ELI5: If you're a Christian, why do you have to be good if Jesus will forgive you no matter what?
I grew up going to church but I'm not religious now and I never really understood this part.
Please, no answers along the lines of "aha, that's why Christianity is a sham" or "religions aren't logical". I don't want to debate whether it's right or wrong, I just want to understand the logic and reasoning that Christians use to explain this.
I had a teacher in school who believed in predestination. Basically, whether you go to heaven or hell is pre-ordained before your even born and there's nothing you can do to change it. I told him that sounded to me like I should be a Satanist because if I'm predestined for heaven I've worshipped Satan all my life for nothing and I get to chill in heaven. If I'm predestined to go to hell I've spent so much time worshipping Satan it probably won't be too bad. I'm personally not really religious myself but I really was dumbfounded at the whole predestination thing.
That's an... interesting take on predestination. The idea is that God already knows what you're going to do, because he's omniscient. It's not a matter of just picking you and then whatever you do is fine. He already 'knew' what you were going to do. So if you're good, he already knew and you're in.
If you wanna get into a religious debate about predestination, though, strap in. It's a doozy.
Writ on a broader scale, if someone has power over you (say a government) but chooses not to get involved when you do something, is that free will? Or have they just not prohibited the action you chose to take? I think you have to scope what you mean by free will for there to be any semblance of it given how nebulous "will" can be. If you believe that outcomes are even to some degree deterministic (say, for example, we are predisposed a certain way because of our background, but may act differently because of our beliefs), then it is compatible with a definition of Free Will that has an omniscient being knowing what we will do.
Writ on a broader scale, if someone has power over you (say a government) but chooses not to get involved when you do something, is that free will?
yes.
Or have they just not prohibited the action you chose to take?
Not relevant. You still had the free will to act.
? I think you have to scope what you mean by free will for there to be any semblance of it given how nebulous "will" can be. If you believe that outcomes are even to some degree deterministic (say, for example, we are predisposed a certain way because of our background, but may act differently because of our beliefs), then it is compatible with a definition of Free Will that has an omniscient being knowing what we will do.
I have no idea what you are trying to say with this word salad. Being predisposed doesn't negate free will. You could be a coward for example and be predisposed to run and hide when there is danger but you have the free will to act bravely when the situation presents itself. You or me or anybody else can't know for sure what you will do. More absurdly you or me or anybody else can't know how you will act in any given situation the minute your fathers sperm penetrated your mother's egg.
That's the situation here. The minute the egg is fertilized god knows exactly what you will in every moment of every day for the rest of your life. That means you don't have free will. You can't surprise god, you can't do anything he didn't foresee.
It sounds like you know more than this about me so correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding is there's a difference between just plain omniscience (which sounds like what you're describing in your comment, and is pretty widely accepted among Christian denominations) and actual predestination (which to my understanding is almost exclusively a Calvinist belief).
Humans believe they have free will. If you think that you have free will, in what way does that differ meaningfully to you from actually having free will?
This gets weird, because the human brain appears to make decisions unconsciously before you consciously make that choice. It appears that our "rational" , thinking brain is making up reasons why we did a thing, rather than those reasons actually driving the choice. So did you--the consciousness that you conceptualize as being yourself--really make that choice, or is there some other 'dark' you that's driving, and you only think you're in control?
One view is that God knows how people will end up not because He is forcing them to act a certain way, but because He has a perfect knowledge of the outcomes of their actions. Kind of like how a parent knows what the outcome of a small child's actions will be.
They have free will but omniscience means it's known ahead of time what that free will will lead to.
If you give a 3 year old the choice between watching either the news or baby shark, you can pretty reliably predict the outcome. That but on a bigger scale.
At least that's the explanation that was given to me.
The omnipotence, when combined with the concept of omnipresence creates a situation of god existing outside our concept of time. It’s similar to how we exist outside the concept of time held by those characters contained in a movie. At our will we can exist at any point(s) in time in the movie, because of this we already know the ending.
I know I'm preaching to the choir but omniscience will have to do much better than that. Let's say someone decides to make a choice depending on the outcome of a throw of a dice. You might say it's trivial for omniscience to predict what a dice shows by perfect physical knowledge.
But how about if someone makes a choice depending on the content of opening a Schrodinger's cat's box? Omniscience will have to be able to predict what is currently physically impossible to predict.
Then someone might argue it is not impossible for omniscience to do that but then we're back in "believe it" territory and not "there is a logical explanation" territory.
The term "free will" is not in the Bible, and there are instances of God overriding people's will, such as God hardening Pharoah's heart so that he wouldn't release the Israelites.
Sounds like your teacher followed the calvinist branch of Christianity then?
Predestination (in terms of religious salvation but also in general, like in determinism) is something that I always found fascinating. Because, if you are predestined to something (either to salvation or to just wake up today), why do we even try so hard if the outcome is already preset? Why try to be a good person if you are already destined to go to heaven or hell since you've been born? Or why do you set the alarm to wake up early in the morning and go to work if you have no influence on what will happen? Couldn't you just sleep the whole day and the result would be the same because it's already preset?
I guess you wouldn't really have that choice. If a full determinism is true, there is no room for free will and even trying to affect the result is something you are already predestined to do and any choice you think you make (or even vacillating over the choices you make) is still something you were predestined to do and only an illusion of free will.
He sure did! And yeah, that's pretty much how I felt about his beliefs. If everything is decided already, then there's no point in having any motivation to do anything because it won't matter. Your destination is decided no matter what, so just do whatever you want regardless of if it's morally just or not.