It gets better. “God’s Plan” and free will are incompatible, yes. But also, Christians love to pray for stuff. “Make mama get better”, “Let the Cowboys win”, “Get me the job I want”, etc. And they LOVE to say that “prayer works”. But at no point do they consider the implications of that notion, that praying for things changes the outcomes of the world.
A) Anything, prayer or otherwise, that can change the trajectory of events is, like free will, wholly incompatible with the notion that the universe is following in lockstep with “God’s Plan”.
B) If absolutely anything would be part of God’s Plan, according the Christian faith, it would be the birth and death of every human. This is directly incompatible with prayer saving someone’s life.
C) Changing the outcome of any choice a person is going to make (such as hiring decisions), is also wholly incompatible with free will.
D) The very notion of prayer causing change places human agency over God’s will. Yes, presumably, God could choose whether for not to grant a prayer. However, if he changes his prescribed outcomes based on your prayer, then that means either that he decided your idea was better (which seems odd for an all-knowing being) or decided to capitulate to you for some reason. Either way, you hold sway over your almighty god’s will for the universe. This thought is SUUUPER narcissistic to believe in.
E) Other people’s prayer holds sway over you. If your prayer can cause God to change the minds of others, then their prayers can likewise cause God to change your mind in turn. Neither of you then has free will. Moreover, it is not just God, ultimately, that can negate your free will, but any other Christian that prays for it. That’s troubling, to say the least.
F) Bad things, things unjustified by karmic justice, things unrelated to human free will, happen all the time. Things like natural disasters, disease, animal attacks, genetic accidents, etc. Those things happen to good people, Godly people, innocents, infants, the unborn. People pray for these things not to happen. “God, Protect them”, “Bless them with your Grace”, “Watch over them”. Yet they still happen. If prayers works, unless God decides to not answer them, then God must have decided to ignore those prayers. Prayer working is, itself, incompatible with the idea that there is a holy plan that must be followed, so that is not a justification for choosing to ignore those prayers and allow such things to happen. That means God could have stopped it and did not. God is directly responsible for these evils. There is no way around that.
On that happy note, enjoy your Sunday service guys!
D) The very notion of prayer causing change places human agency over God’s will.
Obviously it was god’s plan for them to pray for that specific outcome!
Honestly the whole god’s plan thing invalidates sin, since sinning must have been part of god’s plan.
Obviously it was god’s plan for them to pray for that specific outcome!
Which, again, negates free will, and also means their prayer didn’t do a damn thing to change the outcome of things.
Honestly the whole god’s plan thing invalidates sin, since sinning must have been part of god’s plan.
Don’t worry, you were always going to sin and didn’t have a choice in the matter, but you are still going to be punished for eternity for it.
“What’s the point of being God if every run down schmuck with a $2 prayer book can come along and fuck up your plan?”
All religions does what you describe so replace “Christian” with “Religios people/Theists” in your text … maybe Mongol paganism (Tengrism) is less influenced by these contradictions? Idk.
You’re right, but…A) the meme was about Christians, not religious people in general, and B) Christians are the ones voting in people like Donald Trump, defying their own doctrine by supporting him with their extreme levels of cognitive dissonance. So, you’ll have to excuse me if I feel fine about singling them out for their inconsistencies.
There’s a pretty easy out for someone determined to believe in this stuff: their own act of prayer itself was part of God’s plan.
Also, these types of theists usually justify these outwardly incompatible beliefs with a distinction between “true” free will and the “perception” of free will. In some people’s deterministic view, while God has this omniscient perspective that spans all of space and time, the human perspective is one of the impression of freedom, a sense that feels so real that you might as well call it it simply “free will”.
Which, again, negates free will, and also means their prayer didn’t do a damn thing to change the outcome of things.
In some people’s deterministic view, while God has this omniscient perspective that spans all of space and time, the human perspective is one of the impression of freedom, a sense that feels so real that you might as well call it it simply “free will”.
In all fairness, I can get on board with that as a notion. I am also a determinist, though not for any religious reasons. However, I’m not applying any purpose to that determinism, deific or otherwise, or any moral implications on it.
