(Vanity) God, Free Will, and Chess.
Thanks, grey_whiskers.
Posted on 05/20/2011 9:06:00 PM PDT by grey_whiskers
Cheers!
Thanks for the ping!
(Vanity) God, Free Will, and Chess.
Thanks, grey_whiskers.
Interesting as I was just thinking along these lines today.
A weighty issue.
Thx for the ping.
The only being in existence with absolute free will is God Himself.
Every other being ever created has varying degrees of free will... from animals to human beings.
The degree of free will we possess is based upon the factors of intelligence and self awareness.
The choices we make in life further restrict or expand the degree of free will we will possess in the future.
The most important choice of all being what we do with God.
Please check FreepMail.
Got it.
Thanks.
In reality, free will is more like a dimmer switch, as successive choices harden into character, one becomes less free (to commmit sin or license) but more free -- you are not trapped by evil habits.
Or it is like (to quote singer/songwriter Margaret Becker) "like a banner, anchored yet free" -- some things are fixed, but like a flag on a flagpole, it can fly in any direction, even though it is fixed to the flag.
Thanks for pointing that out!!
Cheers!
Thanks for the ping; post/thoughts.
If election is predicated on God's observation of future events rather than on his active interference in those events, then God is reduced to a mere passive observer who is basically irrelevant in our ultimate destiny.
The FACT of the matter is that without God impinging on our freedom "in the least", we are all eternally lost.
Your theory reduces God to a mere observer of his creation. Taking away the veneer from your premise here, it would appear that what you are preaching is some kind of Pelagian Deism where Man is in control and God is ultimately irrelevant.
My FRiend, unimpinged free will is not a blessing, it is a curse. IF you are a Christian it is because God interfered in your free will. God is not merely an observer of his creation, God is in control of it.
A step too far, let's back up here to the chess game.
Do you agree that there are fixed rules to chess? That therefore, one can enumerate every possible choice for the next move on the board?
If so, one can (for each possible move listed) figure out all possible choices for the next move; and so on, and so on. (In principle there are an infinite number of choices due to unresolvable stalemates; but you can think of them as an "equilibrium" situation where there is no gross change over time.)
Let's say you had a super-duper êber-computer that could do 10100 calculations per second, or whatever, so that within ten seconds of any move on the board, the computer would have neatly calculated and catalogued all possible moves to the end of the game. The computer wouldn't *know* which move you were about to make, but it could "see" ALL of them in advance.
But doing so would not make the computer a passive observer, would it?
And so with God, except that instead of chess, one has the entire real world, and everyone's mind and heart, and all of their myriad choices, moment by moment. (And, if you want to get picky, every tree, animal, molecule, atom, electron, and elementary particle, down to Planck's length and whatever infinitesimal division of time you want.)
God knowing in advance everything that could possibly happen, does not preclude him from interfering -- any point at which he acts, and his actions have effect, that state of the universe is one which he can use as a starting point now and see all interactions possible, until the end of time.
Cheers!
super-duper êber-computer = super-duper über-computer
Your point was that God does not interfere in our free will. My point is that unless God interferes with our free will, we cannot be saved. Hence our salvation is not dependent upon our free will, but upon God changing our will to conform to his.
God doesn't simply know your destiny, he has chosen you in him from before the foundation of the earth.
That is the premise upon which you must build your answers to any perceived paradox between your alleged Free Will and God's determined will. To state that God's election is determined by his response to your free will is to render God irrelevant to your salvation.
God chose you in him before he even formed the earth. Start from there.
Now rethink your reasoning, only this time take dimension time to be a volume rather than a stream, for that is the perspective which God has since He isboth inside and outside of the spacetime universe. Which perspective He chooses to take is His purview, and even Jesus taught this, and He is God with us.
Thanks. For later reading.
Actually even God does not have the libertarian free will men claim for themselves .
Exactly
Cheers!
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