luvluv

I'm not sure where you are having a problem. God didn't directly create you, your parents did. And who you are is a result of your genes, your environment, the free decisions of the people around you, and, ultimately, your own choices. All of these things God did not directly create, you did. I don't see how omnimax (I hate that term) implies that God does everything. He doesn't make our choices for us, I'm certain of that.

It logically follows that if someone creates you and gives you free will, that he does not also create your actions. That's what is meant by giving you free will.

That's a fly nickname, I wish I would have thought of that. (I might change my name to Dean Big Brother Almigh-TEE!) She's Gotta Have It Came on T.V. this weekend. That's like one of the best characters Spike ever invented. He should have his own movie.

"Hey Nola."

"What?"

"Hey Nola."

"What?"

"Hey Nola"

"What?!"

luvluv

Elric, what makes you think evil exists?

That is to say, is there a substance which is evil in and of itself?

A self-existent evil is like a self-existent wound. A wound needs a good thing, a functioning limb, to exist in. All evil is a function of the existence of a good thing. Evil is dependant on good for it's existence. For there to be suffering, there must be a thing for which suffering is not the natural state (otherwise how would it know it suffered?). Therefore, evil needs good to exist, they are not two equal and opposite entities. All evil is a corruption in a good thing. All evil is, as it were, a rebellion or a corruption. This is exactly how the Bible describes the origin of evil: as rebellion against goodness. It does not exist in itself, it is simply a perversion of goodness. But perversion has the existence of something in a pure, good form as it's prerequisite.

Marz Blak

luvluv--

You said, "...It logically follows that if someone creates you and gives you free will, that he does not also create your actions. That's what is meant by giving you free will...."

But if that someone is omnipotent and omniscient and omnitemporal, how CAN he logically give me free will? If he makes me, knows what I am going to do, and has the capacity to change it to come out however he would have it, how can I be *free*? Can he *turn off* his omniscience at some point so I become somehow *opaque* to him, motivistically speaking?

What it comes down to is this, I guess: assuming an omnimax God, how isn't all of creation just, well, something like a big flower arrangement, that God can arrange and re-arrange to his taste?

I added something to a prior post while you responding, so I will restate it here so you'll see it:

"...Secondly, I would hold that to an omnimax God there would be no distinction to be made between primary and secondary causes, as you posit...."

Oh, BTW, I meant to ask, are you a Sixers fan from way back?

[edited to clean up, mostly... ]

[ September 10, 2002: Message edited by: Marz Blak ]</p>

Ojuice5001

Luvluv,

Well, basically, I think that hatred is an example of an evil disposition that must be a thing in its own right, not a perversion of a good one. After all, hatred is the polar opposite of love, which is a good thing. And it is hard to think of a disposition that is like hatred, but has a place in a perfectly good world. Anger is the best candidate, but it was condemned by Jesus as being bad just as violent hatred is bad.

My question is, if hatred is a perversion of something good, what is/was that good thing?

Steven Carr

God could have incarnated Jesus as Adam and Eve and saved a lot of bother.

Christians who object to this appear to be denying the Christian doctrine that Jesus was as fully human as Adam.

Jamie_L

Marz,

I agree that an omnipotent, omniscient diety that purposefully creates the universe denies us of free will. Even if God only creates the initial conditions, he knows when he decides what they will be exactly what the end result of all actions and all events will be. So, when he adjusts some minor law of physics at the start of the universe, he knows that the chain of events it starts will lead to you being created and deciding to drink a cherry soda on November 24, 2003. If it displeases God for you to drink that cherry soda, he can create the universe's initial conditions slightly differently, so that you will choose an orange soda. Or, he can leave things the way he has created them, but in this case he is still making a choice: the choice that you should drink that cherry soda.

The only way for him to allow you a choice independent of his choices is to randomly create the universe, or parts of it. This could, in theory, allow your choice to be free of God's will. Now, however, God has made a choice that your behavior will be subject to some random factor. In this scenario, it seems absurd to me that God should judge you for behavior that has some random basis element to it. It's like destroying a die because it rolled a 5 instead of a 6.

Jamie

Marz Blak

Jamie_L:

Exactly. The whole thing about us having free will only makes sense if God purposefully obscures knowledge from Himself , which seems to me to be logically impossible, of if he purposefully injects randomness (BTW, could God create a true random number algorithm? ), in which case it doesn't seem to make sense to hold us ultimately accountable for our actions.

