NOGO

John 5
40 "For this is the will of My Father, that everyone who beholds the Son and believes in Him will have eternal life, and I Myself will raise him up on the last day."

65 And He was saying, "For this reason I have said to you, that no one can come to Me unless it has been granted him from the Father."


Jesus seems to give a choice in verse 40 but then in verse 65 he says that in reality we have no choice. It is all decided by the big man in the sky.

NOGO

I think that you missed the point here.
Decisions are not isolated events. They are usually chained, that is, someone does one thing which influences someone else to do another etc.

The Berlin wall fell ...
Think about comiling a complete list of choices made by countless people throughout history which led to its construction and then its fall.

If God knew when he created the world that the Berlin wall would fall then all of history would in effect be fixed.

To claim that this is very different from a computer program whose execution is known in advance is just splitting hair.

But let's say that there is a difference.
God then created the world knowing full well all the choices everybody would take. Then why bother going through with it. Let's skip the play and get to distribution of the rewards.

The only way this can make any kind of sense is if God simply does not know choices that we are going to make in the future. But then God is not perfect.

By the way the natural world is NOT deterministic.
You guys are still living in a Newtonian world.
Cause and effect has taken quite a beating in quantum mechanics.

I am sure that you all know that Uranium radiates alpha particles. Every once in a while an alpha particle escapes. Why? It is in fact impossible according to Newtonian physics. It is called tunnelling. There is a finite probability that an alpha particle escapes. And it does. Goodby cause and effect.

You want more bizarre things look up John Bell's Theorem.

[ May 25, 2002: Message edited by: NOGO ]</p>

NOGO

Here is my take on morality and the Bible.
I previously posted this elsewhere.

I am sure that you will agree that my morality and yours come from the same place whether we admit it or not.

When I left home I shared an apartment with three other students. We agreed on how much each would pay and other obvious details. Then came the communal living. One guy used the phone too much which left the others frustrated. One guy snored. One guy never cleaned the kitchen after use. Etc. We complained, talked about and made new rules. And so it went.

I have not talked about morality yet. I will argue that morality follows the same pattern. Injustice is first perceived then there is struggle for it to be recognized and finally new rules are made or changed. Rules which obtain overwhelming support from a majority of people across many generations are promoted to the status of moral law. There are exceptions to this general outline but it does cover most of it.

Let me start in Genesis

Gen 2:17 but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die."

So God does not want humans to know good and evil.
Note that God says that "for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die"
Well they did not die on that day. More on this point later.

Gen 2:25 And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

They did not know that it was shameful to be naked. Blissful naivety. Not knowing what is good and what is bad.

Gen 3:4-5 The serpent said to the woman, "You surely will not die!
"For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."

All this is correct they did not die and their eyes opened and knew good and evil.

Gen 3:7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings.

According to the bible this is where humnity acquired the ability to tell what is right and what is wrong. I call this a myth but if you believe that this actually happened then so be it. Humanity aquired this ability and it seems that God himself could not take it away.

Gen 3:10-11
He said, "I heard the sound of You in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid myself." And He said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?"

"Who told you that you were naked?" No rule (law) had been given, yet they knew.

Gen 3:22 Then the LORD God said, "Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might stretch out his hand, and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever"

Man is like one of us, knowing good and evil.
Note that God did not want man to eat from the tree of life and live forever. Man was mortal and did not die when he ate of the tree of good and evil.

So the serpent was correct in every aspect. Man did not die and was like the Gods, kowing good and evil.


Moving on to "Thy shalt not kill."
This is a most fundamental rule which every civilization has had.
According to the bible this law was given to Moses after the exodus from Egypt. This was about 1300 to 1400 BCE. At that time the Egyptian civilization had been in existance for something like 1500 years already. No civilization can exist that long without a "thy shalt not kill" law.

Cain killed Abel. Since Cain did not have the "thy shalt not kill" law then he simply did not know that killing was immoral. Right?
Reread this story in the bible. Did God say oops I should have given man a set of moral laws!

Gen 4:7 If you do well, will not your countenance be lifted up? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door; and its desire is for you, but you must master it."

So God warns Cain that he is about to sin. BUT on what basis since no law had been given at that time

Gen 4:8-10. Cain told Abel his brother. And it came about when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and killed him. Then the LORD said to Cain, "Where is Abel your brother?" And he said, "I do not know. Am I my brother's keeper?" He said, "What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood is crying to Me from the ground.

