Omnipotence of God?

[Xiao15]

JoVo

The problem here is that if God is omnipotent, then He can do anything that He wants.

+ If He can do anything that he wants, He can also make us do anything that He wants.
+ If He can make us do anything that He wants, then we cannot do everything that we want because He will have the ability to control us.
+ If we cannot do everything that we want, then there is no free will.

I don't agree. I think that He can make us do whatever he wants, he just doesn't necessarily exercise that power. It goes back to the Adam and Eve story. God placed the tree with the Fruit of Knowledge in the middle of the garden to test them. He could have stopped them by making them do what he wanted, but He didn't, and Adam and Eve still chose to eat the Fruit.

JoVo

But that's not the case. Free will is the ability to do what we want, in a nutshell. All we need is the ability. If we, from time to time, are constrained from using that ability, then we would not necessarily lose our free will. We would just be unable to use it here and there.

The problem between God's omniscience and free will is more troublesome than the one your teacher has between His omnipotence and free will. I think Mill made a better argument:

+ There is evil in the world.
+ God does not desire there to be evil in the world.
+ Therefore, God would remove the evil in the world if he could.
+ Conclusion: God is not omnipotent.

I don't agree with that either. True, there is Evil in the world and God does not desire there to be evil in the world. But I don't think He would remove the evil if He could. It's kind of like a parent who knows the right path but wants their child to figure it out on their own. Self-help, sort of.

[JoVo]

Poop: Missing the point. I'm sure you got it, though.

Xiao: What parent wants evil to befall his child?

[chaoticpuppet]

There is no freewill not because there is or isn't an all-knowing god; there is no freewill because we are controlled by previous actions, which are both our own, and others'. Also, these previous actions are out of our control, because they are partly based on other peoples actions; which relies on the fact that one cannot control anothers actions, they may influence them, but, they do not control them.

[Mechanism]

If god knows the outcome of each of our choices, but not before the choices are made,
Then god knows the outcome of the first choice that we ever made.
This outcome will span the entirety of our lives. No free will except in our first choice.

If god knows the outcomes before we make the choice, then we don't even get that first choice.

There are other problems with "free will", anyway.

If god is omnipotent, then the act of making humans that he can't control is a logical impossibility. I don't see how this particular thing conflicts with the idea of free will, though, because he obviously made the people, and can control them when we wants, but he doesn't want to.

Quote:

But, since God is omnipotent as well, he doesn't have to follow the bounds of logic. And without logic, there's no logical paradoxes.

So basically you can solve the whole problem with fox bagel hot spindle mars boat Avengers Assemble!

Basically.
And while He's at it, God can:
Forget that He remembers everything,
Be ignorant of His omniscience,
And use his omnipotence to make himself impotent. In the past.

I think that without logic, there's insanity.
It's not a solution.

[Sseureoji Sin]

I would agree that he's omni-potent and yet we have free will, primarilly because I suppose you could call me a Cathar as far as those beliefs go. I believe God basically left Earth to be ruled by "the God of this world." (namely Satan) He doesn't really intervene much at all. I mean, who's seen a vision of God? Most see Mary.

[Deep Vermillion]

Fiddlers Green

Xiao15

See, I don't necessarily think that. Say that you're in a fork in the road and you don't know which direction to go. It's your choice to go wherever, but God knows what will happen if you take either.

Ah, but YHVH already knows which path you will take, and because the "God of the Book" is omniscient, that knowledge is perfect, so your decision is already made. At least that's the point I'm stuck on. I'm actually quite torn on this subject...

The Bible says that God exists outside of time. That he sees everything that has, does and will happen doesn't mean that he causes it, just that he has a, for lack of a better term, "birdseye view" of time.

Again, the TV guide example: Look in the paper and read the TV guide. Now you know what'll happen in the future on TV. Does thist mean that you're the one causing it to happen?