How would an all powerful all knowing God create people with defects and not know it? I can imagine a god doing it but the characteristics of the Christian God wouldn't allow him to not know each of his creations. Heck he claims to know every hair on our heads

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Otherwise, I have no answer on why there would be, for example, children born with birth defects.

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You mean, other than the possibility they weren't created by anything that cared about them?

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Is it possible in your mind to believe in a deity that created mankind, without believing that each individual born had DNA that was hand picked by that deity?

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It is impossible that an omniscient being could create someone who had flawed DNA on accident. He is either omniscient, or He isn't.

I have no problem admitting the existence of matter or anything at all is quite baffling to contemplate with my world view. Why is it so hard to admit these obvious problems to yours? A child could not be born with birth defects unless that was God's will, if indeed God is all-powerful and all-knowing.

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Otherwise, I have no answer on why there would be, for example, children born with birth defects.

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You mean, other than the possibility they weren't created by anything that cared about them?

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Is it possible in your mind to believe in a deity that created mankind, without believing that each individual born had DNA that was hand picked by that deity?

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It is impossible that an omniscient being could create someone who had flawed DNA on accident. He is either omniscient, or He isn't.

I have no problem admitting the existence of matter or anything at all is quite baffling to contemplate with my world view. Why is it so hard to admit these obvious problems to yours? A child could not be born with birth defects unless that was God's will, if indeed God is all-powerful and all-knowing.

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I don't understand the dichotomy view; as in either God controls everything or he controls nothing. I know we go back and forth on this a lot, but I don't see how God's perfect knowledge of what will happen necessitates that he himself is the agent of every occurence in the world. If I stub my toe when I got up this morning; was that God's will? Or was that from me leaving the book I was reading last night smack dab in the middle of the path from the bed to the bathroom? Whether or not God knew I was going to stub my toe is irrelevant

If you know everything that will ever happen and you create the universe then you control everything. You set up the dominoes and knock them over. God knew you'd stub your toe and knew exactly how to rearrange the dominos so that you wouldn't. He chose to set them up in a way that you'd stub your toe. Your "choices" are contingent on how he sets up the dominos. You have no real choice.

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I don't understand the dichotomy view; as in either God controls everything or he controls nothing. I know we go back and forth on this a lot, but I don't see how God's perfect knowledge of what will happen necessitates that he himself is the agent of every occurence in the world.

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Like Aggrad has mentioned before... all these problems go away once you stop staying He is all-powerful and all-knowing and simply say He is incredibly powerful and mostly-knowing.

If God knew every thought and action every person would make and chose to create them anyways, He has authored it. They cannot do anything other than what He already knew they would do (I understand your position on God's timelessness -- however, it doesn't change the outcome). We can do nothing but live the life God has predetermined / willed for us. Whether we go to Heaven or to a literal Hell was known to Him well-before our births. Saying we have free will because He gave it to us doesn't fix this problem. We still can't do anything other than what He knew we would do.

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If I stub my toe when I got up this morning; was that God's will?

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Yes

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Or was that from me leaving the book I was reading last night smack dab in the middle of the path from the bed to the bathroom?

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Same thing.

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Whether or not God knew I was going to stub my toe is irrelevant

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That's because stubbing your toe is pretty much irrelevant. This logic obviously wouldn't apply to whether or not one goes to Hell, or a lot of other things that aren't nearly so irrelevant.

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I don't understand the dichotomy view; as in either God controls everything or he controls nothing. I know we go back and forth on this a lot, but I don't see how God's perfect knowledge of what will happen necessitates that he himself is the agent of every occurence in the world.

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Like Aggrad has mentioned before... all these problems go away once you stop staying He is all-powerful and all-knowing and simply say He is incredibly powerful and mostly-knowing.

If God knew every thought and action every person would make and chose to create them anyways, He has authored it. They cannot do anything other than what He already knew they would do (I understand your position on God's timelessness -- however, it doesn't change the outcome). We can do nothing but live the life God has predetermined / willed for us. Whether we go to Heaven or to a literal Hell was known to Him well-before our births. Saying we have free will because He gave it to us doesn't fix this problem. We still can't do anything other than what He knew we would do.

