There are instances in the Bible of God not giving a shit about free will such as hardening Pharaoh's heart.
28 We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. 29 For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family.[v] 30 And those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified.
The bible's position is more or less that a person (Unless they are a head of state*) has free will but large groups of people and events caused by large groups of people aren't (Prophesies and such)
*Proverbs 21
King James Version (KJV)
21 The king's heart is in the hand of the Lord, as the rivers of water: he turneth it whithersoever he will.
I doubt you can say that the bible as a whole can present a concrete position on anything (other than what is just explicitly stated like the ten commandments).
It is after all a compilation of texts written over the course centuries that were approved by a Roman council with its own interpretations of those texts.
Jephery on
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
A better analogy is that a couple has three children.
One cures cancer.
One lives a simple life and does nothing of importance, but is happy.
One becomes a serial killer.
The couple may be the "first cause" of all those things, but has no claim on the moral responsibility. They could have confined their children to the basement and managed every moment of their lives, but they chose not to - because they loved them. That one of them turned out bad is unfortunate, but still results in the best possible world (i.e. cancer is cured).
You are still assuming limitations and fallibility. "Best of shitty options" doesn't cut it when you are an omnipotent omniscient being that made everything.
A better analogy is that a couple has three children.
One cures cancer.
One lives a simple life and does nothing of importance, but is happy.
One becomes a serial killer.
The couple may be the "first cause" of all those things, but has no claim on the moral responsibility. They could have confined their children to the basement and managed every moment of their lives, but they chose not to - because they loved them. That one of them turned out bad is unfortunate, but still results in the best possible world (i.e. cancer is cured).
That assumes that God is only a first cause and not an active participant in any way. So you rule out miracles and such.
Not a lot of Christian sects would agree with that.
You're right, I suppose my analogy leans a bit Deist there, in my effort to contrast with the earlier analogy.
I suppose the equivalent of a miracle would be the parent working a second job to afford the first child's education.
A better analogy is that a couple has three children.
One cures cancer.
One lives a simple life and does nothing of importance, but is happy.
One becomes a serial killer.
The couple may be the "first cause" of all those things, but has no claim on the moral responsibility. They could have confined their children to the basement and managed every moment of their lives, but they chose not to - because they loved them. That one of them turned out bad is unfortunate, but still results in the best possible world (i.e. cancer is cured).
You are still assuming limitations and fallibility. "Best of shitty options" doesn't cut it when you are an omnipotent omniscient being that made everything.
You're still assuming that the best possible world is a purely mechanical one where no one is capable of making mistakes.
A better analogy is that a couple has three children.
One cures cancer.
One lives a simple life and does nothing of importance, but is happy.
One becomes a serial killer.
The couple may be the "first cause" of all those things, but has no claim on the moral responsibility. They could have confined their children to the basement and managed every moment of their lives, but they chose not to - because they loved them. That one of them turned out bad is unfortunate, but still results in the best possible world (i.e. cancer is cured).
You are still assuming limitations and fallibility. "Best of shitty options" doesn't cut it when you are an omnipotent omniscient being that made everything.
You're still assuming that the best possible world is a purely mechanical one where no one is capable of making mistakes.
Can you not just have a world where all the choices are good ones? I assume God could have done that, if he chose too.
A better analogy is that a couple has three children.
One cures cancer.
One lives a simple life and does nothing of importance, but is happy.
One becomes a serial killer.
The couple may be the "first cause" of all those things, but has no claim on the moral responsibility. They could have confined their children to the basement and managed every moment of their lives, but they chose not to - because they loved them. That one of them turned out bad is unfortunate, but still results in the best possible world (i.e. cancer is cured).
You are still assuming limitations and fallibility. "Best of shitty options" doesn't cut it when you are an omnipotent omniscient being that made everything.
You're still assuming that the best possible world is a purely mechanical one where no one is capable of making mistakes.
Now, lets just establish that we cannot define the best possible world. Not happening, ever.
Well, is the best possible world something that can be created as is or only over time as a process?
Since we're just assuming God is omnipotent and omniscient, then God can do either - create it immediately (no free will) or let it arise as a consequence (with free will).
But at that point, is there actually a distinction between free will and determinism? The end result is the same either way. If God wants and has created/is creating the best possible world and there is only a single such world, then it is deterministic.
To that you can respond: Say, instead of only one best possible world, there are multiple, distinct "best" possible worlds that can be regarded as equally best in whatever sense God wants, and any one of these best worlds will arise as a consequence of the free will God allows.
The problem is that whether you choose one best world (deterministic) or multiple best worlds (free will) is a matter of dogma (do you prefer free will or determinism) because you can't say anything about what actually is.
Jephery on
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
A better analogy is that a couple has three children.
One cures cancer.
One lives a simple life and does nothing of importance, but is happy.
One becomes a serial killer.
The couple may be the "first cause" of all those things, but has no claim on the moral responsibility. They could have confined their children to the basement and managed every moment of their lives, but they chose not to - because they loved them. That one of them turned out bad is unfortunate, but still results in the best possible world (i.e. cancer is cured).
You are still assuming limitations and fallibility. "Best of shitty options" doesn't cut it when you are an omnipotent omniscient being that made everything.
You're still assuming that the best possible world is a purely mechanical one where no one is capable of making mistakes.
No I'm saying you can't have your cake and eat it too. You can have your divine perfect creator God who planned everything out to the smallest decimal and knows and can do all.
You can also have your divine judge of all who rules the spiritual, rejects the worldly, separates the wheat from the chaff, and damns to hell all that disagree with him.
You just can't have both be the same guy. It's not consistant.
Sure you can assume a fallible, limited God, but you can't really do that in the framework of modern, western Christianity, in the sense that you'd have a hard time fitting that into the orthodox doctine of any current major Christian group.
Without fallibility free will doesn't enter into it. Regardless of whether man had free will or not, God must have known the consequences of creation of man from the beginning, and therefore sin is impossible as God cannot take an action, the creation of man, which contradicts his own plan and will.
And what if His will is to create beings who can choose freely, and His plan is not to force them to choose correctly? I don't see any problem with God being omniscient and infallible, and still doing this.
Surely God can desire a thing of us, and not cause it to be done unless we choose to do it.
Free will doesn't really enter into it. I can raise a child, train him as a sniper, send him off to war, and just because he is the one that pulls the trigger to kill the enemy general doesn't mean it wasn't at my direction and doesn't mean I'm not responsible for the actions of the child.
No, you absolutely are not responsible for that!
Why would you ever be?
The western legal system accounts for it: Change the situation above from assassination of a general to a simple murder; at the trial, the evidence presented of the parent's abuse of the child (assuming we would call conditioning a child to kill others abuse) would mitigate the punishment. Such mitigation implies that there IS responsibility to be shared by the parent.
