Hi TheRationaliser
Sorry for getting your opinion wrong before, and I'm still not getting it in fact. On one hand you seem to be admitting that indeed we have free will, but on the other hand you seem to be saying, God could have made me so I would have used my free will differently so it's still his fault? To me your position sounds like, yeah I have free will, but I'm not willing to take responsibility for it (No offense intended).
Nope, you are still not getting it. Let me try something else.
A child born to Hindu parents, raised with Hindu beliefs, indoctrinated. They live in a Hindu village so everyone around them is a Hindu. Hinduism is the only credible religion to them. One day they pick up the Quran and read it, the whole idea of it is so foreign to them that they are simply incapable of feeling that it makes sense.
They have the free will to accept it anyway, because it threatens them with Hell if they do not, but then again Christians threaten the same if they don't believe that Jesus was the son of God so why would they pick one religion that means nothing to them over another that is equally meaningless?
And so the point is. Is that person to blame? They were born with a brain wired in such a way that made them more prone to accept authority - so that's beyond their control. They were brainwashed throughout their life - again beyond their control. By the time they see another religion their brain is so strongly entrenched in their beliefs that they find it impossible to believe any other - beyond their control. And finally if they started to question their belief there is the entire village to back it up and give it credibility - again beyond their control.
So despite having free will the
parameters of their life which guides the mental processes which influence that free will are beyond their control - and so they only act within certain parameters.
Life and culture etc are one massive chaos engine where ones life is influenced by our surroundings and feeds back into that machine. The current configuration is a reflection of the initial parameters, the initial parameters were (apparently) defined by god.
So, when god created Adam he defined his initial configuration (brain wiring etc) and his parameters (his environment and experiences) First of all he told angels to bow to Adam knowing full well that Satan would refuse, he also made sure that Adam would be there to see this refusal. He put a tree there from which Adam should not eat and yet made it accessible. Then he agreed that Satan could spend millennia trying to make humans evil people.
So, these are all input parameters to the first human's life. If god had not created the tree then things would be massively different. If he had not told the angels to bow to Adam things would be entirely different. If he had not let Adam see Satan refuse things would be different. If he had not agreed to Satan misguiding people things would have been different.
I mean, why the hell would god tell people not to eat pigs and then put some people on islands where their primary source of food is pig? That's another input parameter which guides their lives!
Chaos machine : Butterfly effect : Original input parameters : The way the human mind was originally created.
A quick analogy:
I leave my baby in the room while I grab a t-towel to clean up a feeding spillage. The door-gate is up so she cannot escape. However my natural fire is burning away and there is no fire guard. The way her brain currently works (insatiable curiosity) combined with her environmental input parameters (no parent present, pretty fire) make it likely that she is going to get burned. I don't have to perform brain surgery to take away her natural curiosity, I just have to change the initial environment and things will be much different. She won't get hideously scarred, she won't suffer a life of depression, she won't go on to kill herself when she is 15, she WILL go on to have children, and the chaos engine feeds back into itself for each of her children + all the people she meets throughout her life.
All for the price of a fire guard.
Is that any better?
Topic: the apparent paradox between free will and predestination.