They refuse to see the contradiction. Their god cannot have a plan and people also have free will--they cancel each other out.

Also, it is not free will to tell someone they can make their own choices and then tell them you will punish them, and their offspring, severely (as it was with the Jews); or them, for eternity, as it became with the Christians, if they do not do exactly what you tell them to do. That is NOT free will. That is do MY WILL--or else suffer the consequences!

And, seriously, what kind of perfect god would create imperfect people and then punish/condemn them for being imperfect? The Bible is nonsense from beginning to end--and they are just too brainwashed and afraid to see it.

I won’t attempt to understand or argue for or against your friends explanation of free will as a gift of God, but I will offer another way to view this argument - with my answer to a question some time ago on Quora.com. Here was the question:

“If, as a dead atheist, you discover that Heaven and Hell are real, how would you feel?”

Here was my answer:

“Although dead people don’t have feelings since they no longer exist, I will bite anyway:”

“I would feel that ‘God” is a fraud since he/she gave man the ability to reason; provided no evidence that he/she exists; reason requires evidence to draw conclusions; atheists, therefore, conclude that he/she doesn’t exist. So we find out, after we die, that he does exist?! What was the point of having free will and the ability to think? It was a fraud and the worst joke on mankind imaginable.”

Fundagelicals connect free will with responsibility. No free will, no responsibility, no sin, no punishment. So to maintain their system of do's and don'ts and rewards and (mostly) punishments, man must have non-deterministic total free will so that he's 100% GUILTY.

This is just a sideshow to me. The subset of atheists who debate philosophy tend not to buy into total free will but neither are they wrongly connecting that to personal responsibility or attempting to gin up some imagined "anything goes" mentality.

We have at least limited freedom of choice from a limited menu of viable choices and society rightly constrains people from making choices that tend to harm others. The end.

The Christers can continue to imagine what our "true" motivations are for unbelief, all they want, but that doesn't change what they actually are. We are not licentious or immoral or even amoral. Morality doesn't proceed from the forehead of god as administered by the church. It proceeds from empathy, enabled by mirror neurons, and informed by rational long-term self-interest of both individuals and society. Religion has always claimed to be the inventor and sustainer or morality, but really just appropriates it for its own purposes.

That is not an explanation of free will, it is an explanation of how the Christian god is a complete and unmitigated bastard.

There you go

An occasional lucky prediction and absolute knowing aren't even close to the same thing.

I guess I'm not understanding. If this imaginary omnipotent god knows what we're going to do, how is it that we have free will?

Christians vacilate between a personal god who practices free will and doesn't when it suits it. If they truly believed in free will, then they would believe in an impersonal non- interventionist god. Such a 'let the cards fall where they may' god might at least be consistent. But of course, they don't believe in such a god. Churches, prayer, commandments and all the rest would be irrelevant. Free will means god doesn't interfere. Instead they believe in a god which allows free will and abrogates free will when it suits. Every time god "saves" someone, or performs a miracle or responds to a prayer, or 'comes into my life", and other such claims, is an intervention, or put another way means interfering with human free will. Their god is hopelessly inconsistent, responding to some prayers, but ignoring most. Why would a god "save" someone like rich boy G W Bush from his excesses, while ignoring the desperate prayers of parents with children with terminal diseases in hospitals? What made Bush more deserving than poor little dying children? (Free will isn't just people's decisions, it's also the interaction between people and their environment, like disease.)

Christians never explain these inconsistencies. They want to have their cosmic cake and eat it too on free will. All this is utterly consistent with Gods conjured up in human minds and projected onto their lives and the world. From my experience, religious practitioners ( priests, etc) will not thank you for asking such questions as well.

Subjectively, free will seems to be real. But it is an illusion. Objectively, mechanical determinism is real, i.e. everything is a chain reaction of cause and effect starting from the Big Bang until now and beyond.

The reason free will seems real is because it is impossible for our mere human mind to comprehend all the causes determining what seems to be our free choice.

Their god has to allow for "free will" or there's no basis for punishment of sins. This is one of the worst conundrums of religion... a god who is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent who will punish for the wrongs he designed his creations to make. This is why religion constantly tells followers to have faith and not to use reason.

In the view of a Middle Eastern-based Jewish, Christian, or Islamic theology, God must know everything, including the future, or else he's not omniscient. At the same time, if we're predestined and have no free will, that's a problem, since we can't be blamed for our actions and there's no such thing as "sin", which vitiates the whole notion of needing forgiveness, grace, laws and commandments- the entire reason for a theocracy to exist. This creates a whole passel of issues for churches which only exist to dictate to (and thrive on the donations of) their members. If we're predestined to do whatever we do, then logically, nobody can be blamed, and a just god (which we are assured he is- "the judgments of the LORD are true and righteous altogether"- Psalm 19:9) wouldn't send anyone to Hell for a decision they didn't make freely, right?

How to solve the dilemma? With an enigma, of course! "Predestined free will"... I was predestined to freely choose to write this reply, even though up until the very last moment, I was going to let the perfectly good replies of everyone else stand as the final word on the subject, rather than throw my two pence in. Just as I am now making a predestined, yet free-willed choice to sip my single malt (12 year old Glenlivet- delicious) as I type this paragraph. (Ahhhh. Smooth and yet fiery. Or is it fiery and yet smooth? Further experiments are clearly in order.)

Of course, some denominations take it even farther and decide that even your afterlife is predetermined. No matter how righteously you live, your seat in Heaven or Hell is determined the second you're conceived, which makes it seem rather pointless living a decent life, doesn't it? Why don't Calvinists, for instance, just party all week? It can't hurt their chances, or help them to abstain from boozing it up- unless I totally misunderstand everything about their religion, which is entirely possible.

