Many Christians believe the reason there is evil in this world is because of “free will.” God didn’t want things this way — Adam & Eve disobeyed God by eating, and thus got us into the mess we’re in. God created a perfect world, but humanity screwed it up.
That explanation doesn’t make sense to Bart Ehrman. In his book God’s Problem, Ehrman explains why the solution of “free will” is no solution at all to the problem of evil:
Most people who believe in God-given free will also believe in an afterlife. Presumably people in their afterlife will still have free will (they won’t be robots then either, will they?). And yet there won’t be suffering (allegedly) then. Why will people know how to exercise free will in heaven if they can’t know how to exercise it on earth?
In fact, if God gave people free will as a great gift, why didn’t he give them the intelligence they needed to exercise it so that we can all live happily and peaceable together? You can’t argue that he wasn’t able to do so, if you want to argue that he is all powerful.
Moreover, if God sometimes intervenes in history to counteract the free will decisions of others — for example, when he destroyed the Egyptian armies at the exodus (they freely had decided to oppress the Israelites), or when he fed the multitudes in the wilderness in the days of Jesus (people who had chosen to go off to hear him without packing a lunch), or when he counteracted the wicked decision of the Roman governor Pilate to destroy Jesus by raising the crucified Jesus from the dead — if he intervenes sometimes to counteract free will, why does he not do so more of the time? Or indeed, all the time?
The “solution” of free will, in the end, ultimately leads to the conclusion that it is all a mystery. (p. 12-13)
The Christian answer to the problem of evil is complex, mythical and unsatisfying. There is the continuous problem of exonerating God. Supposedly this God is a “loving father,” yet he seems to be more of an absent father. He is said to be justice itself, yet evildoers are rewarded while the virtuous suffer. To explain this, vast theologies of mystery are woven that ensnare the faithful.
The secular answer is simple and — at least to me — far more satisfying. Suffering is simply a byproduct of life. Pain is a result of nerves, which we need in order to survive. There is no sky god watching children suffer to be angry at or puzzled over. There is no comic justice or injustice — only cosmic indifference. Even if there is a god, it doesn’t appear to be anywhere around here, so we must live like there is none. There is no invisible sky daddy to come and help us.
Justice is up to humanity. We must accept the responsibility that comes with our ethical knowledge and sensitivities. If good is to be done, we must do it. If evil is to be stopped, we must stop it. Praying, worshipping, sacrificing goats, performing rituals, chanting scripture, and other superstitions do nothing to further the cause of justice.
It all depends on us. Let’s act like it.
If God made humans smart enough to determine all possible ends, humans wouldn’t have functional free will (cf. Socrates’ problem of akrasia). On the other hand, if God is smart enough to determine all ends, He doesn’t either (cf. the Euthyphro problem).
It’s sticky all the way around.
I had a discussion about free will with a colleague a while back, and I might send this text to him to see what he thinks of it. Unfortunately, he seems to be one of those Christians who’ve simply decided that they’re right, so I have no real hopes of getting any kind of rational replies. Might be fun, though :)
The whole free will argument is, in itself, evidence that the Bible is wrong.
Just taking the Adam and Eve example, you can see problems. Free will is, obviously, our ability to make our own decisions without anyone affecting the outcome or knowing what will happen. Basically, one of two things was true: either Adam and Eve defied God freely, or God knew they were going to do it all along. If Adam and Eve acted freely, there’s no way God could have known what they were going to do, and therefore, God is not all-powerful or all-knowing. If God knew what they were going to do all along, then it wasn’t really their choice. In this case, every single person who has been murdered, died of cancer, died in a fire, or whatever has died according to God’s will. If this is the case, I know Christians won’t have a problem with me robbing their house: after all, God knew I was going to do it!
One might say that since evil people don’t go to heaven, free will in heaven will not cause suffering.
The classic explanation is that it’s all a ‘divine plan’ that cannot possibly understand, and again this explanation clashes with a God that is both all-powerful AND good.
But yes, whatever rational explanation they try to build, eventually they stumble on some ‘mystery’ they have to accept.
With such an enormous amount of inconsistencies, EVERY doctrine could be justified.
Christians fail to realize that if Adam and Eve’s tale were true, then they owe free will to the snake. Their god never intended men to know the difference between good and evil.
The stuff about God having a plan and humans coming along and spoiling it by being human always reminds me of From Russia With Love – SPECTRE comes up with this absolutely foolproof plan, calculated in every detail, with every single possible outcome anticipated and a counter strategy in place and in total control from even before the beginning … and Bond just accidentally screws it all up.
This would make God Blofeld, of course.
I actually think this is one of the more realistic interpretations of the Bible – complex systems mean unforeseen consequences. God alters the natural order by putting man into the equation, natural order goes all wobbly.
I really enjoy this site. You give my whole family a lot to discuss at the dinnertable.
Thank you.
Like so many apologetics are rationalizations to harmonize verses in the bible, the “free will” belief is an attempt to harmonize verses in the bible with real life. I doubt it is an argument Christians ever would have started using as an evidence for their faith being real.
“Free will” is a fantasy, just like ether or flogistum. The only difference is that we can disprove flogistum with hard, undeniable evidence while we can not do that with “free will”. “Free will” is just like God or Santa, there is simply not a single bit of evidence for it, just anecdotes, traditions, what your nanny told you when you were a cute babe, what the Pope says, etc…
I think the concept of free will is one of the weakest links in Christianity.
You can’t have free will if God made you and stuck you in your specific environment. Genes and environment, that’s everything that determines you personality, and he controls both. Not only that, but he knows what you’ll do with your life and how you’ll die. In fact, it’s all part of His plan.
A woman dies, and people say “Oh, it’s part of God’s plan”. A woman’s murdered, and it’s the same thing. God’s just working in mysterious ways, it’s all a part of his plan. And what I can never understand is how you can have a plan and still pretend we have free will. If I make a robot that walks up steps, I throw it in a river, and the battery shorts out, I’m not exactly justified in torturing the robot for all of eternity, now am I?
Plus, if we didn’t have free will in the beginning, how the HELL can we be blamed for disobeying God?!? He didn’t give us enough sense to think for ourselves!! Maybe if we HAD, we would have been able to avoid the whole apple incident (which God had to foresee, since he’s f**king omnipotent). Holy crap.
Free will is an illusion.
Elemenope has unpacked the objections already quite nicely, but I’ll add my two cents.
Some of the objections stand in relation to Calvinism, and some in relation to Arminian thought. But all these objections have been dealt with in a rather satisfactory manner by free-will theists.
Free will entails significant freedom in which we don’t full autonomy but have significant moral freedom (libertarian).
Omniscience isn’t affected by free will if omniscience is defined as knowing reality as it is and future possibilities as possibilities (God knew what the possibilities or probabilities that Adam would fall were). The objection here is that if God doesn’t know the future with complete certainty He is less of a god, but we don’t seem to have this problem when we ask can God make a square circle. We realize that a square circle is a logical contradiction, but knowing the future with complete certainty falls into this category as well. Calvinism has been predicated on neo-platonic thought and has assumed a lot of the ideas of time and perfection from it.
Who knows what free will in heaven will be: It may be libertarian with the ability to “always” do the good that we aspire to. It may be compatibilist freedom in which we have free will and only desire to do what’s good.
Daniel asks that we ignore rituals and the such and execute justice as if we are solely responsible for such actions. I wholeheartedly agree that we should do all that we can to extend peace and justice but to me the question comes, if God doesn’t exist and naturalism is true do we even have free will to make that decision? Free will is an illusion with in naturalism, simply put a human is collection of compounds driven by chemical responses and shaped through a culture of prior causes. As I’ve pointed out on here before many great atheists have made this same point of hard determinism. Others like Hume have opted for compatibilism but in this view your freedom allows you to only fulfill your desires, so if someone only desires to do evil things they are free to do those but not to do good. This isn’t the picture of free will and responsibility that most live with in their daily lives.
I agree that invoking the free will argument is terribly unsatisfying. You can’t get away from the fact that Adam acted according to human nature, which is supposedly created by god. During creation, an all-knowing god must have been picturing the suffering of his creation.
Whether or not human free will is real or illusory is perhaps an issue in itself.
More interesting is perhaps whether or not the deity itself possesses free will. Free will requires that you not know the future. An all-knowing god will know all future choices and therefore cannot make free decisions. You can’t have both free will and omniscience. If god does not possess free will, how can we? If free will is foreign to god, then how can we be created in god’s image? Unless we don’t have free will, in which case god would have a very difficult task in explaining all the suffering in the world.
Ahh, here in lies the rub……free will. Free will is a very creative construct. It answers so many questions of the believer and does so in such a tidy little package. Beyond the traditional definition that removes all evil from God, free will removes the last of the road blocks and puts the path to holiness squarely in human hands.
But once you fully accept the concept of free will what is left for God to do? I mean all he has to do is sit back crack open a cold one, light a cigar and watch.
Kind of like the super bowl. Only in his super bowl God took the rule book and made it cryptic and open to interpretation so the teams are unsure of the correct way to play. They know they have to get to other end of the field but how they get there is unclear. Some of the rules apply, but others are outdated, they are from last season. If they get it wrong they loose but the winners are not exactly sure what they win because that is pretty unclear too. All the teams think they understand the rules and most of the time sit around arguing on which rules to play by. What a LOL he must have watching his games since the players are free to play however they want and that is left for him to do lay a smack down all the teams except one.
Me I am happy to exercise my free will and sit as a spectator 3rd row center field with my cold one and my cigar and laugh right along with him.
This is a great point that I think atheists need to emphasize more often. Free will is one of the first things in my religious upbringing that really stumped me. In fact, I never really entirely bought it to begin with. I distinctly recall getting into an existential debate with one of my parochial school teachers when i was about 11 or 12, in front of the whole class, because I didn’t understand how god could at once omniscient and have given us free will. Thankfully, my rational and inquisitive nature only blossomed from there! :-)
Oh Thou who didst with Pitfall and with Gin
Beset the Road I was to wander in,
Thou wilt not with Predestination round
Enmesh me, and impute my Fall to Sin?
The Rubaiyat
-Omar Khayyam
I have to disagree with Ehrman about the Egyptian armies. They were persuing the Israelites by order of the Pharaoh, not by their own free will. The whole episode is still a farce, however, since God hardened the Pharaoh’s heart against freeing the Israelites (thus negating the Pharaoh’s free will) just so He, God, could egotistically demonstrate His awesome powers.
Ok assume there is a god,
science and this free will story is showing that the influence of any god is diluted so much that life and the universe as we know it would have evolved even when there was no god present.
Suppose that god died 1000 years ago at an age of 5000, how woudl we know that god is not here anymore? How would we know that he left this universe to start some new project on his own in another universe because he got bored here?
Yes there are sightings of god and jezus, but there are far more sightings of santa clause, even video tapes, photo’s and tons of testimonials of Santa clause. Far more than of Jezus or god. So how would we know if god is still here?
Could this free-will explanation be some coverup to hide the fact that god left the building and the priests want to stay in charge so they pretend that god still is here among us?
I also imagine that one time a christian dies and goes to heaven and meets god. And god is asking why the hell did he waste his time in worshipping god instead of using his free-will given by god to actually do some good on earth.
Worshiping god could be done when he dies and is in heaven so why did he wast his time and life in not using his free-will? Instead of blindly following some lunatic priest that takes away your free-will?
Daniel: “Supposedly this God is a “loving father,” yet he seems to be more of an absent father.”
Sure he seems absent TO YOU. But if you were a mother who’s beautiful daughter is dying from a terminal illness and you pray to this seemingly absent god to save her, and then she miraculously is healed shortly thereafter, I say to you that god is very real and very present to this person.
Sure you may say this is just a simple coincidence and she might as well had prayed to a jug of milk, but to her, god truly is real, he heard her prayer and answered it, and there is nothing you or I or anyone else could possibly say to convince her otherwise. God is not absent to those that have the mindset to seek god and then believe that god answered their prayers.
Much of the pain that exists in the world is the direct result of humans failing to care for each other (love). We fight wars while doing too little for those dying of aids or poverty. The message from Jesus is that we are to live sacrificially and love one another, even our enemies. He was the ultimate human, and when His message hasn’t been bent to hell and back, it has created loving communities and erased much evil. So, I agree, we need to do justice. I simply believe that an arbitrary, subjective attempt at justice will always end in a fight. Jesus is the perfect example of what it means to do social justice and walk the talk. At great expense to himself he gave people hope and a way of living that leads to love, joy, and peace, all of which mitigate against evil wherever they spread. His message both in word and action are worth paying attention to.
He was the ultimate human….
“Fezzig, I do not think that word means what you think it means.”
But beyond that, while the Jesus described in the Bible was better than decent, he was a far cry from perfect. He botched badly on the divorce debate (there is no justice in trapping a person in a loveless and/or abusive marriage), made nasty fun of a Samaritan at one point, and on other points gives occasionally fairly bad advice.
“Moreover, if God sometimes intervenes in history to counteract the free will decisions of others — for example, when he destroyed the Egyptian armies at the exodus (they freely had decided to oppress the Israelites), or when he fed the multitudes in the wilderness in the days of Jesus (people who had chosen to go off to hear him without packing a lunch), or when he counteracted the wicked decision of the Roman governor Pilate to destroy Jesus by raising the crucified Jesus from the dead”
Point one, point two were almost convincing but then he just sounded ignorant with point number 3 because he doesn’t understand the atonement. Oh well, so much for that.
