this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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It gets better. "God's Plan" and free will are incompatible, yes. But also, Christians love to pray for stuff. "Make mama get better", "Let the Cowboys win", "Get me the job I want", etc. And they LOVE to say that "prayer works". But at no point do they consider the implications of that notion, that praying for things changes the outcomes of the world.
A) Anything, prayer or otherwise, that can change the trajectory of events is, like free will, wholly incompatible with the notion that the universe is following in lockstep with "God's Plan".
B) If absolutely anything would be part of God's Plan, according the Christian faith, it would be the birth and death of every human. This is directly incompatible with prayer saving someone's life.
C) Changing the outcome of any choice a person is going to make (such as hiring decisions), is also wholly incompatible with free will.
D) The very notion of prayer causing change places human agency over God's will. Yes, presumably, God could choose whether for not to grant a prayer. However, if he changes his prescribed outcomes based on your prayer, then that means either that he decided your idea was better (which seems odd for an all-knowing being) or decided to capitulate to you for some reason. Either way, you hold sway over your almighty god's will for the universe. This thought is SUUUPER narcissistic to believe in.
E) Other people's prayer holds sway over you. If your prayer can cause God to change the minds of others, then their prayers can likewise cause God to change your mind in turn. Neither of you then has free will. Moreover, it is not just God, ultimately, that can negate your free will, but any other Christian that prays for it. That's troubling, to say the least.
F) Bad things, things unjustified by karmic justice, things unrelated to human free will, happen all the time. Things like natural disasters, disease, animal attacks, genetic accidents, etc. Those things happen to good people, Godly people, innocents, infants, the unborn. People pray for these things not to happen. "God, Protect them", "Bless them with your Grace", "Watch over them". Yet they still happen. If prayers works, unless God decides to not answer them, then God must have decided to ignore those prayers. Prayer working is, itself, incompatible with the idea that there is a holy plan that must be followed, so that is not a justification for choosing to ignore those prayers and allow such things to happen. That means God could have stopped it and did not. God is directly responsible for these evils. There is no way around that.
On that happy note, enjoy your Sunday service guys!
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