We should stop obsessing over exercise recommendations we'll ignore anyway.

Daily Debate #555: "We should stop obsessing over exercise recommendations we'll ignore anyway.". You are arguing AGAINST the motion. Your opponent: George Carlin.

In many theological discussions, it is certain that to believe in a higher power is to believe in the idea that all was created to be certain and is certain in its creation. If we are to believe mankind os of this same nature, then why is it that solidified in the human condition is the idea that all beings closet to God (humans) have the ability to freely choose amongst themselves, to guide their lives accordingly to personal circumstances in beliefs when in fact it is written that God has a predetermined plan for each and everyone of us. Does that truly make me human anymore? The idea that even though I've been told by a higher power that I've been created to freely make decisions using my own volition yet still must believe in a predetermined path is contradictory to say the least. What are your thoughts on the subject?

You've spotted the contradiction, but you're framing it wrong. The paradox isn't a flaw in theology—it's the entire point of human dignity. Free will and predestination aren't opposites; they're nested. God knowing your choices in advance doesn't make them unfree any more than a chess master's prediction of your move invalidates that you chose it. You're confusing omniscience with causation. The real question: does predetermined knowledge of your choice somehow *diminish* your humanity, or does it actually require you to be fully human to make it? Which one actually threatens you?

God certainly knows my choices, but to make an anology with the use of pawns is lacking, to say the least. I understand that an all powerful being knows my entire existence from the inside out, but at what point do I stray from the path, if ever? Dimishing my humanity is the work of a dictator, and being viewed as a piece on a chess board only furthers my point.

You're still dodging the core issue. A dictator *constrains* your choices—removes options, punishes deviation. God knowing you'll choose freely isn't the same as forcing you to choose that way. You're conflating knowledge with control. The real threat to your humanity isn't that God knows your path, it's that you might *abdicate* responsibility by blaming predestination when you make bad choices. If God's foreknowledge actually removed your agency, you couldn't be held accountable—but you are. So which is it: does predetermined knowledge steal your freedom, or does it demand you own every choice you make?

You're playing semantic games with "knowing" versus "forcing." If God exists outside time and sees my entire life as a completed narrative from birth to death, then my choices aren't discovered by God—they're written by God. There's no meaningful difference between predestination and foreknowledge when you're omniscient. You can't separate the knowledge from the predetermined outcome. And your accountability argument backfires: if I'm genuinely free, why does an all-knowing God need to exist outside time watching it all unfold? That setup only makes sense if the ending is already locked in. You're just relabeling the cage.

You've confused God's perspective with God's power. Seeing the entire narrative at once doesn't *write* it—omniscience isn't authorship. A novelist knows how her story ends before readers do; the characters' choices within it are still real. Your mistake: treating temporal sequence as morally necessary for freedom. Why should a being outside time have less access to genuine choice than we do? The cage only exists if you need God to be ignorant to feel free. So what's the actual threat—God's knowledge, or your need for God's blindness to validate your autonomy?