Amos

I don't think anyone believes that God is omnipotent if omnipotent has something to do with lifting big rocks. Omnipotent means that whatever humans can do, God can do, for the simple reason that our humanity (wherein we are human), is just a condition of being that is added to the being wherein we are God. In other words, if I can lift a big rock, God can lift that same rock because my body that does the lifting is really God and my ego is just the idiot who is trying to show that he can lift a big rock.

This same is true for omniscience. Do you really think that God knows, or cares, or needs to know how many fingers I am pointing at him unless I am God and therefore make God omniscient to the same extent that I am God?

Further, if God existed in an external reality how could I ever mature in the fullness of Christ and become [another] God?

Darth Dane

"Of course, to actually support this claim a theist must show that Free Will is both a sufficient good and that Free WIll requires ALL the evil we see to obtain. In other words, one must believe that the Nazi Holocaust was a good thing because it allowed a greater good ( i.e. Free Will) to obtain that otherwise wouldn't have been.

I've never seen a theist try to do this."

I'll take the challenge

"They seem to be content to just say "Free Will/Greater Good ... there's an opening ..." and leave it at that.""

I am also content in saying just this


"First, it seems to be that the Free Will Defense begs the question entirely. While the Problem of Evil looks at a common formulation of God as being perfect and comes to the conclusion that the state of the world precludes such a God, the FWD assumes that such god exists in its attempt to explain the problem away. It would seem to me that any defense against the POE would need to do so without making the presumption of God first"

Why can both yin/yang not be valid in Tao?

"Second, the FWD doesn't even address the point of the POE. The POE looks at evil at the world, and notes that not only that an omnimax God would have the ability, knowledge, and desire to eliminate evil, his nature would require him to. In other words, a god can't be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent and still permit evil. A god that permits evil through the mechanism of free will is still permitting evil -- and therefore is either not perfect or doesn't exist. The FWD simply hand-waves at the point the POE is making."

God watches. God is both what we perceive as "good" and "bad/evil", we choose which part we want to identify with.
But freewill gives you the choice to determine what is good and bad....from your POV.

"Finally, how do we know that God wants us to have free will?"

We can't! We can only choose to believe so...<---freewill!

"I know that is what certain Christians think, but even if I assume God exists I can't assume that the opinions of Christians match up with what God desires."

No, you can only match it up against your own belief system.

"In other words, how do we know that the FWD isn't just an ad hoc formulation by theists in an attempt to defeat an argument by their opponents?"

We don't- See above.

You choose. If you don't choose, then you are controlled by forces that is out of your reach, and you have effectively become a robot.

Accused: "the voices made me do it"
Lawyer: "No, you are mental, you always had a choice"


The judicial system is based on freewill, no?


Three choices:

1) absolutely freewill
2) absolutely no freewill
3) partial freewill (i.e. 30% freewill 70% nofreewill)


But listen here: YOU NOW CHOOSE TO BELIEVE ONE OF THEM IS TRUE!

You choose!




DD - Freed Spliff

Wiploc

There are five possible responses to the PoE:

1. God is not that good.
2. God is not that powerful.
3. God is not that wise or knowing.
4. We don't suffer.
5. Logic is the wrong playing field.

You've made moves 1 and 3. Since you don't think god is more powerful than, say, me, the PoE doesn't refute your god. And since you don't think god knows the future, the PoE doesn't refute your god.

But the PoE never purported to refute all gods. It only disproves the tCg (traditional Christian god). The tCg does know everything, including the future, and can throw miracles that violate natural laws.
crc

Ted Hoffman

No, no Amos. God can be lifted like a rock. When you grop the rock, that is God going down. We, as thinking matter in the cosmos, would represent the rocks that lift and drop. God manifests all that is possible by making it possible hence omnipotent.
Before one can lift a rock, the rock must be liftable. That liftable potential, the possibility of that act, is God. We derive out abilities from Gods omnipotence but we can never fully exploit the potential that is God, because we are limited beings.

God does not pay attention to thinking matter just in the same way he does not pay attention to non-sentient parts of the cosmos. His role is to imbue the universe with his presence. Just the way light casts your shadow on things around you. This is what brings forth infocognitive potential (as Michael Langan would put it) the syndifference between the rock and the hand that lifts it is possible because of the structure in the universe.
The mind is part of the reality it exists in. There is no omniscience, its just an anthropomorphism - an illusion, like beauty.