David Knapp,
Could you please explain it to us so we could understand it?
It wouldn’t be fair to be all criticism and no explanation, would it?
If you want to dismiss someone as ignorant, you should be prepared for explaining reality to amend the situation.
@David Knapp: Re. “atonement”.
First–Atonement for WHAT? I never ate no damn tree fruit! And if I did, I wasn’t told not to. I mean, I’m sure I’d have remembered.
Second–Did you read the previous post?
God makes humans. Becomes angry, sends himself to get tortured to death for humankind in order to forgive them for being the beings he created.
Dr. Phil could launch a whole network on the psychology behind that.
Crazy God–makes more sense than anything else I read about him.
this is all incredibly biased.
Freewill is God’s own April Fools joke.
@Miguel, from above (that thread was getting a bit crowded.)
To say that there are objective moral values is to say that something is right or wrong independently of whether anybody believes it to be so. It is to say, for example, that Nazi anti Semitism was morally wrong, even though the Nazis who carried out the Holocaust thought that it was good; and it would still be wrong even if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in exterminating or brainwashing everybody who disagreed with them.
Yes.
On the theistic view, objective moral values are rooted in God. God’s own holy and perfectly good nature supplies the absolute standard against which all actions and decisions are measured. God’s moral nature is what Plato called the “Good.” He is the locus and source of moral value. He is by nature loving, generous, just, faithful, kind, and so forth.
No. At least, not necessarily. This is the Euthyphro problem in all its splendor. There is a distinction between metaphysical rules (rules which must hold true in all possible universes) and nomological rules (rules which exist in our universe). In the discussion above on the boundaries of omnipotence, I pointed out that the armchair definition of omni-attributes is generally flawed because it fails to take into account the absolute implicative force of metaphysical rules. In essence, an omnipotent being can’t make square circles, married bachelors, or good pop music, because such entities violate basic analytic rules that underlay reality itself.
Nobody, and I mean nobody, knows what sort of entities *ethical* rules are (thanks, Hume, you bastard!), if they even exist. Are they metaphysical or nomological, e.g. is murder wrong in all possible universes, or just this one? If moral rules are merely nomological aspects of this universe, then if there is a God, he is the author of morality. However, if ethical rules necessarily hold in any possible universe that God might create, then he is not in any reasonable sense the author of those necessary relations. Instead, the act of creating the particular universe simply instantiates what preexists by necessity, apart from any act of deity.
Miguel:
“I’m not arguing that the Bible is our basis for interpreting Gods objective moral standards. I was merely implying : On the theistic view, objective moral values are rooted in God. God’s own holy and perfectly good nature supplies the absolute standard against which all actions and decisions are measured. Which is why, Theists believe that God is asking them to, in a sense, praise His moral standards.”
Bill:
How do you know that god has a “holy and perfect good nature?”
You do realize that prefacing statements by saying “On the theistic view” doesn’t bolster them in any way – right?
@Miguel
Here’s your argument broken down into premises and conclusion.
A: God exists
B: God authored (created) morality
C: God is the highest standard of morality
The argument is a fallacy as it is begging the question. Note that if god created morality he is also the lowest standard of morality, he is in fact all kinds of standards of morality. You might as well say god is morality and leave the standards of morality out, which is the premise of the conclusion, hence begging the question.
Interestingly, you can replace ‘god’ with ‘man’ in your argument and obtain an equally ‘logical’ conclusion. Although the argument is still begging the question, at least with this one you don’t have to assume premise A.
A: Man exists
B: Man authored (created) morality
C: Man is the highest standard of morality
“Here’s your argument broken down into premises and conclusion.
A: God exists
B: God authored (created) morality
C: God is the highest standard of morality ”
– I’d argue it this way.
A: God exists
B: God authored (created) morality
C: God is the sole arbiter of what is moral and what is not.
If God designed the game, he makes the rules.
We already see morality in creation. We can therefore (since God exists in this hypothetical) proclaim the objectivity of this and assert that truth and morality are fixed and predictible, and available to reason and judgment for the coherent regulation of life.
you said:
“A: Man exists
B: Man authored (created) morality
C: Man is the highest standard of morality”
– First of all, how does man author morality? Does that mean man creates it? How does man ‘create’ morality?
Can we say man “authored” love?
@ miguel
” -We already see value, the real existence of good, beauty, love, and spiritual aspiration, and see a rational order and morality in the creation. We don’t need the bible to see this, we don’t use the bible to see this. ”
But their are just as many bad and ugly things on the planet.
Aren’t lions a part of gods over all creation, are you aware of the fact that lions will sometimes began to eat other animals alive if those animals pose no threat of escape.
For instances there are documented cases of very old and/or adult elephants who are sick being eaten alive. This is how the tale follows sick elephant collapses cannot get up, lions come along and began to eat the elephant alive with absolutely no attempt to kill the elephant. The lions continue to eat the adult bull elephant alive in spite of the fact the that the elephants buddies kept trying to shoo the lions away.
One particular case the lions fed on an adult elephant for 2 days before it died. Another case a baby elephant broke both of its legs, as it dragged itself along nosily the lions heard him, saw that the elephant could not defend itself or run away. The lions began to eat the baby elephant alive and the process which started at night didn’t end the elephants life until several hours later during the day.
Anyway although I love animals I ain’t really bothered by elephants being eating alive, I figure that is part of what elephants have been going through for millions of years. The reason why I mentioned the elephants being eaten alive is because you seem to be arguing that the beautiful things on the planet are proof of gods morality and existence, in rebuttal I feel the need to point out some of the ugly things about the planet.
How about children with cancer is that proof of gods morality.
How about children who have giant tumors growing out of the front of their faces.
How about all of the babies born horribly deformed.
If the good and beautiful things on the planet are proof of gods existence and morality then what are the ugly and bad things proof of?
“Aren’t lions a part of gods over all creation, are you aware of the fact that lions will sometimes began to eat other animals alive if those animals pose no threat of escape. ”
- Markbey, the behavioral instincts of lions are immensely different from transcendental concepts like morality, rationality etc.
(I like that you love animals, I do too. )
Are you saying that the events that transpired in your story are evil? They may seem like “ugly” events, but they are not evil. Lions and elephants do not have the ability to ponder on the rightness or wrongness of a decision.
“How about children with cancer is that proof of gods morality.”
- If you believe in God and an afterlife, how does this make God immoral? A parent who would not permit his child to suffer would never deprive his offspring of any want, nor would he discipline the child. What then, do we mean by ‘suffer’? If we limit the definition of suffering to physical pain, then we have to acknowledge that loving parents permit their children to suffer pain, at least to some degree, when they allow them to have immunization shots, or undergo chemotherapy or teach them how to ride a bike, knowing that the chances of them falling and getting hurt are probable. Therefore, a loving parent does permit his child to suffer physically, if he considers the suffering to be insignificant and for a greater good.
The difference between man and God is that God is fully aware of man’s spiritual reality in addition to his physical reality. God knows that physical suffering cannot harm our eternal souls. God knows that our physical destruction is not an end to our existence. Of what significance is an hour of physical suffering compared to eternity? Of what significance is a lifetime of suffering compared to eternity? We can conclude that from God’s perspective, our physical suffering is relatively insignificant. This is not to say that He is unsympathetic or oblivious to our pain; loving parents feel empathy when their child receives a shot, knowing full well that the pain is inconsequential.
“One of the main problems in Christianity is that people interpret things how THEY want to. This can easily be avoided by sticking to the roots of the teachings of the Church. This woman strayed very far and the consequences were tremendous.”
Although it’s from another post, the argument is what christianity and the church is saying about free will on the consequences of heaven and hell that is of interest.
“Again, *what* information, and/or, revealed knowledge do you base this conclusion on?!?!? ”
– I’m sorry, I meant “if (theistic) God exists then objective moral standards exist.”.
I base this conclusion on the attributes of a ‘theistic God’, who by definition, was a ‘designer and had a relationship with the universe, particularly,us. Ofcourse I don’t have proof, if thats what your asking.
“Biblegod is out of the equation(not only because you’re willing to eliminate said deity, but because, as I and others have illustrated, “Morality” does NOT come from the “Body of Christ”(or any other religiously revealed “Truth”)”
– Ok, but I was really still using “said deity”, and was willing to eliminate the notion that we could derive ‘objective morality’ from the bible – basically because it would be more longer and tedious to defend.
“Miguel….when you refer to “God” in your above hypothetical, are you refering to a Deistic, nonpersonal deity?”
– No, that would make me a deist. I’m a theist, remember?
“Thus, to be able to *KNOW* what “standard” this hypothetical deity seeks to have us follow, you’d need to have communication/correpsepondence with said deity.”
- I wasn’t arguing that we *know* definitively what the “standard” is. But that the highest standard would/or ought to be present in a Theistic God, if He existed.
But like I said, if we didn’t know the “standard” then we are subjectively trying to interpret an objective reality.
If we know the “standard” does not exist, then what is the purpose of trying to subjectively interpret a very subjective reality? It is pretty much, useless.
“It all depends on us. Let’s act like it.”
——————
Why should we? And again, I’m not being sarcastic or rhetorical.
If you deconstruct the religious imperative to do good to someone else, then you must be willing and able to construct another imperative to take its place.
“It’s all on us” does explain that if justice is to be done, then we have to do it, but it does not provide a compelling reason or motive to pursue just actions.
“and you realize that other people have worth and dignity because of their humanity, which is shared with you. ”
– We all feel this. But if you follow the conclusion, that we have no objective purpose, to its logical end – then why should humanity have worth and dignity? Why should we care for the homeless guy on the street? The despair he’s feeling is just a bunch of chemical reactions. If I help him, why is that good? – I just caused him to feel another bunch of chemical reactions.
The first two books of the bible PROVE that the bible cannot be true. The FIRST story in Genesis is, whatever it is, ‘on the first day god created’ whatever, ‘on the 2nd day’ he created plants or whatnot, ‘on the 3rd’ he created fish, etc etc etc, and then the SECOND story in Genesis is adam and eve, so clearly, they cannot BOTH be right. Waste of time to even discuss it, there is not one bit of scripture which has been or could be proven as factually true. It’s a flippin’ BOOK, nothing else.
There will be suffering in the afterlife: it’s called Hell.
Many do not fail to realize it. The Catholics call the Fall the felix culpa, the ‘fortunate sin’, for this reason. Christians generally subscribe to the notion of a Divine Plan, and so by dint of this believe that the drama of the Fall was necessary and, in a roundabout way, good.
Which makes God’s part in the drama a dirty sort of reverse psychology; He says “don’t touch the fruit!”, knowing that by saying it, He has encouraged the curious to touch the fruit. Of course, this requires that Christians toss the part about God not being deceptive.
With such an enormous amount of inconsistencies, EVERY doctrine could be justified.
This is a very important point. In deductive logic, “From a contradiction, everything follows.” It’s called the principle of explosion. Any system that contains a contradiction can never be finitely rectified, because the contradiction poisons the tools (excluded middle, non-contradiction) that make logical decisions possible.
I have still not been convinced that a contradiction does necessarily follow from an omni-omni deity and either a world with evil or a world with free-willed beings (or both), but if it does, then one can take a set of coffin nails to the effort to make Christianity (or, really, any Monotheism) make logical sense.
“One might say that since evil people don’t go to heaven, free will in heaven will not cause suffering.”
This doesn’t respond to those who confess and are forgiven. Those who do great evil, but then say “I’m sorry, thank you Jesus!”. It could be argued that God would have the sense to keep those who’d cause problems in his Heaven out, but even then… what does that say about religions? Religions are pathways to heaven, in a sense. If an evil person does all that his religion requires of him, and God still keeps him out, then shouldn’t that bring every religion into question?
If an evil person gets into Heaven, and does evil, does he then get kicked out? Does God undo it, thus removing the effect that this person’s free will had? And if so, then why did God allow it to happen anyways (all powerful, all knowing)? We’re talking about Heaven, not Earth.
Or with the argument that we’re all flawed, and no one is perfect (I’ve heard that one a lot), but we should strive to be as perfect as we can be, and resist the urge to do wrong. If we retain free will and personality in Heaven, then what happens if we have a lapse in Heaven? If God takes from us the desire to do evil, then what will eternity be like if there’s no longer any choice, and any good feeling to be had from refusing to do evil?
If being good is resisting evil, then how good will we be in Heaven if there is no evil to resist?
Free will is, obviously, our ability to make our own decisions without anyone affecting the outcome or knowing what will happen.
Disagree. Even the most generous definition fo free-will has to include partial causation from prior states. If it didn’t free-will would be utterly meaningless. Choices only matter because we choose between things that are distinguishable according to a decision procedure that assigns value to the possibilities. Prior states must include things like emotional makeup, desires and fears, internal model of the world, knowledge, etc, and these all play into the decision moment.
Prior states, being states, are knowable. And they definitely are influenced (by the environment, by other actors). ‘Free will’ is just will on a really good clearance sale, and it comes somewhat used.
in the Adam and Eve story though, there were no prior states of knowledge.
I’m still not convinced that “free-will” really exists at all. The best argument I’ve heard yet is that it feels like we have free will. But do we really?