In my view, there’s no “plan” so to speak. But every outcome is determined by the state of things at that moment. The universe is a state machine. There may be some randomness in that quantum outcomes are not predictable, but that randomness still does not manifest into “free will”.
Our choices are made by our brains computing an outcome based on its chemical and electrical state at that moment. Macro-features like personality, values, experience, memory, influence, etc. are also just bioelectrical, chemical and physical states of the brain that manifest these traits. They do factor into the decision making, obviously, and this feels like free will but it’s not. Since those are also states in the machine and they would always have been that state of the machine at that time, there is no way that they decision could have been otherwise, EXCEPT by quantum randomness, which is, again, also no free. And those states, too, are determined from other states and events previous.
So anyway, I get that idea
Brilliant breakdown. I love this.
Teaching American fundies theological history is so fun.
They just press both buttons. It’s a test to see if they experience cognitive dissonance.
The theological answer is that God doesn’t really have a step by step plan for the life of each person. Sure, there are ways he wants to bless you, and things he wants you to do that he’s put you in a position to do, but not a step by step plan. Example: Esther was in a position to have the king’s ear when he planned to kill all the Jews. Esther 4 says that the Jews will be saved with or without Esther helping, but God had chosen her and given her what she needed to save the Jews.
Also, on free will, the most important part of free will is the ability to choose to leave God. That’s what the tree of knowledge of good and evil is about. It’s not knowledge in our modern sense, a better description would be “the right to define good and evil”. So when Adam and Eve ate that fruit, they were basically saying “I don’t want God’s idea of what good and evil is, I want to do it myself”. I know that seems not so bad to our culture, but it’s basically saying “I know better than God, who knows everything”.
The theological answer is that different denominations have different answers to the free will vs determinism debate.
The irony for me, is that “Satan” only committed two offenses to god: he gave knowledge to humans about what’s real, and opposed god.
Regarding the first one, Satan couldn’t have done that without it being god’s plan.
The second one is rational, since god flooded the earth and killed everything because he was a jealous, angry god.
How did Satan become synonymous with evil? Seems like he was the only one doing anything good.
This is part of what broke my beliefs. It gets crazier than this even.
Let’s put aside free will and just say it’s God’s will. Oh this flood happened, it must have been God’s will! I ask, to what end?
The average Christian will reply “something good will come of this, you’ll see, we just can’t see it yet”.
Okay, let’s pause there. God is infinite and all powerful, correct? So, that means, in true infinity and all power, no matter what he is doing with his Devine plan, there are infinite alternative ways he could have achieved it. That’s infinity. If there aren’t, then he’s not infinite. If he can’t do some of those infinite ways, then he is not all powerful.
If he can do any of those infinite ways, then he chose this one, the one that destroyed homes and lives, he chose it out of infinite other options that wouldn’t have destroyed people. There exist infinite other paths, he chose the destructive one.
So God is either not all powerful, and he’s just a guy trying his best, which hey, good trying and I understand, but not “God” then. Or he’s sadistic and chooses this.
That is the one that broke my faith.
I presented the same thing to a Christian last week, all it ended with is downvotes.
Now imagine the balance point between having a plan for someone and them having free will, and consider the phrase “God the father”
I think it was CS Lewis that said that ultimately, the only expression of free will is to choose to love God.
Most of the core questions of life are answered paradoxically. If there was a simple answer, the questions would need not be asked.
BUT WHAT IF…
Human will is an expression of god’s will, thus exercising free will is, in fact, realizing god’s will, and only actions that occur due to malady or coercion are corrupted, even though they are themselves attempts at will expression.
Under that model, free will and god’s will can coexist, the horrors of existence don’t have to be god’s fault, and self improvement becomes a refinement process so that the expression of will can be more easily completed.
I should be pope. /s
The free will question was the main thing that started my deconversion. It’s a problem that was simple enough I couldn’t just write it off as “There’s probably an answer, even if I don’t know it.” It’s also a contradiction at the very root of religion that you can’t write off as inconsequential, like some of the contradictions in the Bible.
