Prophecies VS free will

[DarwinsOtherTheory]

I was discussing this issue on another forum and my point was that if prophecies are true then there is no free will, my example was the antichrist, there are 46 prophecies concerning the antichrist so my point is, could someone kill the antichrist? the morons didn't get my point and started rambling about how difficult it is to kill a world leader when my point wasn't about whether it would be practical or not but whether we would have the free will to do it, if we kill him, the prophecy fails, if we can't then god is interfering with our free will, what do you think?

 

[Aught3]

Why does it matter so much to disprove free-will? I guess I'm asking if is there a second part to your argument.

Does prophesy disprove free-will? Prophesy seems to imply pre-determinism which would mean the future was already set (in some ways) thus there would be certain events which we could only choose from a limited set of possible actions. I think it does show a problem for free-will, but what's your next move?

 

[DarwinsOtherTheory]

Because the explanation of all the evil in the world and other dumb stuff is the fact that we have free will and god cannot intervene, so if god can prevent you from using your free will to kill the antichrist why doesn't he prevent evil in general?

 

[Synystyr]

Its only free will when they decide, and they're about as consistent as the wind.

 

[Aught3]

Oh ok, you've got a good point there.

I don't usually try to use their theology to disprove their faith anymore. Most of them will admit that it is inherently contradictory and I don't see the point in continuing that part of the conversation any longer.

Actually, the christian concept of free will is completely at odds with what we know about reality - but then that's more or less expected isn't it?

 

[DarwinsOtherTheory]

yeah my point basically is that you can't have free will and prophecies at the same time, if prophecies are true, then there's nothing you can do to change them, hence you don't have free will.

 

[irmerk]

yeah my point basically is that you can't have free will and prophecies at the same time, if prophecies are true, then there's nothing you can do to change them, hence you don't have free will.

If I were a Christian, like PCS, I would dare say you are an agent of the devil trying to deceive us.

 

[Netheralian]

yeah my point basically is that you can't have free will and prophecies at the same time, if prophecies are true, then there's nothing you can do to change them, hence you don't have free will.

I don't think its just prophecies and free will that can't exist at the same time, but gods hand in pretty much anything and free will. You always hear the comment that god works through people - but wouldn't that also inhibit free will which is supposed to be the big important thing... Free will would mean that God cannot even make the slightest suggestion to you - how well does your free will work when you are being suggested something by a super being? Wouldn't you take it as an absolute order?

 

[corvardus]

My example was the antichrist, there are 46 prophecies concerning the antichrist so my point is, could someone kill the antichrist? If we kill him, the prophecy fails, if we can't then god is interfering with our free will, what do you think?

The strength of Prophesy is all in the interpetation and more often than not after the event. First you would have to identify the anti-christ as the one mentioned in whatever prophesy. Are those 46 prophecies talking about the same individual?

I'd say that there are 4 billion potential anti-Christs on this planet at the moment and with each murder of one that is, a prophesy fails.

Assume for the moment a true prophesy exists and are what they say on the tin. What is going to come to pass. Free will only comes into play when there is a divine intervention occuring. Free will can always operate against and for the individual in question.

You have free will given by God, but what about Free-will given by governments. The human one is quite often an illusion. You have free will to kill the antichrist and if you do then that particular antichrist wasn't THE antichrist. If you are dealing with THE antichrist then that antichrist would take his own actions against people like you and you will ultimately fail.

In that case, though, the onus would be on the losing side to prove that there was some divine intervention at play a difficult task at the best of times considering people can't prove that their deity exists in the first place.

A pure honest-to-god prophesy I don't feel exists because I consider time to be similar to an hour glass sand timer. Each and every grain of sand builds what we call the present. Knowledge of the exact arrangements of the sand particles to come is impossible and most likely the mere knowledge of an upcoming arrangment will change it, nullifying said prophesy.

I'm open to the idea of human prophesy since it is often stating the obvious, someone seeing something outside of the normal boundaries of the status-quo have a high probability of producing a counter-balance no matter what it is. Its easy enough to do. The trick comes in recognising it in the first place and then determine what the likely counter-balance might be.

The Anti-christ are one of the more obvious ones. Who wouldn't love to go down in history as killing Christ (the idea?) once and for all? There would be money, women and worship from billions for that!

 

[Synystyr]

I could proclaim myself the antichrist, sacrifice myself, and then encourage you to worship me forever for my courageous, eternal fate-changing decision.

 

[Daealis]

I've tried to use similar things with one apologetic. I'm just arguing that the whole christian god concept is quite impossible with free will.