How can I know that I could have chosen to use different words in this post? How can I know that my choices are not entirely constrained by the state of my brain (which in turn, is entirely constrained by my prior environment) at the moment I make the choice?
‘Nope, if anyone here can answer that question, it’s probably you.
Elemenope, your response doesn’t counter what I said at all.
For any choice I make to be my free choice – or as you put it, my choice on a really good clearance sale – two things have to be true: one, whatever I do has to literally be possible, and two, no one can know what it is I’m about to do. It has nothing to do with my desires, fears, or emotional makeup.
The fact of the matter is, I am choosing to type this reply right now. Nobody stopped me, and nobody knew that I was about to reply at this exact second, nor did anyone know what it was I was going to say.
There’s a difference between being influenced (I may choose not want to run away if someone has pointed a gun to my head) and literally not being able to do something (I literally can’t run away if someone ties my legs together).
Nothing stated counters that. And if we’re looking at definitions of free will:
1. The ability or discretion to choose; free choice: chose to remain behind of my own free will.
2. The power of making free choices that are unconstrained by external circumstances or by an agency such as fate or divine will.
Even if you are influenced – emotionally, fiscally, or whatever the reason – you can always choose to ignore it. Just because we don’t desire particular outcomes doesn’t mean those outcomes aren’t available to us. When people say you don’t have a choice, they’re almost always wrong. Short of being literally unable to do something – like the being tied up example – you always have a choice. And that choice is yours to make, and nobody absolutely knows what choice that will be until you make it.
Curiosity is a disposition, which is a knowable prior state.
Or navels, ha.
complex systems mean unforeseen consequences. God alters the natural order by putting man into the equation, natural order goes all wobbly.
You realize that by making that assertion, you’ve de-powered God, right?
One of the central themes of Ehrman’s book that Daniel quotes above is that the Christian God has certain attributes – notably omnipotence, omniscience, and an all-loving nature. Any rationale for suffering that relies on removing one of the Christian God’s attributes is, in essence, saying that Christianity is wrong. By claiming that even God can’t build a system without “unforseen consequences” you’re either downgrading his omniscience to something lesser, or his omnipotence to something lesser. Both of which invalidate the Christian God.
I mean, the easiest way to rationalize suffering in the world while still sticking to theism is to claim that God has an equal opposite (the Devil) and the two of them are in a constant battle over the Earth. Evil things come from the Devil, good things come from God and boom, you’re done. Of course now you’re committing the Manichean heresy that has been rejected by Christian churches for something like 1700 years, notably because in order for it to work you have to presume that there is something equal in power to God, which in practice makes you no longer a monotheist.
By claiming that even God can’t build a system without “unforeseen consequences” you’re either downgrading his omniscience to something lesser, or his omnipotence to something lesser.
This doesn’t necessarily follow. It is possible that the human construction of the omni-attributes is too broad; our armchair definitions may be artificially inflated.
For example, there is a fierce argument in philosophy about whether the future exists, such that facts can be known about it if such an entity were privileged to do so. If it does not exist, then an omniscient entity could have no knowledge of the future (because there is no knowledge to have) and still be omniscient, as omniscience is simply “knowing everything knowable” and future facts, not existing, wouldn’t be in the category of knowable facts.
Same thing goes for omnipotence. It is unclear what is necessary for existence qua existence, and what is simply accidental to our particular universe. Which logical rules must hold in a coherent universe? If there are some which must hold in *all* coherent universes (and we exist in a coherent universe), then an omnipotent being could be powerless to change them and still be omnipotent, since omnipotence is simply the ability to “do anything doable”, and changing one of those rules, being a metaphysically necessary rule, doesn’t fall within that set of doable things.
Oh heck no, I couldn’t answer that. The best argument we have is, really, it feels like we have it. Russell, I think, said it best, in his observation that we have the immediate experience of experiencing, and that awareness-of-awareness-of-sensation leads us to believe we are somewhat separate from the causal chain.
The real problem is that, as I said above, absolute free-will is meaningless. We are stuck between two practical options: entirely caused prior states (determinism), and partially caused prior states. The first is pretty easy, if very distasteful. The second is a logical disaster.
I am a free-will guy (at least at the margins; I agree with William James that the vast majority of what humans do is necessarily both routine and essentially unconscious, involving nothing we’d really call ‘choice’), and my personal suspicion is that if there is an effect generating partially un-caused states, it will have something to do with what Russell described (the capacity for introspective awareness).
I’m still not convinced that “free-will” really exists at all. The best argument I’ve heard yet is that it feels like we have free will. But do we really?
Here’s the problem as I see it: certain murky concepts are so universally accepted that they will never be disproven, they will only be re-defined as scientific knowledge advances about what they aren’t. Consciousness is another such concept.
The idea of “free will” is going to be very different for theists and non-theists. And yet they carry on discussions such as this about it without first stating a mutually agreed upon definition.
For naturalist nontheists, I suggest that belief in free will is the last remnant of the dualism they think they have discarded.
Personally, I’m with Hume, Locke, & co in holding that free will and determinism are compatible.
More interesting though is what falls out when you actually unpack what ‘free will’ entails and its implications for various theist arguments.
Briefly, if you are a compatibilist, as most of the philosophers I’ve met seem to be; then free will is flatly not a solution to the problem of evil (for obvious reasons)
If you are an incompatibilist, and still hold that free will exists, then for various reasons you must hold that the will is self-causing, which does obviously terrible things to the first-cause argument.
Then of course there is the third option, hard determinism, which pretty clearly is not a solution to the PoE, but then again I think a serious analysis shows that even forgetting all those problems, the theist can’t really use free will as a solution to the problem anyway
It is possible that the human construction of the omni-attributes is too broad; our armchair definitions may be artificially inflated.
Omniscience ain’t what it used to be.
I know theologians debate the point, but to avoid absurdity, if something’s omnipotent and omniscient it can only possibly mean that it can do and know everything *possible*.
God could turn every cat on Earth into a dog, he couldn’t make a single ‘feline dog’.
So there are limits.
I actually quite like the story of the Fall – God creates paradise for a guy, gives him a hot naked chick, an intuitive understanding of the universe, a perfect mind and body, gives him all the food he can eat and says ‘there’s literally only one thing you can’t do, and it’s eat this one fruit’. And, literally within an hour, the man’s taken a bite.
You can’t blame God for not seeing that coming – he acts benevolently, plays fair. He gives Adam the same deal that Christians say we’ve got now – an immortal life in paradise if you follow some simple rules. I think both God and Adam come out really well from the story.
It’s free will, just loaded so you can only possibly make one choice. As Eddie Izzard says, the choice is ‘cake or death?’, and God isn’t expecting anyone to go ‘I’d like a nice slice of death, please’.
I think, basically, Adam ends up creating a feline dog.
(I hasten to add that there are lots of other stories I like, and I wouldn’t want any of those in a science textbook, either).
“For example, there is a fierce argument in philosophy about whether the future exists, such that facts can be known about it if such an entity were privileged to do so. If it does not exist, then an omniscient entity could have no knowledge of the future (because there is no knowledge to have) and still be omniscient, as omniscience is simply “knowing everything knowable” and future facts, not existing, wouldn’t be in the category of knowable facts.
Same thing goes for omnipotence. It is unclear what is necessary for existence qua existence, and what is simply accidental to our particular universe. Which logical rules must hold in a coherent universe? If there are some which must hold in *all* coherent universes (and we exist in a coherent universe), then an omnipotent being could be powerless to change them and still be omnipotent, since omnipotence is simply the ability to “do anything doable”, and changing one of those rules, being a metaphysically necessary rule, doesn’t fall within that set of doable things.”
Maybe. However, to the best of my knowledge, there is no fierce argument among “Christians” and their philosophy regarding “the future”, and biblegod’s knowledge of said future. The bible makes clear that there IS a “future”, and it can be known..i.e..via “Prophecy”.
You can play devil’s advocate all you like(which you are very adept at, BTW), however, the subject of “inherent sin” and “free will” etc., comes from a *specific* philosophy. I’m confident, yes, confident that you could lay down the blue-prints for some type of “Omni-everything” deity that **might** exist. However, that deity – by the definitions/descriptions set forth in the bible – is not biblegod. Where the bible is concerned, there cannot be simultanious “omniscient”(namely, a knowledge of the future) and “free agency”.
For instance, if biblegod knows, per its knowledge of the future set of events, that there will be nonbelievers..aka “backsliders”, “heathens”, “fools!” etc.,(as set-forth in the bible-Prophecy) then these people are actually necessary, otherwise, its a failed “Prophecy”. Yes? This is the problem I see with the *biblical* deity knowing the future. Our free will would be an illusion, at best.
On another note, I have to wonder—if our ancient, great-grandparents “Adam & Eve” had *not* eaten the “forbidden fruit”, would that have made us “inherently good”? Christians?
Answer that, and to me, you’ll see just how ridiculous the idea of “Original Sin” is.
Yeah, if you have to downgrade the definition of omni-omni is it really omni anymore? Seems like it is something less than the grandest thing we can thing of. Which then makes God something less than our grandest thought.
What a downer.
What if God were one of us….Just a stranger on the bus…
My thing wasn’t really the omni God in conjunction with free will. Instead, it was that God allegedly grants you free will but then punishes you for using it. IMO, that concept is ridiculous. It seems to me that if God had any cause to punish someone for exercising free will, then free will must exist outside of God. Free will couldn’t have been a creation of God. Which then means, as discussed above, that God is something different than the monotheistic religions have normally defined it.
” If an evil person gets into Heaven, and does evil, does he then get kicked out? Does God undo it, thus removing the effect that this person’s free will had? And if so, then why did God allow it to happen anyways (all powerful, all knowing)? We’re talking about Heaven, not Earth. ”
I am following your line of thinking, although I am wondering exactly why god would allow someone into the party only to have them jumping on the furniture and starting trouble.
But as far as this free will thing goes, because all human life is dependent and connected to other living things wouldn’t that completely kill the idea of free will from the getgo.
If a hurricane (that god created of course) rolls through and it is my intention to save all 12 of my kids but I am unable to because of circumstances beyond my control wouldn’t my free will be altered.
If someone kills me and I am not able to provide for my kids even though I had every intention of doing so wouldn’t my free will have been altered.
Also isn’t the free will of most children usurped everyday by things their parents force them to do that they don’t want to and btw do children and babies have free will.
If god intervenes in epic ways and smaller ways into the everyday affairs of man isn’t god a usurper the free will of man.
If god actually did answer prayers (which he clearly doesn’t) wouldn’t that also kind of kill the idea of free will.
If a person prays to god expecting for god to answer their prayers and god doesn’t answer that persons prayers wouldn’t this be a case of god interfering with mans will.
It appears quite obvious to me that even though some people on earth have more freedom than others none of us have ultimate free will because we are subject to circumstances that we have no way of controlling.
Either the all-knowing, omnipotent god exists and there can be no free will (he knows exactly what’s going to happen long before you do), or he’s just as surprised as the rest of us when things go pear-shaped and therefore is not omniscient, hence not god-as-we-know-it.
” this requires that Christians toss the part about God not being deceptive. ”
Christians cannot toss that part as long as god allow the concept of thousands of other gods to exist.
Or as long as god doesn’t give everyone on the planet the ability to see through all of the other god concepts that are fake.
Also in the bible, Invisible sky daddy says that he, himself puts deceit inside of people and that by definition means god is deceptive.
Christians will rarely if ever admit this however.
This is also my objection to the Christian notion of free will. How free is my will if the option is to either love god (supposedly freely) or go to hell. That isn’t free will (to love), it’s coercion– like what an abusive spouse does to his/her significant other.
The evidence seems to be coming along in neuroscience. As consciousness is downgraded so also is free will. See http://www.skeptically.org/spiritualism/id11.html on ‘free won’t’. Other species have been making ‘decisions’ for billions of years without consciousness and free will. It stands to reason that we are, at least for the most part, the same. Based on ToE, I think the burden of proof is on those who argue for free will. Let them construct experiments to show some decision making that starts in consciousness.
Ok – I have to ask what definition of “free will” is being tossed around here. For lack of a better phrase, I have always thought of free will as freedom of choice. In any given situation we can chose different courses of action. Some with desirable consequences, some with un-desirable consequences. That desirability of the outcome doesn’t change the freedom to make the choice. Indeed, people make choices resulting in bad outcomes every day.
Are you actually arguing that whatever “choice” we make under a certain set of facts is not a choice at all but somehow predetermined?
If that’s the case, how do you account for all the time we spend mulling over difficult decisions?
I think there is a difference between freedom and freewill that should not be muddied in the argument with christians and their so-called free will concept.
When christians throughout ages cannot reasonably argue the concept of free will even from that was written from the book, how can they expect anyone to believe in so many doctrines from the churches as “truth”.
Their lofty argument of free will and sin is distasteful even according to their “so-called God” in the Book in their preaching of the salvation of Jesus.
” I think there is a difference between freedom and freewill that should not be muddied in the argument with christians and their so-called free will concept. ”
I understand what you are saying but people being enslaved do not have free will. Or their free will is conditional at best.
The justification for sending people to hell based on their free will to choose the correct religion is a joke because what free will does a woman or man in Saudi Arabia have to convert to Christianity.
For people born in Saudi Arabia they are not free, and they are not free to choose Christianity, so that is how my example of not being free contradicts the principle of free will.