And there you have it. I was predestined to write this, supposedly. For the record- maybe I shouldn't drink distilled alcohol while replying to forum questions. Although who knows- maybe it made me more entertaining than I was otherwise destined to be.

Assertion #1. We were not born knowing all things. We were born pre-intelligent, pre-aware empty vessels. Our physical development at birth, if done well enough is sufficient for us as eacxreted fetuses to survicve with a lot of help, mostly from the mother.
Development contiues through at least an average of 2 years becore sufficient brain development opens complex (words) communication. This not a step, it is a progression.
The idea that a diety has his finger in your life so deeply that you are only a puppet is rediculous. As we develop, we begin to think logically, if that attribute hasn't been stifled by indoctrination to fairy tales of incredible sources. We become member of our families, our communities, our religions our values long brfore we learn to "think for ourselves". By that time, our indoctrinations have been installed in the most basic levels of our awareness. Growing past them is what seperates the shepherds from the sheep.
We do not go from full (knowledge) to pick and choose, we go from empty to full, acquiring the knowledge accepted and given by those who raise ue, feed us, teach us, and keep us alive.
The second assertion "to choose" or to "pick and choose" from this mythical library is the trap we use to validate our belief systems in spite of condradictions and disproven assertions. Please keep that in mind when your religious friends tell you other "theories" of how their god does things. Respectful questioning might help, but faith is tricky, if challenged, the resonse can be anger or defensiveness, or excuses from rote memory like "the bible says...". Again, respectful questioning, where? Ch.and verse? The rest of the chapter? In my experience, if where is found, ch. And verse is read (rote memory) the rest of the chapter may have the indights to the verses actual reference. Be courteous, but be skeptical. Biblical truth is sort of like statistics, theyy can be made to say anything. In all things, find your truth, challenge what you hear with a search for credible evidence and logic.Good Luck.

Free will? Nada. Ain't happening. None such thing. There is one proof of this statement that can not be well refuted.
How many reading this, asked to be born?
None. No free will.
Just here on this dirt ball with equality for all. How is that?, well we all also die, so we are all equal...

It's possibly the worst argument there is. God gave us freedom to choose then killed th whole planet with the exception of his favorite old drunk and his family with a global flood. That's just one of the problems with it.

Free will can not exist in the Christian theology, I made a video about why.

It's all bulshyt.

The big "free will argument" comes about because it is so important that you want to worship god of your own free will. I always heard that god could have robots or angels worship him but with humans it is their choice to do so. This is free will.This is why even the angels are looking into this area of humanity. Once you study enough the big question becomes who in their right mind would want to worship this ignorant tribal god? Why would anyone want to worship anything?

On the other hand the murderer has free will to murder you just as you have free will to be murdered. There are no gods in that equation.

Free will presents problems in secular life too. Scientific discoveries often indicate that our conscious decision making process is largely a post hoc rationalisation of decisions already made subconsciously. This limits the scope for free will. And yet our justice system defaults to the assumption of free will in its reckoning of culpability. The Boomer Bible by RF Laird Describes a generation of people willing to admit to flaws and mistakes but to also suggest they since they are simply a combination of their genes and upbringing (neither of which they're responsible for) how could these flaws be their fault?

Ask your friend if we are free to reject the gift of free will from god. Can god force free will upon us?

A lot of people ask how we can have free will if God knows what we'll choose, but that's never bothered me. On this one point, I agree with your friend. Let's suppose I have a looking glass that lets me see glimpses into the future; my knowledge of which route someone will take to get to work doesn't change anything about the processes that went into their decision. It was as free or not as if I had no prior knowledge. I reject free will as most people think of it (i.e., libertarian free will), though, on the grounds of determinism; every decision is the product of a multitude of environmental factors, antecedent events, and so on. (Technically, I'm a compatibilist, and I rank different types of actions as having different levels of freedom.) But, setting that aside, it introduces other problems. For instance, let's say I created someone knowing every decision they'd make and I could see the harm they'd do and the eternal punishment they'd commit themselves to, I wouldn't create them in the first place. What a horrible thing to allow, knowing the consequences. How irresponsible of me to bring them into existence. Yet this is what many religious people inherently believe of their God. It's the problem of evil, and I've yet to hear a compelling solution aside from the absence of a personal God like Yahweh (all powerful, all knowing, all loving). Every theological explanation multiplies complexity greatly, or reduces it to a non-answer like "it's a mystery beyond human comprehension" or "it's God's plan." A friend of mine, when faced with a logical contradiction about the problem of evil, said smugly, "There's another possibility you haven't considered: you can't think like God." This is where the conversation ends, really, because they've set themselves up with the ultimate in begging the question: "I believe a perfect God exists, and if anything seems to contradict that belief it's only because we are flawed and can't comprehend such perfection." I think it was Sam Harris who said something along these lines: What evidence can you provide to convince someone who does not value evidence? What logical argument can you make to convince someone who does not value logic?

I don't know about anyone else, but I don't kill an entire world by drowning them just because they chose poorly. I don't threaten someone with eternal damnation if they don't do as I command.

Your friends has a poorly formed analogy.

When we finally invent a proper thinking robot, we will put limitations on its thinking for safety to the robot and others around the robot. If we were stupid enough not to do this, we wouldn't blame the robot when it decides to embark on world domination. The endless lawsuits would be directed at the creator for being negligent in design. What kind of creator would design free will and then endlessly complain that you are not doing what I want.

Circular "reasoning" is just gibberish....why enable this xian further ? You're an Atheist and the xian is deluded. End of story.

They say god created the earth, scientists have proven that the earth is millions of years old, we are in 2019 and I wonder why did god wait millions of years before deciding to add humans?