Hello dmvprof

You said :-
Ok, Hilarious and Irish,
Will you agree with this then? God does not have unlimited power. God does have limitations.

Hilarius
My position is that there is a distinction to be made between the availability of unlimited power and the choice not exericise it.

Simple example. I pick a fight with a professional boxer and not knowing his occupation I punch him on the nose. The professional boxer has all the power in the world to flatten me with a single blow, but hw chooses not to do so.

dmvprof
And that your support for this is that god did not want to be betrayed by man but man betrayed him anyway, so god regrets his creation because the limitation that he is bound to restricted him from creating something he would not regret.

Hilarius
God could have regretted his creation be destoying it when man showed he wanted to rebel. God's choice is to allow man the opportunity of repairing self-inflicted damage.

If offered the choice would you prefer instant death (which God has the power to arrange) or the chance to repair your own faults, with God's help?

Oh, Hilarious

quote:
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No defense is needed. For God to have created people with limited free will, would have meant a captive, puppet-like relationship

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Perhaps you will agree with this, we currently DO NOT have unlimited freewill. We are restrained by the laws of physics.

Hilarius
I am not sure that I ever claimed we had unlimited free will, so your statement is entirely correct. What is the relevance of physics to spiritual issues?

Do you consider the laws of physics restrict our moral choices, and even if the laws do operate to restrain our responses to problems why is that an issue, if all are subject to the same laws?

Blessings and Peace

Hilarius

chiron64

If Adam was human, then he had one particular character and not another. He may have preferred dogs to cats, he may have liked the feel of mud squishing through his toes, he may have liked to go to bed early and get up late. Whatever his character may have been, it was of one kind and not another, and it was his creator who gave him his character.

So god could have created Adam with a completely different character than he had (and a more perfect rib). He could have made an Adam who would have chosen to obey. Apparently, He did not do so.

A single human line has developed since Adam, and in that line there are a great number of humans (perhaps a majority) who have chosen to reject god. But if god is omniscient, then He knew all of the people who would result from this particular line (all stemming from the original Adam created as he was and not some other way) and that X number of them would be damned. He also must have known of other possible lines of humans, and some of those infinite numbers of lines would have resulted in humans with free will, but all of whom would not have rejected god. Had He done so, no one would have to suffer in hell. God seems to have chosen a path that would lead to more people being punished than rewarded. Maybe god finds more pleasure in punishing for all eternity the many who will suffer in hell than he does in the few who will reside with Him in heaven. If so, then maybe He did want to be betrayed.

Chiro, ummmmmmmm.........
Ok, I wrote something and then had to re-think it. I think my conclusion is this. It's already been established that to be a person is to be self-aware, capable of making decisions of morality. For a will to be free means that it is not under direct control by another entity. It is autonomous.

I do not believe that freedom of will can be measured in any sense comparable to things such as personality traits, etc. These are outgrowths of individuality. They are not relevant to will. The wrong choice made in Eden was not between one good thing and one bad thing, and the bad thing happened to be what Adam was predisposed toward choosing. It was a choice between mastery of self, or His mastery of us. You would somehow have to say that God should have made man more inclined to submit than take the mastery. And yet it seems impossible to me that this could ever have occured and a will TRULY to have been free. If God could have tinkered in the disposition of our self-awareness then we would not be free. As it stands He made it totally unrestricted. He said "Let us make man in our own image". My take is that this verse means He made us with autonomy of will (as He has). And for God to interfere in anyway with the disposition of that person's will would unmake his/her autonomy.

Now why would it matter to Him either way? Non-autonomous robots of adoration would seem a positive solution to this right?

Only in dire thirst do we TRULY understand the necessity of water. Only in utter slavery do we TRULY value our freedom. Only with the total and perfectly balanced possibility to choose self-mastery would submission of that mastery be valuable. There are no shades of grey in freedom of will. It is either free or it is not. God's interference would mandate the death of that autonomy....
-Shaun

[This message has been edited by Irishbrutha (edited April 22, 2001).]

Shaun,

Has it ever occurred to you that the Tanakh was inspired and written by ancient, ignorant human beings? There is no such thing as "free-will" and "sin." Your argument is moot.

rodahi

I would just like to clarify my meaning with this thread. When I posted that statement, I knew it was an offshoot of a freewill argument. However, I think the way it is framed gives it a distinction since to reject that statement would be equal to saying that god did not get what he wanted.

I believe in freewill, I think physics is the only thing we have governing us. When I argue from the standpoint that "if the bible says this, then we can't have freewill" I am not saying we don't have freewill, I am saying the bible is wrong. Freewill and an Omniscient god are mutually exclusive.

1. Evidently that is not the case, since angels do not have freewill and they are beings.

2. I do not agree that an inability to create a definitional contradiction is somehow part of the what defines a "being." Where is the definition of "being" set out as "a created being with free will"? Why does this not apply to animals?

3. I also do not see where an inability to create a definitional contradiction supports the idea of God's omnipotence. Where is this set out? This seems to work more in the favor of the idea that there is no god at all, since the resulting situation would be a logical absurdity.

4. Besides, I am not sure from where you derived this newfound limitation on god - an inability to create a definitional contradiction? You want a form of omnipotence that is limited so as to prevent internal contradictions. You want a form of omnibenevolence that is limited in such a way as to prevent internal contradictions. Neither of these is truly "omni-" anything.


My mistake. I thought you meant an early, painful death; after long illness or something like that.

