This weekend I saw portions of Bruce Almighty again. Funny movie, and Jim Carrey is his usual self. This was the second time that I've seen the movie, the first time I saw it I was a theist, this time I'm an atheist. I still enjoyed the movie, but this time I saw it for what it truly was, an exercise in Christian apologetics. There were many different aspects of faith dealt with in the movie, but the largest one seemed to stem around free-will. One memorable quote from the movie is when Bruce askeds God (Morgan Freeman):
Bruce: How do you make somebody love you without affecting free will?
God (Freeman): [scoffs] Welcome to my world, son.
This raises some serious questions of consistency in the movie. The movie makes it clear that God cannot alter our free-will, but at the same time, he is omnipotent. As such, he was able to grant everyone's prayer and several thousand people choose the same lottery numbers. How is that not changing their free-will? Wouldn't you have to alter their wills in order to get so many people to pick the same numbers? Then there is mention of people's stocks tripling in five days. The stock market is made up of people. These people engage in buying and selling based on a variety of factors. In order for a stock to go up, people have to want to buy it. If the demand for the stock exceeds the supply, then the stock goes up. So in other words, people's will would have to have been manipulated to some extent to get the stock moving. These are the two most obvious contradictions as I wasn't able to watch all of the movie again.
As some of you are already aware, I am already of the mindset that free-will and omnipotence are mutually exclusive and things like this cement that notion in my mind. I promise that I'll try to get a fully fleshed out free-will post later on. I have it somewhere in my head, I just need to get it down.
