Creation Vs. Evolution = Free will Vs. determinism

Hi WK,I was thinking about this today on the lifeguard stand, but more from the theological perspective.In our universe, we take probability or chance for granted. If you can, imagine a universe where EVERYthing happens for a specific knowable reason. Suppose you lived in this universe. How would you know the difference between your choices and the anti-chance events of the universe? If EVERYthing happened for a specific reason (non-chance), there would be no differentiation between your will and the will of whoever was subjecting the universe to determined actions.In our universe it seems as though the ONLY thing not subject to chance is our free-will. I mean we might as well roll the dice to see who wins the presidential election if free-will was the same as chance. Nations rise and fall. People mature. Some make good choices some make bad. Crime rates rise and fall. Some people from good homes turn bad, people rise from ashes to be great. There are uneven distributions in percentages of those who abide by a certain religion. Etc...People are influenced yes, but only to a certain extent by those around them and by their circumstances.Now if God is in control of everything, and God wants to give us a small amount of sovereignty in order to have meaningful free-will, the only way he can truly give us uncoerced free-will is to create a background of randomness and chance so that our free-will will stand apart. Chance exists to differentiate our will from God's. God is still very much in control of chance, but has hidden his will in chance so as not to coerce our own.I don't know what bearing this has on QM. But it seems like we may have found absolute randomness and absolute order in QM. Random in the sense of unpredictablity and order in the sense that every particle seems to 'know' where every other particle is.It's all mind bending stuff. If I think about it much more, I might go nuts.

Thank you for your reply. yes. Nope. Time is a constraint of the physical universe, which God himself created. I see no reason why God would be time-bound and therefore be limited in knowledge by time. God is omniscient meaning he knows all the knowable simultaneously. Hmm... well, if randomness is a created element of the universe meant to make free-will meaningful, then randomness could not exist "before" the creation of the universe. However, there really wasn't a "before" was there, since time is a property of the universe? So if randomness came with the creation we couldn't really describe the creation itself as random. It's so hard to get away from time.So I guess the answer is no.This message has been edited by Hangdawg13, 07-25-2004 12:31 AM

Oh, I see.Yes, I think God keeps all laws and elements of the universe including randomness functioning accordingly. God has the power to tell all laws to stop or change, which would essentially destroy the current universe.

But this is a human estimation of the situation. You cannot possibly fathom omniscience. Omniscience means that God knows fully every range of experiences that we go through, so he knows what his creations feel to the nth degree. I too think God has an adventurous spirit, but this is an approximation. I think the greatest evidence that God is adventurous is that God provided created beings with the free-will to either choose for him or against him.

Of course not. Jar implied that he knew what omniscience would be like, by relating it to his own experience. If you can imagine what it would be like to completely remove time and space from the bounds of your thinking, you might begin to grasp the tip of what omniscience is like. People often fantasize about if they were no longer bound by gravity and could fly around. I can only suppose removal of more boundaries would be even more awesome.I mean, knowing everything at once is not an accurate description. Knowing everything before it happens or after it happens is not an accurate description either, because these are time words. Removing time from our thinking is pretty dang hard to do, but if God is imminent and transcendent, omniscient and omnipresent, then we have to remove the boundaries of time from our thinking, to get the first inkling of an understanding of his perception of things, if perception is even an applicable word.

My thoughts exactly!

So is it not possible that every atom and molecule that forms your body and brain was put together in such a fashion and set in motion in such a manner that that choice was predetermined? I sure hope not. Or can you have it both ways?

Thank you for your reply.I would tend to agree with you, but the question I'm raising is: are our very choices the result of a previous cause...Kinda like chaos theory I guess... There are a finite number of variables involved in the weather, so theoretically, if you had a big enough fast enough computer that could somehow carry all values out to an infinite number of significant digits, you could know what the weather would do from now till doomsday... Such calculations are beyond our capabilities and knowledge, but that doesn't mean the weather is "destined" to follow a certain pattern from now till doomsday.So as far as our brains go, could all of the incredible (but not infinite) numbers of variables that go into producing a single choice all be affected by cause and affect in the same way so that every thought is just an eventual effect of the first cause of the universe?Maybe you understood what I was saying before, but I felt like I should restate it anyways. And so do I. This would be the spiritual realm of reality perhaps? lol

Good points... All I can say is that I am confident I don't know...

I said, I'm confident I DON'T KNOW... IOW I'm not confident in anything except my own ignorance. I THINK randomness and determinism probably exist at once.