figuer

All very sensible, God wants things and he does what should be done to obtain them. I just must ask: Why should anyone believe this, and the rest of Christian mythology, based on what evidence? How does this make any more sense than Buddhism, or plain Atheism?

You are actually stating that God can violate his own moral system in order to "achieve some higher purpose" (caprice). This makes Christian morality completely subjective, thus your constant claim that "Christian morality is objective and written into the Universe" has no basis.

gstafleu

It may make no sense from the POV of a culture that is conditions its members to believe in free will, true. But from the POV of a culture that sees everyting as an ever repeating series of cycles, like we can see in the movements of the heavenly bodies, it makes perfect sense. God commands us as he has to (god in this scenario is subject to the laws governing the cosmic dance: maat, me, moira, dharma, tao...), and we, following the perfect way as we have to, respond as we will. Free will need not apply.

So, to go back to the OP, from which POV was Genesis written? Both, and that makes it a tad perplexing . The story no doubt started its life similar to the creation story of e.g. the Sumerians, which would put it in the ever ongoing cycles category. But then at some point the priests of monotheistic Judaism got their hands on it, and they changed it to a story of (dis)obedience to the handed down will of a transcendent god.

Hence this curious bit about the two trees. Normally there is one such tree, the axis mundi, which represents the connection between heaven and earth: partake of its fruits and you partake of that connection, thus becoming knowledgeable about the cycles of life and death, good and evil, and thus, seeing all is one, you become "immortal" (if life and death are one, everyone is "immortal" by default). This tree is depicted in lots of Sumerian seals, so I'm not just making this up .

In Genesis we all of a sudden have two trees: one of the knowledge of good and evil and one of immortality. Mankind has eaten the fruit of the former--otherwise they couldn't be subject to the transcendent will of god--but was prevented from eating the fruits of the second. Gaining immortality would have made them similar to the deity, and you can't have that when the deity is transcendent: the town ain't big enough for the both of them, so to speak.

Gerard Stafleu

Cheerful Charlie

Free will as a concept meant nothing to Israelite old testament writers and prophets. It was naturally assumed for the most part. Free will vs determinims became to be a problem only in the times of Greek philosophers. Atomism implied it for example. It became a rather contentious subject for the Stoics.

It was left to Paul to make it a contentious problem for Christianity.

So to the West we have to remeber free will is a problem that developed by stages and we must be careful not to project our knowledge or feelling willy-nilly back to earlier thinkers.

The early Israelites and the prophets saw God as absolutely free and notsubjecttoanythinmg. Especially the prophets. Cycles and gold, silver, iron ages and a new cycle of creation again were Greek.


Free will was assumed. We choose, except in some cases, where God intervenes for his own purposes. Hardening hearts of Pharoah, or in Joshua, the Canaanites, (Joshua 11). Before the flood God laments man is inclined to evil, but that assumes man has free will.

However,by the time of the prophets, the prophets assume God will no longer allow man to be so inclined to evil, at least the Isrealites, his chosen.

See 2 Chronicles 30, Jeremiah 31-2, Isaiah 59-60,63. God will punish way ward Israelites by captivity in Babylon. They will return and God will put his ways and laws in the hearts of his chosen so they will not stray again.

We see a change here in attitudes as to free will.

Jeremiah 32

37Behold, I will gather them out of all countries, whither I have driven them in mine anger, and in my fury, and in great wrath; and I will bring them again unto this place, and I will cause them to dwell safely:
38And they shall be my people, and I will be their God:
39And I will give them one heart, and one way, that they may fear me for ever, for the good of them, and of their children after them:
40And I will make an everlasting covenant with them, that I will not turn away from them, to do them good; but I will put my fear in their hearts, that they shall not depart from me. 41Yea, I will rejoice over them to do them good, and I will plant them in this land assuredly with my whole heart and with my whole soul

Isaiah 59
20 “ The Redeemer will come to Zion,
And to those who turn from transgression in Jacob,”
Says the LORD.

21 “As for Me,” says the LORD, “this is My covenant with them: My Spirit who is upon you, and My words which I have put in your mouth, shall not depart from your mouth, nor from the mouth of your descendants, nor from the mouth of your descendants’ descendants,” says the LORD, “from this time and forevermore.”

But we must not take it that these prophets had any real deep theories about free will.

The trees of Eden of course gave us the doctrine of original sin, but many are still arguing if Adam had free wil or if the fall was predestined from the beginning. sublapsarians vs infralapsarians.

Both original sin ala Christianity and free will problems were the furthest things from the Genesis writers' minds. What this tale tells us is knowldge of good and evil is an aspect of gods, a god-like power. We have it, but are not by any means gods. We lack immortality and judgement. We are inclined to evil. The prophets saw God as finally getting around to fixing that. But since third prophecies failed (see Isiah 59 on for the new heavenly kingdom about to come), all that got pushed to an indefinite future, we got messianistic Judaism and apocalypticism, which Jesus
was influenced by. he saw himself as presiding over Isaiah's new heavenly Kingdom. Where everything would be different, for example,there would be no marriage in this new kingdom.

What exactly Jesus envisoned we will never know, very little of his actual ideas made it to us through the fog of the gospels. But Jesus does not seem to think we do not have free will.

His habit of speaking in parables so not all will be saved, (Mark 4, Luke 8, Matthew 13) argues for Jesus as believing strongly we have free will.

But the fact he is represented as forseeing Judas's betrayal indicates a lack of free will at least for Judas. Jesus was simply not a philosopher who thought about these things in terms of free will and determinism, nor were the gospel writers. Paul did because he probably was aware of the stoics
Epicureans et al. He argued with these people on his travels.

Romans 8 - 11 was his response.

CC

John Kesler

How can you say that you don't know whether they are capable of sinning, when 2 Peter 2:4 states that some angels did sin? Is there some scripture which states that angelic nature was changed after the incident described in Genesis 6:1-4, so that angels are no longer capable of sinning?

I'm glad that you can see the erroneousness of the free-will defense.

Can you see the inconsistency in the bolded portion of your statement? You can't have it both ways by claiming that God doesn't want evil, then claiming that at least some evil is indeed what God wants, allegedly so humans can see how forgiving he is. But why should humans ask for forgiveness if the evil we ask forgiveness for is something that God wanted all along...so that he could forgive us for it?:huh:

Since you admit that free will and sinlessness are compatable, but don't believe that angels get the "benefits" that you claim humans get from the presence of evil, what was accomplished by creating any of the sin-inclined angels of Genesis 6:1-4? Why didn't God only create the angels that he knew wouldn't sin?

Seeker630

Without reading any further responses I will say this-----------

If a god who was (is) supposedly all knowing, deliberately created beings who were flawed, then they must by default be blameless. They had absolutely no input, or knowledge of, how the stage had been set. They didn't send the serpent-------god did, since he manufactured that too. They didn't put the tree of knowledge there in the 1st place either, god provided that also.

I was a police officer for 30 years---------in my business we called it entrapment. The big difference is that god got to create the beings flawed from the start as part of the setup------nobody else gets to do that.

There is no getting around the story logic. This god thingy is a cosmic prick.

figuer

Christianity would make more sense if the claim was that Jesus sacrificed himself to atone for God's sins...so that WE could FORGIVE HIM for the mess He created