My philosophy is rusty so I have no idea how sound my reasoning is, but its something like this:
-If god is all-knowing and all-powerful, he can see the future. Alternatively, as PCS often states, god lives "outside time and space", which would mean that god is free from the flow of time(eternal) and can move around time as he chooses.
-This to me says that god with his knowitall simply can't help it, he knew exactly how things would play out when he created the universe. He created everything with a purpose and everything has gone exactly like he set it going. Even without the all-knowingness a being outside of time&space could simply take a look at the future and go into the past to change the flow of things. Adjust the premises, so to speak.

In short: An all-knowing, all-powerful, outside of time&space god is simply incapable of creating a situation where he does not know how it will end. Unless there are other similar forces(other gods) at play, but I remember somewhere it stating that in the beginning there wasn't.
One example of a counter I've read, but not very convincing(to me):
-He could have given us some "slack", not designing the details and letting us choose some unimportant things freely, still having a "grand-design" that will eventually take place. Again, this is not free will anymore. God is guiding us to a certain, pre-determined ending, either by creating the premise as such that he will know how we choose it, or by simply forcing us to choose(how do we know if we are choosing anything freely or via control of some entity).

I've used this line of thought with the question of evil(or if god is "good") as well. God knows everything and time is just another dimension he moves freely in, so how can evil be a creation of free will, since god willingly put the apple into the garden, willingly let man be tempted(and/or didn't interfere with the eating after finding out about it) and willingly is letting his plan to include this much evil.

Concerning prophecies in general, I can't recall any prophecy not vague enough to be interpreted as nearly anything. Corvardus said it all.

 

[Calamityclam]

Free will is a bit of a tricky subject. I believe that in a sense we don't have true free will because we are bound by our brains and all of our actions were predetermined since the creation of time and space. Let me explain.

We make all of our decisions based on a complex mix of past experience, current objectives, mood and situation. Our brains weigh up all of that data and we decide upon the course of action that most appeals to us.

So take for example, that the beginning of time and space happened again ( be it by the Big Bang or by God ) in exactly the same way it happened the first time. Then fast forward to present day, would anything be different. No, everything would be exactly the same, because all the molecules would have reacted the same way, life would have come about the same way, every decision made by every living thing would be the same, all because the fundamental stimuli which makes anything happen would all be the same.

I could choose to punch myself in the face, a seemly irrational thing, to try and buck the trend and prove that I have feel will and my actions are not predetermined. However, turn the clock back a few minutes, erase any memories I have of the future, and once again I would punch myself in the face. Why?, because none of the circumstances leading up to the punch would have changed.

I probably have some gaping holes in my logic, but what do you think, would appreciate some feedback.

 

[Pulsar]

So take for example, that the beginning of time and space happened again ( be it by the Big Bang or by God ) in exactly the same way it happened the first time. Then fast forward to present day, would anything be different. No, everything would be exactly the same, because all the molecules would have reacted the same way, life would have come about the same way, every decision made by every living thing would be the same, all because the fundamental stimuli which makes anything happen would all be the same.

Only if the physical world is deterministic, which is called into question by quantum mechanics. The quantummechanical behaviour of elementary particles is nondeterministic: their behaviour cannot be determined with certainty, only the probability of various possible outcomes. There are numerous examples: the double-slit experiment, radioactive decay, virtual particles, etc. Some physicists (and famously, Einstein) have argued that quantum mechanics therefore provides an incomplete description of reality, and that there are "hidden variables", properties of particles which we haven't discovered yet, so it only seems as if their behaviour is nondeterministic. But so far, experiments haven't found any evidence of such hidden variables.

 

[IBSpify]

Prophecies and free will are incompatible.

Say for instance you are deciding your breakfast cereal and the choice comes down to cheerios or lucky charms, you decide to go with cheerios, that's well and good, you made the choice. However, if there is prophecy/an all knowing god, and thus it was already determined that you were going to chose cheerios before the choice even presented itself to you, did you really have a choice in the mater, or merely the illusion of a choice?

 

[MachineSp1rit]

according to religion, if u take it literally (which is major problem of most atheists and theists), there is no such thing as free will, nuff said.

 

[JBeukema]

yeah my point basically is that you can't have free will and prophecies at the same time, if prophecies are true, then there's nothing you can do to change them, hence you don't have free will.

Yes, you can. See, by definition, deity would exist 'outside' of the physical universe in which time as we know it exists. Therefore, the argument goes, said deity could observe the entire universe in all 'time-states' (viewing from the 5th or higher dimension, to borrow the terms from M-Theory),. This would allow the deity to interact with one point in this 'dimension' (the universe at a given 'time') and relay knowledge of a later 'point' in time. By placing deity outside of the material universe, the false-dichotomy of Free Will-V-Predestination is avoided. Deity could have knowledge of the future that will come about through free will and individual choice