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If I stub my toe when I got up this morning; was that God's will?

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Yes

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Or was that from me leaving the book I was reading last night smack dab in the middle of the path from the bed to the bathroom?

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Same thing.

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Whether or not God knew I was going to stub my toe is irrelevant

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That's because stubbing your toe is pretty much irrelevant. This logic obviously wouldn't apply to whether or not one goes to Hell, or a lot of other things that aren't nearly so irrelevant.

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It doesn't make any sense; God knows what you're going to do because he's in that moment; he's in every moment at all time. Again, if I have a time machine and go watch the Aggies play Bama in a few months; and then come back and go watch the Bama game; do the players not have free will since I've already seen what they're going to do? You say "they cannot do anything other than what he already knew they would do" and I say "They cannot do anything other than what they've actually done". If I have eaten a bowl of cereal for breakfast, it is now impossible for me to have eaten an orange; however my free will wasn't jeopardized due to the fact that I can't know choose to eat an orange 9 hours ago.

This isn't Mensa level stuff. It's pretty easy to understand even with moderate intelligence.

In your aggie/Bama example you're conveniently forgetting that not only does God know the result of the game but he built every single player in a specific way knowing exactly how they would react in every situation. He could have created them any way he wanted leading to infinite other potential outcomes but he chose one way to do it. The way God created each player and the way he created our environment lead to only one specific outcome God chose when he set up the dominoes. He isn't a powerless observer like you.

Omniscience on its own isn't enough to negate free will. In other words if I know everything that's going to happen but don't have the power to change things then of course you can't say I'm in control. But when you combine omniscience with omnipotence you are left with an entity that knows every consequence of every conceivable action who actually has the power to accomplish anything. Such a deity would have, in the moment prior to all creation, known down to the smallest detail what was going to happen in that universe in the course of its entire existence. Being omnipotent and omniscient it could have changed any one of those details without affecting anything else if it so chose.

Foreknowledge of how any action will turn out negates random chance. For instance for me a roll of the dice is random because I don't know what face it will land on. And omniscient being would know how to change the throw to produce any outcome it wanted.

Pretty much every defense of this relies on there being random chance or some things that God doesn't know, but in those cases God can not be said to be omnipotent.

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Omniscience on its own isn't enough to negate free will. In other words if I know everything that's going to happen but don't have the power to change things then of course you can't say I'm in control. But when you combine omniscience with omnipotence you are left with an entity that knows every consequence of every conceivable action who actually has the power to accomplish anything. Such a deity would have, in the moment prior to all creation, known down to the smallest detail what was going to happen in that universe in the course of its entire existence. Being omnipotent and omniscient it could have changed any one of those details without affecting anything else if it so chose.

Foreknowledge of how any action will turn out negates random chance. For instance for me a roll of the dice is random because I don't know what face it will land on. And omniscient being would know how to change the throw to produce any outcome it wanted.

Pretty much every defense of this relies on there being random chance or some things that God doesn't know, but in those cases God can not be said to be omnipotent.

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How does the addition of omnipotence negate free will with an omniscient God? Omnipotent doesn't mean God has to do everything, it means he can do that which he wills. The mere fact that God could change anything he wished, doesn't mean he actually wishes to do so. Again, God knows what the dice reads before you roll it, because he's at the moment when you read it, the moment before the dice was made, and in the moment before dice were invented simultaneously.

There is no default position where we have choices. How ever God sets up the game determines the outcomes.

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Is it possible in your mind to believe in a deity that created mankind, without believing that each individual born had DNA that was hand picked by that deity?

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Sure. One that either wasn't omnipotent, omniscient or both. Otherwise no.

