Free will, or is it?

Who's supposed to be omniscient, you or God? If you're not omniscient, how the hell do you know all this? Why does God put you here to give tell other people to believe in him when he already knows whether or not they're ever going to believe in him?Does he just like doing pointless things? And if you know the answers to all these questions, are you a prophet or a seer?

So God does like doing pointless things. An omniscient being doing experiments to find results that he already knows?

Exactly. I was actually laughing at someone else's use of it. The idea of an omniscient being doing experiments just tickles me. Shortly, I'll try the experiment of turning my computer off to see if it turns off. It's the nearest I can get to the imitation of God, something Christians tell us we're supposed to attempt.

The verse you quote actually contains three questions and no answers. Meaning, presumably, that your God is a sad and sadistic being.Humans have invented lots of Gods and lots of religions, ICANT, and they tend to invent Gods somewhat in their own image.The God of Jewish mythology is a petulant and irrational character, made in the image of a rather primitive chief or King who requires others to kneel before him, and punishes those who don't.The chances of such a ridiculous character having created this universe are less than one in a trillion.

Neither scientific method or present scientific knowledge would lead you to any specific conclusions about the ultimate origins of the universe, other than (possibly) that we cannot know them.There is nothing in scientific knowledge incompatible with the concept that a God (or Gods, or wizards, or anything else) created this universe, but there's loads of knowledge which is incompatible with Jewish creation mythology, and all the creation mythologies of other cultures as well. It seems to be a characteristic of our species to invent beginnings to fill in the gaps in our knowledge, then believe in our inventions, an apparently pointless thing to do. No-one knows how frequently abiogenesis would be expected to happen in a universe of this age and scale, but I think I'm right in saying that most biochemists who study the various possibilities of how it could happen would be surprised if it has only happened once. Some even think it so likely that it could happen more than once in just one solar system, and even could have happened more than once on this planet.The calculations done by creationists are wishful thinking, and aren't based on the chemistry of this universe, but usually on an already complex micro-organism popping into existence, which has nothing to do with any of the abiogenesis hypotheses, and is extremely unlikely.An idea for you to consider might be that if you observe a phenomenon, then you're probably in a universe which can produce that phenomenon, not in one which can't! I'm as likely to start believing in a God who condemns people to burn for eternity and who wants humans to stone one another to death as I am to believe that the earth is flat, another ancient myth.Your God should learn to love his enemies.Closer to the topic, if your God already knew what I would decide, and he is responsible for producing me as I didn't choose to exist, why doesn't he burn himself for eternity, and cut out the hypocrisy?

There should be the word "if" somewhere in the sentence that you're referring to. It's an "if this, then why not that?" kind of question, not a statement, and you know very well that the likes of me would not state that I was created by your God. I agree that I'm the product of a biological process. A three and a half billion year old one. It's your idea that your God is responsible for us being here, if he's supposed to be both a creator God and omniscient. Omniscient means that having decided to create, he knows that ICANT will come into existence, and will be posting what he posts on EvC. This means he's responsible for everything, because he created knowing what the results would be.The thread is really about the contradictions inherent in the concept of an omniscient, omnipotent creator, and anything else having free will. Genuine free will for us would remove his omniscience and omnipotence, by definition.The best way to get out of this would be to describe us as part of God, so that all power we have removes nothing from the whole. However, we should then stop referring to God in the third person. Also, it conjures up the image of God condemning parts of himself to burn for eternity, and makes him a masochist rather than a sadist as I suggested earlier in the thread.Either way, he's weird.

No, you should note the word "if" and the word "why" and the question-mark, learn what question-marks mean, and then you'll no longer confuse questions with statements. I don't know any Gods, which was why I used the word "concept".I'm saying that if an omniscient, omnipotent God chooses to give us genuine free will, he is passing on some power and sacrificing his ability to know the future, so would no longer be described as omniscient and omnipotent. By definition.A being cannot have all power and all knowledge once others can make decisions and influence events. So, there's a contradiction in your theology. He would also be sacrificing it, as well, and becoming an ex-omnipotent God. He is power sharing by granting any power at all to us.