If God knows the future, what’s free will?

This was also the name of a video on “Closer to truth” on youtube. A wrote in the comment-field and repeat my comments here.

Free will and random choice. Prophesies from God’s prophets.

Imagine I have a card deck and lay the card on the table so that we can see all the card. You get the task to choose the 4 kings, so that it shall be a history of 4 kings, one after the other. First you can choose among four, then among 3, then 2 and at last 1. How many histories can you choose? It will be 4*3*2*1 = 24, it will be 24 histories. You can freely choose the 4 kings in 24 ways. This is mathematics. So the you have a free will, sure like mathematics. No problem.

So why do they discuss it, what’s the problem? There might be another problem, for example that you chose to do something, but you are not able to do it. You want something but can’t get it. Maybe you are not strong enough, not wise enough, you lac information, you are not rich enough to pay for it.

If I shuffle the card deck and let you choose from four cards from it without let you see what card you choose and you still want to choose the 4 kings in the same order, you must be very lucky to succeed. The chance will be 1/(52*51*50*49) = 0,00000015.

In the Bible it was prophesied that should invade Juda (the rest of Israel) and bring them as slaves to Babylonia, but later the king of Persia, Kyros, would let them go home. While they were in Babylonia, God told Daniel that after Babylonia there would come tree great kingdoms, Media, Persia and the Greek-empire. It is told that Alexander the Great’s kingdom should be divided in four, one of them was the Greek-Syrian kingdom. Here should come a dictator, Antiochus 4. Epiphanes, that pursued the Jews.

How could he know? Why did he let it happen, why did he let his own people suffer that much?

He had a plan. He surely saw something valuable in the Greek culture and Alexander spread it with his empire. But there also was something bad.

When Isac Newton was old he wrote a book about Daniels Book and the revelation in the New Testament. The Revelation seems to be a continuation of Daniels book.

God did his work with the people, even when they were not aware of it.

In the second creation history, Genesis.2, it is told that the earth was dry without life. Then God let there come a spring of water to water the soil and then he created the man from the soil and blew the spirit of life into his nose, so that he became a living soul. God planted the garden and said to the man that he should cultivate it and protect it. God let him fall asleep and then he created the women out of his rib, so that she should be a help that suited to him. When the man woke up, he acknowledged what God had done when he was asleep, even though he was unconscious, he acknowledged it when he became consious.

This shows that God did his work with the man before he was alive and when he was unconscious, but when he was consious he experienced that God also did his work in his surroundings.

As long as they did what God had told them to, their will and their doings were in accordance to Gods will.

Then they chose to do what he had told them not to do and that was bad to themselves. They were cheated.

But God still did his work with the people, even thou they didn’t know it and understand it. He chose the Israel as his people and did his work with them, so they were aware of it, but did they believe? But it also told that he did his work with the peoples around them and their kings, even though they did not know him and did not understand it. But some of them came to acknowledge it.

Can science use God’s name? Who can?

My comments to “Can science talk God?” on “Closer to Truth”.

God is perfect, his Son Jesus Christ is perfect and by faith in him we receive what is perfect.

Plato believed in a world of perfect ideas with the good idea. The soul was there initially and had good insight in the world of ideas. But when it came to this material world, it lost much of this insight. That’s how he explained the problem of eval.

The world of ideas suits to God’s heaven and the good idea suits to Gods Word. The Bible explains the problem of eval this way, that after the fall of sin, the sin divided humans from God.

But with one offer for sin, Jesus took away the sin once and for all. With the one offer he has once and for all made those perfect who are made holy (Hebrews.9,26&28 10,10&14). We are made holy with God’s Word and God’s Spirit. God is perfect, Jesus is perfect and his work of salvation is fulfilled and perfect. He gives us life and Spirit from heaven and it is perfect. Jesus is God’s Word, the Holy Spirit reveals and glorifies him for us as our savior and Lord.

God and his Word is perfect, so this functions well together with mathematics. By faith we understand that God created everything by his word, so that what is visible is made out of what is invisible. That’s why the nature is understandable. God created him in his image, that’s why we are able to understand.

In ancient time many people believed that the celestial bodies were gods. They made gods from sticks and stones and worshipped them. But the prophets in the Bible told the people that it was not gods, those gods that did not create heaven and earth were not gods. God created it by his Word, so that what is visible is made of what is not visible. This was not so easy to understand and accept at that time, but now we know that this suits to science.

God said to his people through his prophets that they can know he is the only right God, because he talks to them, he tells what will happen and it happens and he saves. They killed him, but the true and living God made him alive again, rose him for the dead and set him by his right hand side in heaven. He makes his church alive and does same kind of wonders trough it.

God reconciled the world with himself when he let Jesus die on the cross instead of us. On that foundation I let myself reconcile with him, in this way I will get harmony between heart and brain, body and soul. I believe in God and his Word by my heart at the same time as I think mathematics and natural science with my brain. I shall seek Christ and believe in him and love him with all of my heart. That makes me wise in hearth, so that it is fruitful to my brain also.

