Did Adam and eve really have a choice?

That question would worry me seriously if I actually believed there was a God.
If the second option is the case then HE makes the decision as to who will be saved and who will burn in hell. If you happen to be one of those NOT chosen then it doesn't matter how well you live your life. You are going down anyway.

Hi Iano. Looks like we meet again. This time though I am not entirely opposite you in position. (at least as far as free will goes) (that is a bit of a weird layout. Maybe i did it wrong. Ah well it works I suppose)
I kind of agree yet don't agree with both of you here.
On the one hand, if God set up the situation, having foreknowledge of the outcome then from His perspective, there would be no choice.
On the other hand, from the perspective of A&E (and the rest of the Human race) we have total free choice. We are not able to see the future so we don't know which choice we are going to make. We may only have one possible path which we will take yet we are under the illusion that we actually decide it. To me this equates to free will (in a sense) Any choice made can only really be free if all consequences are known. Spelling them out in explicit detail would not be stacking the deck. It would be honesty.
Also remember that God would have also known exactly what Satan would do. His actions were also predestined by the omnipotent foreknowledge of God. I don't understand your reasoning on this.
If God had foreknowledge of the outcome then he really only set the scene for one choice with the illusion of a second which he knew would never be chosen.
Unless you are saying that God didn't know the outcome ahead of time in which case I agree with you.
It is all down to your definition of God I guess. This also doesn't cut it.
First up, God knew full well that this was going to happen when he set up the universe. He designed it with this inevitable event already set in stone. It was His choice to make it that way. He knew that man would fall. He knew that he would send Jesus to earth.
Secondly, it wasn't really much of a sacrifice was it? he sends his son to live as a man for a very short period. he dies then is immediately ressurected. Big deal. What has God lost by this sacrifice?
The way I see it, he created the situation. The fall was inevitable and foreknown as was the utterly pointless sacrifice. He is just causing totally unnecessary suffering for his own amusement, his son's included.This is just one of the reasons that I became an Atheist in the first place

I think you are correct that it is just a story. Trouble is that there are many here who don't think that. to them it is literal history. Again the claim here is that God is omnipotent and omniscient. Any such God HAS to know the choice they would make since that lack of knowledge would lessen him.
He is either all powerful and all knowing or he isn't.The belief by many here is that God is those things and if that is the case then the arguments against free will have merit. If he isn't then they don't and the entire argument is moot. Simple as that.

This is that part that I agree with you on.
God's foreknowledge of mans choice does not in any way influence the choice that man makes. However the fact that God knows it beforehand means that to him the choice is already made. No matter what man thinks he is freely choosing, he can only really go one way. God knows exactly which choice man will make and that is all that is necessary to use Modulus's computer analogy. To him all variables are known just as the programmer knows exactly which sequence will come out of his pseudo-random number generator. (Granted that in practice the programmer doesn't actually know this in most cases. The information is available though if he digs deeply enough and after all, programmers are human and are not all knowing) But god already knows who is going to be condemned and who isn't. It doesn't matter what I do personally. I am utterly bound to do what God already knows I am going to do even though I percieve it as free choice. The one thing I can never do to an all-knowing God is to surprise him. My sins were pre-ordained at the moment of creation. I may have thought I had the choice to commit them or not but in reality God set me up with inevitable failure as the only possible outcome.
In other words, his forgiveness is meaningless since the fault was his in the first place. I refuse to take responsibility for what is beyond my control. Now that is just a typical copout made by those who can't defend their position logically. I thought you were better than that.
Pathetic one liners like this are the MAIN reason I became an Atheist.
Push too hard and the Vicar, Priest, Pastor, Rabbi or (insert your religious advisor here) inevitably comes down to a response like this.
"We can't possibly ever fathom God" or
"We aren't supposed to ask those kind of questions." or
"Thou shalt not question the word of our Lord"
Keep pushing and you just get kicked out of the congregation.Bunch of %^$#* the lot of it Thanks for the offer Iano but I stand by what I said. This is actually a very toned down version of what I might have said. I honestly believe that if there IS a God and he IS Omnipotent, Omniscient etc. then he absolutely fits my definition of EVIL. I would actually rather suffer for eternity than to voluntarily serve such a being.
If he either IS NOT omnipotent or he IS NOT omniscient then I can probably bring myself to forgive HIM for his monumental cock up in creating us the way he did. Perhaps he didn't really mean to screw us all over. Perhaps he really doesn't know what we are all going to do and is just watching us to find out.I could accept that.

Don't be silly. Of course there was a choice. Just like there would be if a car manufacturer made a model in only one color."You can choose any color you like as long as it's black"

If God is all powerful then why did he need a sacrifice at all? he could have just snapped his fingers and made it al right again without going through some pointless ritual murder.
And let's face it the vast majority of the human race is being sacrificed anyway so again, what was the point?
Anyway, why does God demand any sacrifice whatsoever?The whole thing is just meaningless to me.God makes the rules.
God creates a flawed human knowing full well that he will fail to keep the law.
God punishes him for a failure not his fault.
God sends his son to pay for mans failure (more like his own failure IMO) but to what end?
God resurrects his son.
God has sacrificed NOTHING!Did all those poor God fearing farmers get their sheep resurrected?
That is far more of a sacrifice. They needed those sheep and cows to survive yet they willingly gave them to God.Seems a bit like me sending my son down the shop to get a newspaper really. He is away from me for a few minutes then he comes back. end of story.
Death is NOTHING to someone with the certainty of resurrection. Even less to someone to whom a human lifetime is but the blink of an eye. There was a time when I felt I knew God very well. I just didn't like him. I like to think I do my part to alleviate the suffering of those around me. i can't be expected to sort out ALL of God's messes though. That I will agree with wholeheartedly. Until someone betrays my trust they will get it.

