I don't know...but I do know that Free will and belief in god are mutually exclusive.

I don't believe in god...therefore, I believe in free will. :)

Free will is an illusion. We are nothing more than complex chemical reactions.
@Darwyn I don't agree that belief in God and free will are mutually exclusive. A basic tenet of Christianity is that God gave us free will.

Only when you see the future as linear does an omniscient God and free will become mutually exclusive (and then only if you accept that knowing that something will happen is somehow the same a making it happen). A God that can see all possible future choices, but lets humans make these choices for themselves, is both omniscient and allowing free will.

That said, some Christian churches do believe in predestiny.

Yep, kind of odd that. I always looked at that as an extrapolation of what "omniscient" means.

I do not believe in free will. No one is ever in control of their lives at any points, they can make decisions, sure, but rarely do their decisions have the outcome they anticipate.

Yet, as to the OP's question, I think that it's free will that drives our actions. The idea of fate, for me, undermines personal accountability and responsibility. Which is why I like to believe in free will over fate, but can not show causation.

It's not my fault I stabbed Austria - it was fate

Some external force that drove me to it. :-)
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greed.

just because we don't have full control over our actions and their outcomes doesn't mean we don't have control over our motives, although they are inherently selfish.

Yet, to say that our motives are inherently inherently selfish wavers toward belief in fate, as in it's just my nature. So, to an extent, we have a destiny, but can opt out of it?

I don't think nature and fate qualify as the same thing. Just becuase it is in my nature to do one thing doens't mean I won't sometimes do the other

no, there is no opting out. You are what you are. You can try to fight it, but your very nature pushes you towards it anyway. street walkers, presidents, drug addicts, lawyers, etc. people are either born innately drawn to a lifestyle that leads to what they end up being or into a family that pushes it onto them.

Yeah, I agree. One may choose to go with one's first impulse, but it's still a choice.

if it is in your nature to be a religious person you aren't going to ever permanently change and become and atheist. You might have individual struggles with your faith but you are essentially at the core, religious.

to say you have a "core" is no different than saying everything is predetermined. Preists are born relegious, they are raised or have experiences that make them that way.

Even if it were predetermined we cannot predict our actions. The equations governing how we behave are simply too complicated. We can only make guesses, no absolute facts. This is also in a way due to the uncertainty principle of Heisenberg. We cannot know exactly the configuration of our target human brain, so we cannot predict what it will do, eh?

So we must treat it as if there were free will.

What causes this question?

"I don't know...but I do know that Free will and belief in god are mutually exclusive."

Hardly, Darwyn. Without free will, how could we sin? What kind of a God would fate that Adam and Eve to disobey him and all the evil in the world to be acted out? No, free will is necessary to have a cohesive vision of what faith means, at least in a Catholic understanding, which is all I can speak on with authority.

However, if ever there was an ultimately pointless discussion, it is this. You can't falsify free will or fate, so while a nice little philosophical exercise, it really doesn't matter.

"We are nothing more than complex chemical reactions."

spyman, you don't really go through life thinking that way, do you? I for one like to think that I'm more than a pile of atoms.

Inviticus you are of course entirely made of atoms, but as they say the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

The way I like to think of this issue is that our lives are predetermined... by who we are and the choices we will eventually make.

The problem with an omniscient and omnipotent god and free will is that those two particular things cannot coexist. Why? Simple:

Omniscience:
>God knows all possible outcomes of all possible events.
>God also knows which of these outcomes can occur.
Omnipotence:
>God can select any possible (and some impossible, if you assert it) outcome for any event at any time in any place.

Thus, our example god, knowing every possible outcome and being able to choose which one happens, is the master of all choices in the universe, not the individuals who supposedly make decisions.

If you say he simply doesn't act on the knowledge then he has chosen the path that the universe is taking through willful inaction. It's kind of like whether you choose to let your car hit a person or swerve or slam the brakes. No matter what the outcome is, what happens is your responsibility.

