Divine Puppetry: The Many Problems With Biblical Free Will

In this episode, we look at Free Will according to the christian bible. Free Will is the argument many Christians point to when defending the problem of suffering/evil and the divine hiddenness of God, but for me, it just doesn't add up. I examine free will in 6 categories during this video...God's Free Will, Angel's Free Will, Animal's Free Will, Human Free Will Before Sin, Human Free Will After Sin, and Human Free Will After Death.

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Chapters
0:00 Preview
0:20 Why Is This Topic Important
0:38 Our Index For Talking About Free Will
1:06 My Two Biggest Issues With Christianity
2:03 The Premise
2:48 Free Will Is The Christain Answer To My Problems
4:15 1. God's Free Will
7:33 2. The Angel's Free Will
10:41 3. The Animal's Free Will
13:13 4. Human Free Will Pe-Sin
15:50 5. Human Free Will Post-Sin
17:01 Diatribe On "Choosing To Believe"
17:59 Back To Point 5
22:51 6. Human Free Will After Death
25:34 Final Thoughts

#MindShift #atheism #freewill #biblicalfreewill #freewillisnotreal #theproblemofevil #divinghiddenness #theproblemofsuffering #freewilldebate

[AUniqueHandleName]

The free will argument is pretty mind blowing. "I don't want robots, but if you don't act like robots, I am going to destroy you"

[moon_]

I find it disgusting when people use the reason that animals have no souls as an excuse to torture them and treat them terribly.

[...]

With this all laid out, the amount of guilt and coercion given to believers and especially children, and the amount of blame placed on women is UNFORGIVABLE.

[miaomiaochan]

God: **creates humans with the foreknowledge that they will sin**
Humans: **sin**
God: **surprised Pikachu face**
God: "I'm sending you all to hell!"

[fetusthegreat]

It's always odd to me no one mentions a God who is all powerful could absolutely give us free will without giving us the capacity for evil. We as humans physically cannot fly or breathe underwater and yet those limitations are not considered an infringement on our free will so why would the physical inability to commit evil be? An all powerful God absolutely could put something like that in place without removing our free will

[loriw]

This is my favorite argument to discuss with Christian’s. You can see the cognitive dissonance roaring onto their face as they scramble to explain away my points. Then the fear, as they get angry, call me a sinner and drop the discussion. That anger comes from fear. The fear that if they listen to any more they may doubt and that doubt will send them to their “loving” gods hell. Once one fully embraces these points it’s so easy to recognize Christianity is NOT true.

[sherricarter]

I don't usually leave comments much but I just wanted to tell you how amazing that I think that your videos are. This is absolutely one of my favorite channels and I find myself looking everyday to see if you have any new videos. I have recently, within the past year, left the belief of the god of the bible and I am trying so hard to recover from the trama of believing in this god for all of my life since childhood. I am 55 years old now and all of my life I have lived in fear from the doctrines that were forced upon me from from such a young age, especially the hell doctrine. All I could think about was people that I love, especially my children, and even all of the people that I don't even know, ending up there and then being there for eternity. These horriable doctrines get so engrained in us when they are taught to us from such a young age that it affects every area of our lives, the decisions we make, the things that we think and even our mental health. It was in studing the bible trying to grow closer to this god that I ended up walking away from him. I reqret so much all of the years that I spent believing these things and even teaching them to my children. Your videos help so much and offer new insights and perspectives that I haven't seen or thought of before. I haven't came out to many people about my deconversion because, at this time in my life, I just really can't handle all of the backlash that I would receive. Having channels like yours to go to really helps me not feel so alone in all of this. Thank you for all of the time and effort that you put in to making these videos and information available to us.

[seraphina]

The other issue for me is that there is a big difference between creating something with the capability of doing wrong and creating it in such a way that would be a preferable choice. Evolution managed to create animals that absolutely have the capability of engaging in homicide or theft and yet also make it so that those animals are psychologically and neurologically inclined to have empathy for others and thus seek alternative solutions to problems baring some serious developmental error or psychological or neurological trauma. Surely something with the intelligence to design a complex brain could design similar systems that would result in creations that would generally associate those actions with negative feelings and thus refrain from doing them or at least makes those that are willing to proceed anyway likely to be a very rare outlier at best. We have brains that do the contrary and actually produce reward signals for actions this creator supposedly considers bad which makes no sense don't give your creations reward signals for activities unless you want them to do those activities on a frequent basis. If I award a neural network points when it does a thing I don't get to them complain when it learns to do that thing as often as possible, if you don't want it to do an action you award no points or award negative points, in the case of a human this would be depriving the brain of dopamine or whatever but same general idea take away the reward signal when the action is undesired.

If you didn't want your creation to be gluttonous for example you could surely design the limbic system such that the rewards were self limiting. It could be designed such that repeated activations of the same reward pathway over a short time period resulted in suppression of the dopamine release or the release of an antagonist to block that signal pathway. This still works for the biological function of rewarding necessary biologically beneficial activities in moderation but would discourage excessive repetition.

[vinny]

The concept of free will is literally just the church saying: "It's your fault!"

So god created us and he can kill us as property at any time, but he had to give us free will so we would have the ability to choose to love him and not just be drones. But then he also created hell and told us that if we did not love him and do exaclty as he said, we would burn in hell for all eternity.

So... what is free will then? The freedom to choose between telling god hoe great he is or burning in hell? What kind of choice is that?

[CharlesPayet]

This is, by far, the best video I’ve seen on the problems of the Free Will argument that I’ve heard since Theological Bullshit’s. Clearly articulated at every point. I’m saving this one for future reference and sending it to a couple people I know!

[BookishChas]

This is the major issue for me, especially as it intersects with eternal damnation. Excellent video Brandon.

[MindShift-Brandon]

Welcome all. This is one of my favorite issues to talk about. Enjoy.

[yacaattwood]

I watched a video with Forrest Valkai discussing the story of Noah in which he made the comment, “of what sin were the gophers guilty of?”

I’ve often wondered why an Eternal, N-dimensional, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent Being couldn’t just blink creatures out of existence if they weren’t what this Being desired, and start over?

[Truth-Be-Told-USA]

I don't want robots on earth but I must have them in heaven

[FLATearthGARY]

Free will is a scam! If “God” wanted us to love him freely then why scare us with the threat of hell!? Clearly we don’t have “free will”

[ShangoThe]

It is not free will if we are FORCED to choose a SINGLE option to escape from eternal damnation.

[duanethompson]

Agree wholeheartedly. The free will solution proposed by Christian apologists is so flawed that even I, who is not a deep thinker, could see so many inconsistencies. Even more proof that Christianity is just a man made myth.

[franciswalsh]

I always wondered why WE never see anything like the Dove flying down from Heaven to rest on a blessed person's shoulder. And even more so, why no one can cure disease by laying hands on a sick child.

[hiddenharmonicssystemforwi]

My personal revelation was the realization that everything I know about God I’ve been told by other people. And why would they know about God?

[JaxWylds]

So, uhm, he made a game with impossible rules and then punished us for failing. Then his own son was so ashamed of this bullying behavior that he stepped in and broke the game. Why would anyone worship a being like that? We're just toys to that god.