Argument From Free Will - God's Free Will

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:

  1. "knows everything that God chooses to know and that is logically possible to know"; Or instead the slightly stronger:
  2. "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 free will, god and/or free:

    He writes free verse, I’m told, and he is thought
    To be the author of the Seven Freedoms:
    Free Will, Trade, Verse, Thought, Love, Speech, Coinage.
    Robert Frost (1874–1963)

    Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar- room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.
    Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)

    When the passage “All men are born free and equal,” when that passage was being written were not some of the signers legalised owners of slaves?
    Herman Melville (1819–1891)