Ensign Steve

*POOF* God disappears in a puff of logic!

RUG

Howdy Hayden,

Sincerely, no offence intended. Just regurgitating the Merriam Webster's definition of "surrender" and using parent/child analogies in order to break this thing of the human will down into manageable terms. It was also because I wanted to avoid any “military officer vs. foot soldier” scenarios.
But, originally, I chose the analogy of mortal, non-supernatural father/son, in order to avoid discussing the omnipotence and omniscience of God. This was in order to hone in on your point about "will" power.
What I generally view as problematic about this discussion is attempting to discuss "the will" as if it existed in a vacuum. Reality dictates that "the will" is somewhere deep inside us, inside people. That's why I felt the parent/child relationship would be best. And I took a route that may have appeared offensive.
But the child/parent analogy wasn't meant to be condescending, it was meant to address the issue in a more “down-to-earth” manner, by representing in the two, father and son, the actual premeditated lack of interest embedded in the heart of the one less-powerful entity, prior to even making statements, in actually sincerely yielding to the higher power in the first place.

The assumption I made in this scenario was that our view of God chosen for this discussion, "if existent", is one of a supreme being, or as you said .
Hence the "higher power/subordinate power" or "creator/creation" analogy depicted in more manageable, more common terms as parent/child.

So, straight down this line of thought, and precisely according to the axiom at the end of the last sentence you wrote above, would it then not also be very hard to deliberately yield your will to something you don't even believe exists?

I should have stated this more precisely in order to avoid confusion or insult to begin with:
If you do not even believe, from the outset, in the existence of a God, how is it then even possible for you to surrender your will to such God? Much less to ask that God to keep you from doing something? This was the only point I was trying to make when I suggested one possible “inner proclamation”.

Then, from the point of view of a God (higher power, parent etc.), hence also my reference to sovereignty, and how sovereign (or absolute) power would naturally react upon "seeing through" the insubordination of the lesser power. In your sovereignty (supreme power) you saw the futility in "forcing" a teenage son to stop what he was doing, merely to prove your existence.
Your statement
demonstrates this.

So how can you really be so utterly convinced that God is not attempting to persuade you by another method that “He” is in fact your father, if you haven’t actually yielded your will to begin with? A provocative question, not intended as an insult or moral pontification, merely as food for thought on the logic behind your original post, which was as you say intended to initiate a discussion on the human will.
But that a supreme and sovereign God would see the futility in "intervening" in the physical realm, in physically "stopping" you by force from typing a message to test him, should be clear from the premise in your last sentence at the very top of this post.

All this talk is simply meant to follow true to the definition of surrender as it is set forth by, e.g., Webster's: "to give over or yield".
I then merely skipped a step and leapt straight into expounding on the concept of "yielding" to, by definition, include obedience. The reasoning here is also true to the most common usage of the word as we know it, since a “yielded will” must inherently be an “obedient” one. Viewing it in the reverse, for clarity sake, I would assert that one cannot possibly yield or surrender one's will to the will of another, whilst remaining disobedient to that person. Disobedience creates a paradox in this context and jams the works regarding submission.
Therefore, an automatic consequence of true surrender to a higher power must logically be obedience to it.
Whereas it is possible to be obedient without truly surrendering, surrender will automatically give birth to obedience.
For instance, I have yet to see a prisoner of war, who surrendered, but dared to disobey the dominating power when asked to "drop his weapons". That wouldn't make sense.

Therefore, in yielding your will to God, you may first be asked to voluntarily "drop your weapons".
In essence:
if one has truly surrendered, one stops oneself from doing things, making intervention by the higher power unnecessary. Many systems of law, society and even physics are based on this very real notion.
This is actually what I meant in my reference to Godot's post, that if you had truly surrendered, you would never have written the OP in the first place. Again, no offence.

Conversely, God, if all-powerful, might see the utter futility in intervening where iron-willed defiance is present, being that such God would be sovereign, i.e. experienced in all things and knowledgeable that no amount of brutal physical intervention would ever "correct" your will or image of "Him". That is to say, there is often futility in physical intervention, where the iron will of the human being is concerned.

In brief, if you are determined NOT to investigate the possible existence of a supreme being, then your mind is made up before the fact, and the God we've been speaking of here would see the futility in interfering with your premeditated intention to disprove “His” existence.