Surely, it is more similar to sitting next to someone in a car as they speed towards a pedestrian. You can do nothing, and allow the car to hit the person, or you can grab the wheel yourself and force the car away. You have the power to stop it, but by doing so you infringe upon the drivers free will.

"What kind of a God would fate that Adam and Eve to disobey him and all the evil in the world to be acted out?"

Since the apple contained knowledge, there was no way Adam and Eve could have known right from wrong when god told them not to eat the apple. It is similar to telling an infant not to spit up on your boss and then giving him/her to your boss to hold. You can hardly blame the infant for spitting up on your boss when you put him in the position in the first place.

I think the better question would be: what kind of god would set Adam and Eve up to fail unless he wanted all the evil in the world to be acted out?

Adam and Eve had NO sense of right and wrong until they ate the apple (which was when they realized they shouldn't have) yet God holds it against humanity for all eternity?

Absolutely, for the argument - that an omniscient (and omnipotent) God and the existence of Free-will are mutually exclusive - to be compelling one has to confuse "knowing something will happen" with "making something happen" on some level.

To extend Glorious's comment, even if the passenger is shouting instructions (ie The Holy Scripture, fellowship with other believers, and your own conscience) for you to "slow down and be more careful", or "Stop! You're going to hit that guy!" it becomes even less the passenger's (God's) responsibility. He has allowed for your free-will (by not taking the wheel himself) but given you enough information to make the correct choice for yourself with out taking over.

Therfore in this particular instance God has:

A: The ablility to see all possible repercussions of an event (omniscience).

B: The ability to take control of events if he chooses (omnipotence)

C: A caring nature in that he does not want harm to come to anyone (benevolence)

D: A caring nature in that he will not make us automatons by taking free will away from people who choose wrongly (which in and of itself would nullify free-will).

"Adam and Eve had NO sense of right and wrong until they ate the apple (which was when they realized they shouldn't have) yet God holds it against humanity for all eternity?"

But didn't God send his son, Jesus, to be crucified and take the sins of humanity?
So, to put this to a real life example, if you told your children not to do something and then they disobeyed you and did it anyways you would most likely scold them or be mad at them or something, right? But, eventually you would forgive them for what they did.
God sending Jesus was similar. Adam and Eve had done something wrong, so God sent Jesus to take on the sins of humanity and forgive Adam, Eve, and the rest of the Human race.

Actually mlempic it's imp[licit in the story that they knew thay were supposed to obey God. See Adam's response to Eve. If he had no idea of the diffeence between right and wrong he why would he have hesitated and begun to formulate a rebuttal?

For your position to make sense you have to assume that God put the tree their specifically as a trap for Adam and Eve. IF you make that assumption it's on something other than the actual events from the story because God's motives are not addressed at all. It would be analogous to saying that you know exactly why God placed the stars in that particular configuration in the story. You may have a supposition, but it's not based on the story. It's only using the lack of specific information in the story to back up a claim.

As to why was the tree there (assuming that this is a historical event and not an early parable). Neither of us knows the purpose for the tree's existence.

Perhaps God loved that tree as much as he loved amoeba, poison-ivy, and humans. In which case the existence of the tree would be a gift to that tree, having no connection whatsoever to humanity. I have electrical outlets in my house. They serve a purpose and I like having them there. I tell my kids not to play with them for their own good. It doesn't follow that I had my house wired for electricity so that it would be dangerous for my children.

I place that counter-point only to show that other interpretations can be made. I still say that neither of us knows why the tree was there because it's not stated or implied in the story.

@Darth - Even if we assume the "young earth" theory the Earth is at least 6000 years old, Man has been around for all of it except a few days (per Adam and Eve), Jesus didn't come around until 2000 years ago, that's 4000 years of holding it against us. That's not the same as eventually forgiving my kid, it's the same as forgiving my great-great-great-great........grandson for something my kid did.