It makes sin a lot more complicated, though, and I think that's what makes Christianity's "saved by grace" concept both elegant and attractive: actually trying to account for one's sin in a complicated world (and with limited knowledge) is next to impossible, so trying to calculate the works needed to save oneself is a fool's errand.
Of course, that takes me to some of my favorite questions in Christian Theology: assuming "Christianity" in some flavor is correct, as the OP/thread requires, what exactly was gained by Christ's sacrifice, and can it be said truly to be a sacrifice, as nothing was lost?
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Sure you can assume a fallible, limited God, but you can't really do that in the framework of modern, western Christianity, in the sense that you'd have a hard time fitting that into the orthodox doctine of any current major Christian group.
Without fallibility free will doesn't enter into it. Regardless of whether man had free will or not, God must have known the consequences of creation of man from the beginning, and therefore sin is impossible as God cannot take an action, the creation of man, which contradicts his own plan and will.
You're assuming much. Fallibility isn't required for free will to exist, and even all powerful and omnipotent, god is not all-acting (unless that's part of your belief)
Free will is created, and then a path was set for a way to live. From there the choice is up to those with free will whether they will take the path given to them by god or to take another path.
Now, the above is based on Christian nonpredeterminism.
"Sin is a choice by man, not by god"
There are some parts of Christianity that believe in predeterminism, and in that view God is not fallible for creating sin, because it is all part of a predetermined plan.
"It's not a fault, it's a feature."
Of course, there's also Christian Humanism which says that sin is a choice by those with free will, and you should feel bad for is because of it's consequences to others.
"You did bad things, you should feel bad because it has hurt others"
Deism would veer towards Christian Humanism, but with the addendem that your consequences will not likely come from on high.
Or we could drop the terrible analogy and the false dichotomy that goes with it?
Edit: I'm seriously trying to come up with a way to engage that analogy and failing. There isn't even enough context to determine whether or not what the child did is wrong! What if that general were engaged in genocide?
it's a rhetorical trap. IF you assume that nothing you do is your fault, then...
but it is. It is your fault.
Not entirely, or at least not always entirely. This veers further into science than many non-deists would look for sin, but psychologically your choice is limited by experience and mental faculties.
If you are physiologically incapable of empathy, are you responsible for treating others like they don't exist?
If you have grown up in a situation that presents criminal behavior as your only protection, are you responsible for your sin?
If you have not heard of sin are you responsible for committing it?
If you do not believe that something is a sin, is it?
I doubt you can say that the bible as a whole can present a concrete position on anything (other than what is just explicitly stated like the ten commandments).
It is after all a compilation of texts written over the course centuries that were approved by a Roman council with its own interpretations of those texts.
Actually, even those are iffy depending on translation. Until mistranslation, the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" was originally "Thou shalt not murder". Which is an important distinction, when you consider that immediately after that Moses led the Israelites to wipe out a couple of civilizations.
Or we could drop the terrible analogy and the false dichotomy that goes with it?
Edit: I'm seriously trying to come up with a way to engage that analogy and failing. There isn't even enough context to determine whether or not what the child did is wrong! What if that general were engaged in genocide?
it's a rhetorical trap. IF you assume that nothing you do is your fault, then...
but it is. It is your fault.
Not entirely, or at least not always entirely. This veers further into science than many non-deists would look for sin, but psychologically your choice is limited by experience and mental faculties.
If you are physiologically incapable of empathy, are you responsible for treating others like they don't exist?
If you have grown up in a situation that presents criminal behavior as your only protection, are you responsible for your sin?
If you have not heard of sin are you responsible for committing it?
If you do not believe that something is a sin, is it?
I doubt you can say that the bible as a whole can present a concrete position on anything (other than what is just explicitly stated like the ten commandments).
It is after all a compilation of texts written over the course centuries that were approved by a Roman council with its own interpretations of those texts.
Actually, even those are iffy depending on translation. Until mistranslation, the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" was originally "Thou shalt not murder". Which is an important distinction, when you consider that immediately after that Moses led the Israelites to wipe out a couple of civilizations.
Well thats kinda an obvious one when Moses himself kills 3000 people right after that that was written.
Although he does smash those so maybe he just didnt like them.
26 then Moses stood in the gate of the camp and said, “Who is on the Lord’S side? Let him come unto me.” And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together unto him.
27 And he said unto them, “Thus saith the Lord God of Israel: ‘Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor.’”
28 And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses, and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.
Yep, declaring this the best possible world is a consequence of dogma. It's not a provable claim, like a lot of things discussed in this thread.
I think it's pretty clear that this is (at least currently) definitively not the best possible world. In the best possible world people would not starve to death, for example
I doubt you can say that the bible as a whole can present a concrete position on anything (other than what is just explicitly stated like the ten commandments).
It is after all a compilation of texts written over the course centuries that were approved by a Roman council with its own interpretations of those texts.
Wait a minute...
Which version of the Ten Commandments?
I guess it is pretty unequivocal about seething a kid in its mother's milk...
Of course, that takes me to some of my favorite questions in Christian Theology: assuming "Christianity" in some flavor is correct, as the OP/thread requires, what exactly was gained by Christ's sacrifice, and can it be said truly to be a sacrifice, as nothing was lost?
My favorite, completely pulled out of my ass interpretation is that Christ's sacrifice didn't directly do anything for humanity itself, but instead allowed god to become closer to humanity. If sin is interpreted as distancing oneself from god, and god is a perfect entity while humans are inherently flawed, then it's impossible for humans to not sin. The point of Christ was to create a version of god that was on some level human, and went through the same flaws and sufferings as humans do. This version of god would therefore actually be possible for humans to approach as an ideal, and so serve as a bridge between the true god and humanity.
Out of curiosity, are there are real schools that claim this?
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
All this talk about free will and choice and so forth is only serving to highlight the disconnect between science and theology.
Specifically, the universe is spacetime, in creating the universe God creates the universe as a whole and the past and present are simple features of the 4D (or more) (meta-)object ; the past or future are like the top left or back right corners of a cube, simply part of the structure.
The solutions, such as they are, are not particularly helpful for modern theology - God as a part of the universe, creating matter but not the whole shebang, not being omnipotent or omniscient and a range of other things.
This isn't something that can be logic-ed out of by simply asserting dogma or declaring differences of priority or value. The question of "what makes a perfect world" is polishing brass on the Titanic.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
The only way to make sense of the sacrifice of Jesus is in light of Gnosticism and Marcionite theology, you have to realise that the gospels were chosen and (in some cases) edited to tame the scathing polemics and criticisms of the existing tradition that they involved. Gnosticism and the Marcion's Evangelikon being very popular.
