Free Will and Sin

[LilyM]

I like the ruler example, that is very practical.

Can you help me answer this: Why do it? Why did God make our reality knowing it would fail? And how can a sinless and holy God create something perfect knowing it would/will/did sin? If God is all knowing He must have planned sin and its redemption and I find that a difficult paradox.

PLAN our sin? No. It’s like having a child - you know that the child will have sorrows and troubles in its life, that doesn’t mean you actively plan for it to do so.

Planning is the wrong word. But certainly God foreknew that we would sin, and did foreknow that Christ would come to redeem us.

Why is it a paradox? Again, if I have a child I know that child is going to dirty many many diapers, draw on the walls and wet its bed from time to time, and that I’m going to have to change those diapers, clean those walls and clean those bedsheets. I also know that the child is going to need housing, feeding and schooling, and that I will need to work my butt off to provide all those things for it.

These, and the many other sacrifices involved in being a parent, are all more or less cheerfully made if I love my child, because the joy of being a parent makes up for them.

 

[gravel]

Comparing God to a parent only works if God is not all-knowing, that would be like me. I have two children and want the best for them and desire them to make the right choices, and I give them freewill to help them grow and learn. So in this respect Lily you are right, “plan” would be a bad choice, and even an impossible choice.

However! If God is all-knowing He is not like a parent because he knows everything at all points in time. When there was nothing in the universe and He decided to create everything He must have known all about sin and what He was doing, that all His create would fall apart, from Lucifer and the angels falling, to man sinning in the garden.

Steve: Good question, and that could get very complex very fast. But simply, Isn’t the freedom to love/create and hate/sin the same freedom, those are emotions and change? I think the “greater good” is having the free will to choose. But I do not think that the mere fact we have freewill and that I could possibly choose to do good is something that could outweigh the sin that I have done. I think sin can only be repaired by redemption, that special bleach we can only get from Jesus Christ.

Also, “the greater good” is a wicked concept, tell that to all the Arawak Indians Columbus was responsible for slaughtering and committing genocide. There is no greater good in the present tense, it is only possible when looking back and rewriting for the current good.

So I still don’t understand why do it? Why willfully create something knowing it would fall apart, at such a great cost to the creation?

 

[thenobes]

Steve: Good question, and that could get very complex very fast. But simply, Isn’t the freedom to love/create and hate/sin the same freedom, those are emotions and change?

I don’t think the freedom one has to act rightly is the same as his lack of same when acting as a slave of sin.

I think the “greater good” is having the free will to choose. But I do not think that the mere fact we have freewill and that I could possibly choose to do good is something that could outweigh the sin that I have done.

I don’t think personally it outweighs it either. But if you realize that God must be active in giving us the Grace to choose the good, in order for us to choose it, then you realize how remarkable and wonderful it is that even one man chooses to follow the good and how he must maintain faith in order to do so. Thus faith and perseverance are the greater good, and not the sin, nor even the good deed, unless we agree that it is because these deeds can keep one’s faith alive.

I think sin can only be repaired by redemption, that special bleach we can only get from Jesus Christ.

Agreed, but the faith, hope and love are maintained by our free choosing of the Good.

Also, “the greater good” is a wicked concept, tell that to all the Arawak Indians Columbus was responsible for slaughtering and committing genocide. There is no greater good in the present tense, it is only possible when looking back and rewriting for the current good.

God’s greater good was not necessarily Columbus’s. Let’s not participate in equivocation. God alone is good.

So I still don’t understand why do it? Why willfully create something knowing it would fall apart, at such a great cost to the creation?

Because doing right and maintaining faith, and so living forever with God would not be otherwise possible…my opinion.

peace
steve

 

[danmagne]

God is not only omniscient, He is also omnipotent, i.e., He is with total, unlimited power and authority. God can do as He pleases. He decided or chose to make man, His obra maestra, to be different from and stand out above the rest of His earthly creation, and thus gave them knowledge and free will just like the angels.

