Deism is probably the only form of belief and faith that I think I could ever practice, to be honest. And it is arguable that the idea of a God that does not today "actively" participate in His creation doesn't conflict with the idea that the things that happen that we "can't explain" today aren't His work.

Think about it this way. God made the rules. God set everything in motion. God knows exactly what is going to happen. In that respect, *everything* is an "act of God". It doesn't matter if we can one day get down to the nitty-gritty of things and say "this miracle here happened because of such-and-such a quantum fluctuation which in turn caused this macro-scale event which in turn caused so-and-so to not get on the plane which crashed, thus allowing her to later go on to cure cancer." Explaining the "how" does not take away the mystery of the "why". Anybody who has ever taken high-school level physics can tell you how F=ma, only God can tell you *why* F=ma.

Therefore, the argument is simply that God set things up to run the way they do, and everything "miraculous" that happens really *is* God's doing, but not by direct manipulation but by having been the ultimate architect of everything.

That's the argument. Now I'll tell you why it doesn't hold water for me personally. Sam and I have gone round and round on the question of whether God's omnipotence negates my free will. Sam says it doesn't, and believes in both. I can't believe in both, I have to choose one or the other. I still can't get my head around the argument that infallible foreknowledge of an event doesn't necessarily mean that the event was pre-ordained.

The argument is that God knows what I am going to choose. He knows exactly what decision I will make each time I choose to do anything. However, he only knows what *choice* I will make, he does not in any way "force" me to make that choice, or did not pre-ordain that I *would* make that choice.

It seems like a rather logical argument on the face of it. My problem comes in when God shares his knowledge of the future with us. The Bible is littered with prophecies and Divine revelations. How does this jive with free will? Consider this silly example. God reveals to me in some way that in ten minutes, I will jump out of my chair and begin singing showtunes (never mind that I don't think I *know* any showtunes, or even know exactly what "showtunes" are.) God *knows* this is the choice I will make. At that point, it becomes *impossible* for me to make any other choice. I *must* exercise my "free will" and jump out of my chair and begin my pathetic warbling in exactly ten minutes. At the moment he reveals to me what I *will* do, I cannot in fact choose to instead jump out of my chair and commence turning handsprings while shouting "IT'S REALLY A LOVELY DAY OUTSIDE, ISN'T IT?" Once He makes the proclamation, I am no longer free to prove Him wrong.

And yet, as I said before, the Bible is littered with Divine revelations. God is *constantly* telling people, either directly or through prophets, exactly what is going to happen next. God knows what will happen. God occaisionally *tells* us what is going to happen. We then become powerless to do otherwise.

One possible explanation is that these prophesies are only "warnings" of the future. That God has shown us what the future *might* bring in order that we might avoid that. I really can't buy that argument at all. God *knows* exactly what *will* happen. The only reason God would ever warn us about "possible" outcomes would be to influence our decisions and cause us to "choose" the right or better path. And that is just as manipulative as locking down my showtune-singing free will.

So I cannot accept a God with infallible foreknowledge *and* free will. I choose to believe in free will, because believing otherwise to me is unthinkable. I am not a determinist. I do not believe it is possible even in theory to know exactly the outcome of every event. Before 1900 the world looked very deterministic indeed. It was a commonly held belief that "If we could know the exact position and velocity of every sub-atomic particle in the Universe for any one instant of time, we could extrapolate the entire past and future history of the cosmos." Everybody knew that it was for all practical purposes impossible to gather such data--but that was besides the point. In *theory* it was possible, and therefore the Universe was deterministic. No room for free will.

Quantum theory changed all that in 1900. It showed that it was *not* possible, even in theory, to know the velocity and position of *any* sub-atomic particle, let alone *all* of them. And even if it *were* possible, it is not possible to make exact predictions on the behavior of any one sub-atomic particle. Quantum theory is littered with uncertainties and unknowables. You can't ever pin down an electron and say "there it is." All you can do is say "I am nearly 100% certain that this electron is somewhere within this well-defined region of space at this time."

So for me, this uncertainty of the universe is the explanation of free will. A knowable universe is a deterministic universe, and a deterministic universe has no room for free will.

So in my opinion, the only type of God I could accept would be a God that knew every *possible* outcome, and could predict with an extremely high rate of accuracy what probably would happen. But even He could not know *exactly* what would happen, because the inherent uncertainties in His own creation would prevent that.

-- Dave