luvluv

Philosoft:

I'm not following you. It's not a matter of setting a standard. If someone is omniscient they know the best way to accomplish something. It is not arbitrary. He can conceive of every possible alternative and assess the efficacy of each one, then choose the one which is the best to achieve His goals. There is nothing arbitrary about it.

There may be a best way to do something. The only thing you may be able to say is that God's goals are arbitrary, but once He has those goals set, the best way to acheive them is most decidedly not.

Omniscience cannot think of a better way to do things than the best way. It is possible that allowing suffering is part of the best way to achieve God's goals. If that is the case, even His Omniscience and Omnipotence cannot come up with a better way.

HRG

"Best" according to which standard ? Least effort, fastest, least suffering of all around ? More alternatives upon request.

I'm afraid you just shifted the arbitrariness onto the standard of what is "best" or "efficacious".

The Holocaust victim might have a different standard to determine which method is "best" to achieve those goals .....

Why do you think, BTW, that a benevolent god would not include "Avoid suffering" among his goals in the first place ? For an omnipotent being, nothing whatever is an deplorable, but unavoidable side effect.

Regards,
HRG.

[ July 28, 2002: Message edited by: HRG ]</p>

Answerer

Well, here is one site that talks about inaccuracy of biblical history.


<a href="http://www.truthbeknown.com/biblemyth.htm" target="_blank">http://www.truthbeknown.com/biblemyth.htm</a>

Adrian Selby

-- You can't have free will without the possibility of evil--

I find this interesting, because it sounds like you're saying a necessary component of free will is the possibility of evil. Surely we can have free will where the only necessary component is the possibility of good? This does not mean one always does good actions, but not all actions are classed as good and evil anyway are they?

Xyzzy

Fair enough. So lets see if one of us poor dumb non-omnicient shmucks can do a little better.

Let's suppose that Xyzzy was God.. how would he do things?

The God Xyzzy would give men free will sure enough. He would intentionally block himself from knowning the outcome of his divine plan by using true randomness to generate his little universe. Perhaps he would invent the rules of quantum mechanics.

He would certainly have opinions as to the correct behaviors of human beings, and perhaps even want them to behave a cerain way for their own good, but he wouldn't bother with the "I'll throw you in hell bit". The explanation that being good is its own reward should be adequate, and the God Xyzzy isn't a sadistic maniac.

The God Xyzzy would allow suffering since he couldn't prevent it. He made the world a certain way, and isn't going to intervene in it simply because it does what it does. The God Xyzzy does not intervene in the world.. after all, it wouldn't be fair to interve for one faithful person if you aren't going to do it for all of them.

The God Xyzzy doesn't need to send down a person to be crucified. He is all powerful, and thus even has the power to forgive anyone he wishes directly without having some poor guy die a hideous painful death. But since the God Xyzzy doesn't condemn anyone to any hell in any case, there is no point to this either. The God Xyzzy says that doing good is its own reward, and evil is its own punishment.

The God Xyzzy seems to make quite a bit more sense than the other God does.. and he is merely a poor non-omnicient mortal.

So why can't that other God figure all this out?

RogerLeeCooke

Actually "what Christians believe" is a very ill-defined term. There is really nothing at all that Christians ALL believe, including the divinity of Jesus, and even the existence of a man named Jesus. Unless you beg the question by defining certain people who call themselves Christians as "non-Christians," there is no doctrine that they all have in common. And the more specific you get, the more disagreement there is.

I don't need Maier; I can read Josephus himself. And, if you'll permit a correction, Josephus was a Jew. If he was an atheist, he didn't say so explicitly; in fact, the quote Christians most like to make from the text (which is almost certainly a forgery interpolated by a zealous Christian) would imply that, far from being an atheist, he was a Christian. The only thing proved by the references to Christians by Pliny and Tacitus is that there were people around who believed in a Messiah (in Greek: Christ). It isn't certain that those people were followers of Jesus, although the later existence of churches claiming descent from him obviously implies that these cults had origins sometime in the first or second century.

No, sorry, Josephus wrote after the Jewish wars of 78 AD.

Archaeology is seldom conclusive, it is far too incomplete; but what archaeology reveals in very many cases makes the Bible very implausible. The story of the Exodus is a good example of that (no archaeological confirmation whatsoever, and yet there *are* archaeological confirmations of the presence of other groups of people in the Sinai wilderness from the same time).

Another way of saying "it requires a bit of faith" is to say that it contains reports of fantastic events similar to fantastic events reported by other cultures, which we reject because science renders their probability too low to merit consideration.

[ July 29, 2002: Message edited by: RogerLeeCooke ]</p>

Jayhawker Soule

This is clearly a stunning tribute to the flexibility of Christian apologetics. By the way, how old would you say the Earth is, and what date would you assign to the earliest human settlements in Anatolia?

[ July 28, 2002: Message edited by: ReasonableDoubt ]</p>

LadyValar

Kalestia:
"God didn't create evil. Let's make something clear... "evil" in the Christian sense is simply Rebellion against God. Did God create rebellion against himself? Nah, but he allowed the opportunity to exist: Free Will."

If it's a gift from god (as other Christians have stated), and totally under his control, then no one has the free will to make that choice. Also, those condmened to hell for the failure to believe are being punished for something that wasn't their choice to do.

AtlanticCitySlave

I find it rather odd that a self-proclaimed Christian would deceive people about being one.

AtlanticCitySlave

Ah, while I'm here...


"It's not a matter of setting a standard. If someone is omniscient they know the best way to accomplish something. It is not arbitrary. He can conceive of every possible alternative and assess the efficacy of each one, then choose the one which is the best to achieve His goals. There is nothing arbitrary about it."

-This obviously doesn't follow. Just because someone is omniscient, it does not follow they are good at assessing the efficacy of each alternative.