I grew up going to church but I’m not religious now and I never really understood this part.
Please, no answers along the lines of “aha, that’s why Christianity is a sham” or “religions aren’t logical”. I don’t want to debate whether it’s right or wrong, I just want to understand the logic and reasoning that Christians use to explain this.
That’s an… interesting take on predestination. The idea is that God already knows what you’re going to do, because he’s omniscient. It’s not a matter of just picking you and then whatever you do is fine. He already ‘knew’ what you were going to do. So if you’re good, he already knew and you’re in.
If you wanna get into a religious debate about predestination, though, strap in. It’s a doozy.
It sounds like you know more than this about me so correct me if I’m wrong but my understanding is there’s a difference between just plain omniscience (which sounds like what you’re describing in your comment, and is pretty widely accepted among Christian denominations) and actual predestination (which to my understanding is almost exclusively a Calvinist belief).
Omniscience and free will are contradictory but only if you feel like you should be bound by the laws of logic.
Writ on a broader scale, if someone has power over you (say a government) but chooses not to get involved when you do something, is that free will? Or have they just not prohibited the action you chose to take? I think you have to scope what you mean by free will for there to be any semblance of it given how nebulous “will” can be. If you believe that outcomes are even to some degree deterministic (say, for example, we are predisposed a certain way because of our background, but may act differently because of our beliefs), then it is compatible with a definition of Free Will that has an omniscient being knowing what we will do.
yes.
Not relevant. You still had the free will to act.
I have no idea what you are trying to say with this word salad. Being predisposed doesn’t negate free will. You could be a coward for example and be predisposed to run and hide when there is danger but you have the free will to act bravely when the situation presents itself. You or me or anybody else can’t know for sure what you will do. More absurdly you or me or anybody else can’t know how you will act in any given situation the minute your fathers sperm penetrated your mother’s egg.
That’s the situation here. The minute the egg is fertilized god knows exactly what you will in every moment of every day for the rest of your life. That means you don’t have free will. You can’t surprise god, you can’t do anything he didn’t foresee.