In both the God of the Old Testament was considered to exist and be something of a rough customer, or perhaps actively malevolent or incompetent. Marcion thought that Judaism was it's own thing and the letters of Paul and the details of the Gospels were a separate religion to Judaism - and that the father of Jesus did nothing but love and had made a deal with Yahweh for everyone who wanted to be a Christian to be saved in the afterlife! the price of which was sacrificing Jesus, his son. The gnostic picture, on the other hand required Jesus to die to release the divine light to be used in people. In both cases it's fairly clear that the original conception had the sacrifice occurring in a divine realm rather than on earth.
The gospel stories themselves clearly borrowing/being inspired by/being adoptions of existing crucifixion stories for various heroes into which the popular theologies of salvation were retrojected.
You can't simply make sense of it because it's a patchwork of different stories which were mushed together for political reasons and their popularity.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
So, real talk, the best thing about the Bible is the Synoptic Problem, or, as I like to call it "Everything You Know About Christmas is Wrong!". Basically as I am sure everyone is aware there are four Gospels and the describe basically the same stuff on a general level. However on countless details, significant and insignificant there is considerable difference. But even weirder Matthew and Luke reproduce around 60 and 90 percent of Mark respectively. They reproduce Mark almost verbatim except that they reproduce and improve the Greek (though in different ways) in places. Both also have a range or saying and events interspersed but in different orders - these are called "pericopes" (meaning "beads on a string") and refers to the fact that these identical stories are arranged and rearranged throughout the two derivative gospels in incompatible ways. Why is this? Because they are both produced by combining Mark with a document called Q (from the word 'quella' meaning "source") and their own material for their own theological or political agendas.
Half of the classic beats from any nativity scene like the 3 wise men or kings of the orient only show up in one or two gospels. Lots of stuff comes from the author of Luke doubling lots of things up due to translation errors and other weirdness - the thieves crucified next to Jesus, for example - or. Most comically Jesus tiding into Jerusalem on a mule and an ass, simultaneously, like some bizarro circus trick. And quite interestingly, what happens at the tomb once Jesus is resurrected - there are at least 5 accounts across the four gospels. Most interesting though is that of Mark.
Mark is the best Gospel, by far. Firstly, it is the oldest* and has the lowest Christology (as in the theology it presents is the least like what we bow recognize as the orthodox. Jesus is a prophet, he's chosen by God, but he's not in control and put upon by his mission and the world). What's most interesting is that it portrays the disciples as a bunch of idiots - they're constantly getting everything Jesus says wrong, being chastised by Jesus as a rhetorical device to aim exposition at the reader. In fact, when it comes to Jesus telling them that he must die they're even more confused - which leads to the question that I alluded to before "What were they preaching before? What do you need to do for the purposes of Salvation?". It can't be what modern theology tells us (because if so they'd understand that Jesus had to die in order for us to accept that he did so for our sins), but rather about the imminence of the Kingdom of God and how all must repent.
Which, in turn, leads us to the best bit - there are extant copies of Mark where the last verse is not present. And when you look at the story it is clear why - the last verse is an obvious interpolation to reduce the manifestly subversive nature of the actual story (specifically that the disciples were idiots who missed the post of Jesus at every turn and failed to do as instructed and tell everyone about his resurrection, instead running away scared). Which in turn raises many interesting points - it cannot have been considered to be an eyewitness account by its author, it likely wasn't even considered to be historical at all! Furthermore, given its seemingly reactionary and subversive tone it was likely reacting against another existing tradition (which was no more likely to have been the product of eyewitness testimony!).
This, of course, only scratches the slightest of surfaces of Mark, let alone the synoptic problem or the gospels as a whole.
*in contradiction to the traditional ordering which places Matthew first.
This is also the stuff that I find a serious interest in. The history and theology of early Christianity is amazingly diverse and interesting.
I would disagree on the best Gospel.
I kind of like John, because when taken in isolation and compared to the others it's seriously wacky. It's mystical and kind of trippy and that's pretty neat. However, I think that they are all interesting.
We are enemies now.
John is very different and very strange. It's a bit Gnostic in parts, rather schizophrenic in that it makes one pronouncement only to have it completely contradicted or entire mitigated in the next sentence, has a distinctly Gnostic character at times...
It appears that it has significant interpolations or later edits in order to defang various theologically inconvenient pronouncements that would likely have been too well known or too popular to simply remove. So, instead caveats and contrary statements were interspersed.
What is especially whacky are some of the attempted traditionalist explanations as to why it is so gnostic in character - amongst those proffered is the idea that Marcion or Paul or Simon Magus was John's scribe and unbeknownst to John snuck in his gnostic heresies. What.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
I doubt you can say that the bible as a whole can present a concrete position on anything (other than what is just explicitly stated like the ten commandments).
It is after all a compilation of texts written over the course centuries that were approved by a Roman council with its own interpretations of those texts.
Wait a minute...
Which version of the Ten Commandments?
I guess it is pretty unequivocal about seething a kid in its mother's milk...
To really expand on this - what the Bible actually refers to as the Ten Commandments is Exodus 34:13-26 and what they contain is... not what you would expect:
All this talk about free will and choice and so forth is only serving to highlight the disconnect between science and theology.
Specifically, the universe is spacetime, in creating the universe God creates the universe as a whole and the past and present are simple features of the 4D (or more) (meta-)object ; the past or future are like the top left or back right corners of a cube, simply part of the structure.
The solutions, such as they are, are not particularly helpful for modern theology - God as a part of the universe, creating matter but not the whole shebang, not being omnipotent or omniscient and a range of other things.
This isn't something that can be logic-ed out of by simply asserting dogma or declaring differences of priority or value. The question of "what makes a perfect world" is polishing brass on the Titanic.
Well, all you can do it take assumptions and see if they contradict each other. If they do, then something needs to be modified or a new premise added that reconciles it. A majority of people accept omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipotent God, but everyone has a different set of premises to reconcile that with the reality we face everyday.
Its fun realizing that you're probably having the same conversation people in the forums of Rome and Constantinople did two thousand years ago.
Jephery on
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
All this talk about free will and choice and so forth is only serving to highlight the disconnect between science and theology.
Specifically, the universe is spacetime, in creating the universe God creates the universe as a whole and the past and present are simple features of the 4D (or more) (meta-)object ; the past or future are like the top left or back right corners of a cube, simply part of the structure.
The solutions, such as they are, are not particularly helpful for modern theology - God as a part of the universe, creating matter but not the whole shebang, not being omnipotent or omniscient and a range of other things.