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It doesn't make any sense; God knows what you're going to do because he's in that moment; he's in every moment at all time. Again, if I have a time machine and go watch the Aggies play Bama in a few months; and then come back and go watch the Bama game; do the players not have free will since I've already seen what they're going to do? You say "they cannot do anything other than what he already knew they would do" and I say "They cannot do anything other than what they've actually done". If I have eaten a bowl of cereal for breakfast, it is now impossible for me to have eaten an orange; however my free will wasn't jeopardized due to the fact that I can't know choose to eat an orange 9 hours ago.

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You were right earlier... we do have this same argument too often. Even the analogies are the same.

Rocag explains it well, and I can't quite tell if you are being purposefully dense by saying you don't understand this position or if it really is something that really doesn't make sense to you. Nothing I can do will surprise God. He knew every thought I would have and action I would take and because He is also supposedly omnipotent, He could have created me otherwise. You can say I'm just blaming God for my own choices, but I'm telling you that if there is such a thing as an omnipotent, omniscient God then everything that has ever happened or will ever happen is as He wanted it... including all the bad stuff.

Sam Harris has written some interesting stuff on free will, I want to make a concise OP and post it eventually.

Basically, using FMRI studies, they have done tests where subjects are hooked up to a FMRI sensor and asked questions and given tasks. Based on neural patterns, the scientists were able to determine what choices would be made before the subject, sometimes by as much as 1-2 seconds. So the brain produced a decision before the individual was even aware of it.

I'm not sure how to explain this any clearer than has already been done in this thread. If you're honestly not understanding it yet perhaps you just never will. But I'll give it another shot and recommend you reread what has already been posted.

Your response implies some baseline series of events in which God chooses not to intervene. But it's wrong to frame it that way because God already did intervene by the very act of creating the universe. Imagine an infinite number of possible universes that could have been created, each differing in some large or small way. God, being omniscient, would have been absolutely aware of each one and what it contained. In the moment of creation God didn't just create a random universe, he had to have chosen a specific one to create out of an infinite range of choices. For any detail of our universe to be different would have required God, in that moment of creation, to reject our universe and choose one slightly different. The very act of creation by an omnipotent and omniscient being leaves no other option.

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It doesn't make any sense; God knows what you're going to do because he's in that moment; he's in every moment at all time. Again, if I have a time machine and go watch the Aggies play Bama in a few months; and then come back and go watch the Bama game; do the players not have free will since I've already seen what they're going to do? You say "they cannot do anything other than what he already knew they would do" and I say "They cannot do anything other than what they've actually done". If I have eaten a bowl of cereal for breakfast, it is now impossible for me to have eaten an orange; however my free will wasn't jeopardized due to the fact that I can't know choose to eat an orange 9 hours ago.

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You were right earlier... we do have this same argument too often. Even the analogies are the same.

Rocag explains it well, and I can't quite tell if you are being purposefully dense by saying you don't understand this position or if it really is something that really doesn't make sense to you. Nothing I can do will surprise God. He knew every thought I would have and action I would take and because He is also supposedly omnipotent, He could have created me otherwise. You can say I'm just blaming God for my own choices, but I'm telling you that if there is such a thing as an omnipotent, omniscient God then everything that has ever happened or will ever happen is as He wanted it... including all the bad stuff.

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I seriously don't get it, what you're saying is that since God is outside of time and knows what we'll choose to do before we do it, we had no choice; and that since he was able to force us to act differently, he did. Is that about it? Nothing you do can surprise God because he has seen you do it, before you've done it, while you're doing it. If I let an adult child move out of my house, and they end up getting arrested, was I the cause of that since I didn't lock them in a room? If my kid is a drug addict, who has hit the crack pipe every time I let them out of my house, does my foreknowledge they're going to hit the crack pipe again relieve them of their free will?

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I seriously don't get it, what you're saying is that since God is outside of time and knows what we'll choose to do before we do it, we had no choice; and that since he was able to force us to act differently, he did. Is that about it? Nothing you do can surprise God because he has seen you do it, before you've done it, while you're doing it. If I let an adult child move out of my house, and they end up getting arrested, was I the cause of that since I didn't lock them in a room? If my kid is a drug addict, who has hit the crack pipe every time I let them out of my house, does my foreknowledge they're going to hit the crack pipe again relieve them of their free will?

