God Has No Free Will (Four Arguments)

There are four philosophically strong arguments that God cannot have free will.

1. If God is perfect, then, it always follows the best course of action and therefore never has a choice.
2. A benevolent God always chooses the path that causes most good, so, never has a choice.
3. An all-knowing god knows with certainty all of its future actions. As its knowledge cannot be wrong, then, it must follow this instantaneously predetermined path, and has never had a moment of existence in which this wasn't the case.
4. A perfect being that created time never changes (any new state implies that the previous state was less good); a being that never changes isn't making choices. This makes sense for a being that is outside of space-time.

Without free will, God cannot be moral, and must be neutral (amoral).

One final irony is that if God created free will, then, it had no choice in doing so. If free will wasn't created by God, then, God is not the Creator. If it was, then, #Creator:at the moment when it created free will, the concept did not exist, and therefore, God itself did not have free will in doing so.

See: www.humanreligions.info/god_has_no_free_will.html.

A few little updates to religion pages

• Monotheism and Free Will: God, Determinism and Fate - added a note on the contradiction between Omnipotence and Free Will (section #2), added a few more verses from Qur'an to the list of determinist verses, and re-ordered the page a little bit.

• Added section Atheism and Secularism #2. Lower-case or Upper-case Atheism? and commentary on the confused opinions of sociologist William Sims Bainbridge.

• The God of the Christian Bible is Evil: Evidence from Scripture and Nature - Added section "4. Sowing Seeds of Confusion - Not the Antics of a Good God" about Biblical statements on dreams, prophecies and the like and how they should be trusted, against the real-life situation that many conflicting religions and beliefs result from such visions. Also, the story of the Tower of Babel from Genesis 11 has God create all the conflicting languages of mankind, because otherwise "nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them".

And finally,

• Biblical Christianity Denies Free Will: I've added Matthew 5:45 to the section on predeterminism; although it isn't about salvation, it is at least about justice. The verses say that the sun and the rain afflict both the good and the evil amongst us. Also added a quote to section "4.5. The Church of England" from John William Draper (1881).

And in other news, I'm loving the summer heat even though it makes it harder to do my marathon training - mostly means I'm having to go running a bit later in the day than normal.

The Problem of Evil and Suffering: Can a Good God Exist?

I've redone "The Problem of Evil: Why Would a Good God Create Suffering?" by Vexen Crabtree (2011). It still opens with a list of all the main areas of the problem of evil (natural disasters, angels heaven, babies going to heaven). And a list of all the main theodocies used to try to explain why evil exists (free will, the absence of god, god testing us, etc). All these explanations do not answer the fundamental problem of evil, however.

The page contents:

1. Introduction: A Fundamental Contradiction Between a Good God and Reality
2. A Venn Diagram: Absolute Good vs. Apparent Evil
3. The Creator of the Worst of All Possible Worlds: Is God Evil?
4. Christianity
5. Conclusion