Thanks for letting me know about introducing myself, I think I will do.

Cheers,
RUG

Jinto

Wlcome to II. I guarantee you'll be snug as a bug in a RUG.

I do have one point:

There is a difference between acknowledging a physical impossibility (it would be impossible for me to have sufficient forknowledge of my son's line of questioning to prevent him from expressing it), and acknowledging futility. From what I gathered of Hayden's post, he has not done the latter.

Also I should point out that it would not be nessecary for God to control Hayden's free will in order to stop him from submitting his post. God could have, for instance, simply caused Hayden's ISP to disconnect him every time he clicked the submit button. He could also have altered Hayden's post en-route to read I exist, you silly fool. - God or something of that sort. According to most Christians, God interferes on far greater levels each day, diverting cars from hitting pedestrians and other such things, so surely altering the content of a few electronic impulses is not beyond Him?

By the way, along the lines of the original post, if God exists, can He make me a tuna fish sandwich? (Or smack me upside the head for bothering Him with such a silly request. Whatever)

Ensign Steve

I exist, you silly fool. - God

RUG

HA! Snug as a bug...That's one of the coolest welcomes I've actually ever received from any discussion forum, thanks for your comments, Jinto.

I might just add that sufficient foreknowledge of someone's line of questioning may be difficult, but not impossible.
Remember, the scenario is intended to depict the proverbial father and son relationship.
The son is already a teen.
I've assumed many things in putting this forward.
I've assumed that this father/son relationship is not distorted, that the father knows his son, raised him, has observed him, watched his development and, above all, that the father is skilled in pre-empting his son's further development.
Basically I'm assuming we're dealing with the near perfect father here.
A bold suggestion, at worst, but not necessarily improbable.
My own father is far from perfect, but he was an expert at analyzing the rascally intent of many of my acerbic comments by the time I was 14. A subjective example, I know, but then again we're dealing with the human will, the most subjective force in nature, so my example is not inappropriate simply because it is based on subjective experience.

So, assuming we're at least dealing with a "skilled" father, it might be difficult at most for such a father to see through the son's words and realize his intent, but not impossible.
And, assuming the father is capable of doing so, upon perceiving the intent of the son's challenging words, the paradigmatic father would choose the wisest route to respond to his son's challenge.
The possibility I proposed here was:
In his wisdom, the father might conclude that interfering with the premeditated will of his son to act rebelliously is not going to "prove" his own existence to his son.
Of course, what I'm suggesting is that such a father has decided, before acting, that his son’s words are to be viewed as a position statement, and that they are not actually a true challenge.
In essence what the son is doing is proclaiming his disbelief. The father views his son’s statement as evidence of his son having already made up his mind and determines, in his sovereignty, that his own existence should be self-evident to the son, and that the son's challenge is silly.
Therefore it is "sovereignly" ignored.

A better example of the position of sovereign entities vis-a-vis subordinates may have been the example of "citizen vs. State".
We all enjoy an excellent philosophical discussion on the sovereignty of the State and the power of the citizen to make such sovereignty disappear in the twinkling of an eye: i.e., how easy it would be to undermine the power of the State by simply banning together and choosing not to believe it exists.
John Lennon was admired for singing about similar notions.
This is all very amusing, until we speed through a red light in a rush on the way to work.
Imagine the judge’s reaction if in my own defense I would announce,
"If the power of the State to convict me of speeding and running a red light truly exists, then why did it not simply stop me from speeding and running the red light in the first place? As I was stepping on the gas, I called out to you! Where were you? Why did you not intervene? The power of the State is worthless! Since it was incapable, or disinterested or at least silent in this matter, I choose not to believe that the State actually exists!"
I seriously doubt whether my comments would keep me from having to pay a fine, or whether they would actually cause the judge to suddenly disappear in a puff of logic, as Ensign Steve might have put it...

Your tuna fish sandwich point is excellent and hilarious, but I do see a difference between asking for room service and asking for our to surroundings to be altered in order to hinder us from doing something.
In discussing "Human free will vs. God" (without wanting to keep putting only one title on this discussion), I said:
So the question is, according to a similar query above, under what conditions would the test have worked? Could true surrender be a prerequisite? Was Hayden truly WILLing to “drop his weapons” (i.e., keyboard, words) in his original post?

