Can free will and a divine plan co-exist?
Many Christians believe that in God's divine plan, he integrated free will into his plan without fault.
YES
Side Score: 10
|
 |
NO
Side Score: 19
|
|
|
|
|
Yes "free will" and "divine plan" can co-exist in the fairy land that both these ideas come from. Neither can exist in reality. Now concerning "free will" - when I say it cant exist in reality I mean in an absolute sense. We do enjoy some freedom of choice, but you always have to take that in context (as with all reasoning). As an absolute, "free will" doesn't exist. Now concerning a "divine plan"; it is a similar absolute concept as "free will" but only dumber and further away from being in any way detectable in the known world. When I say this I can just hear the rattling brains of dimwits coming up with stupid sentences like "well, you cant disprove that there is a divine plan" and I hate having to tell grown or semi-grown people this (because kids at kindergarten have the brain capacity to understand such a thing) but I will say this once again: trying to argue your case by falling on the "prove a negative" non-argument, in no way helps proving your statement. If you want to argue/prove something it is your responsibility to bring evidence. If there is no hard evidence, but only folk tales and political Pr work that support your argument, then welcome to the club of millions of civilizations who have had such "wives tales" and never shown any evidence for their beliefs. What I am saying is that just because there is some literature and organizations around ideas, doesn't make those ideas any more believable.......except to a certain type of person who thinks that the truth to ideas is determined by how many people follow that idea. And I sure hope you are not one of those people because they are always getting into wars with other people of the same kind that just by accident of birth have a conflicting idea to those people I say: Pretty please with sugar on top , try to grow up. Side: yes
0
points
I hate being bound by logic, but yes they can. Before theists get a hard on though, they don't, but technically they could to a degree. If it were to be described as did one of the only Christians (Jesuit, incidently he disliked born-again types as much as I) who managed to make even a thimble of sense: Life could be like a football game. The main event is the game at hand on the field, and the "plan" is that one team would win, and one team would lose. The result of this match is the plan, however what happens between is very much up to the players... somewhat. Anyone who has played a sport knows that they want to win. Sure they could change their mind, they have free will, but chances are they will use that "free will" to at least strive for the intended result of the "creator" who planned the whole thing out. Even if one or two players decide to use their free will for alterior motives, that likely would not even change the end result. In the end according to the theist, the correct team will win all the while choosing themselves what plays to run, what socks to wear, etc. Simple enough. Even simpler for most because at a football game, most people aren't playing. We hordes are only in the stands. For us our free will is boundless - not even hampered by the rules of the game. And in the end, no matter what a fan chooses to do during the course of this game (free will) the game will end the same. The plan will not have been affected in the least by these insignificant beings and all we can hope is we were cheering for the right team. And as little as those people in the stands matter, lets say one goes really nuts and runs on the field naked, as little as that matters even MORE of us are only watching it on tv. We litterally cannot even get the illusion of changing the outcome because we are no where near the game anyway, just watching. So yeah, free will and a plan all in one place co-existing. Still doesn't mean Jesus made the do whatever you're blaming him for most recently. Even by that theastic analogy, he still doesn't care so much for you. The most annoying thing about this analogy is that the chances of a theist coming up with such a simple explanation for the seemingly incompatible theories is about 1 in a million, but there ya go. God help you if you dare ever use an atheist's explanation in your mission to dumb down the earth, I heard you can go to hell for that. That said, why a creator would make a game of the whole thing can mean only a couple things. 1. He's absolutely nothing like the Christian or any other popular god any religion claims him to be, 2. It's just a cheesy analogy that means nothing at all because in reality there is no "plan" and our limited freewill is bound by experience, genetics, and circumsance. One or the other. Side: yes
Can you describe what you are referring to further? I don't think the analogy is correct, I was actually just giving an analogy how the two possibly could work at the same time. However you'll notice a divine plan would not be specific to every single individual but a generalized plan. Is that what you are referring to? In which case I would say it depends on the definition of a divine plan. Side: yes
1
point
Yes God created everyone and everything he knows whats goin to happen he has always known what was going to happen everything is predestined doesnt mean he is controlling what we do he gave us free will and he knows what we are going to do. He is eternal time doesnt apply to him he created it also, he created up for a relationship man sinned against him he knew it was going to happen he knew he was going to make a way for man to be saved if hes such a bad and hateful God like people think than why make a way for us to go to heaven instead of just destroying everyone and throwing them in hell Side: yes
1
point
1
point
Why would he need to control people after they're created if he already creates them to go along to his divine plan. As soon as he creates someone they're always going to do what he knows they will do. Also this must mean that God created people who would sin and be sent to Hell. Man cannot sin against him if that's what he created him to do as in no sense are they disobeying him. Side: NO
|
In reality, either way, free will doesn't exist. If there is a God with a divine plan, than it's a plan and nothing we do matters, thus keeping us where we are no matter what. IT'S PART OF THE PLAN MUTHERFU-! but if there is no God and we are built by the chain reaction of events (with even a God, that eventually has to be the result), we are only dependent on what occurred before us. Example: one particle does something, either creating more particles or colliding with another or w/e. That collision or split makes more particles. skip a few years, we have the Universe and our planet. Every event influences the actions of the future, like a puzzle. Skip a few years, we have human beings. Every decision we make in life is based off of our experience. Our experiences are dependent on the environment that we observe. That environment is dependent off of all the events before it. Those events are dependent on the origin of the Universe. The origin of the Universe is dependent on the very original piece of existence. That piece of existence, and w/e it did, pre-determined everything. This, I came to realize myself. Most likely it's already a theory, but I never read about this... it just makes sense. (same thing with becoming an Atheist, I never had any Atheist influence, although I knew about it, it just came to me). Side: No
This isn't an issue of contention or mystery. They are mutually exclusive concepts. In order to have a divine plan, like the Calvinists teach (an all-knowing god who determined everything before creation) you cannot have free will. If you have free will, then god cannot know what you will do, and cannot plan accordingly. Trying to bring them together is like saying something is simultaneously hot and cold, one excludes the other. Side: No
I would like to believe that from a philosophical standpoint, freewill is exscersized on a daily basis. Wrong. Free-will as the form we are talking about does not exist and divine plan, I wouldn't call it divine but lets just call it fate for arguments sake, is a moderator that governs every denominator that is not US. These includes the cosmos, physics, quantum-mechanics and natural order. All these things are immune to the concept of 'free- will'. These things are examples of governing forces of our universe that control your life. For example, with natural order, it is because of the earths four seasonal intervals that cause us to create cultivational patterns. Food was a key moderator for humans in the early stages of man as it regulated the time we got up, what food we had to eat, what we had to grow. Emphasis on the "had". On a more to scale sence, our state of mind, and current behaviour is based on an infinite ammount of factors contributing to our emotions and perspective. Neurobiology explains human emotion is a pleasant or unpleasant mental state organized in the limbic system of the mammalian brain. It is designed to cope with the bodies current state in the envrionment. If something negative happens, we feel sad. As a result, our actions will reflect our emotions. for example, feeling sad will make you want to cry, self-abuse, or act out your emotions on other people. People will say that us acting negativley is purely a poor excersizing of free-will. Not true. If factors governing us are controlled by an incontrollable envrionment, then the free will that we are told to possess does not exist. Other examples are when you wake up to go to work. You are not excersizing free-will because you 'have' to work in order to have enough money to eat. This is our survival mechanism at work. Hence free-will and divine plan cannot coexist simply because free-will does not exist at all (or atleast in the form we know it). Side: No
|
