Proud of my Baby Girl

[StudentMI]

That doesn’t really answer my questions but okay.

 

[Zaccheus]

So you think, but the outcome of the event was locked since the foundations of the universe. If God knew that the shooter was going to successfully shoot the person you love, then neither you nor all the king’s horses and men could do a thing to stop it.

In the context of an omnipresent creator God, your free will is an illusion. You may feel you made a choice but literally no other outcome was existentially possible.

If I do a thing and you watch me do it does that mean you made me do it?
God knew from eternity that I would fail one year in high school. That does not mean my choices were meaningless. It means God saw me making the choices. I could have studied more diligently and then God would have seen me pass that year.

God knows the outcomes but we still generate the outcomes, at least some of the time. God just knows before we do, and to see me do something is not the same as to make me do it.

If God is omnipresent then in the moment of creation not only did Genesis 1:1 begin, today began too - at least from the perspective of an omnipresent god.

But not from our perspective, and our perspective is valid for us.

 

[Hume]

catholics don’t believe in predestination

They don’t like to use that word and it’s not considered relevant lay theology, but yeah. They kinda do.

I forget where he said it but even the great Aquinas said the fate of man is unchangeable.

 

[Hume]

If I do a thing and you watch me do it does that mean you made me do it?

If I created you with the foreknowledge that you’d do it, yeah. I think so.

If I didn’t “Make you do it”, then I certainly “Made you to do it”.

 

[sealabeag]

Aquinas on Fate:
https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1116.htm

In answer to your question about free will and Heaven: In my, non-theological terms: In this life, we do not have the Beatific vision, that is, we do not see and experience God in his completeness. “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.” In Heaven we will have that Beatific vision, and seeing and knowing the love and beauty of God, in combination with our choices in this life, we will no longer want or be able to reject him. You say why did God not just create us in this state to begin with? Well, again - we would not have freely chosen it. There would have been no choice. Love is only real love if it is chosen.

 

[Zaccheus]

Zaccheus:

If I do a thing and you watch me do it does that mean you made me do it?

If I created you with the foreknowledge that you’d do it, yeah. I think so.

If I didn’t “Make you do it”, then I certainly “Made you to do it”.

But in a long lifetime I might do hundreds of thousands of things. Did God “Make me to do” each and every one of them?

 

[LeonardoArruda]

If Jesus and God created us and also want us to go to heaven, why didn’t they just create us already in heaven?

Good question, first of all Jesus Is God, and He put us in earth so we can choose to go to heaven, we are not born in hell or heaven becuse in order to get to hell or heaven you need to make a choice, God loves you and wants you to love Him back, if you were already born in heaven you would not really choose Him.

if the part of us that willfully sins is apparently gone when we die and open our eyes in the afterlife, why were we made with that part in the first place?

We have a tendency towards sin, but the choice to do them or not is ours, the reason why we have the tendency is becuse Adam and Eve sinned about (???) years ago, so is like a disease that goes from generation to generation.

 

[Hume]

But in a long lifetime I might do hundreds of thousands of things. Did God “Make me to do” each and every one of them?

You simply could not have done anything else.

I’m not going to argue that any particular action was against your will, like a consciousness trapped inside an automaton, but as every moment that ever existed was created at the moment of creation, the course of everything is set. Cannot be changed.

The person that will end up in heaven will end up in heaven. The person that will end up in hell will end up in hell. Absolutely nothing we can do about it, else we violate all sorts of "omni"s that are used to describe the Christian god.

 

[meltzerboy2]

Why aren’t we born knowing all that we need to know about life? My answer: because we need the opportunity to grow and develop our faculties through learning and experience. This process is what we call life. If we were given everything at the start, what would be the purpose of living? Same regarding heaven. We must develop our mind and faith and sense of morality, justice, compassion, empathy. This takes a whole lifetime to do, and, despite our shortcomings, we are better people for having made the journey.

 

[Hume]

Why aren’t we born knowing all that we need to know about life?

First, I typically enjoy your posts very much. Thank you for opining.

Next, I don’t see that as being the question. I think she was trying to basically trying restate the problem of evil using her 6 year old, evangelical perspective.

“If God’s so good, why don’t we all just go to heaven now (rather than risk hell)” sort of thing. Turns into a discussion about the problem of evil, whether free will exists and is a moral good unto itself, whether free will exists in the eternal afterlife, and if it doesn’t, why give folks a chance to doom themselves?

So on and so forth.

 

[meltzerboy2]

Gd is better than supposed because He gives us the opportunity to consider the choices regarding how we would like to live. The matter of free will is also an opportunity to develop our power of reasoning and to lead a better life than one of personal gratification only. This choice is a more-than-generous gift from Gd because it makes us partners with Him in creating and defining the meaning of our own lives. Making such choices entails risk but without some risk and challenge, life would be stagnant and without purpose.

Your daughter sounds like a budding philosopher, maybe another Hume.

Thanks for the compliment.

 

[Zaccheus]

I’m not going to argue that any particular action was against your will, like a consciousness trapped inside an automaton, but as every moment that ever existed was created at the moment of creation, the course of everything is set. Cannot be changed.

Every moment was not created at the moment of creation. We live in time: we make our decisions in time. God created the universe at the beginning. He knows all moments but we don’t. We live through them in sequence and our moment to moment decisions are real.
God sees what we do. That does not mean God makes us do it all.

I think we’re not going to find agreement on this. We argue from different premises. I’m dropping the subject. May God bless you and your family, your little girl especially.

 

[mary77]

we are made with free will to be free, it comes with the package no its included in the package because we are participating by our creative choices or else we would not experience joy.

 

[Hume]

Every moment was not created at the moment of creation. We live in time: we make our decisions in time. God created the universe at the beginning. He knows all moments but we don’t.

That’s the only real difference. To us, time is a train going on it’s rails. To the omnipresent Christian God, he is simultaneously “present” at all points on the rail while we’re only present where the train is.

What you’re going to be doing exactly 4 days, 3 hours, 52 minutes and 16 seconds from now is absolutely fixed if your God is omnipresent. He’s already “there”, so to speak. You’re just not.

But what you’re going to do at that time cannot be changed. Fully inevitable if your deity is simultaneously omnipresent, omniscient and creator.

Again, Gen 1:1 happened in the very beginning to “us”.
To God, Gen 1:1 happened as did Rev 22:21.

 

[Anicette]

Officially the Catholic Church believe that people are not destined to be saved to to fall, like some protestantism believe it. We believe in free will and that it is the man who makes his choices.

Some dogmas such as Immaculate Conception seems to implicate a predestination, but even if we believe that Mary was born without sin, she had the choice to say “no” to the Angel and it would have been the end of the story.