I say yes, in theory, even this test could actually work, but the key word in the OP is The converse question we should also be asking is, would God, "if existent", intervene regardless of Hayden's lack of willingness to "drop his weapons? Or is God, "if existent", more of a "gentleman", of sorts, than our preconceptions will allow us to believe, only entering in when truly invited?

Surely God, "if existent", decides sovereignly on how to intervene and acts according to principles, just as we do? And certainly these principles could have something to do with ascertaining the character of our challenges and weighing the qualities of our will? Perhaps this is at least one prerequisite to God's intervention? Is it possible that anecdotes of God's intervention consistently leave out crucial aspects which might explain such possible intervention, such as the complete surrender of the requesting person’s will as an overriding prerequisite to any such intervention (that in response to your query about what most Christians assert)?

Anyhow, yeah, as you can see, I'm already snug as a bug in a...
Cheers,
RUG

Jinto

Perhaps, but with any real-life analogy, you have to take into account what is physically possible for humans to do. Yes, his father might be able to stop him from talking with sufficient duct tape, but in order to do that, his father would have to know what he was going to say before he said it. He would also have to know when he was going to say it, as the duct tape would do nothing if applied before his son has the intent to speak, and also nothing after his son has spoken. I doubt that this level of predictive accuracy is even theoretically possible without divine foreknowledge.

The judge would respond as follows:

A) The state was physically incapable of stopping you from running a red light.
B) If the state was physicaly capable of doing this at a reasonable cost, then the state would do this rather than bothering with some stupid law, thereby saving the lives of everyone who is a victim of some idiot that thinks traffic laws apply to everyone but them.
C) The state is however, physically capable of throwing your ass in jail for contempt of court. So unless you want to become personally familiarized with the sodomy that goes on between lonely inmates, I suggest that you pay your fine.

Remember: the moment that you can stop crimes before they happen is the moment laws become unnessecary. And keep in mind that enforcing a law is a bigger violation of freewill than simply stopping people from hurting each other in the first place, which is why most people find the free will defense to be absurd.

Well you might say that God will intervene iff someone truly surrenders their will to him, but that creates a catch-22: sane people will not believe in something without measurable evidence, but God cannot provide measurabe evidence unless people surrender their free will, and people can't surrender their free will to something they don't believe in. So God is unable to convince us of his existence unless we already believe he exists. Okay, fine. But, according to the Bible, God will also punish us in hell for not believeing in him. Now, I'm sure you will agree that if I were to set you on fire that would constitute a violation of your free will, and a much more serious one than just stopping you next post, especially if I were to also prevent that fire from ever going out. So, by setting up a punishment system for an unavoidable outcome, God is commiting a much more seroius violation of our free will than if he were to just have us act however he wanted us to act in the first place. This is one point that I don't understand how Christians can ignore - they say that the PoE is solved by God allowing us free will, but they also don't understand that if God wants to allow us free will for better or for worse then He has to remove himself from the equation COMPLETELY, not just for some brief century and then go back to violating our free will in the afterlife. Frankly, I would be much less inclined to argue against the Christian God if he was actually consistent.

Kvalhion

Now, think about how many other people have done this where God did intervene and we never saw their posts. Therefore, God exists.

Oh, and the reason God didn't interfere with your post is that you are not a true® believer (©0 A.D.). Maybe if you try again for real this time, He will will make himself known to you. Or something.

Jinto

News flash: it can't be © 0 A.D. because

1. They didn't HAVE copyright law in 0 A.D. and
2. There is no 0 A.D. anyway (gregorian calendar starts at 1).

Defiant Heretic

In which case, it hasn't happened yet and can still be copyrighted.

Anyway, back to the original topic:
Stopping you from posting that wouldn't be a violation of free will, because you wanted it to happen. It would be honoring a request. If a god had the power and the desire to do so, it could stop you without taking away your free will.

RUG

Hey Jinto, Hayden,

I see I caused more confusion.
I was working from a particular premise and didn’t explain it.

Backtracking:

If you request something from a “god” then it’s best to identify which one (Ensign Steve pointed this out).
I began working from the premise that Hayden was addressing YAHWE.
If so, then YAHWE has boundaries one needs to adhere to if we expect ANY answer at all.
According to the bible, YAHWE works with people, in a space-time continuum, deals with physical matter.
But if Hayden wasn’t addressing YAHWE, then for the purposes of this discussion, Hayden needs to specify what he meant by “God, please stop me submitting this post“.
So Hayden, who or what is your God?