Or for my last example take actual slaves in America, in many cases they were not allowed to marry or females were sexually abused. Even if these slaves wanted to exercise their free will and wait until marriage to have sex their lack of freedom prevented them from exercising their free will.
If you wanted to raise your son according to christian teachings but your slave master sales your child this is a clear example of how not being free takes away the free will of so people.
So I believe my adding the condition of not being free is totally relevant to any discussion on free will. After all if I god allows someone to enslave me and my family against our free will can any christian really argue that god has given man free will.
Your argument is not unrevelent. The percecuted and the tortured are one of the argument of human will, abeting free will argument.
markbey: “For people born in Saudi Arabia they are not free, and they are not free to choose Christianity, so that is how my example of not being free contradicts the principle of free will.”
One of the clearest examples of how free will really is not free in many circumstances. One of the commandments is keep holy the sabbath day. If you live in a country where there is no church how would you do so? To hell you go.
I know theologians debate the point, but to avoid absurdity, if something’s omnipotent and omniscient it can only possibly mean that it can do and know everything *possible*.
God could turn every cat on Earth into a dog, he couldn’t make a single ‘feline dog’.
Since this point came up a couple times…..
but many believers claim that their omni God can do the impossible. To limit God to “the possible” is to make God less. This means there are rules that exist outside of God and God is subject to those rules. This is a limited God.
If there is a God, I do indeed hope God could create a feline dog. It might be beyond *my* imagination but then that would be the point.
‘feline dog’
What, no catty b*tches in your world?
;)
And if he’s limited to what’s possible… then why all the stories of the impossible things that he does?
What is the “I”?
This is an argument we should be aware of, our will and/or our doing or however, but not fall into the trap of meaningless arguments of christianity salvation.
A person who had knowledge of your brain states a moment before you typed would know what you are *about to do*. Action potentials take time. There was a neat experiment a while back that showed that action potentials for movement precede awareness for the desire of movement by about a third of a second. In other words, a person with access to an fMRI of your brain knows you are going to move about a third of a second before you do.
And no action has no prior antecedents. You typed what you did in part because you are responding to what I typed. I responded to what you typed. You responded to the article. There is no action separate from environmental causes, and we are *always* restrained by environment. How we learn how to respond to situations (including habitual counter-suggestibility, i.e. “being strong willed”) are learned behaviors that have prior antecedents, none of which are prevented from being completely caused.
The culmination of a choice is a ephemeral thing (and from neurobiology we know does not occur in a *moment* but is rather a complex, temporally smeared process of events), and there is nothing whatsoever to suggest otherwise other than our own psychological states that there is an un-caused element, which since Freud we have known are not exactly the best reporters of truth in existence.
Um…I would be referring to me, as I was the one who wrote that sentence?
If I am to make a choice of my free will…etc.
I’m not sure what exactly you’re asking…assuming it’s not for me to define the word “I”.
Zotmaster – yes, I am asking what comprises our sense of identity in terms of brain function. By extension, what is the relationship between consciousness and unconsciousness. With the rapid improvement in brain scanning technology it is becoming possible to research what role different parts of our brain play in decision making and it seems to be going toward a theory that the impetus lies mostly, if not all, in the unconscious (at least in regard to action decisions).
The evidence piling up seems to not be in agreement with the idea that ‘I think this and do that so I am a free agent’.
Perhaps it’s all a blind alley but since species have been making decisions for billions of years without consciousness and free will the burden of proof is on those who argue for free will. I’m skeptical about philosophical arguments that do not attempt to take science into account.
:)
I’m confident, yes, confident that you could lay down the blue-prints for some type of “Omni-everything” deity that **might** exist. However, that deity – by the definitions/descriptions set forth in the bible – is not biblegod.
I agree with you there. There are reasons I’m not a Christian, and this is among them. Christians are constrained by a data-set (the Bible) that seems woefully inadequate to the task of describing what would need to be described to make its God plausible.
“There are reasons I’m not a Christian, and this is among them.”
Me, too.
“Christians are constrained by a data-set (the Bible) that seems woefully inadequate to the task of describing what would need to be described to make its God plausible.”
Agreed.
But all these objections have been dealt with in a rather satisfactory manner by free-will theists.
I wouldn’t go that far. As BoomSLANG pointed out above, a great number of these arguments work for the logical plausibility of *some* omni-omni God and free-willed us, but not so much the God of the Bible. The devotee to the Bible God has to explain away utterances which do damage to parts of the argument (such as verses that imply God has future-knowledge) and yet nonetheless must be accepted because they are part of special revelation.
The Molinists really gave it a good college try, and yet I don’t think they quite do it.
It has actually been shown to precede in some cases by10 seconds.
It has actually been shown to precede in some cases by10 seconds.
Wow.
You typing wow is SO ten seconds ago.
You typing wow is SO ten seconds ago.
LOL! I was thinking the same thing. There is no free will! “Oh, I’ve wasted my life…”
“There was a neat experiment a while back that showed that action potentials for movement precede awareness for the desire of movement by about a third of a second. In other words, a person with access to an fMRI of your brain knows you are going to move about a third of a second before you do.”
Yes that is true, deep in your subconscious you generate an action before your conscious knows it. But you conscious can then decide to act on it or not. That is your free will, once you realize that you do these subconscious actions.
This is a highly controversial statement in the field of neuroscience.
I was just about to say the same thing, Question. Because I HAD TO.
:)
“The devotee to the Bible God has to explain away utterances which do damage to parts of the argument (such as verses that imply God has future-knowledge) and yet nonetheless must be accepted because they are part of special revelation.”
Prophesy is definitely the stickiest point for the open theist, and though I think they can handle those scriptures in a biblically sound manner, there are even Christians who wouldn’t agree. I think that is because they have accepted the armchair definitions of what an omni-omni God must look like.
God, within the free will system, can have knowledge of those things that he determines will come to pass regardless of human free-will, for example His plan to sacrifice His son for an atonement.
Some prophecies should be read as conditional in nature like the pronouncement of destruction on Nineveh that was withheld.
Some prophecies can be explained as God knowing that something will come to pass based on history of an individual. The prediction of Peter’s denial may fall into this category, Jesus knew Peter’s character so well that he foretell Peter’s actions. We do this even today, I predict that if we get several poor earnings reports with a report of increasing unemployment the stock market will go down.
I find Molinism attractive too, the idea of counterfactuals isn’t off the radar, but the problem is still I think that libertarian freedom is destroyed. Better minds than mine like Craig would disagree with me though on that point.
If we reduce the definition of an omni omni God, how do we know that God *couldn’t* die or leave the building? How would one ascertain the limits of possibilty and therefore how would one ascertain the limits of God?
God, within the free will system, can have knowledge of those things that he determines will come to pass regardless of human free-will, for example His plan to sacrifice His son for an atonement.
“will come to pass regardless of human free-will”
Earlier you suggested that God only knew of the possibility of Adam’s fall – not the certainty of it. The cross is *precisely* because of man’s (Adam’s) free will – free will enabled the fall. If God did not know with certainty that Adam would fall, he did not know with certainty that there would be a sacrifice. Therefore, Jesus wasn’t planned at the dawn of creation – he was a change-up.
That seems pretty surprising for a Christian to suggest that Jesus was a pinch hitter.
You may be right, but you are going to have to contribute more than a one line assertion to convince anyone.
Same as for anyone asserting “god(s) exist” you will need to submit strong evidence …
Further, I think this throws a wrench in the Christian interpretation of the creation story.
Paul refers back to the creation of Adam and Eve to explain the role of christian marriage and christian church. Paul references the order of creation as having weight in Christian organization. This implies that God knew at the dawn of creation that there was going to be a Jesus and a Christianity. So Biblically, God had to know that there would be a fall before it happened. Adam’s fall and Jesus’ sacrifice – those two events are inseparable.
I wouldn’t say that Jesus was a pinch hitter, but that His sacrifice was definitely in the mind of God because of the inherent risk of free will. If Adam hadn’t sinned it was likely that one of his progeny would.
Also all we can say is that Adam was innocent the institutions of marriage as a symbol of the church may still have a had a correlation even without a fall, in the sense that God still may have had a plan to further “evolve” or “refine” what we are as humans. This would be related to what Christians call the ressurected body, similar to our own but indifferent to any problems. This isn’t spoke of in much detail in churches, but even if Adam wasn’t set up for death at his creation, our biology seems to be built to experience pain in ways that most don’t think the resurrection body will.
if Adam wasn’t set up for death at his creation, our biology seems to be built to experience pain in ways that most don’t think the resurrection body will.
Based on the logic in your first paragraph, I think the probability of someone sinning approaches so closely to 100%, that God knew it to be a certainty. If he is the creator of all, it is reasonable to say He set up humanity (if not Adam) for death and sin. He set up the conditions under which it was almost 100% certain that someone would disobey.
But the point about pain is still interesting because it suggests that some Christians note that not all bad things are an effect of the Fall. God inserted pain into the reality of humans regardless of our behavior.
Does it suggest in the Bible that one won’t ever feel pain in heaven? It says you get new bodies but I don’t recall any comments on pain. I think that’s one of those many things Christians just *hope* happens. AFAIK, it doesn’t have textual support. Maybe heaven will even have those parasites that eat out peoples eyeballs. The God in the Bible is pretty whimsical (and not in a good way). Maybe he acts like that in heaven too.
Worship is one of those poorly analyzed beliefs in religion. Why would a god ever desire or need to be praised? The book of Revelation talks about the 24 elders who stand around the throne of God and continually praise him. What’s the matter with this guy?
In actually, Christians most likely perform praise because the ritual makes them feel good. It sure felt good to me when I was there.
God’s need for constant praise and validation has always seem weird to me. Like that needy girlfriend who constantly needs to be told how pretty she is, it starts getting on your nerves very quickly.
“Yes, yes, you’re Lord of all Creation, Most Perfect of all Beings, Love Incarnate, blah blah blah. Now leave me the fuck alone so I can watch the game.”
Oh, and yes, the universe DOES make you look fat. Live with it.
Worship is one of those poorly analyzed beliefs in religion.
ITA. I mentioned once before that my former pastor chastised me for worshipping improperly. I realized then that I didn’t really know what worship means. What does it mean to praise God? Is god going to be less awesome if I don’t worship him? Does my worship some how add to God?
It gets back to the definition of an omni omni God. The Bible God is needy. Not what you’d think of in an omni omni God.
Question-I-thority: “Why would a god ever desire or need to be praised?”
An omnipotent being would desire nothing and need nothing. Omnipotent means nothing is a challenge. What could such a being desire? What could such a being need? If this being wanted anything it would already have it in unlimited quantities. It simply doesn’t make sense to invent an omnipotent being then burden it with human desire and emotions. It just doesn’t fit. It is amazing to me how so many people turn a blind eye to this.
I challenge any Christian to explain to me why an omnipotent being would get angry or desire anything at all.
We are such arrogant creatures in this limitless and cruel universe. Instead of studying god we should study ourselves! After all, who are we to argue with the opportune nature of chaos?
What does it mean to worship? Adore, revere, glorify, praise…
Isn’t there more to God than just the being of an entity? What are people worshipping when they worship God? They are worshipping an objective moral standard. What good does it do to continuously praise a moral standard? I would have to say that praising a standard would ensure that those praising it would honor it and try to live by it.
We don’t worship God for His sake. God asks that we worship Him for our own sake.
Sure. But then she only has to look around the world and realize that for most people, God is absent. Starving children, natural disasters, war, poverty, etc.
“But if you were a mother who’s beautiful daughter is dying from a terminal illness and you pray to this seemingly absent god to save her, and then she miraculously is healed shortly thereafter, I say to you that god is very real and very present to this person.”
How many people actually miraculously gets healed without using any modern medical threatment? Just put that person in a bed, don’t let any doctor touch or examine that person, don’t give any medicine and only pray?
If it was your own daughter would you dare to test this yourself by just praying and not give any medical attention?
I agree but we are selfish. If it was your daughter suddenly the suffering children in Africa mean little…
Kinda reminds me of a great episode of law and order where a millionaire businessman hired someone to kill a homeless man in order to get his kidneys for his dying daughter. She was terminal and would die any day. He paid a doctor a million dollars to perform the transplant in secret. Although he was caught his daughter lived and thrived and upon going to prison he looked at the prosecutor, smiled and said ‘it was worth it.’
benoverby – very well spoken. But what of the people born into cultures where they never learn of Jesus? What happens to them?
Dammit, that was meant to go under benorverby’s post. My bad.
he “made nasty fun of a Samaritan”??? No way. Where??? Jesus was perfect. He walked on water remember? Yeah, walked on freaking water man…
He also cast demons into a heard of pigs causing them to go crazy and drive themselves off a cliff.
LOL
“Oh, and yes, the universe DOES make you look fat. Live with it.”
Any attempts of mine to marshal my thoughts on the subject of free-will have been ruined by this line. Still laughing.
Could it be that god is so afraid that if we stop thinking about him and stop praising him and worshipping him that he would seize to exist?
One fun question to pose:
If God is the best at everything, would that not also make him the absolute best liar?
“I AM eternal!” [Holy fingers crossed behind back]
What a jerk.
So you’re saying PETA would rather go naked than wear Jesus?
The argument is not directly about the atonement, it’s about the presence of miracles reversing the natural course and consequence of human acts.
