I just don't get how we can have free will in a universe where God already knows what will happen because that means it was always going to happen. [Spirituality & Religion]

Your eyes saw me before I was put together. And all the days of my life were written in Your book before any of them came to be.

Psalms 139:16

If everything i'll ever do is written down before i'm even born, then how do i actually have free will rather than just the illusions that i am acting under free will along a path set before me?

This page is a permanent link to the reply below and its nested replies. See all post replies »

Coralmist · 41-45, F

I feel the same way. Do we truly have free will. It's strange, I feel on one hand, we can SOMEWHAT choose things in life, but was it OUR choice???? say a person grows up very wealthy and can have their tuition all taken care of by parents at an Ivy League school. If they choose to go, that choice was there because of their foundation ALREADY, and their assets their parents had. Could I choose to go? No I have nothing compared to that. So if some one said to me, well you didn't choose a better path or a better this or that, it was not truly MY CHOOSING in life. You know what I mean? And then I wonder ARE our lives already determined? If so then there's surely no free will. One of my favorite author Byron Katie says, WE are not doing things, we are being done. (By source, universe) I liked that a lot.

Pikachu

@Coralmist

Yeah i guess it would be impossible to know whether you were acting with free will or just thinking you were even though you're essentially nothing more than an organism reacting to stimulus.

ViciDraco · 41-45, M

@Coralmist I am actually a determinist. I believe that we don't really have free will. We just don't have a high enough understanding of the inputs to predict the outcomes. But as biological machines we are still just reacting to our environments based on past stimuli. However, even the belief in free will is critical to how events deterministically play out.

Pikachu

@ViciDraco

I'm honestly not convinced one way or the other yet.