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From: soudan@iitmax.iit.edu (Bassel Soudan)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.islam
Subject: Re: Free will vs. Predestination
Message-ID: <1990Nov3.214829.12588@nntp-server.caltech.edu>
Date: 3 Nov 90 21:48:29 GMT
Sender: bes@nntp-server.caltech.edu (Behnam Sadeghi)
Organization: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
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Approved: bes@tybalt.caltech.edu


In article <1990Nov1.215418.20068@nntp-server.caltech.edu> bes@tybalt.caltech.edu ( Behnam Sadeghi ) writes:
>------
>1)  God has *determined* all of our actions beforehand.  Our 
>"will" plays no role on what we do in life.  God has also 
>determined our reward and punishment in the hereafter for our 
>conduct in life (which was itself predetermined by God).
>
>Clearly all that is done by us, good,
>bad, or otherwise, is "willed" by God because it is determined
>by God.
>

	In this view, you are placing a lot of unfairness upon God by saying
that he has "predetermined our actions and rewards. It sounds like He
decided everything and then let us go through the motions. But there is
nothing as fair as God. He did not predetermine our actions and deeds. He
did not decide for us that you shall be muslim and you shall not. He left that
to us. In the Quran God says that he has taken a vow from all the children of
Adam that he is thier Lord. Then he showed every one of us the two paths and
"WE CHOSE". The best way to think about this goes like this:

	God created us. He knows exactly what we are going to do because he
	is the one who created us and he is Omnisient. He knows what choices
	we will make because he created us and knows everything about us. We
	have all the freedom we want in doing what ever we want. But he still
	knows how we will excercise this freedom. He gave us the freedom to do
	what we want, then said: If you want me to be happy with you don't do
	this and do that. He asked us to limit our own freedom for his sake so
	that we may prove our belief in him. That is why he will reward us in
	the here after. For the limits that "WE" placed on "OUR" freedom
	following what he "ASKED" us to.

I will give a simple example from our daily lives that may explain this
better without having to go through all the Philosophic discussions.

(Wa lillahu al mathalu ala'la.) (to those who don't speak Arabic this means
that I don't give this example to mimic what God does, I am just doing so to
explain a fact about him. Litrally it means that God has the better and higher
example.)

Any way.
If you put together a computer program and you work on it for a long time
perfecting it. (the idea of time is placed here because we humans can not
better anything without spending a lot of time on it. It doesn't relate to
God in any way or fashion.)
Back to the example. You worked on the program and you know exactly what it
will do. then you run it. The program will encounter many situations, but you
know exactly how it will act in each one of them, because you are the one who
put it together, so you know exactly how it should act and react. The example
would probably explain the situation better if you think about in terms of an
Artificial Intelligance program (a program thet learns from its experiences.)
In that case you may not tell it how to react to every situation, but you tell
it how to negotiate its way out. You know how it will do that, you know what
kind of situations it will encounter, therefore you know how it will react and
what it will do.

	I hope that this might shed some light on this age old question. All
of this is my own opinion, I might be right and I might be wrong. May God
forgive me if I am wrong. Responses are welcome.

Bassel