Your objection is like listening to a person’s opinion on a movie and then dismissing it on the grounds they can’t remember one of the actor’s names.
One of the most prominent NT scholars doesn’t understand the atonement? Perhaps you should write that accusation up and see if you can get it published in a journal.
Plus, there’s the issue of the ‘us’ and ‘them’ mindset that seems to be very much a part of the human make-up. A daughter is part of ‘us’ for the mother – she counts as a real human being. The images of people starving halfway across the world can seem as unreal as any fictional program. They are, after all, ‘them.’ Most people don’t have the same emotional response to seeing suffering from afar as suffering close to, even if they make the conscious effort to remember that ‘them’ are real people too. This can cloud people’s thinking when it comes to evaluating ‘miraculous’ events like the one described.
I want to understand the (substitutionary) “Atonement”, too. Until it can be explained to me in way that doesn’t make it the vile act that I believe it is, then I’m prepared to remain “ignorant”. Lol.
You jest but I asked that question to Alex a few weeks ago.
How does anyone know that God *must* keep his promises?
WRT Christianity, people are just hoping that the Bible God keeps promises. Some of the things Christians hope for aren’t necessarily even promised in the Bible, there’s quite a few theological assumptions made. And then if we start introducing all the “mays” of what God meant or will do under the guise of Open Theology, it just makes discerning God’s intent even less certain.
I believe that free will doesn’t exist. We have the illusion
of free will , when in fact we are the some of the parts of
our conditioning. The little bits and pieces that we have
picked up and assumed , the stuff we get from other
people. What we have learned this far.
To truly exercise free will we would have to do
something that goes completely against our most basic
drives , like oh, do some horrible thing that we find
abhorrent.
If we exist in a dysfunctional state we would go against
an egocentric set of conditioning to embace an altruistic
or vice versa.
No one on this planet has had an original thought either ,but that is a topic for another forum.
“this is all incredibly biased.”
Oh, crap…….we’ve been found out!
Okay, yes, it’s true—-we’re “biased” to want to believe what stands the best chance of actually being *true*.
With “faith” any belief is possible to the individual employing the “faith”. That’s why we here on “Unreasonable Faith” employ skepticism in our “bias”.
We’re cRaZy like that.
Christians have always argued that God respects ‘free-will’.
“Egyptian armies at the exodus (they freely had decided to oppress the Israelites)”
– So.. The Egyptian armies were essentially disrespecting the Israelites ‘free-will’, right?
“he fed the multitudes in the wilderness in the days of Jesus (people who had chosen to go off to hear him without packing a lunch)”
– Seems like simple kindness, I mean, feeding people and stuff. If I feed a homeless guy, wait, am I infringing upon his free-will?
“he counteracted the wicked decision of the Roman governor Pilate to destroy Jesus by raising the crucified Jesus from the dead”
- Well.. nah, I think I should overlook this one.
David Knapp: “Point one, point two were almost convincing but then he just sounded ignorant with point number 3 because he doesn’t understand the atonement. Oh well, so much for that.”
I haven’t forgotten; ‘still waiting to be enlightened on the subject of the “atonement”.
Oh, wait, I guess I *did* forget who I’m dealing with, here.
Miguel(aka “Michael”)…
“[Those who worship the Christian biblegod] are worshipping an objective moral standard.”
There is no “objective moral standard” in the body of “Christ”. A moral(ethical) standard exists outside of “God’s Word”, because if “God’s Word” is intrinsically “moral”(as implied), then “God” could decide to reinstate its “kill all nonbelievers” policy(as seen in Deuteronomy), and Christians would have to honor that judgement as the “moral” thing to do, when we know fully-well that most if not all Christians would NOT obey a command to kill nonchristians.
“We don’t worship God for His sake. God asks that we worship Him for our own sake.”
- This statement is an accusation that “God” is been irresponsible for the free will that christianity says God gives to humanity.
interesting you quoted the phrase ‘kill all non-believers’ as to imply that that was how it exactly was written in the bible. I think you quoted something from the Quran.
Miguel: “interesting you quoted the phrase ‘kill all non-believers’ as to imply that that was how it exactly was written in the bible.”
Yes, it’s true, I paraphrased it from memory, so perhaps I shouldn’t have quoted it. I believe the specific langauge therein were the instructions to kill those who would lead you away from biblegod, including your own family members. I think its a safe bet to assume that people who would lead you away from Christianity would qualify as “nonbelievers”, otherwsie, they wouldn’t be leading you away from it. If you’d like to reference the exact language therein and supply the “correct” context, feel free.
In any event, you didn’t refute the my rebuttal that says there is no “objective moral standard” found in the body of “Christ”. And there isn’t.
“I think you quoted something from the Quran.”
To my knowledge, both “Holy” books condone the killing of nonbelievers….or if you prefer, those who would lead you away from “Christ”/”Allah”, respectively.
Miguel: “Where is the error in my reasoning?”
Where?….here: when you suggest that there exists an “objective moral standard” to “worship”. There is not. The “Word of God”(biblegod) is not intrinsically “moral”.
If “God” woke up and decided that dashing babies against rocks was the “moral” thing to do(regardless of the reason), I would wager that Christians would not see it as “moral”, let alone do such a thing.
There exists a moral standard outside of “Christianity”, and all other revealed “Truths”.
“because if “God’s Word” is intrinsically “moral”(as implied), then “God” could decide to reinstate its “kill all nonbelievers” policy(as seen in Deuteronomy), and Christians would have to honor that judgement as the “moral” thing to do”
- Ok, but you are already assuming from the outset that thats what the text means. If we are going to base God’s ‘objective morality’ on the bible, as you suggest, then we should also honor “Thou shall not kill” and a host of other scripture that would seem to undermine the command of ‘killing non believers’
Can’t we just agree that, if a God does exist, then He embodies the highest standard of objective morality.
@ miguel
” Can’t we just agree that, if a God does exist, then He embodies the highest standard of objective morality. ”
How can you make this statement when your invisible sky daddy tells lies to his supposedly beloved creations.
For instance this bible verse right here.
“Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you. “For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it shall be opened. “Or what man is there among you, when his son shall ask him for a loaf, will give him a stone? “Or if he shall ask for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he? “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him! (NAS, Matthew 7:7-11 ”
This statement is a lie because your invisible sky daddy does not answer all prayers. If your divine being ask us to pray to him and he will answer mans prayers, it seems to me when he doesn’t answer prayers that kinda invalidates your statement about god embodying the highest standard of morality.
Don’t you think.
Miguel: “Can’t we just agree that, if a God does exist, then He embodies the highest standard of objective morality.”
No, we can’t agree. And the reason – even as shown within your own argument – is that this supposed “objective standard” is dependent on *subjective* interpretations of the language found therein. In other words, biblegod apparently leaves it up to us, fallible, untrustworthy humans to evaluate each cirmcumstance, and act according to what *we* think the right thing to do is. For example, you said……
“If we are going to base God’s ‘objective morality’ on the bible, as you suggest, then we should also honor ‘Thou shall not kill’….”
Firstly, *you* are the one suggesting this “objective morality” is based on biblegod’s “Word”; not me.
Secondly, since “Thou shalt not kill” is not absolute – in other words, since it is perfectly acceptable to “kill” in the right circumstance(i.e..self-defense) – then, again, it is obvious that it is up to us to determine the circumstance and act accordingly. Hence, why we cannot agree that “objective morality” comes from a “God”. This “higher standard” you speak of is “higher” than “God”. ‘Follow?
“Let us assume that we both believe a God exists (for arguments sake, lets not take the Biblical God). We can therefore logically conclude that, God, being the author of morality embodies the highest standard of morality, can we not? Is this not logical?”
No
“No, we can’t agree. And the reason – even as shown within your own argument – is that this supposed “objective standard” is dependent on *subjective* interpretations of the language found therein. In other words, biblegod apparently leaves it up to us, fallible, untrustworthy humans to evaluate each cirmcumstance, and act according to what *we* think the right thing to do is. For example, you said…… ”
– Boomslang, I’m sorry I left you hanging for awhile.
I’m not arguing that the Bible is our basis for interpreting Gods objective moral standards. I was merely implying : On the theistic view, objective moral values are rooted in God. God’s own holy and perfectly good nature supplies the absolute standard against which all actions and decisions are measured. Which is why, Theists believe that God is asking them to, in a sense, praise His moral standards.
The root for this argument was to answer that that God is somehow immoral for asking His followers to worship and praise him right?
“This statement is an accusation that “God” is been irresponsible for the free will that christianity says God gives to humanity. ”
– How does praising moral standards make God irresponsible for the free will that Christianity says He gives?
We don’t worship God for His sake. God asks that we worship Him for our own sake.
- like the statement says.
“God asks that we worship Him /(praise moral standards) for our own sake.”
The statement says that God asks us to praise moral standards (worship him) for our own sake.
You bring your boy to school and tell him to respect the other kids. Are you being irresponsible by bringing him to school?
I am amused with your reasoning. I suspect you don’t really understand the statement you made I first quoted.
Maybe you should clarify your position and exactly what you meant by what you said.
I just analogized God as being not just an entity but an objective moral standard. Thus when we are praising Him, we are praising an objective moral standard. Therefore the statement says that God asks us to praise moral standards (worship him) for our own sake.
Where is the error in my reasoning? Perhaps you could point it out, instead of being so abstract.
The free will apart from going to heaven or hell is reasonable if I misunderstood you.
@ miguel
” I just analogized God as being not just an entity but an objective moral standard. Thus when we are praising Him, we are praising an objective moral standard ”
How can god be an objective moral standard. If he is an objective moral standard, which objective moral standard does god represent.
Please explain exactly what you base god being and objective moral standard on. Is it because of how you think god treats you or makes you fee, I ask this because your invisible sky daddy did a lot of cruel and unnecessary things.
Also if I drowned babies most people wouldn’t consider me moral, why does your invisible sky daddy get to kill innocent and yet you still call him moral.
What exactly is moral about drowning babies.
“How can god be an objective moral standard. If he is an objective moral standard, which objective moral standard does god represent. ”
– Well, He isn’t just an objective moral standard, but if He does exist, then He is not only an entity but is also the objective moral standard ; or embodies the highest standards of morality if you prefer.
“Please explain exactly what you base god being and objective moral standard on. Is it because of how you think god treats you or makes you fee, I ask this because your invisible sky daddy did a lot of cruel and unnecessary things.”
– Maybe you could actually point to a particular “cruel and unnecessary thing” so that I may make an attempt to defend it (with enough time ofcourse). It would be hard to refute such a sweeping statement, I don’t think you will be convinced if I answered that with a simple “Did not!” .
“Also if I drowned babies most people wouldn’t consider me moral”
- Maybe Kim Jong Ill would consider you moral, thats his subjective view of morality, who are you to say that he is being immoral for having such a view?
“Well, He isn’t just an objective moral standard…”
It is like “drawing line in the sand”, except she is the one who decide the line.
“It is like “drawing line in the sand”, except she is the one who decide the line. ”
– I can’t argue with this. By definition, God is the author and designer of life, therefore His standards of morality are objective. Your description is accurate, however oversimplified it might seem.
@ miguel
“- Maybe you could actually point to a particular “cruel and unnecessary thing” so that I may make an attempt to defend it (with enough time ofcourse). ”
I’m talking about creating babies only to drown them during the flood of Noah.
How about talking about dashing babies heads on rocks
How about giving advice on selling ones daughter into slavery.
All of these things I listed are cruel please answer my question on exactly what you base the statement that god is objective morality on.
Also if your god makes a statement claiming he will answer prayers and then he doesn’t answer them is that morality.
How can god represent or be morality when he violates his own commandment of not lying.
Trying to reason as a gentleman, maybe unappropiate, not so, I thought.
“please answer my question on exactly what you base the statement that god is objective morality on. ”
– Lets first set aside (for later) your emotional rants on what you perceive to be immorality on God’s part.
Let us assume that we both believe a God exists (for arguments sake, lets not take the Biblical God). We can therefore logically conclude that, God, being the author of morality embodies the highest standard of morality, can we not? Is this not logical?
Nothing about God being God implies that He is necessarily the author of morality.
” – Lets first set aside (for later) your emotional rants on what you perceive to be immorality on God’s part. ”
No one is getting emotional. I asked you to please answer my question because I figure you might evade it or pretend as if you could not read, which you did.
I specifically asked you to explain your bases for the statement of god being objective morality.
What I’m getting at is, what makes you feel justified in this statement. Did the bible say it or did god himself tell that he was objective morality.
Also whether or not god exist has nothing to do with him being objective morality. Since god created Hitler and Stalin would you say that god represents or is objective evil.
If you make a statement the least you could do is back it up.
@ miguel
Miguel before you go accusing me of emotional rants, please remember you asked me to provide examples of were your just and loving invisible sky daddy had been cruel. Which I did.
Also It takes some serious nerve to accuse someone of emotional rants when your entire case the belief of god and evidence of his existence is built on 100% pure emotion.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
Miguel: “Lets first set aside (for later) your emotional rants on what you perceive to be immorality on God’s part.”
To my understanding, his references were not “emotional rants”, but actual instances taken from the bible, which, BTW, you are here suggesting is the “Highest standard”….or, the “objective moral standard”. I have shown this to be false—we don’t get “morality” from a “God”.
