision. The time delay is microscopic, but it's there: you do something and then rationalize it. Your brain's just on cruise control most of the time, and you're watching it work, pretending that you're giving the orders. You have no free will: you just think you do.
But it's not so bad. Having no free will means that you can live on faith. After all, if we're not in control, someone else must be, and so all we can do is hand the controls over to whatever sort of God there is and enjoy the ride. The only other option here is that life is just an insane, meaningless pile of nonsense, in which case you may as well just give up and enjoy it, because nothing matters at all.
Cheers!My fellow blogger kerstenkiwi has been blogging quite a bit lately about faith, God, humanity and the like. Go check out her blog.
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If we do not have free choice then according to you we do not choose whether we are religious or if we believe in God. God knows if we believe in him or not and if we never choose this then He, God, made that choice for us.
If I am correct in my thinking so far then you would have to believe that God either creates us all as Christians and we go to heaven, or God chooses some who go to heaven and some who go to hell, which if I'm not mistaken is fundamental in the beliefs of Calvinists.
If neither one of these is what you believe, I’m curious as to what it is you do believe.
I don't really know what I believe all the time, because it's difficult to be certain about anything. But it seems to me that a God who would make some people go to heaven and some go to hell would be cruel and twisted, not the all-loving God that is usually described. I would have to say that, free will or not, if we were created by God, he probably likes us enough not to create a hell.
(if you can't see the fnords they won't eat you)
wolfengromper
This a common concept, and one I struggled with for years.
My problem was in understanding that foreknowledge and predestination were not the same thing. If someone knows something ahead of time, that is not the same as causing it to happen. This is the stuff of which some interesting movie plots have been made; everything from betting on the right horse to attempting to prevent someone's death. The fact is that God does know everything-but the way we see it, He knows it "in advance". That's because we live and operate from one day to the next, trapped, if you will, in time. God is not limited to time, however. He created it, and someday time will, according to the book of Revelation, cease. If you could devise a time line that extended from eternity past to eternity future, and then you could stand back and look at it, apart from it, that would be a little bit like what being outside of time would be like. There is no "in advance" for God, no past, present, or future in the way we understand it. All is present for Him. It's just one of those mindblowing things about God, that makes Him God, and us, well, not.