this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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There's a pretty easy out for someone determined to believe in this stuff: their own act of prayer itself was part of God's plan.
Also, these types of theists usually justify these outwardly incompatible beliefs with a distinction between "true" free will and the "perception" of free will. In some people's deterministic view, while God has this omniscient perspective that spans all of space and time, the human perspective is one of the impression of freedom, a sense that feels so real that you might as well call it it simply "free will".
Which, again, negates free will, and also means their prayer didn't do a damn thing to change the outcome of things.
In all fairness, I can get on board with that as a notion. I am also a determinist, though not for any religious reasons. However, I'm not applying any purpose to that determinism, deific or otherwise, or any moral implications on it.
In my view, there's no "plan" so to speak. But every outcome is determined by the state of things at that moment. The universe is a state machine. There may be some randomness in that quantum outcomes are not predictable, but that randomness still does not manifest into "free will".
Our choices are made by our brains computing an outcome based on its chemical and electrical state at that moment. Macro-features like personality, values, experience, memory, influence, etc. are also just bioelectrical, chemical and physical states of the brain that manifest these traits. They do factor into the decision making, obviously, and this feels like free will but it's not. Since those are also states in the machine and they would always have been that state of the machine at that time, there is no way that they decision could have been otherwise, EXCEPT by quantum randomness, which is, again, also no free. And those states, too, are determined from other states and events previous.
So anyway, I get that idea