Geebo

I started this thread after a discussion with a xian about the good-evil choice of man giving him free will. My original comment was as an argument against the illogical views of xians , but the thread seems to have developed as an pure atheist debate about how it could be possible, regardless of the untruth of it (which is still interesting).

Xians say that man has the choice between good and evil and that only having the choice of good would mean that man had no free will.

And this destroys the xian arguement.

I argued that because I cant fly or run 100 mph then my free will isnt 100% free and is limited anyway. Therefore god could limit it more by taking out the capacity to do evil without taking away our free will. I’m sure most of the people I know would love to live without murder and rape, for example.

That to me proves that god is responsible for evil

Then I thought about heaven.
If the above hold true, you dont need ‚a finite life‘ to get to an ‚eternal heaven‘ that is just the same as life, but eternal. When limiting free will is able to stop evil, then you dont need life as a mechanism for weeding out evil doers.

Then I though of heaven from a xian point of view and wrote the original thread.
If only having ‚good‘ is not free will.
Just having ‚good‘ in heaven is not free. So what’s the point.
Having a choice in heaven for eternity means that every available option will happen and evil will occur.
I personally think it would be possible to have free choice limited to good on earth, free choice limited to good in heaven and everyone lives happily and goes happily to heaven. The fact that possibility isnt so is a good reason to be an atheist!

Then there are also spiritually low beings.
But then why go through the process of life as a mechanism to differentiate between good and evil when its a foregone conclusion that spiritually higher beings will choose good and there weaker counterparts wont.

Whatever option you choose, they are both forms of limited free will and show that free will in life would have also been possible.

Maybe god can only create 'weak' spiritual humans
and so needs the limited period of life and the good-evil choice, as a mechanism to push up the spirituality of those who choose good. Maybe god creates being but cant control the spiritual level and cant see the difference between individuals spirituality and so needs life, like litmus paper, to show up the differences before he takes them off to eternity.

StarkStirner

Not "necessarily", but almost. The chance still persists that only good actions will be chosen freely. Just as no statistician could prevent me from dicing an eternal string of sixes. However, does such an absurdly improbable scenario even merit contemplation, except for maintaining that a benevolent heaven with free will is not logically impossible? Hardly. Perhaps we should, as you suggest, turn to the "extraordinary actions" instead.

But, in connection with the above, let me first suggest how God could perhaps have arranged goodness without impeding on the free will of souls. Whether or not this idea qualifies as extraordinary, I will not judge.

Our omniscient God reads the infinite number of ways life in heaven could evolve. He notes that a small number of these include only good actions from the heavenly inhabitants, while the vast majority contains at least one evil deed. Each and every of these possible courses of events include free will. Our omnipotent Creator realizes that He can adjust the parameters to install whichever heavenly scenario he wishes. True to the form of a benelovent God, he decides to twitch the parameters in one of the ways which only lead to good actions. He has not determined that the celestial beings can only choose good. But he knows that they will always use their free will to do good because he facilitated it that way. Would it have been any different if God just randomly "twitched the parameters" and then full-knowingly allowed a scenario where 4.5 percent of all actions were evil? Of course, this idea raises the question of whether or not it is even possible for God to read the minds of free-willed agents.
That is exactly my position. Limiting the scope of an individual's actions is not equivalent to limiting or destroying free will. Say: Scientists discover a method to identify a brain state which automatically leads to an evil action. Based on this discovery, a Big Brother-inspired government installs a micro chip in the body of every citizen. When the chip detects an evil thought in the brain, it paralyzes the individual before he or she carries out a corresponding evil action. In such a society much evil would be eradicated, while free will would remain intact.

A similar form of determent may be applied to heaven.

Philosoft

This is playing awfully fast-and-loose with the definition of free will. I don't see how pre-emptive limitation of possible actions by a controlling force with an admitted agenda is not a constraint of free will.

Is free will simply decision-making or must it include the ability to act on a decision without being limited by someone with an agenda? To return to your flying human example, it can be argued that I can make a decision (however trivially) to grow wings and fly but if I am physically or logically unable to do so, have I made a meaningful free will decision?

Blu

I think we can say that there are flaws in everything that has been created by humans including religion. The argument here is about the Judeo-christian (and others) of Heaven and Hell, angels and the Christian personalized God.

So is it safe to say that Atheists are against the Judeo-Christian beliefs of God, Angels, Heaven and Hell concepts? Or are they against everything involving spirituality?

Does everyone agree that energy is everywhere? Maybe there is positive and negative energies on a grand scale. Heaven may actually be positive energy. Maybe hell is a void of negaitve energy. There may be a combination of both negative and positive energy on earth or associated all physical matter. And all of this exists within space and time.

Maybe there are other dimensions in the universe and the human brain cannot fathom what these dimensions are and can't even percieve them in any way.