To address your argument, then: if a person knows that their offspring will die (a normal death), then should they procreate? Certainly, if they want to. Death after a long life is not a good or bad thing, it is merely normal and natural. The fact that the party comes to an end does not mean that you shouldn't throw the party anyhow.

And as another measure by which to judge this: if you ask the person who has lived their long life what their preference would be ("if you could go back in time and prevent your own conception and birth, would you do it?") I seriously doubt that you'd have many people take you up on it.

Notice, however, that these two paragraphs don't apply to the God/hell scenario.

Exactly.


Sorry; the analogy still does not hold.

With the man & child:

1. there is a biological drive to reproduce, a "need" that is to be satisfied;
2. there is nothing that the man can do to prevent the death of his child, no matter how hard he tries; he cannot change the rules of biology
3. there is no reason why death (normal death, after long life) should be prevented - death by itself is not something that is evil, in and of itself;
4. death is not a choice that the child himself/herself can somehow opt out of; it is inevitable;
5. the child himself/herself would not regret their life or reverse the decision to be born, even knowing that death was at the end of the life.


None of points 1-5 apply to the God/hell scenario.

"Wanted" betrayal? I don't know about "wanted". That wasn't my argument, actually.

I'm more of the mind that (if you take the christian view at face value), then God knew what would happen, and all the misery that would be created, and nevertheless went ahead and did it anyhow.

My answer may therefore wander a bit from the topic that was started in this thread.


You're still missing the point. From the standpoint of the Creator, imagine yourself looking over his/her shoulder, right at the moment before taking the decision to create a being like man. At that moment, there is a moral equation that has to be addressed. Given omnipotence and omniscience, this Creator knows what the end result of his actions will be: 99% rejection rate, 1% success rate. Tremendous misery for the overwhelming majority of created beings.

So you have the choice that I outlined earlier:

a. do not create this race of beings in the first place
b. create them, and they either go to heaven (1%) or to hell (99%)

As a Creator being capable of creating:

1. which of these two outcomes is morally and ethically the least offensive? And
2. which one causes the least amount of misery and pain?


All the more reason to ask why God wanted/needed to create a race that would mostly go to hell in the first place. If God wsa already at "maximum pleasure" before humans existed, then why create humans at all?


I can merely point to how lowly humans would handle the same scenario. Given a choice, would I prioritize the pleasure of 10 people above the unending misery of just 1 person? Absolutely not. But with God, that is what happened. Except that the ratios are reversed. That tells me that humans are more ethical than God (or, at least, than the picture of God painted for us by theists).



No, it's not that simple. Your inability to craft a valid analogy illustrates:
(a) exactly why this isn't as simple as you think; and
(b) the conundrums of dealing with the logical absurdities presented by the freewill argument.


I submit the creator, for creating broken products and then blaming the product. And then for punishing the offspring of the object, even though the offspring never had the same chance and was born with a defective template.

"1. Evidently that is not the case, since angels do not have freewill and they are beings."

Ummm, what foundation are you using to claim that angels don't have free will? Satan sinned against God. Therefore Satan was cast out of Heaven. He and all angels have a free will.

Ok, before I start posting anything else, I want to know whose post you read? Certainly not mine. I don't claim that God is omni-anything. I claim that He is Perfect Morality, The Creator of the Universe (requires a lot of authority/power definitely), the Form of Good, The Ultimate. I claim that God can do anything that fits within Holiness and Rationale (not so set on the Rationale thing, but definitely on the Holiness thing). I never used the definitional contradiction issue to SHOW that he was omnipotent, where did you get that from? I define Free will as the ability to make moral decisions. I do not think animals have an awareness of morality, therefore they cannot have moral free will. They may be self-aware but they are not moral beings.


Om - "To address your argument, then: if a person knows that their offspring will die (a normal death), then should they procreate? Certainly, if they want to. Death after a long life is not a good or bad thing, it is merely normal and natural. The fact that the party comes to an end does not mean that you shouldn't throw the party anyhow."

Death = pain, so it would be inhumane (not necessarily immoral) of a man to procreate when he knew that his offspring would suffer. But again the argument is not whether or not it would be right or wrong to procreate, I believe it IS moral. The question is whether or not it was the father's MOTIVATING FACTOR when he did it. That is the title of this thread.

Hey Om, I will respond to the rest, but for now I gotta go. Don't write anything back until I get the rest as I'm going to incorporate several things, and I may answer your objections before you get to them,,,maybe ....Have a good day 'till then. Thanks for writing back anyway.
-Shaun


P.S. one thing does have to be answered right now though. My ability to craft a valid analogy has to do ONLY with the fact that I cannot create a being with free will, because I cannot create a being at all. God can.



[This message has been edited by Irishbrutha (edited April 25, 2001).]

O.k. Om, I'm back. So you've rejected the initial discussion topic that God wanted to be betrayed then, correct? Before I can continue I need to know what your new proposition is. Something like it was immoral of God to create humans that He knew were going to go to Hell?
-Shaun

P.S. O.k. I couldn't let these go either....

1. there is a biological drive to reproduce, a "need" that is to be satisfied;

there is no biological need. It is a biological desire. The individual man (not the species) would live without having sex. Otherwise many of us would die very early deaths (Did I just say that out loud???)

2. there is nothing that the man can do to prevent the death of his child, no matter how hard he tries; he cannot change the rules of biology

God could not change the rules of free will. He cannot make an enslaved/free will. No such thing. He could not create a being who would positively accept Him and still be a morally responsible being.

-Shaun


[This message has been edited by Irishbrutha (edited April 25, 2001).]