Re: free will and god poll
 

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floating on a sea of randomness is a far cry from free will. (although still admittedly better than a strict mechanical view of the world, where no free will exists.)


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that's really all i am saying. it doesn't prove anything. doesn't even imply it, it just leaves room for it whereas billiard ball physics does not; and people usually don't believe in free will because there is no room for it

Re: free will and god poll
 

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But it is completely irrational for theists to believe free will exists.


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are you sure? elaborate.
i don't follow- since, intuitively, the opposite seems true

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It's pretty simple really. In a universe with an omnipotent omniscient god, no other being can possibly have free will. This is completely obvious and I won't elaborate further.

There are a lot of things, such as morality, free will, purpose meaning, values, which are purely nonsensical in a universe with an omnipotent omniscient god. Atheists can legitimately claim these issues as there own.

Atheists should not let religious propaganda trick them into believing that they are supposed to believe what religious propaganda says atheists are supposed to believe.

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it is equally obvious that free will can't exist when there is no God.

if i claim that God exists, and that the "world" is just an arena for some kind of "will competition" between souls...what logic do you use to prove there can be no freewill? i would think the same logic could be used to prove there is no freewill in the absence of God.

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If you believe that, then you are obviously deeply influenced by religious propaganda, which is exactly the point I was making.

Re: free will and god poll
 

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But it is completely irrational for theists to believe free will exists.


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are you sure? elaborate.
i don't follow- since, intuitively, the opposite seems true

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It's pretty simple really. In a universe with an omnipotent omniscient god, no other being can possibly have free will. This is completely obvious and I won't elaborate further.

There are a lot of things, such as morality, free will, purpose meaning, values, which are purely nonsensical in a universe with an omnipotent omniscient god. Atheists can legitimately claim these issues as there own.

Atheists should not let religious propaganda trick them into believing that they are supposed to believe what religious propaganda says atheists are supposed to believe.

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it is equally obvious that free will can't exist when there is no God.

if i claim that God exists, and that the "world" is just an arena for some kind of "will competition" between souls...what logic do you use to prove there can be no freewill? i would think the same logic could be used to prove there is no freewill in the absence of God.

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If you believe that, then you are obviously deeply influenced by religious propaganda, which is exactly the point I was making.

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i don't follow. how does the person being influenced by religious propoganda affect whether freewill can exist? it would appear you are arguing that God can't exist- which is a reasonable argument - but i don't know how you got to: if God exists, then freewill can't. if it's so obvious, just tell me.

Re: free will and god poll
 

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if God exists, then freewill can't. if it's so obvious, just tell me.

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i think it's basically that god is all knowing and all powerful, and made the universe and everything in it according to his will. therefore anything that you think is your will is actually his

Re: free will and god poll
 

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if God exists, then freewill can't. if it's so obvious, just tell me.

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i think it's basically that god is all knowing and all powerful, and made the universe and everything in it according to his will. therefore anything that you think is your will is actually his

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by similar logic - if you don't believe in God, but instead believe that we are products of the natural world, then everything we are is determined by our biology (which is, i suppose, determined by the other sciences). we didn't choose to exist, therefore we can have no free will.

if you say - "biology gave us free will" then you can say "god gave us free will."

if you say - "i know i have free will because i experience it" then it doesn't matter whether there is a God or not.

What if God exists and you are God? that is easiest way for me to comprehend the existence of freewill.

Re: free will and god poll
 

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if God exists, then freewill can't. if it's so obvious, just tell me.

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i think it's basically that god is all knowing and all powerful, and made the universe and everything in it according to his will. therefore anything that you think is your will is actually his

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so you're saying there is no scenario in which god acts as solely an observer? or an entity that can intervene but leaves people to do as they wish. while god would have the power to affect our decisions, why do you assume that he would do so?

Re: free will and god poll
 

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if God exists, then freewill can't. if it's so obvious, just tell me.

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i think it's basically that god is all knowing and all powerful, and made the universe and everything in it according to his will. therefore anything that you think is your will is actually his

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so you're saying there is no scenario in which god acts as solely an observer? or an entity that can intervene but leaves people to do as they wish. while god would have the power to affect our decisions, why do you assume that he would do so?

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i don't assume it but i think a lot of people do

Re: free will and god poll
 

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if God exists, then freewill can't. if it's so obvious, just tell me.

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i think it's basically that god is all knowing and all powerful, and made the universe and everything in it according to his will. therefore anything that you think is your will is actually his

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so you're saying there is no scenario in which god acts as solely an observer? or an entity that can intervene but leaves people to do as they wish. while god would have the power to affect our decisions, why do you assume that he would do so?

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given all of the evidence (namely that there is none,) if there is some sort of god, this seems to be the most plausible scenario. we needn't a meddling god. humans just wish there was one.

Re: free will and god poll
 

There's a tremendous amount of material to cover here. I'm not ignoring the thread, I'll get to it, but right now I'm exhausted and I don't have time.

Re: free will and god poll
 

poor englisch, me german yada yada yada.

Of course we cant discuss without a defenition of free will, and I think for the purpose of our discussion here the only valid point we have to focus on is determinism.
If there is a omnipotent God every thing is determined and therfore that,what we with our limited consciousness call will, is just a causal consequence of god.

But if you have a naturalistic viewpoint on the world, as I do, without god and all his projection of hope, even the word determinism is made up by man.
Even the thinking complex about free will is made up by man, yeah I am talking about "Cogito ergo sum" and actually about the whole philosophy of Sartre.
Its late here and I would love to go into detail, but I lack an adequate vocabulary in english to discribe my thinking process, but to give an short summary:
Only the fact that we live let,us define ourself.And Defenition ist acutally everything what free will is about, we create images of reality and, in progress ,try to develop an proper image that is in the end identical to the world.And than we are able to get from the bigger picture in our heads to the real world, which we only experience through our senses.
Even though this is more about subjectivism (spelling please), it still leads me to the conclusion, that we humans first of all trie to make an proper copy of our the world in our heads which is influenced just by our senses and this picture only leads all our action.
So we define ourself and even more the world we are living in, whether this is determined in our genes or not is for us unable to answer, because, after all the fact whether we have free will or not doesnt influence our life at all.

Ya spelling is bad, grammer worse and I guess my thinking process lacks in koherent junctions but again its late yada yada yada.