spurly

I guess the question at hand is something like this. Is my probability of choosing the alternate plan zero because God made it so, or is my probability of choosing the alternate plan zero because I made it so. The answer to this question is the second.

God desires you to choose to enter into a relationship with him. However, he will not force that on you or anyone else. Love can not be forced.

Does God know whether or not you are going to choose to follow him? Some theologians say yes, some say know. But if he does have foreknowledge of the choice you are going to make, that does not mean that he makes you make that choice. That is a jump in logic that is not possible to make. Sort of like me getting a running start and trying to jump the Grand Canyon. It doesn't work.

If you are working from a Calvinist mindset, what you say might make sense, but we are talking about free will. And in that discussion, it is not a logical step.

No, I am not saying that at all.

Kevin

Philosoft

I don't follow. You can't make any choices before you exist. If God's plan exists prior to your choosing, your choice is thus constrained in some way.

Is this an essential property of love that not even God can alter?

Rather than make undecipherable analogies, why don't you explain how your compatibilism works if we stipulate a situation wherein God's plan proscribes the choices we make and yet we still have the ability to freely choose? All I've seen so far is assertions that there's no contradiction. I need to understand why there's no contradiction.

I think your objection would be sound if applied to an ordinary, non-creator being with perfect foreknowledge. The problem is, God's creator status and his foreknowledge imply that apparently free choices are actually constrained prior to the choices being made.

Silent Acorns

Personally, I believe that if you combine the concepts of creator god and an all-knowing god you can't have free will. My reason for this is based on the following:

1) The universe operates with fixed rules (supposedly created by a god)
2) The universe started with a certain set of conditions (we don't know what they were, but if a creator god exists then it decided what they were).

Now it can be mathematically proven that for a given set of rules the end results are predetermined by the initial conditions, assuming that there are no "random" processes built into the rules. If there are no random processes, an all-knowing creator god couldn't help but know exactly what would happen at every instant.

Obviously, the theist could claim, "free will acts like a random process" (of course they would never claim that it IS a random process since this would undermine free-will). He could claim that our decisions are made independently of god's will and thus It cannot know how things will all play out.

My problem with this argument that while this may be valid, theists don't actually belive it themselves. Most theists believe that god does know how things will all turn out. They usually claim that god can see all the past, present, and future "simultaneously" from Its unique vantage point. Thus, such a god knew from the beginning what we would choose to do under the circumstances we found ourselves in. By creating the universe the way It did, this god knew exactly what It was doing. While this may not make free will impossible, it does put the blame for evil squarely on god because It knew evil would happen and yet It went ahead annd MADE IT HAPPEN anyway.

So the reality of evil plus an all-knowing creator god leaves us with the following possabilities:

1) pure determinism set out by god (no free-will)
2) free-will with a creator god that only knows the past and present (not the future), and thus some evil is our fault (not god's)
3) free-will with a creator god that knows past, present, and future, and thus is solely responsible for all evil

Thus the free-will argument can only address the problem of evil if god does not know the future (and thus is not really "all-knowing" in the traditional sense). Any theist who adopts this point of view should not jump back and claim the god does know the future when it becomes convenient on another issue.

Finally, even if we accept this, it does not answer the issue of evils like disease, earthquakes, meteors, etc. (but that's for another thread).

rehpotsirhc

You have to determine if it's logically possible before even an omnipotent deity could accomplish it. An omniscient God can't create a 'square circle' or a 'three-sided pentagon'. If the idea of foreknowledge intertwined with free will is determined to be logically impossible, it would also be impossible for God.

Basically, there are limits to the power of omnipotent beings.

malpensante

philosoft:
the fact that some malpensantes (i don't know if "roughly half") will go to heaven and some to hell, is not different from the fact that some originally free and pure souls will go to hell and some to heaven because of the choices they will make. to say that god allows some free souls to choose hell is no different than saying that god allows some parallel universe malpensantes go to hell because of their free choice.

what is an SOA?

Wiploc

That's not what "omnipotent" means. A truly omnipotent god could make a square circle.

It's a question of who is the master, god or logic. If god made everything (including the rules of logic) and if he can violate the rules he made (that's what a miracle is, right?) then he isn't bound by logic. If he is not the master of logic, then he is not omnipotent, and he is not the creator of everything that exists.