Continues….”Let us assume that we both believe a God exists (for arguments sake, lets not take the Biblical God).”
Why shouldn’t we take the “Biblical God”? You are not a “Deist”; you are a Theist, and you are here attempting to defend a *specific* deity. If some arbitrary, generic deity exists, how would we know what its “Standard” is?
Continues….”We can therefore logically conclude that, God, being the author of morality embodies the highest standard of morality, can we not? Is this not logical?”
No, it’s not “logical”. It’s actually a false dilemma—you throw out biblegod, but then assume the only other choice for where “morality” comes from is some *other* “God”. You simply will not concede that “morality” doesn’t come from a “Divine” source. Again, it does not.
“We don’t worship God for His sake. God asks that we worship Him for our own sake.”
How precisly would worshipping god for our sake be any different compared if we would not worship him?
“Nothing about God being God implies that He is necessarily the author of morality”
- To say that there are objective moral values is to say that something is right or wrong independently of whether anybody believes it to be so. It is to say, for example, that Nazi anti Semitism was morally wrong, even though the Nazis who carried out the Holocaust thought that it was good; and it would still be wrong even if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in exterminating or brainwashing everybody who disagreed with them.
On the theistic view, objective moral values are rooted in God. God’s own holy and perfectly good nature supplies the absolute standard against which all actions and decisions are measured. God’s moral nature is what Plato called the “Good.” He is the locus and source of moral value. He is by nature loving, generous, just, faithful, kind, and so forth.
“Miguel before you go accusing me of emotional rants, please remember you asked me to provide examples of were your just and loving invisible sky daddy had been cruel. Which I did. ”
- I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you by that. I asked you to provide a particular example, because your argument was ‘He is cruel therefore can’t be moral’ – how do you expect me to answer this? By saying “No!” ? I suspect such an answer won’t be satisfactory.
Yes you provided examples of his ‘cruelty’ (I certainly wouldn’t be able to answer all those, that would be long. Maybe if you quoted something specific) but that’s your opinion that He’s ‘cruel’, it has no bearing on what I was previously arguing that if a God existed, then He has is the Highest standard of morality.
“Also It takes some serious nerve to accuse someone of emotional rants
- So, you were not ranting emotionally? That is what it seemed. Be that as it may, it wasn’t an accusation.
“when your entire case the belief of god and evidence of his existence is built on 100% pure emotion.”
- Which is, understandably, why you were irked, I apologize. But I wasn’t accusing you, I was asking you to see my argument from a different perspective for awhile.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
Damn, Miguel,
You and I already talked about this and you conceded the point. Morals are socially constructed. Why re-hash?
Whoops, on my last post, I forgot to delete your statement from it:
“Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. ”
There was nothing meant by that.
“To say that there are objective moral values is to say that something is right or wrong independently of whether anybody believes it to be so. It is to say, for example, that Nazi anti Semitism was morally wrong”
I mean, seriously…
You think Nazism is wrong but the genocides committed by the Israelites in the name of God were just fine???? Have you actually READ the bible?
(This is an argument that you just can’t win, guy!)
LRA,
I’m not arguing that the Bible is our basis for interpreting Gods objective moral standards. I was merely implying : On the theistic view, objective moral values are rooted in God. God’s own holy and perfectly good nature supplies the absolute standard against which all actions and decisions are measured. Which is why, Theists believe that God is asking them to, in a sense, praise His moral standards.
The root for this argument was to answer that that God is somehow immoral for asking His followers to worship and praise him right?
And, how, exactly, do you access this source of supposed Ultimate Morality (TM) if not from the bible?
If you want to claim that objective morals are rooted in God, then there must be some way for us to GET those objective morals in the first place. How do we get them if not from the bible?
“And, how, exactly, do you access this source of supposed Ultimate Morality (TM) if not from the bible?
If you want to claim that objective morals are rooted in God, then there must be some way for us to GET those objective morals in the first place. How do we get them if not from the bible?”
-We already see value, the real existence of good, beauty, love, and spiritual aspiration, and see a rational order and morality in the creation. We don’t need the bible to see this, we don’t use the bible to see this. The Christian faith (or a theist worldview in general) simply proclaims the objectivity of these and asserts that universals do exist and can be used to guide thought and action. The faith provides the affirming declaration that truth and morality are fixed and predictible, and available to reason and judgment for the coherent regulation of life.
Ok Miguel– check this out:
Nominalism:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nominalism-metaphysics/
As I said, we construct things that we see as “universal” through things like LANGUAGE.
Free will is based in part upon the regularity of nature, e.g. of cause and effect. Having a will is only important if when you attempt to actualize something, an act pursuant to that will produces a consistent result. If intend to drop something to the ground, I release it from my hand, since experience tells me that whenever I release something from my hand, it drops. A regularity of behavior.
Miracles screw that up by introducing an irregularity into the normal chain of cause and effect. If I release something from my hand, and a team of little angels whisks it up and puts it on the highest shelf in my house, my will to drop something to the ground has been thwarted by those angels.
Get it?
Humans lack the capacity to change the rules of the universe, and so cannot *disrespect* free will in the same way that a God could. We can deny the actualization of someone’s will only by adopting actions within those same rules to thwart them; a competition of wills, like in the above example a person who places their hand below mine and attempts to catch the object as it is falling. What makes what God does different is that he, through miracles, changes the rules so that normal cause and effect are disconnected.
I really think your digging deeper than you should.
I was defending God’s involvement in other peoples free-will.
If I, immorally, impose my will upon you, then I am virtually denying you your ‘free-will’ in some regard.
If we are morally justified in imprisoning or denying the ‘free-will’ of people who immorally infringe upon the free-will of others, why can’t God?
If I, immorally, impose my will upon you, then I am virtually denying you your ‘free-will’ in some regard.
No. This is the difference that you are eliding. A person’s will, if it exists and is free, is free only to the extent that certain decisions produce certain effects. Sometimes we are faced with a situation where our options are reduced by the environment, and sometimes we are faced with a situation in which all the remaining choices are unpleasant. If another person causes such a choice-poor environment intentionally, then they have done us harm, but they have not deprived us of the *capacity* for meaningful choice, which rests only on the knowledge of causality.
If we are morally justified in imprisoning or denying the ‘free-will’ of people who immorally infringe upon the free-will of others, why can’t God?
I find the punishment of crime (that is what you are here referring, yes?) to be one of the most problematic areas of ethics. I don’t think that we can be blithe about the apparent morality of punishment and incarceration, and personally I am not sure it is possible to show it is moral to do so. (At best, one might endorse a ‘least evils’ perspective.)
In any case, a person incarcerated still has the knowledge of the reliability of causality; their free-will is functionally intact, though their options amongst which they may choose are reduced significantly. The complaint is not that God is immoral for depriving a person situationally of free-will, the complaint is that God by utilizing methods outside the chain of causality undermines free-will *itself* universally by undermining the reliability of causality.
Are you actually arguing that whatever “choice” we make under a certain set of facts is not a choice at all but somehow predetermined?
It’s entirely possible.
If that’s the case, how do you account for all the time we spend mulling over difficult decisions?
The psychological perception of free will doesn’t mean it exists. Our brain constructs illusions all the time. For example, our brains construct an entirely unreal perceptive spatial point for visual orientation, even though vision does not operate from one point (it is a stereoscopic overlay of two spatially displaced images, each with a separate perceptive point).
Knowing what we know about the physical universe, it is highly probable (nearly to a degree of certainty) that macroscopic systems obey chains of physical cause-and-effect. If that is true, though, humans, being made of matter, should obey the same causal determinism. There is, after all, nothing special about the “stuff” that makes us up. As Mr. Question points out, the burden is on us free-will advocates to show that such a thing is possible nonetheless, and to show where in the causative model there is room for partially un-caused events.
So the argument is that I have a perception of choice but no actual choice?
Let’s put this in context. For example, there is an item I would like to have – say a big screen TV. You are saying that my weighing of the cost benefit analysis of buying, stealing or not acquiring the TV is of no consequence? My brain predetermines by “phsysical cause and effect” what course of action I will take?
Basically. Having a decision procedure is by itself no evidence that the resulting phenomenon is not entirely determined by the starting state. Computers, in fact, work on this very principle. A computer has a set of algorithms for manipulating data-sets. You enter a piece of data in one end and out the other comes an entirely predictable transformation of that data.
Likewise, you could have an algorithm set in your brain that chomps on the data-set encompassing all relevant points of interest in the issue of buying a TV. It is no less reasonable (and in fact, in light of what we know about the physical world in general and neurobiology in particular, a great deal more reasonable) to assume that there is only one possible outcome for a given set of inputs, than there is several such possible outcomes.
Now, the total quantity and diversity of inputs that enter into the total state of a human mind at any given time is stupefyingly humongous, so it would be impossible to directly test the proposition that given the *exactly* same circumstances a person would only ever make one and the same decision, not least because you are only ever exactly what you are at the given moment you are. Hence the debate; there is no conclusive evidence either way.
The presumption is against free-will because we can discover no explanatory mechanism for how it is that humans, and the stuff we are made out of, is somehow “special” in this way that it doesn’t strictly obey the rules of causality that everything else seems to.
Interesting theory – obviously I’m no expert but it seems counterintuitive. I’m skeptical.
If widely accepted it also could have devastating consequences for the idea of personal responsibility.
How can I argue with that? You win.
But I was arguing for a God who asks us to praise and worship Him.
“If moral rules are merely nomological aspects of this universe, then if there is a God, he is the author of morality.”
– Lets assume this first. If this is true, do you agree then that praising God is like praising ‘the highest standard of morality’ ?
No– because the biblegod is hardly the pinnacle of morality.
Here’s where it really gets fun.
The problem with praising the author of morality on the basis of his authorship is that he is not (obviously) bound by that morality, and so it is unclear that such an act is per se praiseworthy, since the rules that would allow the valuation do not apply to the actor.
Is it good to create morality? How could such a determination be made?
Are virtuous acts pious because the gods love them or do the gods love virtuous acts because they are pious?
“The problem with praising the author of morality on the basis of his authorship is that he is not (obviously) bound by that morality ”
– He isn’t bound by it, He is it, or it is His nature, if you prefer.
Christians believe that God is Holy and moral. Whether you believe this or not has no bearing on the fact that: if the Christian God were real, He wants us to praise Him (praise holiness and morality) for our sake. You will first have to assume that the Christian God is real, before you could be able to assume He is immoral for asking people to praise Him.
A: God exists
B: God authored (created) morality
C: God is the highest standard of morality
The argument is a fallacy as it is begging the question.
Disagree. You are collapsing a piece of the argument by conflating two claims that are not the same, and then collapsing a descriptor into an identity.
“X is the author of Y”, a claim about material causation (X causes Y) is different from the separate claim “X is the arbiter of value of Y”, a claim about normative implication. You are here eliding the is/ought distinction by collapsing them into one.
And then there is no justification for you to make the move “God is value bearer of morality” to “God is morality”; this is a metonymy, always inappropriate in deduction.
The real mistake with Miguel’s argument is that it is not an argument at all; just an assertion of two independent premises (1. God created morality, 2. God is the arbiter of morality) neither of which entail the other.
It is entirely possible to create something and not be the definitive value bearer for that thing; the paradigmatic example is the normative relation between parents and children. Parents are not the arbiters of the value of their children. It is also possible to be the definitive value bearer of something one has not created. The paradigmatic example here is the creation of a technology by a scientist that has practical implications far beyond what he considered when he or she created it; those affected by its existence can lay greater claim to arbitrate value than the creator.
@Elemenope,
I agree with your careful dissection of my hasty interpretation of Miguel’s ‘argument’. As you have pointed out it is merely an assertion of two premises, although the wording tries to portray it as an argument.
I suppose we can only ask Miguel to justify either one, or both, of his premises or assertions.
“The real mistake with Miguel’s argument is that it is not an argument at all; just an assertion of two independent premises (1. God created morality, 2. God is the arbiter of morality) neither of which entail the other. ”
– So, the guy who created the game of ‘chess’ was not the final arbiter of the rules of ‘chess’? Can I make my own rules while playing the game, and still call it a ‘chess’ game?
“It is entirely possible to create something and not be the definitive value bearer for that thing; the paradigmatic example is the normative relation between parents and children. Parents are not the arbiters of the value of their children.”
- Your analogy is flawed since the relationship of a parent to a child is galactically different from the relationship of a creator to its creation. Only the designer of something can assign a ‘definitive value’ of anything on that something. If I invented a spoon for eating, that is exactly what the purpose of the spoon would be – scooping food for eating. The spoon (assuming it was self knowing) might subjectively assign meaning to itself and think that he is for digging dirt – that subjective assignment of meaning in no way changes the fact that the spoon is and only will be for scooping food and eating. Only the designer is in a position to know his intention; all others can only speculate concerning his intention.
“The paradigmatic example here is the creation of a technology by a scientist that has practical implications far beyond what he considered when he or she created it; those affected by its existence can lay greater claim to arbitrate value than the creator.”
- Again, your analogy isn’t sound. A scientist will use knowledge he gained from ‘science’ in the creation of the technology – thus, he may have the prerogative to define exactly what his new creation is for, but this creation stemmed from a ‘body of knowledge’ that was formed collectively – he thus cannot be the sole arbiter of its value.