Chrisitans think of Heaven as a place like a beautiful garden or something and Hell as a place of fire and of suffering. They are relating these "realms" to what they know is negative and positive on earth. It is not good to be thrown in a pit of fire. And usually people think of beautiful gardens as peaceful and nice. So maybe we should think of Hell as being negative and Heaven as positive rather than thinking of these things as realms or places one can go to. But sometimes one (being human) can't describe supposedly spiritual things without using words like "realm" and other human-earth aspects.

What exists beyond space and time? Isn't space and time confined to physical matter etc? What if there is something that is out there beyond space and time and if so could this "something" be everywhere but existing (not in the way we think of as existing) in another dimension?

Look beyond the terms people use and look at the associations and the meanings of what religion talks about. If something is completely positive how can anything negative exist inside a positive. So the idea of angels (positive energy perhaps) can be negative and be negative in a positive "realm" (heaven) and have human aspects as well is kind of ....well... it doesn't make much sense. It also doesn't make sense to associate any human characterists to non-human and supposedly, non-physical beings like God.

Humans created religion therefore there has to be flaws. But what about peeling away earth and human emotion associations from things that are deemed spiritual. What can you come up with then?
I would be interested in "hearing" responses.

Philosoft

I have found it rather frustrating that some people take meaningless, contradictory, non-existent concepts (heaven, hell, God, Satan), assign to them properties that are only compatible with non-existence (immaterialism, omnipotence, temporal transcendence) and then proclaim that they exist. According to this model, there is no such thing as logical non-existence because such things that are said not to exist can simply be given properties that are compatible with non-existence and then said to exist.

There are many words in many languages that are gramatically correct when used in phrases or sentences but they are not necessarily meaningful. Things like "beyond existence" or "beyond space and time" do not immediately appear incongruous when we hear them because they don't describe something self-contradictory. As it turns out, they don't describe anything at all.

Blu

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Philosoft:
[QB]I have found it rather frustrating that some people take meaningless, contradictory, non-existent concepts (heaven, hell, God, Satan), assign to them properties that are only compatible with non-existence (immaterialism, omnipotence, temporal transcendence) and then proclaim that they exist. According to this model, there is no such thing as logical non-existence because such things that are said not to exist can simply be given properties that are compatible with non-existence and then said to exist.

Hello,

We were philosophically discussing concepts (God, Satan, Heaven, or Hell) that were created by humans. Whether you believe these exist or not is subjective. If your view is that these things do not exist, then they won't for you. But these types of beliefs are very strong otherwise these concepts would have lost there place in society and culture long ago. Is there a reason for this strength? Who knows?

I don't. I like not knowing all there is to know. I like to debate and discuss and think about all of these ideas. It kind of ends a discussion and ends discovery when someone just says: "No it doesn't exist."

Please feel free to read my other posts so I don't have this urge to repeat other things I have written to try to make my overall point.

Philosoft

I think you miss my point entirely. What reason is there to speculate about a thing's existence if the only things that can be said about is that it doesn't have any properties that we associate with existence the other 99.44% of the time?

I agree, and by all means try to convince me that the phrase "God exists" actually means something. This is part of my philosophy you know.

Blu

Hello,

I would like to hear more of your philosophy. My philosophy basically says that humans associate spiritual aspects with earthly-physical aspects which I think is the start of all confusion and all arguments involving all spiritual aspects.

When you say that it is false that we say God exists, I immediately ask myself: how can he say Energy doesn't exist?

Because my perceptions of these spiritual beliefs are different from the perception you have about people's perceptions (beliefs) of the spiritual, I find the whole argument of whether or not God exists a tad weird. When you say God doesn't exist, I think to myself: We exist. When you, or anyone, says there is no proof of God, I think to myself: There is life on this planet, isn't there?

Would "God" exist if there was no life on this planet or physical matter? Well, if Energy is "God" and the "Universe" is God, would these things exist if there was no physical matter or human minds?

These are the things I think about. People think of "God" in a Judeo-Chrisitian sense. I know children like to think of "God" as being a Manly-like figure that somewhere lives in the sky and "He" also has a nice flowing white beard which signifies wisdom. "God' in that sense is no existent for me. But sometimes people need to associate earthly aspects to spiritual aspects so they can begin to feel that they can comprehend the incomprehensible.

Just my two cents

eh

Blu, are you a pantheist? There is a site somewhere dedicated to 'scientific pantheism' but I've lost the URL. The basic ideas of scipan seem to be a lot like what you're talking about.

Blu

I assume you mean Pantheism as identifying the deity with the Universe and its phenomenon, if so sure I would go for that. But I rather like responding to ideas on here. The stuff people write make me think.

I would like to here from the person I was responding to.

thanks