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.
Biblically the teacher is right. God does know where you are going to end up when he creates you. That’s the doctorine.
But he’s all knowing and all powerful?
Which means he knows exactly what you will do for the rest of your life which means what you will do is predetermined.
that… does not sound right. humans have free will
Humans believe they have free will. If you think that you have free will, in what way does that differ meaningfully to you from actually having free will?
This gets weird, because the human brain appears to make decisions unconsciously before you consciously make that choice. It appears that our “rational” , thinking brain is making up reasons why we did a thing, rather than those reasons actually driving the choice. So did you–the consciousness that you conceptualize as being yourself–really make that choice, or is there some other ‘dark’ you that’s driving, and you only think you’re in control?
They have free will but omniscience means it’s known ahead of time what that free will will lead to.
If you give a 3 year old the choice between watching either the news or baby shark, you can pretty reliably predict the outcome. That but on a bigger scale.
At least that’s the explanation that was given to me.
The omnipotence, when combined with the concept of omnipresence creates a situation of god existing outside our concept of time. It’s similar to how we exist outside the concept of time held by those characters contained in a movie. At our will we can exist at any point(s) in time in the movie, because of this we already know the ending.
One view is that God knows how people will end up not because He is forcing them to act a certain way, but because He has a perfect knowledge of the outcomes of their actions. Kind of like how a parent knows what the outcome of a small child’s actions will be.