Free will vs. God Free Dating, Singles and Personals

Free will vs. God Posted: 3/16/2008 3:59:22 PM
RE the Opening Post by the OP: I think this sums it up nicely for me: Since many of life's events are a surprise and out of our control, then free will is reduced to being a matter of choice in how we REACT to an event. G-d does indeed decide everything that happens. However, we still have choices. But the results of those choices will end up the same, whatever choice we make. I believe that the driver had the choice to run the woman down, or not. But if he had chosen to not drive over her, then something else would have happened that would still have caused her death in any number of ways. A clot in her leg that had previously not been detected could have got loose and got to her heart. The driver could have swerved out the way, and she could have ran to avoid the pick-up and ran straight into the vehicle. The brakes could have failed. Another car could have lost control. A ladder could have fallen and swung at her head. The driver could have lost control of the wheel, through no fault of his own. Any one of a number of things could have caused her death. So I believe that her death was pre-determined. But that the driver had the choice to be the method of her death. So I believe that EVERYTHING that happens is G-d's will, even the things that we choose to happen. But we have the ability to choose to be the executor of any one of those actions. RE msg 7 by the OP: But I find the butterfly effect most interesting. It makes me think of us all bouncing off each other in one giant chain reaction. If anyone knows something about chaos theory, please share. I've read a bit of it, and did some in university. 1) The Butterfly Effect: Basically, if you take certain simple formulas, you start off with an initial value, and call it X0. Then you put X0 into the formula, and you get X1. Then you put X1 into the formula and get X2. Then you put X2 into the formula and get X3, and so on, and so on, and so on. If you chart that as a graph, you get a nice pattern. But what is interesting is that you can an entirely different pattern for every initial value. What pattern you get cannot be clealrly determined by the initial value. So if you want to determine X1000, you have to re-apply the formula 1000 times, and just see what you get. For the 1 million-th value, you have to re-apply the formula 1 million times. But for most of those formulas, no-one has a clue about how to calculate a formula that can tell you what will be the 1 million-th value directly. Any system that can change massively in a very short space of time, is described as a system where the behaviour of certain systems to be dependent on formulas that are incredibly sensitive to the initial conditions, and that behaviour is called The Butterfly Effect. 2) The Physics of the Universe: Now, everything that happens in the world, is affected by forces that can be defined by formulas that work in this way. Every force in the universe uses the values of the properties of the objects that are here now, to determine the values of those same properties in the next infinitesimally small moment from now. But the values in that next moment are used by the forces of the universe to determine the values of the moment after that, and the values of that moment are used to determine the values of the moment after that. There are easily more than a thousand of such moments in a single nano-second, and most of those formulas that run the universe are also those types of formulas that no-one has a clue about how to calculate a formula that can tell you what will be those values after 1 million moments. In theory, we could calculate those values after 1 million moments, by working them out manually. But the Uncertainly Principle tells us that there is a limit as to how accurate we can measure those values, and Chaos Theory says that even by changing ONE of those values a tiny bit, we can get completely different answers, and there is no way to know what those answers will be. So when you combine the Uncertainty Principle with Chaos Theory, you find that even when you have made all the measurements as best as you possibly ever make them now, they cannot give you any clue of how things will be in the next nano-second, so they don't help you at all. So the Physics of the Universe seems to also follow The Butterfly Effect and is also Chaotic. 3) Anti-Chaotic Behaviour: Certain chaotic systems have another odd property. If we keep certain values constant, and let the other values change, then even though we have no idea of the end result of these systems, these systems seem to observe certain relationships, or laws, all the time. Some of those laws seem to apply not just to any individual object, but to groups of objects, such as marbles which are composed of millions of atoms, or even a whole planet. We see that the universe is such a chaotic system, and that this anti-chaotic behaviour applies to the universe, and what we call "laws of the universe", are in fact examples of this anti-chaotic behaviour. Sometimes we observe such behaviour, such as gravity, and sometimes we deduce such behaviour, such as Boltzmann Mechanics. But either way, we can observe that the universe acts according to certain laws, but we cannot seem to derive those laws from the much simpler behaviour which adds on itself to make the behviour of the universe. So the universe has laws. But we cannot figure out how we get from the microscopic world to the planet-size world, or from the planet-size world to the microscopic world. This is basically what I remember. But I'm sure that someone will correct me on it. RE msg 49 by crazylitling: I wonder why people get so caught up on such a topic of ultimate freedom when we are not even free to be ourselves. From the moment we were born we have become slave to our emotions, wants and needs, desires etc... Then we pretend that we are in control of our lives. I don't think one human being is free to make a single choice that is truly free. Our Choices are based mostly on emotional responses instead of clear thought and heart centered action. This is spot on. I was taught that there are most things are not under our control, but habitual. However, we have a very tiny amount of free will to change a certain level of action, at any one moment, and this is called the "point of choice". That might not even be the action itself, but merely a tiny desire to do that action. However, in so making that tiny desire of action, we have ever so slightly changed our habits. If we then make that tiny desire for the next month, that desire will build and build, and eventually it will become an action. By this way, we can ever so slightly change our habits, until we have completely changed ourself in whatever direction we so choose. But it doesn't happen overnight. It takes a little bit every day. That still means that our actions, however changed they are, are still in accordance with G-d's plan, because the plan remains the same, and we are only changing which parts of G-d's plan we are choosing to be the executor of.