The issue of free will and determinism creates problems for religious belief. Traditional theistic belief

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To what extent are human beings free?

        Freedom is the most important aspect of human life – some people take it for granted, some dream of it, and others fight wars over it. However, if God exists, how can humans be free, as He knows everything that has happened, is happening, or will happen? And if we are not determined, how can God be omnipotent?

The issue of free will and determinism creates problems for religious belief. Traditional theistic belief involves a Creator God, which is both omnipotent and omniscient. Thus He can do anything. The problem here is that God knows everything that has happened and everything that will happen. His knowledge cannot be wrong. There is not a single event that He has not foreseen. Given that He created the Universe the way He did, do we have free will? Consider that when God made the Universe He could see every possible result of what it was doing. Which means He could not create something without knowing what the results would be, and without knowing how it would be affect the things around it. So therefore He created the Universe knowing every single choice every single human being would make. As a result, everything we will ever do is known by God and therefore predestined. For example, let's say that Fred has a choice that will save his life, and the final choice is to be made tomorrow. God knows already what choice he will make - God cannot be wrong therefore Fred cannot choose otherwise to what God has predicted. When God created the chain of events that made Fred He also knew that He was making Fred's choice for him, and knew how the various circumstances and character would make him choose either right or wrong. Fred would go forth and make that very decision that God knew he would make, and by virtue that God knowingly set up all the factors that affected his decision, it was not up to Fred but to God to decide how Fred would fare. Therefore, in this line of thinking, human beings are not free.

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Hard Determinists would argue this. They believe that everything can be explained in terms of cause and effect. Every event can be explained by a cause, and in turn these causes are events. Human behaviour is by definition an event, because it has various causes. If an event is caused, then it cannot be free and thus no human behaviour is free. Free will is an illusion, and the only reason the future seems undetermined is because we do not have sufficient knowledge to know all the causes operating in the world. As a result, everything we do has already ...

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