God's Free Will
It has also been suggested that this can lead to a "Freewill Argument for the Nonexistence of God" on the grounds that God's omniscience is incompatible with God having freewill and that if God does not have freewill God is not a personal being.
Theists generally agree that God is a personal being and that God is omniscient but there is some disagreement about whether "omniscient" means:
- "knows everything that God chooses to know and that is logically possible to know"; Or instead the slightly stronger:
- "knows everything that is logically possible to know"
If omniscient is used in the first sense then the argument's applicability depends on what God chooses to know, and therefore it is not a complete argument against the existence of God. In both cases the argument depends on the assumption that it is logically possible for God to know every choice that he will make in advance of making that choice.
The compatibilist school of thought holds that free will is compatible with determinism and fatalism and therefore does not accept the assumptions of Barker's argument.
Read more about this topic: Argument From Free Will
Famous quotes containing the words god and/or free:
“No, no. God will not damn a lunatic’s soul. He knows that the powers of evil are too great for those of us with weak minds.”
—Garrett Fort (1900–1945)
“A nation grown free in a single day is a child born with the limbs and the vigour of a man, who would take a drawn sword for his rattle, and set the house in a blaze that he might chuckle over the splendour.”
—Sydney Smith (1771–1845)