Many Christians believe in a punk god, less than omniscient. They still call him omnipotent, but they constrain him in various ways. Often they say he is bound by logic; then they blame his failures-to-perform-as-advertised on convenient logical conflicts that they invent for that purpose.

If you are a non-believer yourself, you have no standing to pick one type of god and say, "This is the right god (that doesn't exist) and the other kind is the wrong god (that doesn't exist either). Instead, you take your Christians as you find them, and refute whichever type of illogic the particular Christian commits.

crc

rehpotsirhc

What if a god could be bound by his own rules, but is capable of changing the rules? He could change the rules to accomplish anything, but he can't accomplish everything under one set of rules. I'm saying that under the set of rules that we live by, which you can call logic[a], even a god could not create a square circle. He could change the rules to logic[b] so that he could make a square circle, but he still wouldn't be creating it logically[a]. For that matter, he could change the word 'square' to mean 'blue', and then he certainly could make a 'square' circle, but not under the current 'rules of the game'.

You also have to realize the difference between something that is 'logically impossible' (paradox) and something that is 'logically unsound' or violating the laws of nature. A lead pipe floating on liquid water is certainly logically unsound, but isn't logically impossible.

The argument makes no sense and will get me nowhere, but I didn't have anything better to do. It's obviously not an argument for or against the existence of God (or anything else worthy of our time )

BTW, I know the counter argument is that an omnipotent being couldn't be bound by any rules or laws, so he/she/it would have no need to change any rules. I guess it depends on how strict your definition of 'omnipotent' is.

Philosoft

Perhaps, but that's not the problem. If God were to create a single universe with beings that behave according to various internal probabilities, it's conceivable (a nonzero probability) that all beings contained therein end up in heaven. Whether or not the choices that lead to eternal bliss are truly free is debatable, but there is at least one possible world in which no souls go to hell. Note that a single probabilistic world is incompatible with perfect foreknowledge.

Now, when you talk about a multiverse, you no longer have any possible worlds. Any conceivable world is now actual. If there is a nonzero probability that some evil choices obtain, then some evil choices will necessarily obtain in some actual worlds. Thus, as I said before, god has statistically guaranteed some souls will go to hell.

You are confused. In a single universe, it is at least superficially meaningful to talk about probable actions in relation to free-willed beings. But, as I said, a multiverse in which even the tiniest amout of evil is allowed mandates that some souls will go to hell. There are no probabilities in a multiverse - only actualities.
State-Of-Affairs.

What's a malpensante? "Bad thinker"?

malpensante

philosoft:

for god to statistically guarantee some selves to go to hell is no different than for god to prohibit adam & eve (who were, while in paradise, ignorant of good & evil) to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good & evil; is no different than for god to have burned uzzah to death just because he touched the sacred ark, in spite of the fact that uzzah only touched it to prevent it from falling and breaking. in short, god doesn't need to seem fair to our eyes in order to possess his fair qualities. my preliminary claim is that a multiverse god has all the same properties as a monouniverse god, except that the former can be omniscient and free, and the latter not.

the first reference to the concept of "multiverse" appears to be in gottfried wilhelm leibniz, who explored one aspect of theodicy - why is there evil in the world if god is omnipotent and omnibenevolent? leibniz suggested that our universe was the best of the infinite set of all possible universes, and the evil in it was unfortunate, but at least our universe exhibited the smallest amount of evil one could hope for.

i speculate that maybe it is physically impossible for a universe within the multiverse to be without even the smallest possible amount of some characteristic, event or entity, that can be conceived in at least some farfetched respect as evil. in other words, i speculate that evilness (along with goodness, of course), is an inherent, if perhaps only minimal, characteristic of any physically possible universe.

malpensante means bad thinker, both functionally and morally.
does philosoft mean lover of software, or of softness?

Wiploc

It is humans who call him fair, using human language and meaning. If he is not what humans mean by fair, then he is something else. And the less his character is what we mean by fair, the more it is like what we mean by unfair.

It is perfectly okay to say god's character includes some X factor. It is not good to say god's character includes "fairness," unless you mean what other people mean by fairness.


Is there any reason to believe that? Wasn't the world free of evil before the fall? Isn't Heaven free of evil? Isn't god, whom I assume you believe has free will, free of evil?

crc