Vanderzyden

Vanderzyden:

How is an all-good, all powerful God inconsistent with this account?


Perhaps. We shall see.

It seems as though you are questioning the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and free will. You are asking, in effect, "How could God "force" humans to make a choice in which they were likely to choose wrongly?"

Do I have it correct? OK then. Do it better. Perhaps you have a better idea on how to create beings who are completely free to choose. How will you prevent some of them from rejecting what is right?

Vanderzyden

MortalWombat

If I set it up so that I were invisible and undetectable and my kind acts occured at a rate which was indistinguishable from random chance, then I obviously wouldn't care about "rejection."

K

Vanderzyden:

If I was omnibenevolent and omnipotent I would. I think it kind of goes with the territory. Even though I am neither, I can not think of any acts of rejection from my kids that could possibly prevent me from performing kind acts for them. One reason is that they are currently very young and therefore many years behind me in moral development. How much greater would the difference be between us and an all-knowing god? How could He possibly be less benevolent than a parent to a young child.

I prefer luvluv's descriptions of God. His seems doesn't seem to act with the pettiness that yours does.

luvluv

I think this is a good point. Perhaps the attribute we are describing as goodness is closer to love. Instead of saying God is totally good, we might say God is totally love. So the question could perhaps be better answered if we went into the attributes of love. Like goodness, I don't think love exists without a society of some sort. So what are the attributes of love. I mean by this, the attributes of agape love, the love one has for his fellow man, the love Jesus was talking about when He said "Love thy neighbor as thyself". Perhaps this would give us a clearer picture of the goodness God claims to have.

To answer your question Vib, no I don't think God's love is rejectable, but a relationship with Him is. He'll love you whatever you choose, which is why he'll respect your decision.

[ September 04, 2002: Message edited by: luvluv ]</p>

phlebas

Not deliberately. I don't believe in free will.

Actually, I was talking about that specific event described in Genesis. You know, the nonsense with the tree and the snake. If you left a loaded gun in easy reach on a table, and told a young child not to play with it, aren't you just a little bit responsible when he shoots himself?

Like I said, I don't believe we are free to choose as it is. Why this god of yours should give a crap about what we do here is yet one more insoluble question.

If God didn't want us to do anything bad, then he could have avoided it by not creating us. Leave the planet to the morally neutral plants and animals, who don't go violating the commandments.

But, like luvluv said, we shouldn't hijack his perfectly fine thread and turn it into Vanderzyden's Remedial Ethics Class.

luvluv

This would be a good time to bring in the Problem of Pain and Lewis's descriptions of love in the different relationships. C.S. proposed that we could not say of love that it desired nothing but that it's object not suffer. It wanted it's object, whether it was a husband, a dog, a wife, or a son, to become the best it could be even if that meant some suffering along the way. Would you agree or disagree that this is what love requires? Does it require that it's object never suffer or that it's object become the best it can be? Which is true love?

Vibr8gKiwi

Will he supposedly "unconditionally love" me and "respect" me all the way to hell? Do you torture your children forever if they fail to find you (while you’re actively hiding from them!)?

I can't speak for everyone, but personally I'd rather be brainwashed than be tortured eternally. But surely an all-powerful being wouldn't have created a system that ends in such an awful, immoral conundrum in the first place.

[ September 04, 2002: Message edited by: Vibr8gKiwi ]</p>

luvluv

Vib:

He's not actively hiding from you. He sent me to get you!

wordsmyth

An omnipotent and omnibenevolent deity would not allow free will.

Does a good parent let their children play with fire so that they can learn on their own that fire can hurt them? No. Does a good parent let their children play with knives so that they might learn that knives can hurt them? No. Therefore a just plain benevolent parent would not allow their child the free will to choose between a toy and a knife to play with regardless of whether some potential greater good might come of it. Can you provide a single example of an instance where a good parent would give their child a choice, and one of those choices was openly harmful or even fatal and what greater good might come of it.

No, a good (benevolent) parent would never subject their child to anything potentially harmful. The analogy of the Genesis account is equivalent to a parent giving a child a choice between a cookie and a knife... or even better, giving two children a choice between a cookie and a knife, one child grabs the cookie first, the other picks up the knife, kills the first child and takes the cookie. Would it be better to simply give all children a cookie rather than a choice? From an omnibenevolent perspective, YES! That is why an omnipotent and omnibenevolent deity would not allow free will.

In another thread luvluv used an analogy of giving a child a flu shot (i.e. causing the child harm for a greater good), however this is a bad analogy and luvluv admitted as much, so now I would ask if you can provide a better analogy of how an omnipotent and omnibenevolent deity could allow us to suffer and what possible greater good might come of it.

As I and others have stated on the other thread, if you remove the OMNI from Yahweh's omnibenevolent attribute, the problem of pain nearly disappears.

War would seem to be the #2 killer of humans throughout history. Disease being #1. War is a prime example of free will run amuck. Can you in any way rationalize war being for our own greater good? When you remove free will, as an omnibenevolent deity would, the desire for war disappears and any greater good is either achieved a priori or is irrelevant. Can you even fathom what possible greater good could come of 6 million Jews being exterminated during WWII?

On disease... the Black Blague wiped out nearly two-thirds of Europe's population. Various diseases wiped out entire civilizations in South and Central America. If you have three children and you allow them to play in a sandbox where you know two of them will contract disease and die, what rationale do you use to say that its either for the greater good of the two that died or the one that survived? All I'm asking for is a single example of how it could possibly be for any greater good.

Greater good? The greatest good is omnibenevolence which entails not allowing harm to come to others and omnipotence would grant the power to enforce it.

luvluv

so wordsmyth, I take it you would rather be a slave or a robot?