We would not need to mature because maturity is a property that is a preserve of what we call living things. We can never be Christ because he represents the anti-man part of man. He represents what we are not, but what we desire to be.
In the end, as we struggle to grasp at zero, dreaming in metaphors and clutching neutrinos, we realize that we are God, just like we are reality.

There is no external reality. Reality represents potential (both -niscience and -potent) what we can get from reality is our world - a part of the universe that has decohered from the rest - (going by Everetts interpretation of quantum mechanics) God is the docoherence, he is the superposition of the wave functions and represents the syntax of our self-configuring-self-processing universe.

If you have questions, please ask now.

Silent Acorns

Am I to assume that this was your solution to the "challenge"?

Travis

I am not quite understanding the free will defence and problem of evil. From what I do understand I have taken that the Problem of Evil is an argument against God. And that the Free Will Defence is the rebuttal saying that there exists a god that has given free will and that the use of this free will through man is the reason that a perfect god and evil can coexist.
Am I understanding the problem ?

Amos

Hello IronMonkey and thanks for your effort. I have no questions but just wanted to tell you that you have it all backwards!

God is not the rock and we are not the thinking matter of the universe but God is (we only think we are). We are limited images of God only because we don't know who we are in the fullness of our God identity wherein God can be no greater than me for me. So the liftability of the rock is the fullest extent to which we as single individuals can be the continuity of God. "As individuals" because your strenght is your stength in the same way as your omniscience is yours and mine is mine and therefore you draw from your mind and I draw from mine (notice that we are omniscient in the fullness of our own mind).

God does pay attention to "thinking matter" because God needs our science to expand his omniscience. This is very clear from Gen.3:5 where the woman of the TOL saw that the TOK was good for gaining wisdom, food and beauty and to gather this raw material and data we were banished from Eden so we could go by sense perception to learn first hand from experience in the TOK while at the same time we perceive things with the eye of our soul (woman of TOL) in relation to things as they are as a whole. From this follows also that we are the illusion in our ego identity (as in outside of Eden), and beauty is real (only beauty and truth are real).

We need to mature and liberate (not preserve) ourselves from our delusions. Our delusions are good motivators while outside of Eden but if ever we wish to return to Eden we must let go of our idea that we are "like god" and just "be God," like in "when the ego raptures that which remains is in heaven."

Eternity is reality which is maintained by beauty and truth from which we extract "niscience and nipotence" (?) to generate the temporal "out of" and "through which" the eternal is regenerated as the image of God.

For me it helps to lean on the fact that we are eternal in our subconscious mind and temporal in our conscious mind. If this is true, do you see how with our conscious mind (outside of Eden) we add to, and extract from, our subconscious mind?

Wiploc

You've got it.

The PoE points out that a god who
- wants to keep us from suffering,
- is strong enough to keep us from suffering, and
- is smart enough to keep us from suffering
wouldn't let us suffer. Since we do suffer, such
a god doesn't exist.


The FWD says, what if ...
- we can't avoid suffering if we have free will, and
- not having free will would be a greater harm
(entail more suffering) than the harm we do each
other with our free will, and
- what if god isn't really strong enough to give us
free will without letting us hurt each other.

In that case, might not better worlds than this
one be impossible? Might this not be the best
of all possible worlds?
crc

Family Man

I agree we bear the burden of proof, but they can't refute the argument by begging the question, which is what the FWD does. The FWD essentially says, "God wants us to have free will." That presuming that which you aim to demonstrate.

I would agree that the POE can be shunted aside if it is conceded that God is not perfect. But most of the formulations I've seen don't make any of those assumptions.

I would agree on the grounds that the restriction doesn't sufficiently change God's attributes. Logic doesn't demand that there be evil in the world.

I disagree. If they were allowed to use any idle speculation (which is what the free will argument is) then we could use any idle speculation to demonstrate the possibilty of any conceivable entity. It's the same sloppy thinking that allows biblical inerrantists to "reconcile" biblical contradictions.

Let me put it this way. If Christians could show that free will can not exist without God, and that we indeed have free will, I think they would have a point. I'll concede the latter, but not the former.

Family Man

Wiploc --

Notice that in all of your responses after the first one the god formulated is an imperfect one (he isn't strong enough, isn't really omnipotent, etc.) That is the only real response to the POE. Free will can only exist if God isn't perfect. The FWD by itself fires wide of the mark.