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You're being willfully obtuse. You continually ignore the difference between a mortal father and the author of the kid's DNA and circumstances. Simplify it. If you set up 5 dominoes and knock them over, you are like a God to those dominoes. Once you set the table and initiate the reaction, they have no other choice but to fall in the exact way you intended.

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I seriously don't get it

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/Mensa

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I'm not sure how to explain this any clearer than has already been done in this thread. If you're honestly not understanding it yet perhaps you just never will. But I'll give it another shot and recommend you reread what has already been posted.

Your response implies some baseline series of events in which God chooses not to intervene. But it's wrong to frame it that way because God already did intervene by the very act of creating the universe. Imagine an infinite number of possible universes that could have been created, each differing in some large or small way. God, being omniscient, would have been absolutely aware of each one and what it contained. In the moment of creation God didn't just create a random universe, he had to have chosen a specific one to create out of an infinite range of choices. For any detail of our universe to be different would have required God, in that moment of creation, to reject our universe and choose one slightly different. The very act of creation by an omnipotent and omniscient being leaves no other option.

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There are no possibilities with God, no choices, there is only actuality, what actually happened. Possibilities presuppose a non omniscient God. In the time when "God created the universe" he was simultaneously in the created universe, and after the created universe. Essentially what you're saying is it's not possible for an omnipotent being to will his children to have free will, which doesn't make any sense.

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I seriously don't get it, what you're saying is that since God is outside of time and knows what we'll choose to do before we do it, we had no choice; and that since he was able to force us to act differently, he did. Is that about it? Nothing you do can surprise God because he has seen you do it, before you've done it, while you're doing it. If I let an adult child move out of my house, and they end up getting arrested, was I the cause of that since I didn't lock them in a room? If my kid is a drug addict, who has hit the crack pipe every time I let them out of my house, does my foreknowledge they're going to hit the crack pipe again relieve them of their free will?

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You're being willfully obtuse. You continually ignore the difference between a mortal father and the author of the kid's DNA and circumstances. Simplify it. If you set up 5 dominoes and knock them over, you are like a God to those dominoes. Once you set the table and initiate the reaction, they have no other choice but to fall in the exact way you intended.

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If I willed not to knock the dominos over would it impact my omnipotence?

Are you arguing for a deity without free will? Because in your explanation you paint God as just another feature in a predetermined universe which he has no choice or control over.

And of course it doesn't make logical sense for free will to exist in a universe created by an omnipotent and omniscient God. That's my entire point.

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Are you arguing for a deity without free will? Because in your explanation you paint God as just another feature in a predetermined universe which he has no choice or control over.

And of course it doesn't make logical sense for free will to exist in a universe created by an omnipotent and omniscient God. That's my entire point.

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and my entire point is that I disagree. God totally has free will, which doesn't mean that he had choices, he willed, he could only have willed that which he willed, because it was willed.

It doesn't make logical sense to say that an omnipotent being isn't able to create a universe and leave his creation with free will.

And you have yet to show how that is possible or address the points raised beyond simply disagreeing.

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And you have yet to show how that is possible or address the points raised beyond simply disagreeing.

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How it is possible for an omnipotent being to do that which he wills?

No, how the existence of free will is logically consistent with an omnipotent and omniscient creator. Unless you're just throwing anything making logical sense out the window.

Though I'd say that worshiping a nonsensical deity comes with its own problems.

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No, how the existence of free will is logically consistent with an omnipotent and omniscient creator. Unless you're just throwing anything making logical sense out the window.

Though I'd say that worshiping a nonsensical deity comes with its own problems.

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I've already shown you how it's logically consistent; an omnipotent deity would have the abilityto grant free will to his creation, while still maintaining foreknowledge of their actions from free will due to his timeless nature. An omni-everything creator would stand to gain nothing by the creation of rational beings, other than the joy of the beings themselves, and even less by creating rational beings and ensuring they do nothing but follow preprogrammed lines of code.