Note the "voice of your brother is crying to Me"
As I said people complain and then rules are created.

Gen 4:11-12 "Now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand. "When you cultivate the ground, it will no longer yield its strength to you; you will be a vagrant and a wanderer on the earth."

So God punishes Cain. It seems that Cain knew he had done something wrong. Cain was not like Adam and Eve in blissful naivety when they did not know that they were naked.
He had knowledge of good and evil and knew that what he had done was wrong.
He had no law to go on since it was not given yet.

Conclusion:
Even according to the Bible Man has a sense of morality which is built-in. Either because we ate the apple or because that is our nature.

DRFseven

Yes, in the sense that people usually mean it, we certainly don't have free will. We can pursue a course of action (to a limited degree) IF we happen, not only to know how to do this, but to know how to WANT to do it. This is happenstance, not free at all.

ManM

ex-preacher,
As I'm sure you have noticed, my interests are primarily philosophical and so my history knowledge is lacking. I do not know every intricate detail of Church history. Philosophically, the councils make sense, both in their sanction and their results. Still, I don't understand the drive of your posts anymore. Are you attacking the idea that a majority vote is safer than individual interpretation? Your claim that a majority vote is not a good criterion for truth is silly. Given a historical question, you would expect the majority to be far more reliable than any one individual. Let's suppose 15 people see a light in the sky. Four claim it was a flying saucer while eleven claim it was a plane. I don't think I am being unreasonable for believing the eleven over the four, especially if they can provide good reasoning. The majority is not always a good criterion for truth, but in this case it is fine. Alternatively, are you saying that one of the results of a council was wrong? If so, name the position you wish to defend and I'll give the argument against it. I just want to stay focused on something relevant.

You claim that you find it odd that people would look to councils instead of the Bible. Yet, don't you agree that a book is nothing without an interpretation? If I'm looking for an interpretation I'm not going to go to the book, especially when it uses metaphors and symbols. No, I find it much more reasonable to look to the ones who compiled the Bible to try and find out what they said it meant. Remember, the Bible was not the source of Christianity. The Church came first. So it is much more reasonable to look at the Church instead of trying to recreate the wheel yourself.

My religion tells me love. Sin is an abuse against love. An abuse against love leads to suffering (hell). Put Jesus's teachings in this context and you will see what he was saying. If something is causing you to sin (to "miss the mark" of love), remove yourself from it so that you can love better. If you refuse to love, you will naturally lead yourself (and others) to suffering (hell). If your hand should cause you to sin, it is better that you do without it, for the distress caused by sin is far worse. Don't take this literally, but just as a symbol for what I said above.

Given my philosophical persuasion, the free will/determinism debate is important to me. As far as I can tell, it has consequences which deal with the consistency of naturalism and my experiences. As I've said before, I believe in free will because to do otherwise leads to absurdity. Determinism renders human value judgments meaningless. I have shown before the infinite regression which comes out of determinism. There is no difference between the rational and irrational, just and unjust, and so forth. Taken seriously, I think this leads to complete apathy. I also do not think this squares well with reality. We believe reason is better than incoherence. We believe in our theories, and we actually think they are better than opposing ideas. This only makes sense if we are free to choose which theories we believe in. We feel guilt. This only makes sense if we were free to choose to act in a way other than how we acted. Determinism leads to conclusions that are far removed from human experience, and on top of that it leads to a philosophical absurdity. If determinism is true, then I have no grounds to believe determinism is true. This is obviously a contradiction which removes determinism from my options for belief. Thus I am left with free will.

How does God's gift undo the chain of causality? You are presupposing determinism with this question. The chain of causality may indeed have an effect on us, but it does not determine us. There is no chain of causality to undo.

I've given the reconciliation between God's foreknowledge and our freedom multiple times. It seems intuitively obvious to me that knowing about an independent event does not cause that event. Your claim is that no event is independent of God's causality, and so nothing can be considered independent of God's intentions. This idea assumes that God cannot create something which could oppose His will. I do not grant this assumption, and so I have no problem asserting that our decisions are free of God's causality.

Those are my answers to your challenges.

