October 9, 2002

Annatar and Free Will
Eriol

Please refer to Annatar's post of Oct 3 for my quotes:

"... Why did he bother creating the world at all?"

Surely God did not create the world to "get" something out of it, be it adoration, sadistic kicks, or even our love (the usual explanation). God doesn't need our love! On the contrary, he created the world because HE loves US, and He thinks (some distinguished scholars would disagree) that existence is better than non-existence. The greatest gift he can give us is existence, to be followed by our loving him. Sounds strange, but no one ever said that trying to figure out GOD would be easy :)

"This DOES remove the concept of free will"

If you know what someone will do, this does not remove his free will. I think God's foreknowledge is like that, only perfect. In a ME setting, Eru knew that Bilbo was "meant" to have the Ring, and Frodo was "meant" to be the ringbearer. But the characters didn't, and at any time they could have made one of a trillion wrong moves and the future would be different then FOR THEM. God, of course, knew what they would do even before they did. In a nutshell, the fact that God (and ONLY God) has a perfect knowledge of the future has no bearing on our free will.

Will this persuade Annatar? I don't know, and Annatar doesn't know also. But God does :)

Hope this was helpful, see you!