This isn't something that can be logic-ed out of by simply asserting dogma or declaring differences of priority or value. The question of "what makes a perfect world" is polishing brass on the Titanic.
Well, all you can do it take assumptions and see if they contradict each other. If they do, then something needs to be modified or a new premise added that reconciles it. A majority of people accept omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipotent God, but everyone has a different set of premises to reconcile that with the reality we face everyday.
Its fun realizing that you're probably having the same conversation people in the forums of Rome and Constantinople did two thousand years ago.
And then it becomes less fun when you realize that you're completely missing out on the conversations that ended with something being modified or a new premise added, most people agreeing with it, the rest of the people being killed or banished, and then everyone forgetting that the contradiction ever existed.
All this talk about free will and choice and so forth is only serving to highlight the disconnect between science and theology.
Specifically, the universe is spacetime, in creating the universe God creates the universe as a whole and the past and present are simple features of the 4D (or more) (meta-)object ; the past or future are like the top left or back right corners of a cube, simply part of the structure.
The solutions, such as they are, are not particularly helpful for modern theology - God as a part of the universe, creating matter but not the whole shebang, not being omnipotent or omniscient and a range of other things.
This isn't something that can be logic-ed out of by simply asserting dogma or declaring differences of priority or value. The question of "what makes a perfect world" is polishing brass on the Titanic.
Well, all you can do it take assumptions and see if they contradict each other. If they do, then something needs to be modified or a new premise added that reconciles it. A majority of people accept omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipotent God, but everyone has a different set of premises to reconcile that with the reality we face everyday.
Its fun realizing that you're probably having the same conversation people in the forums of Rome and Constantinople did two thousand years ago.
And then it becomes less fun when you realize that you're completely missing out on the conversations that ended with something being modified or a new premise added, most people agreeing with it, the rest of the people being killed or banished, and then everyone forgetting that the contradiction ever existed.
You could say their flame wars were more literal than ours.
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
I doubt you can say that the bible as a whole can present a concrete position on anything (other than what is just explicitly stated like the ten commandments).
It is after all a compilation of texts written over the course centuries that were approved by a Roman council with its own interpretations of those texts.
Wait a minute...
Which version of the Ten Commandments?
I guess it is pretty unequivocal about seething a kid in its mother's milk...
To really expand on this - what the Bible actually refers to as the Ten Commandments is Exodus 34:13-26 and what they contain is... not what you would expect:
That whole story is so much different in the bible than it is usually told.
What with the slaughter and second Ten Commandments and the orgy and people drinking gold and explaining why they didn't have all the stuff they stole from Egypt.
Best bit is Aaron covering his ass when Moses get back.
. 22 “Do not be angry, my lord,” Aaron answered. “You know how prone these people are to evil. 23 They said to me, ‘Make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.’ 24 So I told them, ‘Whoever has any gold jewelry, take it off.’ Then they gave me the gold, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!”
I love presuppositionalism. Presuppositionalism basically means that Christianity is presupposed to be correct and all facts are interpreted in light of this presupposition. Atheists presuppose reason or empiricism so Christians get to presuppose the existence of God and whatnot. The argument then usually goes that the atheist worldview is incoherent while only the Christian world view is coherent. One argument is that God is needed for the certain and uniformity that rational thought requires. Things like the coherency of the Christian world view and whether absolute certainty or uniformity as supposedly provided by God is actually needed are questionable. It basically takes all evidence and pretends that it doesn't matter, which is problematic for me because world views not tested by evidence tend to be kind of insane.
The best part of the argument is that it is pretty much entirely there to convince the believers.
Another important aspect of the Van Tillian apologetical program is the distinction between proof and persuasion. According to the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, man has ample proof in all of creation of God's existence and attributes but chooses to suppress it.[24] Van Til likewise claimed that there are valid arguments to prove that the God of the Bible exists but that the unbeliever would not necessarily be persuaded by them because of his suppression of the truth, and therefore the apologist, he said, must present the truth regardless of whether anyone is actually persuaded by it (Frame notes that the apologist is here akin to the psychiatrist who presents the truth about the paranoid's delusions, trusting that his patient knows the truth at some level and can accept it — though Frame, as a Calvinist, would say the special intervention of God in the Holy Spirit is also required for the unbeliever to accept ultimate truths.[25][26]) An implication of this position is that all arguments are "person relative" in the sense that one non-Christian might be persuaded by a particular argument and another might not be, depending on their background and experiences; even if the argument constitutes logically valid proof.
Also, certainty is for squares. Long live uncertainty.
All this talk about free will and choice and so forth is only serving to highlight the disconnect between science and theology.
Specifically, the universe is spacetime, in creating the universe God creates the universe as a whole and the past and present are simple features of the 4D (or more) (meta-)object ; the past or future are like the top left or back right corners of a cube, simply part of the structure.
The solutions, such as they are, are not particularly helpful for modern theology - God as a part of the universe, creating matter but not the whole shebang, not being omnipotent or omniscient and a range of other things.
This isn't something that can be logic-ed out of by simply asserting dogma or declaring differences of priority or value. The question of "what makes a perfect world" is polishing brass on the Titanic.
Oh, I see. You're mistaking "some" theology for "all" theology. That isn't even especially true of all Christian theology, much less the theologies that embrased time as a cohesive whole as a basic tenet. In Deism (Christian) the belief is that scientific observation is the key to understanding God, and it rejects revelation and miracles as methods of understanding. Catholicism has moved closer to this view over the years, and the adoption of non-literalist views was sort of the knock off point for Catholic scientific advancement (though in reality there have been many monks, saints and priests who advanced scientific teachings over the years).
I'm actually very interested in your understanding of time because my understanding was that the nature of time was still under considerable debate. I certainly haven't read anything that states that time occurs all at once.
All this talk about free will and choice and so forth is only serving to highlight the disconnect between science and theology.
Specifically, the universe is spacetime, in creating the universe God creates the universe as a whole and the past and present are simple features of the 4D (or more) (meta-)object ; the past or future are like the top left or back right corners of a cube, simply part of the structure.
The solutions, such as they are, are not particularly helpful for modern theology - God as a part of the universe, creating matter but not the whole shebang, not being omnipotent or omniscient and a range of other things.
This isn't something that can be logic-ed out of by simply asserting dogma or declaring differences of priority or value. The question of "what makes a perfect world" is polishing brass on the Titanic.
Well, all you can do it take assumptions and see if they contradict each other. If they do, then something needs to be modified or a new premise added that reconciles it. A majority of people accept omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipotent God, but everyone has a different set of premises to reconcile that with the reality we face everyday.
Its fun realizing that you're probably having the same conversation people in the forums of Rome and Constantinople did two thousand years ago.
