Admittedly, I've used a similar argument with regards to the free-will discussion: if God knew all, then all actions are predetermined, therefore free-will becomes irrelevant. — 8livesleft
Omniscience and free will cannot exist in the same universe, omniscience is a claim to knowledge and if you were to know what will happen then it will happen. — CallMeDirac
can you both expand on your respective points for me, please? im not really grasping this. how can’t an omniscient being be a passive observer of these actions taking place? just because the being knows what’s going to happen before it happens wouldn’t mean the action wasn’t done out of the creature’s own accord/self interest? it’s not like God has a joystick for every individual organism and it has a hand in any actions taken by them? — Ignance
We can never do what we weren't planned to do. — 8livesleft
Everything is planned, predetermined. According to most religion God has a plan for each and everyone of our lives. And then came free will. We have freedom to ignore this plan, and live and do as we please. Granted, it doesn't necessitate this non-acceptance wasn't known long before it happened and all actions aren't known. It means we have the freedom to either accept or reject the plan for our life. Theo-philosophically speaking at least. — Outlander
If I know a friend has an alcohol addiction, and I planned for him to become sober and improve his affairs, I could present every opportunity and yes even show him the most likely outcomes of either continuing or discontinuing his consumption, he still gets to make that choice and it is still his. So, if I offer him 5,000 dollars to either go to a nice rehab, and get his life on track, with the caveat that he can actually choose to spend it on whatever he wishes, I knew his choice, but it wasn't my plan. Makes sense somewhat eh? — Outlander
Your life would have already been fully mapped out and he room for choice is none. If you cannot change your path do you have choice in your life? — CallMeDirac
We can never do what we weren't planned to do — 8livesleft
how do you know we were “planned to do” something from this being? it’s simply all-knowing. — Ignance
you don’t do certain things out of a laid out blueprint of your existence, you do whatever you FEEL you need to do in the present moment, whether that’s eating, going to work etc. there’s no magical being sending thoughts nor controlling you to do things.
Maybe there is a plan maybe there isn't. Point is that in the context of this Omni-being, all it's creations can only do what it wants. There is no choice. — 8livesleft
How could one justify the existence or purpose of a "Hell" then? — Outlander
Another way to put this is to say that a wavelength of zero, where there are no ‘features’ to be seen, is akin to the situation where no statements are overtly made, but in which all possible statements are inherent. The silence that we are talking about here is not therefore impoverished, or lacking, but rather it is a like a ‘pregnant pause’ – it is like the Gnostic conception of the ‘fruitful womb of Eternity’, the ‘Pleroma’. If a particular statement is made (a particular rule) then this is all very good and it might look like a ‘step forward’, it might look like an act of creation, like as the positive act of creation whereby God created the world in Genesis, but from the Gnostic point of view this was not ‘creation’ at all but arbitrary limitation masquerading as creation since the particular positive statement can only stand as a particular positive statement if it implicitly denies the existence of any competing positive statements.
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