Jinto:
I need to explain something regarding your comments on my last post:
Just to clear this up, I was NOT assuming the earthly father would have the ability to know what the son was going to say BEFORE he said it, so that he could use duct tape, for instance.
I was assuming the earthly father was like any run-o’-the-mill dad. That he first LISTENED to his son’s comments, PERCEIVED their mocking intent by way of acquired parental skills and experience with his son, and then, in his wisdom, proceeded to ignore the son’s comments, having recognized that any violent reaction (e.g. duct before or after the fact) would be futile since the son had already made up his mind to begin with.
So you and I were working from two different points in time.
You: the father’s pre-emptive action BEFORE the words are even spoken;
I: the father’s REaction AFTER the words are spoken.

But let’s just assume the earthly father was not only in possession of excellent parental skills, wisdom and self-control, but was also clairvoyant, like a god.
In his wisdom, I still don’t believe he would see any point in duct-taping his son’s mouth, only in order to prove his own existence!
Possible, but not probable.
Remember, I’m not talking about a perverted, sadistic father with an inferiority complex and violent tendencies. Although I’m talking about more of a super-dad: wise, calm, self-confident and skilled, I’m still talking about a relatively normal, boring family man ...
Perhaps, if you insist, we could still include your added aspect of clairvoyance (although this breaks free from the conventional definitions of “normal”, “boring” and “family man”), but even so, I would still assert the above (fist sentence of this paragraph).

This is an excellent point.
I agree with your basic premise here.
(I’m only concerned now that the moderators aren’t going to like where I’m about to go with this. I only hope they’ll see the value of the philosophical reasoning behind it overall and let us carry on for now.)

So now, according to what you’ve proposed above, and since we seem to have started talking about the God of the bible, consider the fact that YAHWE DOES have the power to physically stop people from doing useless or horrible things, which (figuratively speaking) would also be more “cost-efficient” in a sense, if he were to do so.
Again, as you pointed out, the State does not have this power to pre-empt crime and stop people from committing criminal acts, although it would if it could,
whereas YAHWE does have the power to interfere, yet he doesn’t.
In my view this demonstrates a broader exercise of tolerance for human beings’ exercise of their free will than even the State demonstrates. It appears that this particular God, (and again, since Hayden did not specify, I simply made an assumption and began working from it, if Hayden objects to this choice, I should hope he would stop us before we take this too far) works in a time-space continuum, works with people in that continuum, with the laws of physics, biology, emotions, thoughts etc. That he works WITHIN the framework of human free will. Allows people choices. And also allows them to reap the consequences of those choices through the simple workings of nature so that they can learn on their own, from experience. He allows them to discuss, to deliberate, even to mock him to a great extent. In my view, this God at least appears to have integrity!
In spite of the fact that he has rules, he allows people to violate them and reap their own consequences.
So are you saying you believe it is unreasonable for YAHWE to set forth prerequisites to his intervening on someone’s behalf?
Is it unreasonable for him to stand his ground in respect of certain fundamental principles? To act as a constant in the universe?
I have a different image of this God, one of a God who patiently awaits a personal decision to surrender, and grieves when people choose death and destruction over mercy, death and destruction being the logical consequence for extremely dangerous actions-
That is, if you eat ten chickens that you know are infected with salmonella, it would be illogical to complain when you die of salmonella poisoning.
The God of the bible's actions are often analagous with this, in that he often appears only to be warning people from poisoning themselves. But we reject the warning and carry on.