And then it becomes less fun when you realize that you're completely missing out on the conversations that ended with something being modified or a new premise added, most people agreeing with it, the rest of the people being killed or banished, and then everyone forgetting that the contradiction ever existed.
You could say their flame wars were more literal than ours.
Actually many of those are pretty well documented, and many of those documents still exist in the Vatican library (this was Rome after all). There's also histories of the Jewish tradition of rabbinic review of the old testament, which created many variant texts and even new stories.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
All this talk about free will and choice and so forth is only serving to highlight the disconnect between science and theology.
Specifically, the universe is spacetime, in creating the universe God creates the universe as a whole and the past and present are simple features of the 4D (or more) (meta-)object ; the past or future are like the top left or back right corners of a cube, simply part of the structure.
The solutions, such as they are, are not particularly helpful for modern theology - God as a part of the universe, creating matter but not the whole shebang, not being omnipotent or omniscient and a range of other things.
This isn't something that can be logic-ed out of by simply asserting dogma or declaring differences of priority or value. The question of "what makes a perfect world" is polishing brass on the Titanic.
Well, all you can do it take assumptions and see if they contradict each other. If they do, then something needs to be modified or a new premise added that reconciles it. A majority of people accept omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipotent God, but everyone has a different set of premises to reconcile that with the reality we face everyday.
Its fun realizing that you're probably having the same conversation people in the forums of Rome and Constantinople did two thousand years ago.
well, they likely weren't having THIS part of the conversation given Einstein and relativity hadn't happened yet (if _J_ were still around I bet he might be able to demonstrate a similar point had been made by someone somewhere.
But my point is that the dispute and rationalizations DON'T try to fit with what science tells us of reality, the arguments and rationalisations for free will and choice ignore the much larger problem of what it means to be external to the universe.
All this talk about free will and choice and so forth is only serving to highlight the disconnect between science and theology.
Specifically, the universe is spacetime, in creating the universe God creates the universe as a whole and the past and present are simple features of the 4D (or more) (meta-)object ; the past or future are like the top left or back right corners of a cube, simply part of the structure.
The solutions, such as they are, are not particularly helpful for modern theology - God as a part of the universe, creating matter but not the whole shebang, not being omnipotent or omniscient and a range of other things.
This isn't something that can be logic-ed out of by simply asserting dogma or declaring differences of priority or value. The question of "what makes a perfect world" is polishing brass on the Titanic.
Well, all you can do it take assumptions and see if they contradict each other. If they do, then something needs to be modified or a new premise added that reconciles it. A majority of people accept omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipotent God, but everyone has a different set of premises to reconcile that with the reality we face everyday.
Its fun realizing that you're probably having the same conversation people in the forums of Rome and Constantinople did two thousand years ago.
well, they likely weren't having THIS part of the conversation given Einstein and relativity hadn't happened yet (if _J_ were still around I bet he might be able to demonstrate a similar point had been made by someone somewhere.
But my point is that the dispute and rationalizations DON'T try to fit with what science tells us of reality, the arguments and rationalisations for free will and choice ignore the much larger problem of what it means to be external to the universe.
Being a game developer is sort of like being a god of a universe you are external to.
I can change the rules of the simulation, add or remove objects from the world, start and stop time, etc. I'm an all powerful being that creates and destroys worlds at a whim.
Of course I'm not omniscient since I can't perceive the entirety of the world I create at once, I can only view a snapshot of time and only a two dimensional projection of the three dimensional space at any one time.
My creations lack any real intelligence, which is good because I'm not very nice to them. Getting better by the year though!
Edit: Doesn't answer your point though, sorry. Just an interesting line of thought.
Edit2: Oh and my perfect creation would be the one that entertains me the most. I like the concept of a non-benevolent god that created us for its own amusement, instead of any higher goal than that. I can relate much better to it, after all.
Jephery on
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"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
So, real talk, the best thing about the Bible is the Synoptic Problem, or, as I like to call it "Everything You Know About Christmas is Wrong!". Basically as I am sure everyone is aware there are four Gospels and the describe basically the same stuff on a general level. However on countless details, significant and insignificant there is considerable difference. But even weirder Matthew and Luke reproduce around 60 and 90 percent of Mark respectively. They reproduce Mark almost verbatim except that they reproduce and improve the Greek (though in different ways) in places. Both also have a range or saying and events interspersed but in different orders - these are called "pericopes" (meaning "beads on a string") and refers to the fact that these identical stories are arranged and rearranged throughout the two derivative gospels in incompatible ways. Why is this? Because they are both produced by combining Mark with a document called Q (from the word 'quella' meaning "source") and their own material for their own theological or political agendas.
Half of the classic beats from any nativity scene like the 3 wise men or kings of the orient only show up in one or two gospels. Lots of stuff comes from the author of Luke doubling lots of things up due to translation errors and other weirdness - the thieves crucified next to Jesus, for example - or. Most comically Jesus tiding into Jerusalem on a mule and an ass, simultaneously, like some bizarro circus trick. And quite interestingly, what happens at the tomb once Jesus is resurrected - there are at least 5 accounts across the four gospels. Most interesting though is that of Mark.
Mark is the best Gospel, by far. Firstly, it is the oldest* and has the lowest Christology (as in the theology it presents is the least like what we bow recognize as the orthodox. Jesus is a prophet, he's chosen by God, but he's not in control and put upon by his mission and the world). What's most interesting is that it portrays the disciples as a bunch of idiots - they're constantly getting everything Jesus says wrong, being chastised by Jesus as a rhetorical device to aim exposition at the reader. In fact, when it comes to Jesus telling them that he must die they're even more confused - which leads to the question that I alluded to before "What were they preaching before? What do you need to do for the purposes of Salvation?". It can't be what modern theology tells us (because if so they'd understand that Jesus had to die in order for us to accept that he did so for our sins), but rather about the imminence of the Kingdom of God and how all must repent.
Which, in turn, leads us to the best bit - there are extant copies of Mark where the last verse is not present. And when you look at the story it is clear why - the last verse is an obvious interpolation to reduce the manifestly subversive nature of the actual story (specifically that the disciples were idiots who missed the post of Jesus at every turn and failed to do as instructed and tell everyone about his resurrection, instead running away scared). Which in turn raises many interesting points - it cannot have been considered to be an eyewitness account by its author, it likely wasn't even considered to be historical at all! Furthermore, given its seemingly reactionary and subversive tone it was likely reacting against another existing tradition (which was no more likely to have been the product of eyewitness testimony!).
This, of course, only scratches the slightest of surfaces of Mark, let alone the synoptic problem or the gospels as a whole.
*in contradiction to the traditional ordering which places Matthew first.