You're just repeating that he would be able to, not addressing the points raised or showing how. "Timeless nature" is irrelevant to this discussion. I presented the argument in terms of "before creation" for the ease of understanding, not because it is a key issue. If this is the only universe that could exist then God is not omnipotent. But if God is omnipotent and omniscient then the universe exists exactly how the creator chose for it to exist down to the smallest detail. God created this exact universe and not one even slightly different in any way.

Again, the point is to show logical consistency. Not to repeat omnipotence means he can do anything, even if it is illogical.

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I've already shown you how it's logically consistent; an omnipotent deity would have the abilityto grant free will to his creation, while still maintaining foreknowledge of their actions from free will due to his timeless nature. An omni-everything creator would stand to gain nothing by the creation of rational beings, other than the joy of the beings themselves, and even less by creating rational beings and ensuring they do nothing but follow preprogrammed lines of code.

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This makes sense only if you grant a degree of uncertainty in what will result from free will of humans. If this uncertainty exists then God is not completely omniscient.

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You're just repeating that he would be able to, not addressing the points raised or showing how. "Timeless nature" is irrelevant to this discussion. I presented the argument in terms of "before creation" for the ease of understanding, not because it is a key issue. If this is the only universe that could exist then God is not omnipotent. But if God is omnipotent and omniscient then the universe exists exactly how the creator chose for it to exist down to the smallest detail. God created this exact universe and not one even slightly different in any way.

Again, the point is to show logical consistency. Not to repeat omnipotence means he can do anything, even if it is illogical.

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The universe exists exactly down to how God wanted it to exist, down to the smallest detail; which can include human free will. I expounded on why an omnipotent-everything God would create a rational being with free will, as opposed to one who had his entire life programmed. Timeless nature is relevant to this discussion because it explains his omniscience, it goes from "you have no choice because Gid knew X so it had to be X" to "God knew x because you did X". I don't see how such a thing is illogical.

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I've already shown you how it's logically consistent; an omnipotent deity would have the abilityto grant free will to his creation, while still maintaining foreknowledge of their actions from free will due to his timeless nature. An omni-everything creator would stand to gain nothing by the creation of rational beings, other than the joy of the beings themselves, and even less by creating rational beings and ensuring they do nothing but follow preprogrammed lines of code.

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This makes sense only if you grant a degree of uncertainty in what will result from free will of humans. If this uncertainty exists then God is not completely omniscient.

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This is where the timelessness comes in, there is no uncertainty about an action after the action has taken place. It has no bearing on my freedom to say it's not fair that I can't have eaten pizza if I ate pasta for dinner.

Again, you describe a God with no free will. Either at some point God had control over creation (in which case you must face the issues I presented) or he is just a powerless piece of a creation that has always existed from his point of view. Frankly the God you describe is rather weak and useless. He creates the universe as is because he knows its the one that has to exist, he seems to have no input in the matter.

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Again, you describe a God with no free will. Either at some point God had control over creation (in which case you must face the issues I presented) or he is just a powerless piece of a creation that has always existed from his point of view. Frankly the God you describe is rather weak and useless. He creates the universe as is because he knows its the one that has to exist, he seems to have no input in the matter.

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Who has input then? A God that creates the universe is rather weak and useless? Compared to what? God creates the universe out of an act of his divine will which logically includes free will. What issues have you created that I haven't faced? Why would it be illogical for him to create a universe with free will?

You're granting there is no uncertainty correct? Perfect omniscience.

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You're granting there is no uncertainty correct? Perfect omniscience.

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How can there be uncertainty with perfect knowledge of actuality? Yes, perfect omniscience.

I've never seen somebody so out of their depth.

Plus you're granting that God is also perfectly omnipotent with regard to creation. Every atom every strand of dna was created exactly as he intended. Perfect omnipotence in other words , correct?