If I designed a new board game, players, without the set of instructions for the new board game, can only have opinions as to how the game is designed to be played. They don’t know, with certainty, the objective intent of its designer. But when the designer reveals the objective purpose of the game through written instructions and rules, he objectively states his intention. The designer is the authority concerning his design; he is the objective authority when it comes to purpose of the design because only he can know, with certainty, its purpose.
“- I’d argue it this way.
A: God exists
B: God authored (created) morality
C: God is the sole arbiter of what is moral and what is not.”
C remains an assertion. You seem to have introduced another premise: ‘An author (creator) is the sole arbiter of his creation.’ With this premise your argument appear have formal logic, however that does not make the argument sound. You are yet to justify premise B.
“We already see morality in creation.”
Yet, we do not observe morality to be fixed. Even if God was the sole arbiter of what is moral and what is not, it would not follow that morality is necessarily fixed or absolute.
“How does man ‘create’ morality?”
I was not asserting that argument being true, just highlighting the ‘logic’ in your argument. So the question is how does God author (create) morality?
If only God can know, with certainty, what the correct moral code is, then this objective morality might as well be non-existant. I mean, if we can’t know what it is, then it is not of much use for us.
Unless, it is somehow revealed to us, of course. And the Bible is supposed to reveal this objective morality? With all its errancies and contradictions, please, you be hard pressed to find a book more open to subjective speculation than the Bible.
If we are just speculating about the what the objective morality is, aren’t we in essence authoring our own morality?
Miguel attempts…”So, the guy who created the game of ‘chess’ was not the final arbiter of the rules of ‘chess’? Can I make my own rules while playing the game, and still call it a ‘chess’ game?”
‘Sorry….’terribly lacking analogy, IMO.
The objective of the game of chess is to *win*. The objective of “morality”, is either a) the avoidance of unnecessary harm to human beings(Naturalist approach), or b) obeying “God’s Word” because of its supposed intrinsic “moral” goodness(Theistic approach)
I argue, and have been arguing, that the answer is “a”. Again, while “thou shalt not kill” applies *sometimes*, it does not apply ALL of the time. In other words, it’s NOT absolute. ‘Same goes for being deliberately deceptive…aka “lying”. Some times lying is the ethical thing to do.
Miguel, we do not get our sense of “morality” from a “Divine” source.
Only the designer is in a position to know his intention; all others can only speculate concerning his intention.
There is a world of difference between purpose and value. I would argue that intention is nearly irrelevant to value in most cases.
Take duct tape. It was intended to be used to fix pipes and ducts. That was its created purpose.
Its value, on the other hand, is derived not only from its purpose (which it still achieves on occasion), but from all the things that people not its inventor found duct tape is absolutely awesome for. Its value is not determined by its intended purpose to fix ducts, but by its actual use in a myriad of other, originally unintended applications.
“Yet, we do not observe morality to be fixed. Even if God was the sole arbiter of what is moral and what is not, it would not follow that morality is necessarily fixed or absolute. ”
– I would say that morality is absolute. However, this was not the premise I was initially arguing for.
“I was not asserting that argument being true, just highlighting the ‘logic’ in your argument.”
- There is no logic in substituting ‘God’ for ‘Man’, because, by definition, one can author/create anything, and the other cannot (anything that would transcendental in nature that is), and that was my point.
“So the question is how does God author (create) morality?”
– I wouldn’t know the answer to this.
“The objective of the game of chess is to *win*. The objective of “morality”, is either a) the avoidance of unnecessary harm to human beings(Naturalist approach), or b) obeying “God’s Word” because of its supposed intrinsic “moral” goodness(Theistic approach)”
- The objective of the ‘game of chess’ is to win, but there are rules. The objective of the ‘game of life’ is to win, but there are rules (morality [in the theistic approach]).
A guy creates the game of chess, God creates the game of life.
The guy creates the rules for ‘the game of chess’, God creates the rules for the ‘game of life’
Nah, I think my analogy is sound.
“I argue, and have been arguing, that the answer is “a”. Again, while “thou shalt not kill” applies *sometimes*, it does not apply ALL of the time. In other words, it’s NOT absolute. ‘Same goes for being deliberately deceptive…aka “lying”. Some times lying is the ethical thing to do.”
- Ok, but I wasn’t arguing that those examples you just mentioned are moral absolutes, so I don’t get what you are trying to say.
“Miguel, we do not get our sense of “morality” from a “Divine” source.”
- But if we did, would you agree that praising this “divine source” is the same as praising a high standard of morality? This was the initial argument, remember?
@ miguel
” But if we did, would you agree that praising this “divine source” is the same as praising a high standard of morality? This was the initial argument, remember? ”
I would not agree with this statement because how can you get past god drowning babies during the flood of Noah being moral.
Whenever you praise the Invisible Sky Daddy of the bible you are praising someone who-
Said folks should be happy after bashing babies heads on rocks. Psalms 137:9
Who created babies only to drown them.
Who gave instructions on selling ones daughter into slavery. Exodus 21:7-11
Even if you could prove that your god did exist (which you cant because he uses his power to hide from you) how to you possibly add that up to mean that god is morality.
Unless morality for god means something different than it does for man.
So Miguel why are humans being, whom god created flawed held to a higher standard of morality than your perfect god?
For example you claim that god is moral, but it is a fact that your god caused human babies during the flood to drown. If I caused babies to drown or failed to act if I could save a drowning baby I don’t think anyone would consider me moral.
@ miguel
“Are you saying that the events that transpired in your story are evil? They may seem like “ugly” events, but they are not evil. Lions and elephants do not have the ability to ponder on the rightness or wrongness of a decision. ”
Miguel I was responding to your reasoning for the existence of god part of which was-
” We already see value, the real existence of good, beauty, love, and spiritual aspiration, and see a rational order and morality in the creation. ”
This is your statement, you mentioned the real existence of good and beauty to imply gods existence.
I gave you some examples of things that exist that are not beautiful in response to your claim of the beautiful things in nature being proof of gods existence.
I responded to your explanation for the proof of god.
” What then, do we mean by ’suffer’? If we limit the definition of suffering to physical pain, then we have to acknowledge that loving parents permit their children to suffer pain, at least to some degree, when they allow them to have immunization shots, or undergo chemotherapy ”
A parent may allow their child to suffer the pain of getting needles for what they see as a greater good. A greater good such as avoiding chicken pox, small pox or the measles.
Also a parents options are limited, either you get a child all of their shots and vaccinations or you run the risk of them coming down with something possibly life threatening in the future.
Your god is not limited, his options are infinite. You (and other Christians) are the ones making specific claims about god being objective morality. You are the one who implied that beautiful things on the planet were proof of gods existence and you did it with out offering any justification for it.
I would really love to know how can you give the ultimate supreme, divine, loving creator credit for all of the good things on the planet but you don’t give him credit for all of the bad things.
Its funny how your god who created everything including evil is somehow not responsible for the evil that exist on the planet.
Miguel: “God knows that our physical destruction is not an end to our existence. Of what significance is an hour of physical suffering compared to eternity? Of what significance is a lifetime of suffering compared to eternity? We can conclude that from God’s perspective, our physical suffering is relatively insignificant. This is not to say that He is unsympathetic or oblivious to our pain; loving parents feel empathy when their child receives a shot, knowing full well that the pain is inconsequential.”
This all sounds perfectly logical and makes sense BUT why wouldn’t God just create us as eternal beings to begin with? Why dump us on this little ball of dirt for a fleeting blink of time to live a practically worthless, insignificant mortal life of pain and suffering? As a matter of fact your logic points to the conclusion that from “God’s perspective” human life is worth very, very little indeed.
“I gave you some examples of things that exist that are not beautiful in response to your claim of the beautiful things in nature being proof of gods existence.”
-Firstly, if there is no ‘universal standard’ in which to compare the “ugly” things you just mentioned. Then your opinion that these things aren’t beautiful is just that, an opinion. While we both think that it seems “ugly” when a lion eats a baby elephant, some people do not share this ‘opinion’ and may think it is not “ugly” – who are we to say that they are wrong? Were you arguing for absolutes here?
Secondly, while I agree nature was ultimately created by God, I wasn’t arguing that beautiful things were created by God, whereas ugly things were not.
I took your comment to mean one thing: Why does a moral God allow suffering or evil. So this is what I tried to argue for.
“Your god is not limited, his options are infinite.”
- (This really wasn’t the topic I was arguing for, but ok. ) Wrong, His options are limited. He cannot create a holy and moral people without giving them a choice to to be ‘immoral’. Thus, people can choose to do “ugly” things. The “ugly” or evil things men do is not evidence of an error on God’s part, but evidence that He has succeeded in creating ‘free-will’ agents.
“You are the one who implied that beautiful things on the planet were proof of gods existence and you did it with out offering any justification for it.”
– I implied no such thing. “We already see value, the real existence of good, beauty, love, and spiritual aspiration, and see a rational order and morality in the creation.” – Thats what I said. I was implying that without a God, all these concepts are subjective, therefore, who are we to say that they are “beautiful or ugly” things? If we agree that there are universals, then we have to account for where these universals come from.
Miguel: ” ‘We already see value, the real existence of good, beauty, love, and spiritual aspiration, and see a rational order and morality in the creation’.
What on earth do you mean by something’s “real existence”? You mean, as opposed to UNreal existence?
Also, you should really refrain from saying “we” see this, that, and the other thing in “the creation”. Yes, *you* may see “spiritual apsiration” in “the creation”. However, neither concept has been confirmed, thus, it remains your *opinion*.
And again, to my knowledge, you have not substantiated the notion that there is an “objective moral standard”(your term), and that it comes from a Divine source, i.e..”God”, let alone, from biblegod. Simply asserting a propostion as “fact” without credible evidence is the fallacy of bare assertion.
“What on earth do you mean by something’s “real existence”? You mean, as opposed to UNreal existence? ”
- You mean you didn’t know what I meant? Or was this retort done for the sake of being contentious?
“Also, you should really refrain from saying “we” see this, that, and the other thing in “the creation”. Yes, *you* may see “spiritual apsiration” in “the creation”. However, neither concept has been confirmed, thus, it remains your *opinion*”
– Thank you for your *opinion*, however, in my *opinion*, I should disagree.
“And again, to my knowledge, you have not substantiated the notion that there is an “objective moral standard”(your term), and that it comes from a Divine source, i.e..”God” ”
- I was not trying to prove that “there is an objective moral standard and that it comes from a Divine source, i.e.. God”. I was arguing that, if objective moral standards exist, then it must come from God.
“Simply asserting a propostion as “fact” without credible evidence is the fallacy of bare assertion.”
- Are you asserting the opposite? If Objective moral standards exist, they don’t come from God? If so, “Simply asserting a propostion as “fact” without credible evidence is the fallacy of bare assertion.”
Boom, stop arguing with this knucklehead. He hasn’t met a logical fallacy he wouldn’t use.
“Are you asserting the opposite? If Objective moral standards exist, they don’t come from God? If so, “Simply asserting a propostion as “fact” without credible evidence is the fallacy of bare assertion.”
Seriously, Mikey, this is a mess.
You are asserting that Objective moral standards exist, with no evidence.
THEN, you make an If A, Then B statement when you say “If objective morality moral standards exist, then the come from god.” But even if I grant you the A premise, the existence of objective morality, that still doesn’t do anything to prove your B conclusion, that this must come from god.
You are asserting left and right, with nothing resembling an actual argument or evidence.
And no, Boom is not making the opposite assertion. He is merely pointing out that your assertion contains no evidence to support it. Those are two different things.
First, I would appreciate it if you’d stop being rude.
“You are asserting that Objective moral standards exist, with no evidence. ”
- No. This is what I was initially arguing:
“Isn’t there more to God than just the being of an entity? What are people worshipping when they worship God? They are worshipping an objective moral standard. What good does it do to continuously praise a moral standard? I would have to say that praising a standard would ensure that those praising it would honor it and try to live by it.”
I was arguing for that statement. You have to assume that God exists before you can assume that He is immoral for asking people to praise him. If you assume God exists, then you assume objective morality exists. I wasn’t trying to prove or give evidence for objective morality.
“And no, Boom is not making the opposite assertion. He is merely pointing out that your assertion contains no evidence to support it. Those are two different things.”
- My assertion is that if God exists then objective moral standards exist.
According to Boom, this was what he was arguing :
“I argue, and have been arguing, that the answer is “a”. Again, while “thou shalt not kill” applies *sometimes*, it does not apply ALL of the time. In other words, it’s NOT absolute. ‘Same goes for being deliberately deceptive…aka “lying”. Some times lying is the ethical thing to do.”
Isn’t that an argument for the bible having no objective morality? Thus under the premise that God exists, objective morality does not come from him?
Miguel: “- My assertion is that if God exists then objective moral standards exist.”
Again, *what* information, and/or, revealed knowledge do you base this conclusion on?!?!?
To review, you were willing to eliminate “BibleGod” from the equation for sake of argument[paraphrased from a previous post]. Fine; done; gone. Biblegod is out of the equation(not only because you’re willing to eliminate said deity, but because, as I and others have illustrated, “Morality” does NOT come from the “Body of Christ”(or any other religiously revealed “Truth”)
Now, with that hopefully out of the way…
Miguel….when you refer to “God” in your above hypothetical, are you refering to a Deistic, nonpersonal deity? I don’t think you are, as a nonpersonal deity would obviously be impartial to humans and their code of ethics.