[ September 11, 2002: Message edited by: Marz Blak ]</p>

sandlewood

The character that robbed the bank cannot do anything else but rob the bank. No matter how many times you play back the video tape, the character will always rob the bank. The character does not have a choice because whoever created the tape made it that way.
So let’s say I build a machine that makes other machines. Does that mean that a machine built by a machine has free choice? Does it mean that I am absolved of all responsibility of the actions of the machine that was built by the machine that I built?


Here is what makes no sense to me about the “robot” arguments. As theists say, God's intention is to collect all those people who freely choose to believe he exists and who obey him. So God created humans with free will, knowing that some would behave as he wanted and some would not. (If all behaved as he wanted, then how would he know they had free will? He would have created them in such a way that they could not have not obeyed him.) As a result, the ones that obey him he pulls up to heaven to surround himself with. (All other people are tortured for eternity.)

So God's ultimate goal is to have only people who obey him. He accomplishes this by a filtering process. Thus, after filtering, the only people left are the people that obey him. I claim that this whole process is no different than if he had only created people that obeyed him in the first place.

The theist objection here will be that if he created people that already obeyed him—if he created robots as you say—then they will not have gone through the process of choosing to obey him. But I don’t see what difference the process makes. Either way, in the end you’ll have people who willfully obey God. He could have created only people who willfully obey him.

I know the next objection is that if you create a person who is designed to willfully obey you, then that person is not really willfully obeying you. But it is not the same thing as, for example, drugging a person to do your bidding. If I give someone a drug to cause them to obey me when they otherwise wouldn’t, then it can be argued that the person’s choice was not a willful one. That’s because without the drug, they would have chosen differently. But if I’m God and I create a human who will obey me, it can’t be said that that person would have chosen differently in any other circumstance. There is no underlying will that is being covered up. That person really does want to obey me. He does because I created his will to be that way.

So whether God creates a race of beings that all obey him or whether he creates a mixture and filters out the bad ones, he still ends up with the same result.

Edited for spelling.

[ September 12, 2002: Message edited by: sandlewood ]</p>

Wyrdsmyth

I like your approach. This is actually a very direct and straightforward question. But it is deceptively simple. There is a subtlety to it that few people seem able to grasp. I don't think even St Augustine was able to completely come to grips with it. Hence his argument that "Just because God can see your future, doesn't mean he is mandating what you do." As if God were some kind of spatio-temporal weatherman.

That argument might work, if God was only ever posited as a kind of supernatural observer. But the subtlety I think most people miss is that he is defined as much more than that. He is defined as the creator of everything, down to the smallest and most insignificant things... the electrons, quarks, wave-functions, laws of physics and everything. You can't make a decision without the atoms and electricity in your brain moving in such and such a way. And the way that stuff moves in your brain is determined by God, just as everything else. There's no escaping it.

But that's why "free will" is always defined in such a hazy, amorphous way. It has to be a mystery. Because if you take it to it's logical conclusion, there is no difference between us and robots. If I build a robot with a computer brain, and I build it to function in a certain way, I can't justifiably complain when it functions as I built it. And if I build some "randomizer" in it -- say, so that it will malfunction 1 out of every 10 functions (on average) and "disobey" me, then I still can't complain, can I? And the thing about God is, he just can't play ignorant. He can't say, "Well, sin crept in there as a random factor, a glitch, a mistake I didn't foresee." He can't say that because he's defined as perfect and omniscient and Good. I can build a robot that makes mistakes that I didn't intend, sure -- but God can't make creatures that have imperfections he didn't intend.

[ September 13, 2002: Message edited by: Wyrdsmyth ]</p>

Marz Blak

I just had another thought. In keeping with the robot/flower arrangement analogies, one can make the whole concept of an omnimax God make sense, sort of, if God's motive in making the universe is primarily aesthetic. That is, maybe he finds the way the patterns play out, given his setting the initial conditions, to be interesting, like someone playing with a fractal pattern-generating software app by playing around with its starting parameters....

Sort of like a cosmic Spirograph.

But wait. That doesn't make sense either, because God doesn't have to run the patterns to see them. He is omniscient, and so all possibilities of all the patterns are already known to him. Maybe all of creation isn't 'real,' but is just God running thought experiments? Meta-solipsism, anyone?

Also, it doesn't make sense unless because it implies that God created (or allowed to come to pass--the difference is inconsequential, given God's proposed attributes) events of evil/suffering simply because they are aesthetically pleasing to him, which either renders him not perfectly good by any reasonable human definition, or leads us off into some variant of Unknown Purpose or some third-party subjective ethical theory, which...well, I think you can see where that leads.

Nope, can't make any sense out of the idea by thinking about it this way either. Nevermind.

[ September 12, 2002: Message edited by: Marz Blak ]</p>