Slaytan: as far as our minds can perceive, yes, God's utter omniscience and our own Free Will logically conflict. There are a few possibilities:
1 - He willingly gave up utter omniscience by creating begins with Free Will. I've always felt sentience and a Will of our own was what was meant by the idea of being created "in His image." Naturally, known all things present and past, He's still one heck of a prognosticator.
2 - We don't have Free Will.
3 - They do NOT conflict, but our minds cannot yet grasp why. Which is a possibility, you must admit. If God exists, it stands to reason that there are some things about Him we wouldn't be able to understand just now.
Originally posted by firegod
You make two conclusions to start this message, and you don't explain how you came to them. Why do you say that atheists believe there is no such thing as free will and that their choices were inevitable? Did you read another book from some wacked out apologetic?
No. No book. No apologetic (wacked out or otherwise).
Think about it: if a leaf falls from a tree, the cells it is made up of are going to react to the weather conditions around it. The wind and temperature will "hit" the cells and the cells will react accordingly, so to speak. The leaf has no choice in reacting the way it does; it is totally a victim of circumstance. It lands wherever cause-and-effect say it MUST land. Every cell reacts a certain way to certain conditions. It doesn't choose to react to it. It must. It's simply following a number of Universal Laws.
So, I ask you: why are the cells and chemicals that make up human beings exempt from this? Is it just because we happen to have a LOT of them? When you break us down, aren't we made of the same bits and pieces as everything else? What key ingredient sparks us with choice? What part of our body is isolated from cause-and-effect so as to allow us to have a Will of our own?
Originally posted by The Silver Bullet
And I would just like to say to Chris, as much as I love you Chingo, that just hurling comments like this one out into the void is the biggest turn off in regards to believing in God, those who believe in God, and dare I even say it, yourself. It reads smugly, arrogantly and is just ack [oh, yes, dammit: ack!].
If a simple, relatively polite, straightforward claim about a logical inevitability in regards to Atheism is a "turn off" to you, then I'm not sure quite what to say. Any smugness or arrogance you picked up on was injected, and not inherent.
I can tell you, however, that always, always, always dropping into such a discussion to remind us all of how much time we're wasting is a much bigger "turn off." We're all well aware, I'm sure, of the likelihood of convincing another party...but that's not why we discuss it. Maybe you're trying to serve as some mediator or voice of reason, but I don't think it's necessary.