Original post by Joleee
your question is quite vague; could you clarify what you're asking? 
as this is in the faith and spirituality forum, are you asking is our futures predetermined by God or....what? or do you mean free will from a sociological perspective?
as this is in the faith and spirituality forum, are you asking is our futures predetermined by God or....what? or do you mean free will from a sociological perspective?
Both.
Original post by RosesOnRaindrops
The title says it all. What are your thoughts
Yes
No we don't have free will.
Everything happens due to cause and effect. Nothing in the universe is random. What seems random to us is merely an illusion caused by our tiny limited brains being unable to compute the massive amount of cause and effect data involved in everything.
You kick a ball in a field. Your kick creates a disturbance in the air which has implications in all the surrounding air and gasses. Your shoe scrapes the dirt and grass sending bits flying and they interact with each other. The ball rolls along the ground affecting every blade of grass it touches and some that it doesn't touch. There are a gazillion impacts to that one simple action of kicking a ball. But ALL of it, every impact is governed by the laws of the universe. Gravity, friction, pressure, heat exchange, energy exchange, all of physics.
You and I can't comprehend nor compute all those factors. Thus we can't predict where the ball will land nor how many blades of grass it will touch and what will happen to those blades of grass. Nor can we compute the billions of air atoms the ball moves through and affects along its trajectory.
However none of it is random. From the very moment the ball is kicked the entire sequence is totally predictable, totally inevitable. There are simply too many factors involved for a human to ever compute them and so to us it appears random.
If there is a God and if that God is omniscient (all-knowing) then he/she/it has the capacity to compute all of those factors and indeed every facet of the universe. On that basis God knows everything that has happened and everything that will happen. God can map every possible eventuality of every factor and because of that there simply can be no free will because everything is happening due to cause and effect.
Even my typing this post is the result of cause and effect.
Thus from the very moment the universe came into being everything was then predetermined because everything is subject to the laws of the universe.
Free will, real true free will means being able to do ANYTHING you want to and there being absolutely no consequences to your actions.
No-one has such free will . . . . . except God (if you believe in God)
God can do anything, anytime, with total impunity.
God can kill anyone, God can engage in ethnic cleansing. God can engage in genocide. God can kill innocent young children, babies or even as yet unborn babies and do so with total impunity. All of this God did according to the Old Testament.
God can travel anywhere anytime.
We can not. We are not remotely free to do as we please. We are born into a societal structure which is really a prison in which our lives are simply one of slavery and servitude to higher powers who themselves are slaves to even higher powers and so on.
If I had free will then:
1 - I choose to never get ill
2 - I choose to live forever and not die
3 - I choose to have sex with any person I choose to
4 - I choose to travel the length and breadth of the galaxy at will
5 - I choose to know everything there is to know
6 - I choose to have the power to create, to manifest matter just using my thought and will
and so on
Naturally I can't do any of those things. I am in a prison, not of my choosing, I had no choice in my birth, I had no choice of the planet I would exist on in the universe, I had no choice of which physical body I would inhabit, indeed I had no choice about being stuffed into a physical body at all.
Everything I do has serious consequences. I can't kill anyone without some higher power punishing me. I can't leave this planet in any real tangible sense. Therefore I am not remotely free. I am a slave. I am effectively a constructed robot, albeit a seemingly sophisticated one, a biological robot obviously designed by some other entity to do work for them, to exist as a slave. My lifespan has been severely restricted by design so that I can't learn and experience too much. Imagine what knowledge we would have if we all lived 1000 years.
In the end we are all just marking time. We're stuck here in these bodies, forcibly thrust into a closed environment (the Earth) which we can not escape and everything we need to survive and live has been seized and made into a commodity which we can only have access to if we participate in the slave system. I'm not sure that even "death" as we think of it, is any kind of escape from this prison. I suspect that we might simply go round and round and round the same loop with our spirit/souls separating from the physical body at "death" and then being reattached to a new body afterward where we are once again born as babies and do the whole slave thing again. Perhaps this is in fact Hell.
Either way there is no free will for humans. Human life is a life of constraints and rules and limitations not freedom.
Only God has true free will. No-one else.
For those that believe in Gods and religions the thought process here is really really simple.
If I hold a gun to your child's head and tell you to lie on the ground otherwise I shoot the child, then you DO NOT have free will. Sure, you could choose not to lie down and let your child be shot but you won't because you love your child. This is not free will. It is force. Coercion. Blackmail.
Similarly the Biblical message is one of forced coercion. Act in such and such a way otherwise you will go to Hell not Heaven. Believe such and such otherwise it's Hell not Heaven.
That is NOT free will. That is slavery. That is Authoritarianism.
Ironically with this entire free will debate, there can only be free will if the biblical God does not exist. There can only be free will if nothing can be predicted, if everything can be random. If things were unpredictable and random then no God could "know everything", no God could be Omniscient. For God to be Omniscient, everything must either be totally predictable (and thus the result of cause and effect) or everything must have already happened, past, present and future in which case what we have is predeterminism, nothing matters because it has all already happened. Take your pick.
