Community members in a Tennessee school district want to banish Satan from their children’s halls after the formation of a new club was announced.
The After School Satan Club (ASSC) wants to establish a branch in Chimneyrock elementary school in the Memphis-Shelby county schools (MSCS) district.
The ASSC is a federally recognized nonprofit organization and national after-school program with local chapters across the US. The club is associated with the Satanic Temple, though it claims it is secular and “promotes self-directed education by supporting the intellectual and creative interests of students”.
The Satanic Temple makes it clear its members do not actually worship the devil or believe in the existence of Satan or the supernatural. Instead Satan is used as a symbol of free will, humanism and anti-authoritarianism.
If god is omniscient they would know exactly what everyone is going to choose, nullifying free will entirely
For those downvoting the above, @captainlezbian@lemmy.world is making a reference to John Calvin, who is considered to be an OG determinist.
(Determinism: The view that God determines every event that occurs in the history of the world.)
If god is omniscient they would know exactly what everyone is going to choose, nullifying free will entirely
Yeah but if God knows every choice that’ll be made ahead of time, it doesn’t mean he’s taking the choice away from the person actually making the choice, they still go through the motion of making the actual choice, and hence, they have free will to make the choice. God just predicted it ahead of time.
Yeah but if God knows every choice that’ll be made ahead of time, it doesn’t mean he’s taking the choice away from the person actually making the choice
That argument would only make sense if god wasn’t the supposed creator of the universe and everything in it. If god created everything, is omnipotent and omniscient then at the moment of creation she would have known every single event and circumstance in that person’s life leading up to making a certain choice and she would have been able to create the universe differently so that a different choice would have been made.
If you set up all the dominoes, you cannot claim the 100,00th domino falling over wasn’t your doing because you only tipped over the first one.
That argument would only make sense if god wasn’t the supposed creator of the universe and everything in it. If god created everything, is omnipotent and omniscient then at the moment of creation she would have known every single event and circumstance in that person’s life leading up to making a certain choice and she would have been able to create the universe differently so that a different choice would have been made.
This actually makes my point though.
God knowing everything doesn’t mean that God made you make that choice, God let you make that choice, but knew what that choice would be ahead of time.
You still had free will, you still were the one that had the neurons fire off in your brain, and you made the choice. God was able to predict that choice ahead of time with 100% accuracy.
On a side note, I love that you use ‘she’ for God.
This is a great example of why I don’t believe free will is a coherent concept outside of religion. It’s basically a perk that negates God’s omniscience as it applies to you, but if you don’t believe in God, it’s meaningless.
Ah, but that is the point, until Man chose it hadn’t happened, it is the precognition paradox. Until the event occurs, what is known is all the possibilities.
That’s… just like your opinion man.
Then god isnt omnipotent, cause you know, it lacks the power of whats actually to come and is only good at knowing all the hypotheticals. Or may be lacks omnicience, but one could argue that knowing all the possibilities counts.
All that matters is that its lacking something, when it shouldnt
Is that true. Could he know what we will do but what we do is still our choice without influencw
Take the garden of Eden story.
Did God know that if he put the tree there then the people would eat from it?
Did God have a choice to put that tree there?
Could God have made a world where they did not eat that fruit?
If he picked this possible world out of all possible worlds based on an outcome that he had in mind, then we’re just playing out the parts that he assigned for us.
God is supposedly all powerful and all knowing. God created the universe and everything in it. He did so with the full knowledge of everything that would happen in advance. He chose to do it anyway, despite knowing all the suffering it would cause. And then he chose to create a realm of eternal suffering (either by literal fire and brimstone, or by ‘absence of God’, it doesn’t really matter) for those fleetingly finite-lived humans that he created knowing they would screw up. Less than a hundred years of life in exchange for billions of years of torment. And he created them in a way that is fully capable of realizing how horrible a way to treat someone this is. It’s nothing but cruelty of an unimaginable scale. Part of the reason I don’t believe the Christian God exists is because I can’t accept something that evil. It’s too horrifying.
True, if somebody comes from the future and knows what you’re going to eat tomorrow morning, that doesn’t make it suddenly not your choice. But to add to the other comment, an important point is that he made us all as well. Because if a god creates you according to his grand plan—knowing full well every single decision you will ever make—it is no longer a choice. Every one of your decisions were predetermined from the start.
Something I like to think about is that it is impossible to go against the Christian god’s plan. If such a thing were possible, then this god would not be omnipotent nor omniscient. As such, everybody that has ever gone to hell did so because god designed them to.
How is that a choice. If they know exactly what’s going to happen I don’t have the power to do anything except for what is going to happen. If you only have an apple at home, you can’t get any other kind of food and your gonna die if you don’t eat the apple, did you really choose to eat the apple?
My knowing what you shall do in no way invalidates your free will. That is invalidated by the futility of your choices. Totally man made and not to be confused with determinism.
I think its still possible that I could freely choose my actions and you knowing what they would be would not invalidate that it was an action I choose based on my own free will.
The funny thing about the free will argument is that theoretically if you could build a galaxy powered “super” computer, you could potentially track every single movement of every single particle in the entirety of the universe, so that level or scientific inquiry nullifies free will.