NOGO,
Regarding John 6:65 (And he said, Therefore said I unto you, that no man can come unto me except it were given unto him of my Father), St. John Chrysostom says "when thou hearest that 'He hath given', imagine not merely an arbitrary distribution, but that if any hath rendered himself worthy to receive the gift, he hath received it." Basically, I need not believe your interpretation of the Bible. Your challenge against God's omniscience is the same as ex-preacher's, namely you are assuming God could not create something which could oppose His will. My answer to you is also the same as the one I gave to ex-preacher. I simply do not accept your assumption.

You also claim that the natural world is not deterministic, but probabilistic. We do not know what causes alpha particles to be released from Uranium, so there must not be a definite cause? There is nothing more than the probability we observe empirically? It might just as easily be the case that we have not created an adequate theory yet. A good friend of mine from college loved to throw around his theory that probability and randomness are tributes to human ignorance. I find this idea very persuasive.

NOGO

You take as a given that if something happens then it must have a cause. Even if all the evidence is contrary you will not accept it. Perhaps you should study quantum mechanics a bit more. With the causal nature of your world you are putting in place all the elements which will keep you in your current track undisturbed by the real world.

This kind of attitude can also be seen with John 6:5. Your interpretation of John 6:5 is pure fantasy. There is no justification for it. Where does it say "if you are worthy". The statement does not say that God grants access to Jesus only to those who are worthy. You are reading this into it. The statement is not conditional.

ManM

NOGO,
Yes, I assume that the world is deterministic. Likewise you assume that the world is probabilistic. Let me give an example of the difference between our views. We can flip a coin 1000 times and decide that there is a 50% chance it will wind up on heads on one flip. This satisfies your worldview. However, I will claim that if we know the relevant variables, we could predict with 100% accuracy which side the coin lands on. If I had made such a claim before Newton came along I would probably have received the same criticism you give me now.

And for the record, that is not my interpretation of John 6:65, but the one of St. John Chrysostom. To put it in perspective, St. John lived around 350-400 AD. The first known list to contain the present twenty-seven book New Testament Canon was written in 367 AD. And so I would say that your interpretation is the new and "fantasy", not St. John's.

[ May 27, 2002: Message edited by: ManM ]</p>

NOGO

You are trivializing Quantum Mechanics. Einstein had a problem with it and never accepted it. I am sure that you know about his famous quote "God does not play dice with the world". Essentially Einstein believed that the world was deterministic but our inability to see enough detail prevented us from predicting the future. Niel Bohr claimed the opposite. He said that in a quantum mechanical system all the probabilities existed at the same time and that was the nature of the world we live in. Niel Bohr was correct as was verified through experiment.

Our world is not deterministic. What we know today is that even if you knew all the variables you cannot be certain of the outcome. Actually you cannot know all the variables. Not that you cannot measure them but that different possibilities exist simultaneously.

What you need to do is get information. There is a lot of material on this on the net. One part of it can be found if you search for "John Bell Theorem". Welcome to the twenty-first century.


I am familiar with St. John Chrysostom. You are appealing to authority; why don't you answer my point instead. St. John claims that there is a condition on the statement John 6:65. Where is this condition? what evidence do you have that such a condition was intended.

St. John lived more than two centuries after these books were written. He therefore cannot claim to have spoken to Jesus nor the authors of the books. So how would he know that an unwritten condition applied to the statement in John 6:65? He and you cannot justify this position.

ex-preacher

One word: Galileo.

<strong> What if 11 said they were aliens and that all humans must commit suicide to join them behind the Halley Bopp comet. And 4 said it was a plane.

<strong> I have no interest to split fine hairs over the council decisions. They certainly invented doctrine when you compare their positions to the Bible. But then, you don't take the Bible as a standard. You have no basis to disagree with anything the councils decided because you have already decided that anything they decided was a good decision because they decided it. A bit circular for me.

<strong> Are you so disdainful of your own ability to interpret? Are you aware of the utterly bizarre and contradictory interpretations which the church fathers assigned to Jesus' parables? I would trust you over them any ol day. You still have to interpret their interpretations. After all, virtually all the thousands of splintered Christian denominations accept the basic council decisions. Why add annother layer of interpretation? Why not go back to the source or as close to it as possible?

<strong> How about going back to those who wrote it? Do you really think that the bishops hundreds of years after the fact knew better what Paul meant than learned scholars today who rely on primary or secondary sources?