This is also the stuff that I find a serious interest in. The history and theology of early Christianity is amazingly diverse and interesting.
I would disagree on the best Gospel.
I kind of like John, because when taken in isolation and compared to the others it's seriously wacky. It's mystical and kind of trippy and that's pretty neat. However, I think that they are all interesting.
We are enemies now.
John is very different and very strange. It's a bit Gnostic in parts, rather schizophrenic in that it makes one pronouncement only to have it completely contradicted or entire mitigated in the next sentence, has a distinctly Gnostic character at times...
It appears that it has significant interpolations or later edits in order to defang various theologically inconvenient pronouncements that would likely have been too well known or too popular to simply remove. So, instead caveats and contrary statements were interspersed.
What is especially whacky are some of the attempted traditionalist explanations as to why it is so gnostic in character - amongst those proffered is the idea that Marcion or Paul or Simon Magus was John's scribe and unbeknownst to John snuck in his gnostic heresies. What.
Do we have to be burn each other to death enemies?
Can we be like...
frenemies?
I didn't know about that, but it is interesting. I like the early gnostic heresies, and some of the "gnostic gospels" are really interesting. I think that is just my total fascination with all the early christian mythos. So wild and varied with all these little regional sects that believed some very different things from one another.
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Yep, declaring this the best possible world is a consequence of dogma. It's not a provable claim, like a lot of things discussed in this thread.
I think it's pretty clear that this is (at least currently) definitively not the best possible world. In the best possible world people would not starve to death, for example
Uh...
This is clearly the best possible world because God has the power to create anything possible, and the wisdom to know what the best possible world is.
This is the one he created so it must be the best possible world.
Not to mention all the modal ontology you got going on here...
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Yep, declaring this the best possible world is a consequence of dogma. It's not a provable claim, like a lot of things discussed in this thread.
I think it's pretty clear that this is (at least currently) definitively not the best possible world. In the best possible world people would not starve to death, for example
Uh...
This is clearly the best possible world because God has the power to create anything possible, and the wisdom to know what the best possible world is.
This is the one he created so it must be the best possible world.
Not to mention all the modal ontology you got going on here...
Wouldn't it be best to create the best possible world, then in a different dimension create the second-best possible world, and then in a different dimension create the third-best possible world, until you eventually reach the worlds that kind of suck but are still better off existing than not?
Edit: Or I guess you could go many-worlds quantum, and just manually Armageddon the interpretations that start to suck too hard. I don't know if that sort of interference is actually physically possible without rippling to the other interpretations, but heck, you're an omnipotent deity, if you want it to work it does.
Yep, declaring this the best possible world is a consequence of dogma. It's not a provable claim, like a lot of things discussed in this thread.
I think it's pretty clear that this is (at least currently) definitively not the best possible world. In the best possible world people would not starve to death, for example
Uh...
This is clearly the best possible world because God has the power to create anything possible, and the wisdom to know what the best possible world is.
This is the one he created so it must be the best possible world.
Not to mention all the modal ontology you got going on here...
Even granting the first two, the third does not necessarily follow. Why must it have created the best possible world. Why would a god even care? Particularly the Abrahamic god who is really quite a dick, especially to non-believers
If you are stating omnibenevolence, what is your solution to the problem of evil? If you're not, then there's no particular reason to think that this is the best possible world (for us; the "best possible world" from the perspective of a timeless ineffable being might be very different)
Yep, declaring this the best possible world is a consequence of dogma. It's not a provable claim, like a lot of things discussed in this thread.
I think it's pretty clear that this is (at least currently) definitively not the best possible world. In the best possible world people would not starve to death, for example
Uh...
This is clearly the best possible world because God has the power to create anything possible, and the wisdom to know what the best possible world is.
This is the one he created so it must be the best possible world.
Not to mention all the modal ontology you got going on here...
Even granting the first two, the third does not necessarily follow. Why must it have created the best possible world. Why would a god even care? Particularly the Abrahamic god who is really quite a dick, especially to non-believers
If you are stating omnibenevolence, what is your solution to the problem of evil? If you're not, then there's no particular reason to think that this is the best possible world (for us; the "best possible world" from the perspective of a timeless ineffable being might be very different)
Well, I never claimed it was the best possible world for us, just the best possible world.
And, of course, my argument presupposes two things:
1) God is not a dick
2) God knew what he was doing
The original point was regarding the nature of sin, for which what God's concept of what is a perfect world is irrelevant.
My perfect world might be a pile of feces infested with maggots, and thats fine, but I can't turn around and say that the maggots that I purposefully built into my shit pile are doing wrong by being there, without saying I made a mistake putting them there in the first place.
The problem really with most orthodox christian theology was that the elements of the theology were quite literally designed by committee to integrate various popular ideas from previous religions and appease political concerns, then for the next 1500 years people tried to back reason their way into making it all fit together. So you get a lot of weirdness and apologism.
I've been thinking about how the Christian view that this mortal world is insignificant compared to the afterlife leads to fatalism or nihilism.
Fatalist: Apocalyptic views that the end either will come eventually or is eminent - no matter what we accomplish now, it will all be wiped away in the end.
Nihilist: Mortal pleasures are sinful and mortal acts outside of faith or charity do not matter, so there is no point in trying to achieve anything in this life.
Granted, I don't think these views are in the mainstream of Christianity anymore.
Jephery on
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
I've been thinking about how the Christian view that this mortal world is insignificant compared to the afterlife leads to fatalism or nihilism.
Fatalist: Apocalyptic views that the end either will come eventually or is eminent - no matter what we accomplish now, it will all be wiped away in the end.
Nihilist: Mortal pleasures are sinful and mortal acts outside of faith or charity do not matter, so there is no point in trying to achieve anything in this life.
Granted, I don't think these views are in the mainstream of Christianity anymore.
I think they're the mainstream of everybody now, regardless of religion or not
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I've been thinking about how the Christian view that this mortal world is insignificant compared to the afterlife leads to fatalism or nihilism.
Fatalist: Apocalyptic views that the end either will come eventually or is eminent - no matter what we accomplish now, it will all be wiped away in the end.
Nihilist: Mortal pleasures are sinful and mortal acts outside of faith or charity do not matter, so there is no point in trying to achieve anything in this life.
Granted, I don't think these views are in the mainstream of Christianity anymore.
I am reminded of the one parable of the dude clearing people's debt after he finds out he is getting fired so they owe him favors.
Sort of, what you do in life is only good as currency for the afterlife.
Anyone here read NT Wright? I just got done with The New Testament and the People of God. Was a fascinating read and it really speaks to the current discussion. About to start up Jesus and the Victory of God. It seems a little daunting.