If choices were made after he wrote the book and he had to modify it by erasing names then that means that he CANNOT BE all knowing or else he would have written the book right the first time.
I have already said that I could forgive such a God for screwing us all over because he didn't know any better. Just so long as he didn't KNOW that he was screwing us over.

Yes there are some differences with the computer analogy. I acknowledge that.
I thnk that we actually do agree on this freewill business. Since it is all about the perception of the person making the choice anyway.
So long as you agree that the one path we are all going to take is pre-ordaned in that God knows every choice we will ever make, I will happily agree that we have free choice from our perspective. I don't really see a conflict between the two since we, ourselves, don't know which way we will go. Up to this point I am right with you but this appears to be double-speak.
Yes I have the choice to do good or evil but as God knows which I will choose and has always known since the beginning of time then I am going to do whatever it is that I am going to do. OK so I am going to choose to do it but all that means is that there is no possible way for me to make a different choice than the one that God knows I will make.
Sounds pretty pre-ordained to me. (I don't think pre-ordained means precisely having no choice. More like I will do what I will do, no matte how much I don't want to do it)
If God knows I am going to remain an Atheist until I die then I cannot ever make any kind of choice that will change that. The only thing that lets you off the hook to some degree is that I can never know what God knows. It still makes my choices very illusionary.
(this is making my head hurt ) This kind of goes back to the thread about what is natural and supernatural doesn't it?
You should know my views on this by now. Here I will refresh your memory.
"No man can do such a thing. " YET!
"No man could understand how it could be done." YET!
"Why is it unreasonable to say there are aspects of God which can't be explained?" Because any aspect of God that has any effect on the natural world in which we live, MUST have been done in a NATURAL way. True SUPERNATURAL cannot interact with NATURAL or else it becomes NATURAL. Once it is in the realm of the natural then science can jump all over it, poke it, prod it, disect it, reverse engineer it till we know how it was done. I contend that whenever God interacted with our universe he would have done it according to the physical laws which He put in place.Back to the computer program analogy. If you create a virtual world then want to change something in it, you do so by manipulating the code according to the rules that you have set up. (again not a perfect analogy) No not precisely. More like if God wants to run His universe the way He wants to (which he has a perfect right to do) then just stop at the next bus stop and let me off. I just don't want to play anymore.This message has been edited by PurpleYouko, 09-28-2005 03:57 PM

Save Hitler from WHO. ME? In what possible way could torturing my son make ME any less likely to punish Hitler? Just like with Jesus coming to Earth I cannot fathom the romotest connection between the two events. they appear to be utterly unrelated as far as I can see.How can God be forced to send his son to be tortured in order to be allowed to change the rules so that he no longer has to punish inocent people for his own cock-ups?Can you hear that noise? It is my brain trying to jump out through my ears! How exactly do you know this? God sending you emails again?

Agreed on all counts jazz

The crux of it is that any pre-knowledge by any being implies a universe in which all events are fixed in stone. There is just no other way that the future CAN be known with any kind of certainty. My choices seem real to me but in each and every case I only have ONE path down which it is possible for me to go. You just can't escape that. Yes the laws exist.
Yes they can be observed in action.
Yes you might find some reputable scientists who will say that we can nevr know how or why or what causes them to be so.
But then again you will also find any number of reputable scientists who are actively studying these questions and constantly pushing back the boundaries of the unknown. Today they know more about them than they did last week and so on. To claim that they will never know is to claim fore-knowledge yourself. You just can't do that.
So once again I emphatically add the word YET to your statement. Have you got a link to any reputable scientist who says it can't?Unlike God, you or I DON'T know the future so we can't say for sure if it is impossible or not. Given the advances made over the last 50 years and the fact that the level of technology is currently increasing at an exponential rate, I'd say it is highly likely that eventually we will be able to do these things. On the basis that he designed them and implemented them from outside (just like the computer analogy). If he wants to go inside of his creation to an area controlled by his own laws and rules then he would need to operate within those rules or else the whole thing would most likely unravel. (Chances are he would have built in an online editor of some sort to make this kind of stuff easier )
As I said before, to interact with NATURAL you need to use NATURAL. You may well say that SUPERNATURAL can do anything and I still contend that if it does then it becomes NATURAL in doing so.

I beg to differ. If (as you say) we have free will then God implicitly gave me the right to make any choice I want. In which case I choose to be independent until he reneges on the deal and unfairly revokes my rights like a corrupt politician.If, on the other hand, I am right then he made me the way I am so it's HIS choice not mine.Either way my point standsWhen I die, maybe I will find out there is a God. If so then I will ask him these questions point blank and if he decides to punish me than all that will prove is that I was right all along and he never was worth any of my time.
Then again, maybe he will come up with an explanation that makes it all fall into place.
More likely than not though, when I die I will just be gone, dead, no more etc. and this whole debate will be moot.

Works for me!

Compared to God they were. they also had no knowledge of good and evil. Irrelevent! And exactly what do you think they understood of death at this point? To someone who has never lost a loved one to death this is a pretty meaningless concept.
God might just as well have said "If you eat of the fruit then you shall surely jkhxjthjfv"And anyway, this is all beside the point if God knew exactly which choice was going to be made prior to creating the universe in the first place. History was going to play out in a specific way and there was nothing that anybody could do about it.

No. Only your eat analogy is nonsense. A&E knew perfectly well how to eat, what it meant to eat and every concievable part of the concept of eating. they did it all the time.However thay did NOT know how to die. Nobody they knew had died. How could they possibly understand what "to die" meant?Besides this, you still haven't shown me any way in which any decision that they made would have had a shread of effect on the outcome anyway since God knew from the start that they would "fall".