I choose to turn to Jesus and bless him, in this way I am blessed. That’s why I become a blessing and so I say to them: May God bless you.

Noadays God does wonders.

I use to go to free churches where there happen to come messages as translations of “speak in tongues” and once I had written about this the Lord spoke to me in this way and said I was loved by a three times Holy God. So I understood it this way, that the Fader, Son and Holy Spirit me who trying to understand, loves me in my trying to understand.

For many decades I have visited such living churches and Jesus has talked to me trough the speech and trough translations of speak in tongues. Once and economist was the speaker and he also translated a speak in tongues. He also told that he was healed from cystic fibrosis and heart attack. Cystic fibrosis is a gene disease, people get sicker and sicker and then they die, maybe the get little more than 30 years by good treatment. But he was quite healty and more than 50 years old. This was so special that I wrote about it in my blog.

Some years later he had got canser and they prayed for him to be healed again. They had the meeting on youtube and I wrote about it in my blog again. Many called the leading of the church and told them that they didn’t like this. They called him too and this was troublesome to him and came in addition to his illness. This time he was not healed and died of cancer about 60 years old.

These telephone calls were like protesting against healing by prayer. Surly they argued on the basement of science, but scientific interest was not really the point. They wished him not to be healed and what was the point in that?

If scientific interests were the point, then they would have liked to gene-sequence him to find out what really had happened. Were genes changed or was the reading of the genes changed or what? I suggest the genes were changed and it would have been interesting to verify it.

So it happens that people are healed by prayer. Nowadays there are many such witnesses. I mean this is interesting to science and nature philosophy. If somebody says it is not true, then it is a lie. But the purpose of science is to say the truth!

How do brains function? 

My comments to “How do brains function?” on “Closer to Truth”.

Create computer in human image. Tabula rasa. But God created humans in his image.

The neurologist and computer engineer create the computer in the human image.

Neurologists research the brain and nervous system, by making models of parts of the brain. Thus they try to create new computer. And then he thinks that such computers will be as spiritual as human beings!? But what kind of human vision is that? Is man as programmable as a computer? In that case, I think man has lost something along the way, but what? Has it lost its soul? Physics is fundamental to chemistry, so they use chemistry and biology and throws away physics.

In the past, humans made gods out of sticks and stones, they resembled humans and animals. So humans worshiped them. But God told them they were not gods, there was not the spirit in them, they neither heard nor saw, did not speak and answered them, they did nothing.

” Tabula rasa” means clean blackboard, so you can write on it as you wish. The point is that a child is from birth like a pure blackboard that learns through experience, that is what writes on the blackboard.

This is how it is with a computer. Hardware is added there, so it is ready for use and the user programs it further and enters what he wants. Can the computer be an idol for you? Can you be as programmable as it is?

According to the Bible, God created man in his image, then we need to turn to him, to get the right self-understanding.

What is consciousness?

They don’t know how our thoughts and memory is represented in the brain. May bee it is by the wave function, so that our consciousness and subconscious is the wave-function. But there is something deeply hidden.

Many explain and defines our consciousness by what we sense through our afferent neurons. But it may also give an immediate response trough an efferent neuron or the hormone system. Or the signal may go to our brain so that we think of it and make a decision and send the instruction trough the efferent neuron. The information we receive and we give this way is coded by the neurotransmitter. Anyway there must be collapses of the wavefunction in these processes.

Well, we compare a human with a computer. When you get a new computer you are free to use it on that programming level, you don’t need to refer to the hardware and its machine-language to argue for what you write. You can write and read about it if you like, but when you talk about something quite different it is not reasonable to argue this way.

Similarly we may very well talk about elementary particles and the mathematical physical description of the nature, but it is not reasonable in all circumstances. And remember that there still is something deeply hidden.

If a human is like a computer, who is to use it? It is also the user of the computer! How do you explain that? By the soul and the “self”. A newly born child has been thought of as a tabula rasa, hopefully it’s parents loves it an teaches it what is good for it. Then it is wise to teach it to bee a living soul that uses it’s own “computer” and also to be social and learn that way.

A scientific experiment is repeatable. But what happens in our daily life is not repeatable.

A scientific experiment is repeatable. We can use science and technology to make apparatus that repeats a certain process, like machines and robots in a factory. Humans that work in a factory often does the same operation over and over again. And more and more they are replaced by robots.

But how about our daily life. There is not much point in anyone trying to repeat what someone else has done. If somebody takes part in an ice dance competition, each have their own program they try to do as best as they can. But it is impossible to repeat exactly what someone else has done earlier. We are unique and it is impossible for someone to try to be like somebody else and there is no point in it.

So those who argue for such equality on behalf of the scientific method, that the experiment shall be repeatable, can not have understood much of it, they lac the rationality, that’s what we expect to be repeated.

When we search Christ on the foundation of his fulfilled work of salvation, he meets every one of us individually, we may come to him just like we are, yes, that’s the way to come to him. He talks to us, he saves us for eternity and gives us eternal life. And it happens that he heals people from sickness. The true and living God does’s miracles, no other “god” can do like he does.