From the very beginning, God chose to give us privacy in making choices or decisions; He delibertely put Himself off limits in tha area. If God took control of Adam’s and Eve’s will, they would not have not committed the sin of pride, which gave rise to a wrong exercise of the free will given them.

However, with free will comes accountability. I’d rather stop at this point, for what naturally proceeds from the use of free will is another topic.

 

[geekborj]

I don’t understand the logic for the following statement. “So, since he knows we are gonna do it, it can’t be a sin.” The best answer I can come up with is It is sin. Just because God knows we are going to do it doesn’t change the fact that we went against his commandments and disobeyed him. The way I understand free will and predestination is that we do the good things through God and he gets the credit but when we do evil we do it of our own accord and take the blame. I hope that answers the question.

Simply:

1. Love can only be realized with free will. Hence, obedience out of love and therefore sin because of disobedience. Free will => love => obedience.
2. God’s ability to know both future and past does not affect our free will. Out of his love, God (as believed by Christians) does not take this free will away even if He knows already how one will end up.

For me, it is comforting to realize that God, being all-knowing, optimizes history so that every individual will be (has been) given all the possible chances of showing that authentic love for Him in the end.

 

[eggsem]

“I [SIGN]always asked, if God knows everything, and he let’s us choose what we want, then he knows we are gonna do it. It’s fate. So, since he knows we are gonna do it, it can’t be a sin.”[/SIGN]
In response to the above I have always felt that without free will there would be no sin. But free will is a beautiful gift from God in that it let’s us choose our path. God wants us to want Him on our own. He knows all , sees all in such a way that we cannot. He sees All with the extra seeing ability that also sees the application of free will. It is NOT fate. It is simply his ability to KNOW.

Love and Prayers to all.

 

[Cinbare]

People have conveniently forgotten that God is omnipotent. He knows the beginning AND the end of a thing. Man in his finite mind cannot fathom the depth of His knowledge, and cannot grasp the concept of knowing the end of a thing, and what that really means.

Free will was most certainly given to man. Humanity can choose to give their hearts to Christ and follow Him, or simply to reject Him, with disastrous results. All throughout life, man has the chance to respond to Him, right to the very last breath. Even though God does know the end result, it is STILL up to man to respond.

Don’t be fooled by Satan. Sin is sin, and it GRIEVES the heart of God. Reject sin and choose Christ !

God says NOTHING to man about what the final end result of his life will be. Only that God beckons us to respond to Him. Man is only requested to live by faith in His Christ, and by THAT outcome, coupled with a genuine response to God’s invitation to life, will the result be favorable to man. It cannot be earned. It is a gift. And we are living in an age of grace. Time is running out.

Come to Christ!! While you still have a chance to respond to Him.

 

[losh14]

Now he said:

"Hmm…so he knows what we are going to do no matter what. He knows what we will do before we do it, so there is no way to change our minds. We (in a way) have to do it.

Sounds a lot like fate to me."

The weakest part is between “He knows what we will do” and “so there is no way to change our minds.” I would argue that He does try but He does not force. Your discussant will argue that if He does not force it is because He cannot force, and your counter should be He does not force because He desires that we willingly follow Him, and that He condemns only for willingly disobeying Him.

There’s a difference between knowledge and cause - one is prescience (pre-knowing) and the other is predestination (pre-causation). The key question is not “who knows it” but rather “who does it”.

If I observe an sign in front of a vacant lot that says “Coming Soon - Dunkin Donuts!” I expect there to be a Dunkin Donuts store in the near future. That does not mean I cause it, nor that it is fated.

Likewise, if I am given a parametric equation that describes a stochastic system, I can predict the resulting values of that system given the parameters. I do not cause the system, but I can understand the outcome before the system is simulated.

Here is where I suspect your discussant is confused.
God created all things. Agreed? Does God cause all things?

Let’s assume for the moment He does. Consider that last night a local college student was grabbed, pulled into an alley, mugged, raped and beaten. Did God make the man do it - not just make him but indeed direct his every motion and movement like some puppet?