<strong> You seem to make no distinction between the "Church" of the first century and the "Church" hundreds of years later. You do realize that these weren't the same people? Have you ever played the game "Gossip"?

<strong> I think you have invented your own religion. That's okay, because it's what every other Christian does. That way it fits you nicely.


Well, ManM, we may be at a stalemate. Here’s how I see things:

1. Morality – we seem to agree that looking out for each other (love, mutual interest, psychic pleasure) is the highest form of morality.

I don’t think you have answered my long-standing question: Would you obey a command from God to kill innocent children?

2. Free will vs. determinism. This is an age-old question that has puzzled philosophers and theologians for millenia. I doubt we can resolve between the two of us.

Since we can’t seem to reconcile naturalism and freedom (as you and I agree, randomness isn’t the same as free will), I see four possible alternatives:

A. Naturalism (or a major part of it) is wrong.
B. The free will view (or a major part of it) is wrong.
C. Both are wrong.
D. Naturalism and free will can be reconciled, but we have not yet discovered how.

For you to assume A seems to me to be without solid evidence. You say that human experience confirms the reality of free will. Yet, determinists would call that an illusion. Certainly you would concede that there are many scientific realities which are contrary to common sense human experience. It doesn’t seem realistic to me that people on the other side of a round world can keep from falling off. It certainly looks like the sun rises and sets. It doesn’t seem possible that a flower, a fish and a human are somehow related genetically. For you to automatically prefer your subjective experience or desire over the logical outcome of reasoning seems arbitary and contradicts your stated reliance on philosophy.

BTW, I still do not think you have reconciled omniscience + creation with free will. It's not just a matter of God knowing what would happen. He set up all the initial conditions and created (or creates) each person knowing exactly what "choices" they would make. He knew the end before he began. Besides making this world a waste of his time (I guess he's got plenty of that) that also means he could have saved many millions the misery and suffering they've had in this world. Why not just cut to the chase - heaven/hell. He knows where everyone will end up anyway, right?

3. Church councils. I’ll admit that I have rambled, but it was all with a purpose. I understood you to believe that the Bible is not inerrant, but that the will of the majority of bishops at a council somehow expressed God’s divine will. I was attempting to demonstrate that the councils display only human involvement.

You are also inconsistent in that you want to go with the majority only until the split between Catholic and Orthodox. Then, you switch to relying on your own evaluation of each group’s positions. If you truly think that the majority view should prevail, I think you should become a Roman Catholic. Or admit that the majority view is not really your criteria.

I continue to be unimpressed by the notion that one can discover the true nature of the teachings of Jesus and the apostles by studying the church councils of the “Dark Ages” (better titled “Middle Ages&#8221 ; ) rather than simply going to the New Testament.

If you wanted to know Joseph Smith’s views on polygamy, would you consult the current council of Twelve Mormon elders? Or would you go back to find what Smith actually said and wrote?

If you wanted to understand what Madison really meant when he wrote the Constitution, would you go to the Supreme Court decisions of the 1890s? Or would you look for primary documents by Madison and his contemporaries?

If you wanted to know Mohammed’s views on war, would you consult a council of Muslim Imams? Or would you search for an interpretation of him written hundreds of years later by Islamic officials? Or primary sources?

If you wanted to know what the writers of Genesis meant by a certain phrase, would you rely primarily on Rabbinic interpretation hundreds or thousands of years later?

So if I want to know Jesus’ views on pacifism or Paul’s views on homsexuality, why in the world would I turn to the church councils that took place centuries after the event, instead of trying to access first or second generation sources?

It seems obvious that the churches (I reject the notion that a single “Church” existed) of the 7th century were vastly different than the churches (definitely no single “Church&#8221 ; ) of the first century. Look at the form of church government, views on the Christian and government, doctrinal positions, the role of women, miracles, etc – all these changed dramatically. One of the most significant changes was that the rich variety of theological expressions was being forced into a few rigid patterns of orthodoxy.

I hope we can continue to discuss other areas of interest on other threads, but I think our work here is done.

[ May 27, 2002: Message edited by: ex-preacher ]</p>

ex-preacher

NOGO,

I know very little about quantam mechanics, but I think I understand the basic point here - there are utterly random elements in our universe. While it undermines a purely deterministic world, this randomness does not equate "free will" as used in the theological or philosophical sense. At least that's my understanding.