Originally posted by Grand_Moff_Gav
When someone is created just because God knows the ultimate destination of their life doesn't mean it isn't up to the person to choose.The problem here is our concept of time- someone studying History in the 45th Century might be learning that Obama instituted a second holocaust...that doesn't mean that Obama is fixed to that fate- it up to him to choose...
That doesn't even make sense. If they're studying the history of it, it happened. It had to happen that way because that's how it did happen.
Yes, we choose things. We make decisions from among myriad possibilities on a daily basis. Yet we had to make those choices, and could have made no others. There's a cause for each action, whether it's a large, identifiable cause, or a cause that is so small and imperceptible that we can't actively record it because it deals with brain processes that we can't track. And a cause that precedes the actions that lead to the decision. So on and so forth. Causality. Simple enough.
But Christians seem to think we actually could pick something else. Say you're deciding between vanilla and chocolate. You're torn. You choose chocolate. Now rewind existence to before the choice and run it again. You aren't aware of the first iteration, and all the particulars of the situation, down to a sub-atomic level, are the same. You'd pick chocolate. Run it a million times, you'd pick chocolate. What is it that gives free will then? What makes Christians believe that if you did that, sometimes you'd pick chocolate and others vanilla? God does. Yet, how is it "free" if some divine randomness is inserted into the equation? It isn't "you" making the decision....meaning, the physical (and even metaphysical) aspects of yourself causally affecting one another to make a decision. That's determinism, and would be the only way we'd actually be free in the sense that we determine our actions for ourselves. How is it that our actions, and ours alone, are outside causality? How is everything we do not determined by that which comes before it? It isn't in a Christian paradigm.
Pseudo-scientific attempts to sneak free will in the back door that is quantum mechanics have also been thoroughly debunked and called into question. We have no rational reason for believing everything we do isn't determined by that which precedes it.
So yes, we choose things all the time. But free will is thrown around far too often without justification. Perceiving a choice, and having a choice (both of which we do), isn't the same as saying the choice will be made a certain way, and could be no other way. Issuing God paradoxes like this one is starting with a flawed premise, because Christian free will is logically impossible to begin with.