If God did, then God wants the rape to happen. But we know from Scripture that God is offended by sin. So God cannot enjoy sin.

If God did, then the man is not at fault. If God does not punish him, then God is not just. But we know from Scripture that God is just.

If God did, and God is offended by sin and punishes the guilty, then God’s punishing the rapist makes God capricious. But we know God is just, that He loves the repentant sinner.

We must conclude, then, that God had foreknowledge and hates the action before it is done. What we cannot know is whether the rapist heard the voice of God ordering him not to, or instead listened to some Satanic voice.

Relating back to the question at hand:
God will let us walk into the very mouth of Hell but will scream at us the entire way. If we do not hear Him, it is not through lack of volume but rather willfull ignorance.

 

[mpenaco]

When you say that man has free will, does that mean that man has the ability to either accept or reject salvation? Has God placed upon man the responsbility to choose between heaven or hell? If we are dead in our sins and if man’s thoughts are continually evil as the Bible claims, how can we recognize good from evil? How can we decide to choose life instead of death unless God resurrects our dead spirits first?

 

[fear_n0_evil]

When a father, or a mother teaches a child to walk, he knows the child can and will learn even though the child falls many times will learn eventually no matter how many falls the toddler makes, the father will be there help him get up and try again, and the child is always willing. Freewill and sin isn’t the only way of looking at predestination, there is also freewill and virtue.
Sin is where we begin and will always stay if we are not taught to walk in virtue. Outside of time, or in eternity, we would appear to be taking the first steps in virtue and falling, another step and down we go again. A hand of Grace from the Father through the Holy Spirit lifts us up again.
Does the Father know I will fall into sin? Of course. Does He intend me to stay in sin? No, that is why he sent His Son and the Holy Spirit. Am I willing? Well, honestly, some days more than others. But if I become a saint it’ll be because of His Grace. And if become a saint it will be because I choose to co-operate with the Hand of Grace I was offered. I know His Grace is sufficient, and He knew it before I was.

 

[headsmith]

This determinism v. indeterminism debate has gone on since the Sixteenth Century because Luther opened the door to subjectivism. He had to in order to detach himself from papal Christianity.

Christianity is an objective religion in the sense that God operates outside our perception of Him. Whether we acknowledge Him or not, He is there. Subjectivism makes truth by thinking it; objectivism, in this sense, only observes objective things through the bodily senses and makes truth by adequately conceiving them.

Thus, to be an adequate deity, God does in fact control all details of the universe, past, present, and future. However, we have volition, which is free will. We can choose anything at all because we cannot predict the future.

Science seems to be flying in the face of this with its goal of prediction and control of the future. This is why science seems so adverse to religion. However, what science predicts and controls is only probabilities, never certainties. Nor does it predict the accidents in detail of future events, only its probable elements. And we need certainties in order to act. We never act until we are certain that what we do next will probably yield a personal benefit.

There are no pure altruisms. Even Christ’s hanging on a cross was motivated by His knowledge that He that way was redeeming all of mankind. That was His "personal benefit, " and He said so when He said, “It is finished.” That antecedent of the pronoun “it” was His mission in the world.

This is perfectly illustrated by President Harry Truman’s request to J. Robert Oppenheimer: When Oppenheimer said that there was a thousandth-to-one chance that the atomic bomb test would incinerate the atmosphere, Harry said he’d give permission when it was a millionth-to-one chance. And Oppenheimer came back with that answer. In short, Oppenheimer could not predict with certainty what would happen, only a probability.

In short, science is about probabilities, not about certainties in the future. And of course the past cannot be changed, though histories about it change with the times. Hence, the present is when we decide what to do next about our immediate, intermediate, and final future. What counts is having an adequate view of that final goal, namely God, which we can get with an adequate view of Christianity. When we have that, the route there falls into place, and we know what act will yield a probable certainty.

Hence, any God with half a claim to be the sole deity has to be in control of everything, but we are utterly free to choose, too, because we cannot see the future. In short, time travel is a fun fantasy but never a possible factuality. We can blame Einstein for suggesting that time is an entity, like something with matter, and can be bent. His reification of time is fun to play with but wholly speculative.