Anyone here read NT Wright? I just got done with The New Testament and the People of God. Was a fascinating read and it really speaks to the current discussion. About to start up Jesus and the Victory of God. It seems a little daunting.
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The bible's position is more or less that a person (Unless they are a head of state*) has free will but large groups of people and events caused by large groups of people aren't (Prophesies and such)
*Proverbs 21
King James Version (KJV)
21 The king's heart is in the hand of the Lord, as the rivers of water: he turneth it whithersoever he will.
It is after all a compilation of texts written over the course centuries that were approved by a Roman council with its own interpretations of those texts.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
You are still assuming limitations and fallibility. "Best of shitty options" doesn't cut it when you are an omnipotent omniscient being that made everything.
You're right, I suppose my analogy leans a bit Deist there, in my effort to contrast with the earlier analogy.
I suppose the equivalent of a miracle would be the parent working a second job to afford the first child's education.
You're still assuming that the best possible world is a purely mechanical one where no one is capable of making mistakes.
Can you not just have a world where all the choices are good ones? I assume God could have done that, if he chose too.
Now, lets just establish that we cannot define the best possible world. Not happening, ever.
Well, is the best possible world something that can be created as is or only over time as a process?
Since we're just assuming God is omnipotent and omniscient, then God can do either - create it immediately (no free will) or let it arise as a consequence (with free will).
But at that point, is there actually a distinction between free will and determinism? The end result is the same either way. If God wants and has created/is creating the best possible world and there is only a single such world, then it is deterministic.
To that you can respond: Say, instead of only one best possible world, there are multiple, distinct "best" possible worlds that can be regarded as equally best in whatever sense God wants, and any one of these best worlds will arise as a consequence of the free will God allows.
The problem is that whether you choose one best world (deterministic) or multiple best worlds (free will) is a matter of dogma (do you prefer free will or determinism) because you can't say anything about what actually is.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
No I'm saying you can't have your cake and eat it too. You can have your divine perfect creator God who planned everything out to the smallest decimal and knows and can do all.
You can also have your divine judge of all who rules the spiritual, rejects the worldly, separates the wheat from the chaff, and damns to hell all that disagree with him.
You just can't have both be the same guy. It's not consistant.
The western legal system accounts for it: Change the situation above from assassination of a general to a simple murder; at the trial, the evidence presented of the parent's abuse of the child (assuming we would call conditioning a child to kill others abuse) would mitigate the punishment. Such mitigation implies that there IS responsibility to be shared by the parent.
It makes sin a lot more complicated, though, and I think that's what makes Christianity's "saved by grace" concept both elegant and attractive: actually trying to account for one's sin in a complicated world (and with limited knowledge) is next to impossible, so trying to calculate the works needed to save oneself is a fool's errand.
Of course, that takes me to some of my favorite questions in Christian Theology: assuming "Christianity" in some flavor is correct, as the OP/thread requires, what exactly was gained by Christ's sacrifice, and can it be said truly to be a sacrifice, as nothing was lost?
You're assuming much. Fallibility isn't required for free will to exist, and even all powerful and omnipotent, god is not all-acting (unless that's part of your belief)
Free will is created, and then a path was set for a way to live. From there the choice is up to those with free will whether they will take the path given to them by god or to take another path.
Now, the above is based on Christian nonpredeterminism.
"Sin is a choice by man, not by god"
There are some parts of Christianity that believe in predeterminism, and in that view God is not fallible for creating sin, because it is all part of a predetermined plan.
"It's not a fault, it's a feature."
Of course, there's also Christian Humanism which says that sin is a choice by those with free will, and you should feel bad for is because of it's consequences to others.
"You did bad things, you should feel bad because it has hurt others"
Deism would veer towards Christian Humanism, but with the addendem that your consequences will not likely come from on high.
Not entirely, or at least not always entirely. This veers further into science than many non-deists would look for sin, but psychologically your choice is limited by experience and mental faculties.
If you are physiologically incapable of empathy, are you responsible for treating others like they don't exist?
If you have grown up in a situation that presents criminal behavior as your only protection, are you responsible for your sin?
If you have not heard of sin are you responsible for committing it?
If you do not believe that something is a sin, is it?
Actually, even those are iffy depending on translation. Until mistranslation, the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" was originally "Thou shalt not murder". Which is an important distinction, when you consider that immediately after that Moses led the Israelites to wipe out a couple of civilizations.
Well thats kinda an obvious one when Moses himself kills 3000 people right after that that was written.
Although he does smash those so maybe he just didnt like them.
26 then Moses stood in the gate of the camp and said, “Who is on the Lord’S side? Let him come unto me.” And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together unto him.
27 And he said unto them, “Thus saith the Lord God of Israel: ‘Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor.’”
28 And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses, and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.
I think it's pretty clear that this is (at least currently) definitively not the best possible world. In the best possible world people would not starve to death, for example
Wait a minute...
Which version of the Ten Commandments?
I guess it is pretty unequivocal about seething a kid in its mother's milk...
My favorite, completely pulled out of my ass interpretation is that Christ's sacrifice didn't directly do anything for humanity itself, but instead allowed god to become closer to humanity. If sin is interpreted as distancing oneself from god, and god is a perfect entity while humans are inherently flawed, then it's impossible for humans to not sin. The point of Christ was to create a version of god that was on some level human, and went through the same flaws and sufferings as humans do. This version of god would therefore actually be possible for humans to approach as an ideal, and so serve as a bridge between the true god and humanity.
Out of curiosity, are there are real schools that claim this?
Specifically, the universe is spacetime, in creating the universe God creates the universe as a whole and the past and present are simple features of the 4D (or more) (meta-)object ; the past or future are like the top left or back right corners of a cube, simply part of the structure.
The solutions, such as they are, are not particularly helpful for modern theology - God as a part of the universe, creating matter but not the whole shebang, not being omnipotent or omniscient and a range of other things.
This isn't something that can be logic-ed out of by simply asserting dogma or declaring differences of priority or value. The question of "what makes a perfect world" is polishing brass on the Titanic.
In both the God of the Old Testament was considered to exist and be something of a rough customer, or perhaps actively malevolent or incompetent. Marcion thought that Judaism was it's own thing and the letters of Paul and the details of the Gospels were a separate religion to Judaism - and that the father of Jesus did nothing but love and had made a deal with Yahweh for everyone who wanted to be a Christian to be saved in the afterlife! the price of which was sacrificing Jesus, his son. The gnostic picture, on the other hand required Jesus to die to release the divine light to be used in people. In both cases it's fairly clear that the original conception had the sacrifice occurring in a divine realm rather than on earth.
