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by alok-g 4347 days ago
Why cannot God have free will and "dictate" (and thereby predict) the future? (The situation becomes different when multiple entities possess free will.)
1 comments

Depends on your definition of God. If it includes perfect and omniscient, then that being can't make any decisions. They've already been made for him / her. That god is an automaton.
Or alternatively, s/he has "already" made all decisions outside of time/at the moment time began. From this point of view, any being that is both omniscient and omnipotent cannot change his/her mind, if said being changes over time, this implies s/he will make decisions now based on how s/he will feel about things later, after taking her/his own evolution into account.

I'm sure we're not saying anything that hasn't been said literally millions of times before half-drunk at countless frat parties.

> From this point of view, any being that is both omniscient and omnipotent cannot change his/her mind, if said being changes over time, this implies s/he will make decisions now based on how s/he will feel about things later, after taking her/his own evolution into account.

You see, the problem is that people think of the evolution of an omniscient deity as a strict linear progression from cause to effect, but actually it's more like a great big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey... stuff.

:P

Well of course. Who'd want to be sober at a frat party? :)