Hence, the free will v. fate debate is a dead issue, except to Calvinists, who think they can tell who are the elect subjectively. Catholics know that the elect are the baptized objectively, and what they do with that status is known to God but up to them as they act within it. Knowing that God knows what we will do before we do it does not control what we do, for we cannot tell ahead what the interaction of our body with the surrounding chains of causality will yield until He reveals it to us by what happens. In short, we learn the Father’s will by watching what happens.

 

[PJM]

=Quies_Noctum;526377]Someone on another message board that I go to recently posted a difficult “question”. It goes as follows:

The difference my friend is that “knowing,” permitting," and “causing” are as far apart as "the East is from the West in cause and effect."

Simply because God knows IN NO WAY IMPLIES that God causes the action.

Every human person for all time; has been Gifted with Spiritual Gifts of a Mind, an Intellect and a Freewill that are specifically provided to partner with our Souls.

The precise use of these gifts is well expressed in **Isaiah 43:7 and 21 **
[7] every one who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made." [21] the people whom I formed for myself that they might declare my praise."

God, being God in an absolute sense MUST [no option here] offer every person SUFFICIENT Grace to say YES to God’s call for ones personal salvation. But what happens is that GOD [again in an absolute sense] cannot fource one to accept His Grace. [nor would God want to; which is exactly why God made us as He did.].

It is always, everytime, no exceptions mans FREEWILL choice aided by ones MIND AND INTELLECT, to choose geaven or hell. It is mans decision, NOT GOD"S WILL or desire.

God loves us Soooooo very much that He allows us to choose! The fact that God knows beforehand what our choice is; in NO WAY effects our decision; and is simply further evidence of how much trust God places in His Created beings.

Knowing is NOT DOING!

Love and prayers,
Pat

 

[tommyjoe]

We humans deal with the present. The past is gone and the future hasn’t happened yet. In God’s eyes all things are happening at the same time because God is not limited by time and space. Just because God knows what you will do does not mean he hasn’t given you the free will not to do that sin. If you decide not to do the sin you were going to do God knows that too. The only difference is when you do the right thing God will make you stronger so the next time you are faced with a similar situation it will be easier to say no to sin and aggravate Satan. Talk to God and listen, He will give you the answer, just listen.

 

[I_Fortuna]

If someone tells you they are going to murder someone, and then proceeds to do so, are they any less morally responsible for the act because you had foreknowledge of it? Did your foreknowledge of the event in any way cause the event?

Also bear in mind that God foreknows all of our actions because he is omniscient, yes, but also because he stands in eternity, outside of time, and has the fullness of time at his disposal.

IMHO
I am sorry I have to reject your comparison because if we have foreknowledge of a crime and do nothing then we are complicit in the crime.

I believe there is a moment that transcends time in which God has the ability to perform a miracle and/or use that moment for us to make a choice to do His will. Of course, He is all-knowing, but I believe He does not create the scenarios that may lead us to certain bad choices some of those are orchestrated by forces of Satan working through us that constantly and insidiously works to separate us from God. In other words there are two forces opposing each other all the time. I believe the forces of good, God, are winning even though it may not seem that way because God is all powerful and good and we are not and we are subject to the force of evil or Satan. This portrays a world in flux.

If one looks in nature God shows us that the law of opposing forces is His law and that this law, opposing forces, exists in all things. Also, consider God’s law of cause and effect, for every cause there is an effect or consequence.

I define all-knowing as God knowing that there are several choices that we have the opportunity to make and this is why we must constanty try to do His will and keep His word and worship Him. And, all powerful as He has the power to change any event. This is why God and His word are in concert with a living breathing world whose consciousness is evolving and growing as God has planned for us as human beings with souls to do.

