From time unknown, Christians have been harping on the fact that human beings have their own free will, which they use more often than not to do things to piss off God. It’s enough to make you wonder why he bothered with us at all. He creates us and loves us, we turn our backs on him, which causes him to be sad, but not as sad as when he HAS to throw us into Hell when we don’t follow the obscure, questionable rule book. It’s his game, and though he doesn’t like the rules, he follows them. Except it isn’t a game for us.

Life, it seems, is a big game for God, who sits up in Heaven, shouting at the TV screen, trying to make the players do what he wants so they will win. I have to wonder if he’s even trying anymore. According to the Bible, God used to throw figurative sports drinks and energy bars to the players on the team he liked, while throwing allegorical empty beer cans and hot dog foils at the opposition. He even played on the team for a brief period of time, until he was forcibly retired. Now he sits in front of the TV, yelling at the players.

Yet God already knows how the game is going to end. He knows who’s going to win and who’s going to lose. The Bible states in 1 John 3:20 “For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.” If this is true, God knows every minute atomic reaction, trillions of which are going on around us all of the time. God knows how every little atom bounces off of others, creating an inhumanly incalculable field of chaos that only God could make sense of. Ever hear of the butterfly effect? God could tell you where each oxygen element will end up from the point it’s pushed by the wings of a butterfly in China to the point it assists the beginning of a hurricane in Florida.

When put in this perspective, the concept of God is all the more incredible.

God knows EVERYTHING. Even what you’re going to do for the rest of your life. He knows it in such detail that you can’t make a single grain of sand crumble underfoot in any way that would surprise God. Explained like this, you can’t really say that your will is your own.

The topic of free will isn’t anything new. The concept of free will has been debated for centuries, and the only way you’ll get anything new out of this post is if you either never thought about it or have the intelligence of a centipede. It’s a pretty important debate, as the very intentions of God are under examination.

I have to conclude that if God exists and is all knowing, there can’t be free will. Since he knows everything, he can see into the future. If there is indeed a future to see into, one can logically conclude that the future is already determined, and anything we do is simply acting within God’s will. Since God is so powerful, we really can’t do anything he doesn’t want us to do, since he would correct our mistakes simply by willing it. It wouldn’t take him any more effort than doing nothing.

Plenty of Christians who don’t want to forfeit the liability of human actions (or at least the actions of the unsaved), but don’t want to undermine the perfection of God (I haven’t run across a Bible verse that said that God himself was perfect, but feel free to correct me) argue that we are responsible for our actions and we genuinely make choices, despite the fact God already knows the choices we are going to make. It could be argued that we have choices and God knows exactly all of the alternatives that are available at every second of our lives, but if he is all knowing, he would know which alternative we would choose. Hence, our fates are pre-destined.

To give the other side a shot, I dug up this argument on the subject that says, yes, God knows the future, but we still have free will. This piece starts out with an analogy that free will and foreknowledge of the future is like a parent knowing that their child will choose to eat a piece of chocolate cake over a bowl of rotting dead mice. Common sense would tell you that the child would choose the chocolate cake, but the flaw in this argument is that we’re applying common sense to religion and humanity.

There are variable factors in this equation. What if the child wanted to try something new? What if the child was insane? What if the child wanted to gross out his parents? Or what if the child simply enjoyed the taste of rotting mice over chocolate cake? While it’s a safe bet to assume the child would eat the cake, this is only based on common sense, not foreknowledge. It would not surprise God if the child ate the mice. In fact, God could tell you which group of bacteria that were previously feasting on the mouse remains ended up doing the child in.

The article admits that we are not all knowing, but God is. However, it also claims that God has no list of things we have to do for each of us, that we will make our own choices. We don’t have to go to point B to make the sequence of universal events keep moving. We can go to point C instead, or D, E, F, or just stay on A and forget the whole thing. God will know where we end up going, though.

They mumble something about God existing in the future and can list the things you’ve done only after you do them, but the wrinkle is he can go into the past or present and tell you what you’re going to do because he already listed it in the future, after the fact, because he’s God. This seems to undermine the concept of God, who you would think would simply know what’s going on. I don’t think it would be a process for him at all. It just sort of happens.

What I love about this piece is that it simply keeps stating that God doesn’t have a list of things you will do, but reneges on this and says that he has access to such a list because he wrote it in the future. So basically, God knows what you’re going to do. It has already been determined. The future has been written down.

So what this article ends up saying is that we only have the illusion of free will. I think this makes sense. We think we’re choosing our own destiny, but actually we’re just following a pre-determined path. It’s like going through a maze with all of the wrong ways blocked off.

The reasons Christians are so desperate to instill the concept of free will on everyone, besides appearing better than the unsaved because they decided to let Jesus take over things, is because if God had decided what was going to happen a head of time, suddenly everything is all God’s fault. Every murder, every rape, every dropped cell phone call is God’s fault, and by letting all of this happen, God is nothing more than a big meanie.

The big one, for the Christians, is if we have no free will and we go to Hell, God is the one whose responsible mapping out that path and not intervening. In fact, I’ve decided that if God does exist and he wants me in Heaven, he’ll find a way to get me on the path there, because he knows how to do it better than me. In a way, this statement (besides the parts where I question God’s existence) exercises more faith than the Christians who throw themselves down to their knees and pray to Jesus because someone told them to in a vulnerable moment.

So maybe everything in the Christians’ world is true. Based on my free will theory, God will show me this in a meaningful way. These don’t included Chick tracts or brainwashed Christians. I’m not saying God has to come down and personally smack me on the back of the head (this would help a lot, though), but if he’s all he’s cracked up to be, he will guide me if he wants. God does as God pleases, and right now, he’s yelling at the TV.

In the end, if God is like he’s described, then our futures have been determined, so we should just give up, right? Well, if you’re going to absorb this idea, then that is your fate, and there’s nothing you can do about it. But humans aren’t like that. It’s natural for us to overcome challenges and keep going no matter how hopeless it seems, even if we only think we’re going it based on free will. I, for one, would be happy to live thinking I’m making my own choices, because that has been the case since time began, and I haven’t seen any problems with that system that would be remedied by true free will. It think it’s impossible for anyone to argue this point without undermining God, but I welcome anyone to take the challenge.

And for those of you who are condemning me for this idea, God wanted me to do it. If he didn’t he would have fried my computer or blocked the website, which he has so far failed to

Okay, I’m not ending it like that. You’ve read it, and the seeds have been planted, as God decided. Live with it.

[post your thoughts]