The whole situation pretty much sucks TBH.
Everything happens due to cause and effect. Nothing in the universe is random. What seems random to us is merely an illusion caused by our tiny limited brains being unable to compute the massive amount of cause and effect data involved in everything.
You kick a ball in a field. Your kick creates a disturbance in the air which has implications in all the surrounding air and gasses. Your shoe scrapes the dirt and grass sending bits flying and they interact with each other. The ball rolls along the ground affecting every blade of grass it touches and some that it doesn't touch. There are a gazillion impacts to that one simple action of kicking a ball. But ALL of it, every impact is governed by the laws of the universe. Gravity, friction, pressure, heat exchange, energy exchange, all of physics.
You and I can't comprehend nor compute all those factors. Thus we can't predict where the ball will land nor how many blades of grass it will touch and what will happen to those blades of grass. Nor can we compute the billions of air atoms the ball moves through and affects along its trajectory.
However none of it is random. From the very moment the ball is kicked the entire sequence is totally predictable, totally inevitable. There are simply too many factors involved for a human to ever compute them and so to us it appears random.
If there is a God and if that God is omniscient (all-knowing) then he/she/it has the capacity to compute all of those factors and indeed every facet of the universe. On that basis God knows everything that has happened and everything that will happen. God can map every possible eventuality of every factor and because of that there simply can be no free will because everything is happening due to cause and effect.
Even my typing this post is the result of cause and effect.
Thus from the very moment the universe came into being everything was then predetermined because everything is subject to the laws of the universe.
Free will, real true free will means being able to do ANYTHING you want to and there being absolutely no consequences to your actions.
No-one has such free will . . . . . except God (if you believe in God)
God can do anything, anytime, with total impunity.
God can kill anyone, God can engage in ethnic cleansing. God can engage in genocide. God can kill innocent young children, babies or even as yet unborn babies and do so with total impunity. All of this God did according to the Old Testament.
God can travel anywhere anytime.
We can not. We are not remotely free to do as we please. We are born into a societal structure which is really a prison in which our lives are simply one of slavery and servitude to higher powers who themselves are slaves to even higher powers and so on.
If I had free will then:
1 - I choose to never get ill
2 - I choose to live forever and not die
3 - I choose to have sex with any person I choose to
4 - I choose to travel the length and breadth of the galaxy at will
5 - I choose to know everything there is to know
6 - I choose to have the power to create, to manifest matter just using my thought and will
and so on
Naturally I can't do any of those things. I am in a prison, not of my choosing, I had no choice in my birth, I had no choice of the planet I would exist on in the universe, I had no choice of which physical body I would inhabit, indeed I had no choice about being stuffed into a physical body at all.
Everything I do has serious consequences. I can't kill anyone without some higher power punishing me. I can't leave this planet in any real tangible sense. Therefore I am not remotely free. I am a slave. I am effectively a constructed robot, albeit a seemingly sophisticated one, a biological robot obviously designed by some other entity to do work for them, to exist as a slave. My lifespan has been severely restricted by design so that I can't learn and experience too much. Imagine what knowledge we would have if we all lived 1000 years.
In the end we are all just marking time. We're stuck here in these bodies, forcibly thrust into a closed environment (the Earth) which we can not escape and everything we need to survive and live has been seized and made into a commodity which we can only have access to if we participate in the slave system. I'm not sure that even "death" as we think of it, is any kind of escape from this prison. I suspect that we might simply go round and round and round the same loop with our spirit/souls separating from the physical body at "death" and then being reattached to a new body afterward where we are once again born as babies and do the whole slave thing again. Perhaps this is in fact Hell.
Either way there is no free will for humans. Human life is a life of constraints and rules and limitations not freedom.
Only God has true free will. No-one else.
For those that believe in Gods and religions the thought process here is really really simple.
If I hold a gun to your child's head and tell you to lie on the ground otherwise I shoot the child, then you DO NOT have free will. Sure, you could choose not to lie down and let your child be shot but you won't because you love your child. This is not free will. It is force. Coercion. Blackmail.
Similarly the Biblical message is one of forced coercion. Act in such and such a way otherwise you will go to Hell not Heaven. Believe such and such otherwise it's Hell not Heaven.
That is NOT free will. That is slavery. That is Authoritarianism.
Ironically with this entire free will debate, there can only be free will if the biblical God does not exist. There can only be free will if nothing can be predicted, if everything can be random. If things were unpredictable and random then no God could "know everything", no God could be Omniscient. For God to be Omniscient, everything must either be totally predictable (and thus the result of cause and effect) or everything must have already happened, past, present and future in which case what we have is predeterminism, nothing matters because it has all already happened. Take your pick.
The whole situation pretty much sucks TBH.
(edited 2 years ago)
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