P.S. If this wasn’t the case God would be bored (?) and there would be no redemption for the sinner and prayer would mean nothing. I have no other way to describe it in human terms. The true answer is one of God’s mystery but it is fun to conjecture.:curtsey:

 

[I_Fortuna]

I know this is a corney example but the overall point is that God can help guide our decisions and he sees the outcome in the end, but the gift of free will allows us to choose out own fate. We choose to sin by knowing the sin, being conscience at the time of sin, and giving full consent of the will. Notice that ***we ***give full consent of the will to sin. Sin is all about choice, not fate and God knowing our choice does nothing to change the fact that we made it.

I disagree, sometimes we do not choose to sin and we do it without knowing it is a sin. Satan and his works are insidious. Example: it may look as though we are doing the right thing at the time but the consequences of our actions may play out differently. Or, we just may not fully know that what we did was a sin.

As I have said before, evil is insidious in other word, by it’s very nature creeps in sometimes without our noticing. If we are in prayer and constantly vigilent, we may
be able to thwart it.

This is why we say in confession “for those sins known and unknown to us”.

 

[PJM]

=headsmith;6579515]This determinism v. indeterminism debate has gone on since the Sixteenth Century because Luther opened the door to subjectivism. He had to in order to detach himself from papal Christianity.

Christianity is an objective religion in the sense that God operates outside our perception of Him. Whether we acknowledge Him or not, He is there. Subjectivism makes truth by thinking it; objectivism, in this sense, only observes objective things through the bodily senses and makes truth by adequately conceiving them.

Thus, to be an adequate deity, God does in fact control all details of the universe, past, present, and future. However, we have volition, which is free will. We can choose anything at all because we cannot predict the future.

Science seems to be flying in the face of this with its goal of prediction and control of the future. This is why science seems so adverse to religion. However, what science predicts and controls is only probabilities, never certainties. Nor does it predict the accidents in detail of future events, only its probable elements. And we need certainties in order to act. We never act until we are certain that what we do next will probably yield a personal benefit.

There are no pure altruisms. Even Christ’s hanging on a cross was motivated by His knowledge that He that way was redeeming all of mankind. That was His "personal benefit, " and He said so when He said, “It is finished.” That antecedent of the pronoun “it” was His mission in the world.

This is perfectly illustrated by President Harry Truman’s request to J. Robert Oppenheimer: When Oppenheimer said that there was a thousandth-to-one chance that the atomic bomb test would incinerate the atmosphere, Harry said he’d give permission when it was a millionth-to-one chance. And Oppenheimer came back with that answer. In short, Oppenheimer could not predict with certainty what would happen, only a probability.

In short, science is about probabilities, not about certainties in the future. And of course the past cannot be changed, though histories about it change with the times. Hence, the present is when we decide what to do next about our immediate, intermediate, and final future. What counts is having an adequate view of that final goal, namely God, which we can get with an adequate view of Christianity. When we have that, the route there falls into place, and we know what act will yield a probable certainty.

Hence, any God with half a claim to be the sole deity has to be in control of everything, but we are utterly free to choose, too, because we cannot see the future. In short, time travel is a fun fantasy but never a possible factuality. We can blame Einstein for suggesting that time is an entity, like something with matter, and can be bent. His reification of time is fun to play with but wholly speculative.

Hence, the free will v. fate debate is a dead issue, except to Calvinists, who think they can tell who are the elect subjectively. Catholics know that the elect are the baptized objectively, and what they do with that status is known to God but up to them as they act within it. Knowing that God knows what we will do before we do it does not control what we do, for we cannot tell ahead what the interaction of our body with the surrounding chains of causality will yield until He reveals it to us by what happens. In short, we learn the Father’s will by watching what happens.

Well done… THANKS,

Welcome to the Forum!

 

[edgarddb]

In my Bible study I stumbled on some very confusing Verses: 1 Sam. 16:14-18 God send an evil spirit to torment King Saul, not once but twice: 1 Sam. 18: 8-11 The next day an evil spirit of God came over Saul.
It seems in the first instance to create a way for David to meet with Saul, and the next time: to lay the groundwork for the demise of Saul and the elevation of David to the trone.
But according to those verses God does have control over our conduct?