The gospel stories themselves clearly borrowing/being inspired by/being adoptions of existing crucifixion stories for various heroes into which the popular theologies of salvation were retrojected.
You can't simply make sense of it because it's a patchwork of different stories which were mushed together for political reasons and their popularity.
We are enemies now.
John is very different and very strange. It's a bit Gnostic in parts, rather schizophrenic in that it makes one pronouncement only to have it completely contradicted or entire mitigated in the next sentence, has a distinctly Gnostic character at times...
It appears that it has significant interpolations or later edits in order to defang various theologically inconvenient pronouncements that would likely have been too well known or too popular to simply remove. So, instead caveats and contrary statements were interspersed.
What is especially whacky are some of the attempted traditionalist explanations as to why it is so gnostic in character - amongst those proffered is the idea that Marcion or Paul or Simon Magus was John's scribe and unbeknownst to John snuck in his gnostic heresies. What.
To really expand on this - what the Bible actually refers to as the Ten Commandments is Exodus 34:13-26 and what they contain is... not what you would expect:
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=exodus 34:14-26;&version=KJV
Well, all you can do it take assumptions and see if they contradict each other. If they do, then something needs to be modified or a new premise added that reconciles it. A majority of people accept omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipotent God, but everyone has a different set of premises to reconcile that with the reality we face everyday.
Its fun realizing that you're probably having the same conversation people in the forums of Rome and Constantinople did two thousand years ago.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
And then it becomes less fun when you realize that you're completely missing out on the conversations that ended with something being modified or a new premise added, most people agreeing with it, the rest of the people being killed or banished, and then everyone forgetting that the contradiction ever existed.
You could say their flame wars were more literal than ours.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
That whole story is so much different in the bible than it is usually told.
What with the slaughter and second Ten Commandments and the orgy and people drinking gold and explaining why they didn't have all the stuff they stole from Egypt.
Best bit is Aaron covering his ass when Moses get back.
. 22 “Do not be angry, my lord,” Aaron answered. “You know how prone these people are to evil. 23 They said to me, ‘Make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.’ 24 So I told them, ‘Whoever has any gold jewelry, take it off.’ Then they gave me the gold, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!”
The best part of the argument is that it is pretty much entirely there to convince the believers.
Also, certainty is for squares. Long live uncertainty.
Oh, I see. You're mistaking "some" theology for "all" theology. That isn't even especially true of all Christian theology, much less the theologies that embrased time as a cohesive whole as a basic tenet. In Deism (Christian) the belief is that scientific observation is the key to understanding God, and it rejects revelation and miracles as methods of understanding. Catholicism has moved closer to this view over the years, and the adoption of non-literalist views was sort of the knock off point for Catholic scientific advancement (though in reality there have been many monks, saints and priests who advanced scientific teachings over the years).
I'm actually very interested in your understanding of time because my understanding was that the nature of time was still under considerable debate. I certainly haven't read anything that states that time occurs all at once.
Actually many of those are pretty well documented, and many of those documents still exist in the Vatican library (this was Rome after all). There's also histories of the Jewish tradition of rabbinic review of the old testament, which created many variant texts and even new stories.
well, they likely weren't having THIS part of the conversation given Einstein and relativity hadn't happened yet (if _J_ were still around I bet he might be able to demonstrate a similar point had been made by someone somewhere.
But my point is that the dispute and rationalizations DON'T try to fit with what science tells us of reality, the arguments and rationalisations for free will and choice ignore the much larger problem of what it means to be external to the universe.
Being a game developer is sort of like being a god of a universe you are external to.
I can change the rules of the simulation, add or remove objects from the world, start and stop time, etc. I'm an all powerful being that creates and destroys worlds at a whim.
Of course I'm not omniscient since I can't perceive the entirety of the world I create at once, I can only view a snapshot of time and only a two dimensional projection of the three dimensional space at any one time.
My creations lack any real intelligence, which is good because I'm not very nice to them. Getting better by the year though!
Edit: Doesn't answer your point though, sorry. Just an interesting line of thought.
Edit2: Oh and my perfect creation would be the one that entertains me the most. I like the concept of a non-benevolent god that created us for its own amusement, instead of any higher goal than that. I can relate much better to it, after all.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
Do we have to be burn each other to death enemies?
Can we be like...
frenemies?
I didn't know about that, but it is interesting. I like the early gnostic heresies, and some of the "gnostic gospels" are really interesting. I think that is just my total fascination with all the early christian mythos. So wild and varied with all these little regional sects that believed some very different things from one another.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Uh...
This is clearly the best possible world because God has the power to create anything possible, and the wisdom to know what the best possible world is.
This is the one he created so it must be the best possible world.
Not to mention all the modal ontology you got going on here...
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Wouldn't it be best to create the best possible world, then in a different dimension create the second-best possible world, and then in a different dimension create the third-best possible world, until you eventually reach the worlds that kind of suck but are still better off existing than not?
Edit: Or I guess you could go many-worlds quantum, and just manually Armageddon the interpretations that start to suck too hard. I don't know if that sort of interference is actually physically possible without rippling to the other interpretations, but heck, you're an omnipotent deity, if you want it to work it does.
Even granting the first two, the third does not necessarily follow. Why must it have created the best possible world. Why would a god even care? Particularly the Abrahamic god who is really quite a dick, especially to non-believers
If you are stating omnibenevolence, what is your solution to the problem of evil? If you're not, then there's no particular reason to think that this is the best possible world (for us; the "best possible world" from the perspective of a timeless ineffable being might be very different)
Well, I never claimed it was the best possible world for us, just the best possible world.
And, of course, my argument presupposes two things:
1) God is not a dick
2) God knew what he was doing
My perfect world might be a pile of feces infested with maggots, and thats fine, but I can't turn around and say that the maggots that I purposefully built into my shit pile are doing wrong by being there, without saying I made a mistake putting them there in the first place.
The problem really with most orthodox christian theology was that the elements of the theology were quite literally designed by committee to integrate various popular ideas from previous religions and appease political concerns, then for the next 1500 years people tried to back reason their way into making it all fit together. So you get a lot of weirdness and apologism.
Fatalist: Apocalyptic views that the end either will come eventually or is eminent - no matter what we accomplish now, it will all be wiped away in the end.
Nihilist: Mortal pleasures are sinful and mortal acts outside of faith or charity do not matter, so there is no point in trying to achieve anything in this life.
Granted, I don't think these views are in the mainstream of Christianity anymore.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
I think they're the mainstream of everybody now, regardless of religion or not
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I am reminded of the one parable of the dude clearing people's debt after he finds out he is getting fired so they owe him favors.
Sort of, what you do in life is only good as currency for the afterlife.
White: 1721-3651-2720
Care to give us an overview?