So now we’ve arrived at Jinto’s catch-22:

Ok, so here we’re definitely talking about the Christian God. Again, I hope the moderators will cut us some slack since Hayden still needs to delineate a bit. Until that point we’ll continue working from this premise in regard to free will.
So if you’re talking about the Christian God, then that would include the entire Trinity then:
The Father, Jesus and the Spirit of God.
As far as I’ve understood the bible, and in particular, the NEGATIVE consequences of a choice to reject him, i.e., hell, I have to correct a misconception about punishment that you appear to be working from in understanding the mind of God on this, Jinto.
I couldn’t possibly care any less what any other well-meaning bible-thumper has told you about hell, but the bible clearly explains that hell was not actually created for human beings.
And, contrary to popular contention by the critics, the bible is NOT a bifurcated work.
It’s one fabric.
If you look at the Old Testament, God was constantly physically intervening in order to prove his existence, in order to STOP people from making horrible choices on earth, the consequences of which end in eternal death.
But in spite of him PHYSICALLY revealing himself, people still didn’t believe.
So then Jesus Christ actually appeared in the flesh and performed countless miracles right before the eyes of unbelievers in order to PROVE that he was God, but people STILL didn’t believe.
E.g., immediately after Jesus raised his old friend Lazarus from the dead, at least one particular Pharisee bolted back to report to the others that Jesus must be stopped, killed. Shortly thereafter, he was brought up on charges of blasphemy and crucified.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands had seen totally unexplainable things with their own eyes, with Jesus announcing that he was only doing it so that they would believe him, but they became frightened instead.

Today most of the Western world, huge parts of the Middle East, Asia, the Americas etc. etc. have the bible, the account of all these unexplainable events. Yet the bible continues to be ripped to shreds before it is even opened.
No reasonable book critic would dare such a thing with any other work, yet people CHOOSE not to believe the account before even scholastically investigating what’s up with all of it.
Upon actually reading it, however, you find hundreds of references to God’s long, tireless patience with people. You find tales of a miracle-working Jesus. And you find talk of a Holy Spirit, all provided as proof.
But all this is still not enough.
So people continue to enjoy denying his existence, even though, at least according to the bible, God contended with people for thousands and thousands of years in order to fulfil a complex plan, in order to provide a way OUT for people, WITHOUT interfering with their free will to choose.
But do you really think that God, in essence, tippy-toes around our free will?
Sooner or later, we reap what we sow. That’s a given. And it’s consistent, constant.

Still, don’t simply believe what well-meaning Christians have told you about hell and God’s punishment. Find out for yourself.
Since, at least according to the bible, hell is nothing more than the end result of the consequences of millions of actions, millions of moments in which people consciously choose to deny God.
The greatest false premise that people work from is that God is to blame for all the horrors of this world.
God is blamed for allowing child pornography, rape, murder, hate crimes, etc.
Funny, people want free will, but then love to point the finger elsewhere and claim that things are not the result of decisions PEOPLE make.
They ironically rather blame God for the perversions of the human race, than to simply accept his existence, admit fault and follow his rules without constantly challenging him to prove himself.

The bottom line is that people hate God and the idea of God so much, that they’re actually more than WILLing to suffer the consequences of their faulty actions rather than simply investigate what this surrendering of the will is all about.
Another such example appears in the post above with that weird copyright stuff, which appears to be mocking the word “true” (I thought this string was supposed to be for “people who think hard”).
I defined over and over what I meant by “true”. And I explained that we have no means to measure whether Hayden’s surrender was real, or whether it was meant as mockery. Only Hayden knows that.
I explained that if one “truly” surrenders, one essentially stops oneself from doing things that are detrimental to oneself and others, one chooses to obey God, follow him, thus making “intervention” unnecessary.
My posts are verbose, though, so maybe that was the problem.

But we’ve been talking about God’s attempt to intervene, without canceling out the value of free will.
In the context of Christianity, the greatest “intervention” into mankind’s confused ramblings was performed in the person of Jesus Christ.
But people reject this before even examining it.
They make up their minds before the fact, set their hearts NOT to believe, and THEN examine. Which means they’re basically biased BEFORE examining the NATURE of God.
But that’s free will in action for you.

So anyhow, I agree with Defiant Heretic’s post, that God honors REQUESTS.
The nature of a request, is that it assumes prerequisites will automatically be placed on the fulfillment of those requests.
The prerequisites set forth by the God of the bible, and Jesus, is that humans voluntarily invite him in; he must be INVITED in before he will intervene.
However, it’s not a violation of your free will for you to reap what you sow, Jinto.

So along those lines: "Why HELL?":
If you want to discuss what can be found in the bible about what hell was actually intended for, maybe we should move to another string?
I’m not interested in moralizing pontification though.
I’m only interested in discussing this further if you are.
Hell was not actually intended for people, but people choose that consequence freely, believe it or not (no pun intended ).
RUG