So, that leaves you taking a Theistic position. Thus, until I hear otherwise, you are refering to personal deity who created the Universe to revolve around humankind, and who obviously *does* take an interest in human ethics. Thus, to be able to *KNOW* what “standard” this hypothetical deity seeks to have us follow, you’d need to have communication/correpsepondence with said deity. If the Christian philosophy is eliminated from the argument, how would we *know* what this “Higher Standard” is? If you will suggest it’s innate, then this argues for Naturalism, and against Theism.
Elemenope,
Following our hypothetical of God creating/authoring morality, I think this ultimately falls under ‘purpose’. Although we can also ask questions on its value, if we follow our answers to its logical end it will be a question on what is its ‘purpose’.
“If we are just speculating about the what the objective morality is, aren’t we in essence authoring our own morality? ”
- But if we believe objective morality exists, then we are subjectively interpreting an objective reality. If we believe it does not exist, then what is the purpose of subjectively trying to interpret a very subjective reality?
brgulker,
What do you think it is specifically about the religious motives which makes them compelling reasons to pursue just actions? Why should we follow any of them, and if so, how do we select which standard to follow?
Let me be clear: I’m not trying to persuade anyone of any particular religion. I’m not trying to convince anyone that religion is even the best or exclusive motive for doing good or for pursuing justice.
Rather, I am observing that religious people do a lot of good in the world and pursue justice in the world.
(I know they do evil, too, let’s not chase that rabbit for the sake of discussion)
I brought this up because that’s the point of the post seems to be that doing good doesn’t depend on religious superstition; rather, it depends on us.
My point is that “religious superstition” actually is the motive for a lot of people who do good works. If you deconstruct that for those people, then what do you put in its place? If you remove religion from them for the sake of rationality, etc., then you are also taking away their motive for justice, albeit unintentionally.
So, if you are going to pursue arguing that justice is our responsibility, don’t you have the responsibility to provide a reason why we should care about justice in the first place?
===========
Concerning religious motives for justice, I am really only qualified to speak from the Christian perspective — and I’m in a big hurry. So here’s a brief attempt. More to come tomorrow, if wanted/needed:
The Christian belief is that God lovingly created the world and all its inhabitants (animals, plants, humans, etc) and gave human beings a charge to be stewards of that creation.
Moreover, Christians believe that God loved that creation so much that God entered into that creation in the form of a created being in order to demonstrate what human life can and should look like
(Jesus).
In short, we love and should do good for others because we are all equally God’s creation and children. In other words, we are all one family and united. Hence, the call to love one’s neighbor as oneself.
==============
If you deconstruct all of that for another person, then I think you should at least present an alternative.
I want to know what that alternative is. Why should I care about someone else? Because I have chemicals in my brain that produce the feeling of compassion? For me, that just doesn’t cut it.
I agree that we are responsible and that it’s on us — I get that part of it. What I want to know is why I should give a damn.
Sure, it’s on me. But what do I care if Africans are exploited as slaves and prostitutes? If my perception is that life and the universe is accidental, then my default posture to others is disconnectedness. And it’s awfully hard to care about someone from whom I am inherently disconnected.
Does my question make sense?
brgulker,
I understand your purpose, and your question.
“My point is that “religious superstition” actually is the motive for a lot of people who do good works.”
I definitely agree with that. I have met many religious people who do good works, and I agree that it can be a motivating factor for them.
I acknowledge that religious people do a lot of good in this world, and some of it is because of religion.
“So, if you are going to pursue arguing that justice is our responsibility, don’t you have the responsibility to provide a reason why we should care about justice in the first place?”
I believe you are correct.
“In short, we love and should do good for others because we are all equally God’s creation and children. In other words, we are all one family and united. Hence, the call to love one’s neighbor as oneself.”
I think I understand that. This is why I don’t like Lewis’s “Lord, Liar, Lunatic”. I do think that there was probably a Jesus-like character who was a good moral teacher, for the most part. Lewis does not mention that someone could have existed like Jesus, and that his followers could have exaggerated his characteristics. Anyway, that is a tangential point. What I’m trying to say is, I think Christianity does provide some positive moral teachings, without regard for its spiritual claims.
“If you deconstruct all of that for another person, then I think you should at least present an alternative.
I want to know what that alternative is. Why should I care about someone else? Because I have chemicals in my brain that produce the feeling of compassion? For me, that just doesn’t cut it.
I agree that we are responsible and that it’s on us — I get that part of it. What I want to know is why I should give a damn.”
Why should you care about other people?
I don’t know for certain, brgulker.
Here’s a question for you: why should you love your family?
Because you have chemicals in your brain that produce the feelings of committment and devotion? That doesn’t cut it for me, either.
If it were somehow hypothetically revealed to you that Christianity was not true, would you still love your family? Would you still try to treat other people decently? Would you still be pained by human suffering? I think you would.
But ultimately, why should you?
I don’t know for sure.
I would surmise that you should care about other people because you want to be treated well, and you realize that other people have worth and dignity because of their humanity, which is shared with you. Maybe it’s because you want to make as much of a positive difference as you can in this existence, and you want to make it better for those whom you share it with. Again, I don’t know for sure.
I wish I had more answers, but I don’t.
“If it were somehow hypothetically revealed to you that Christianity was not true, would you still love your family? Would you still try to treat other people decently? Would you still be pained by human suffering? I think you would.”
To the former question, yes, I would still love my family — but I do have a life’s worth of experience with them to fall back on if my current worldview were disassembled.
To the latter question, I suppose I can’t say I really know, as I’ve never had my worldview completely disassembled — although I’ve certainly been close on more than one occasion. I suppose that compassion would still be real for me… but I’m not convinced I would feel motivated to act for justice on behalf of a complete stranger. I’m just not sure about that part.
I would surmise that you should care about other people because you want to be treated well, and you realize that other people have worth and dignity because of their humanity, which is shared with you.
Yeah, I suppose the common humanity argument is the best one I’ve heard. The problem is, if you assume that the universe is inherently indifferent, then what is the inherent dignity and quality of human life? If humanity has simply come to be with no ultimate rhyme or reason, then it becomes very difficult for me to understand why I should care about strangers who share that humanity if it is not inherently valuable.
@ miguel
” We all feel this. But if you follow the conclusion, that we have no objective purpose, to its logical end – then why should humanity have worth and dignity? ”
Maybe because being kind to others and assisting others in need is of benefit to all of society in a larger sense.
What I don’t understand is what bases do you make the statement that objective morality comes from god when your belief in god is not objective.
What evidence do you have or what argument will you use to show that objective morality comes from god especially given the fact that every religion or god belief is purely subjective.
How can you go around claiming that a being that you can only prove through subject reasoning is where we get objective morality from.
That’s like saying Santa Claus exist, then in spite of the fact that their is zero evidence for the existence in Santa Claus you go on to claim that this being that you haven’t proven is the author of objective morality.
“Maybe because being kind to others and assisting others in need is of benefit to all of society in a larger sense. ”
– And if it is, why is that good? Logically argue why helping society is good (We both know its good, but logically prove to me we are both right in thinking it is “good” )
“What I don’t understand is what bases do you make the statement that objective morality comes from god when your belief in god is not objective.”
- I don’t have to go that far. If objective reality does exist, then we are subjectively trying to interpret an objective reality. If it doesn’t, logically argue what use there is in attempting to subjectively interpret a very subjective reality.
in realizing that morality is relative and, therefore, subjective, one must conclude that morality can only have a subjective reality. There simply isn’t any evidence that would lead us to believe in an objective moral reality, other than the fact that we as individuals ‘feel’ that our own opinions are somehow more right than the opinions of others. When we give our subjective opinions concerning that which can only have a subjective reality, what are those opinions really worth? We find ourselves desperately scratching at an illusion that we must deceptively maintain in order to preserve our justice system and maintain the ‘order’ of our society.
If we are interested in truth and not persisting in an illusion simply because of the negative consequences of rejecting that illusion, we have to admit that there really is no right or wrong. And if no real standard of right and wrong exists, then why bother to try and find it and exert energy trying to convince others that your morality is superior to theirs?
Once we have become enlightened to the nature of non-existant morality, logically we should become apathetic to both ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ doings.
Belief in God provides us with yet another opinion concerning morality. Whether or not this divine opinion is arrived at arbitrarily, or through independent human reasoning, makes no difference, because I am not addressing what God’s opinion may be, but rather the possibility that His opinion is an objective reality. The opinion of such a designer, wouldn’t qualify as an opinion, but rather it becomes a standard by definition of the role that a designer fulfills.
I would like to stress that the above is not an argument for God’s existence. It is a case that attempts to demonstrate the necessity of God as a basis for any concept of morality, no matter what that morality may entail.
Maybe because being kind to others and assisting others in need is of benefit to all of society in a larger sense.
You still have the same problem that I highlighted earlier.
Instead of assuming the inherent dignity of the human person, you are assuming the inherent dignity of society.
My point is not to argue for an objective morality that comes from God; rather, my point is this: if “you” are going to deconstruct the worldview that provides the impetus for responsible social action, then “you” need to offer a convincing alternative.
In other words, if one of the benefits of a religious worldview is responsible social action, and if that worldview is deconstructed, then the unintended consequence is: one is left without any impetus to care about justice and goodness.
Appealing to common human dignity only works if you can demonstrate that human dignity actually exists, i.e., that human life is inherently meaningful and ultimately worth caring about. However, if you assume that human life is ultimately accidental and that the universe is ultimately indifferent to us, then you’ve completely undercut the dignity and inherent worth of human life.
Yes, we all of this shared human experience, but if it’s ultimately not meaningful, then what’s the point of giving that shared experience any further thought? It certainly can’t be used as the grounds for justice and goodness, can it? If so, I want to know how. And I want that argument to be rational and consistent so that it’s not hypocritical.
Moving from the individual to the society raises the exact same question, but in a different form. Most of us value society because we’re looking out for our own good, a type of social contract I suppose. However, that worldview only encourages people to not do harm to another person – it does not offer any motivation to do good.
Most of us blindly assume that the good of society should be desired. I’m asking all of us why we assume that and how, if at all, the worldview that produces that assumption can motivate someone to act justly.
We act justly for the good of society! But why should I give a damn about the good of society? There has to be some inherent value in it for me to care about it, right?
@ miguel
” – And if it is, why is that good? Logically argue why helping society is good (We both know its good, but logically prove to me we are both right in thinking it is “good” ) ”
Dude why are you playing games, right and wrong are not absolutes. Prove to me that your Invisible Sky Daddy exist.
Once you have proven the existence of your Invisible Sky Daddy then prove to me that you have picked the correct Sky Daddy. As you know thousands of them have been claimed.
” – I don’t have to go that far. If objective reality does exist, then we are subjectively trying to interpret an objective reality. If it doesn’t, logically argue what use there is in attempting to subjectively interpret a very subjective reality. ”
You haven’t proven objective reality yet, you haven’t even given an explanation for what you mean when you use the term objective reality.
Miguel why all of the Intellectual Gymnastics.
Some of your statements are beyond incoherent.
” in realizing that morality is relative and, therefore, subjective, one must conclude that morality can only have a subjective reality. There simply isn’t any evidence that would lead us to believe in an objective moral reality ”
You are the one who brought up objective reality coming from god, others have pointed out to you clearly that their is no such thing as absolute morality yet you still keep making this claim. I have never stated anywhere that their is a such thing as objective morality.
”
We find ourselves desperately scratching at an illusion that we must deceptively maintain in order to preserve our justice system and maintain the ‘order’ of our society. ”
What is your point, we (humans) create all kinds social constructs and programs to better organize and make since of our lives.
” Belief in God provides us with yet another opinion concerning morality. Whether or not this divine opinion is arrived at arbitrarily, or through independent human reasoning, makes no difference, because I am not addressing what God’s opinion may be, but rather the possibility that His opinion is an objective reality. ”
That may be but belief in a personal god is not proof of gods existence. Also exactly what is gods opinion concerning morality since you made the statement in the first place.
How on earth could you possible know that gods opinion is an objective reality.
How can you claim a being you have absolutely no proof for has an opinion and that opinion is in fact objective morality.
You should have a reason for making a statement such as this which you don’t, or which you refuse to provide.
I have asked you clearly in our back and forth what do you base the statement of objective reality being from god on and you haven’t answered.
Basically what your doing is claiming that god exist and that he is morality but not offering a shred of proof for either claim.
” And if no real standard of right and wrong exists, then why bother to try and find it and exert energy trying to convince others that your morality is superior to theirs? ”
Generally speaking I don’t, but when holy rollers such as yourself make absolute and exclusive stating that morality comes from bible god I do feel an urge to point out how ridiculous and without foundation your statement is.
So far in our back and forth you have offered no rational reason for why you believe your god is objective morality and even after being rebutted on this point you still keep making this claim. How dishonest you are.
Also your god can go shove, I don’t get my morality from your bible or god. I do kind and good things in my community because I enjoy working with and helping people. I enjoy it because you don’t have to be rich or smart to volunteer your time and energy.
” I would like to stress that the above is not an argument for God’s existence. It is a case that attempts to demonstrate the necessity of God as a basis for any concept of morality, no matter what that morality may entail. ”
Excuse me. Your case is flawed my friend, how can you prove that something is derived from something else without proving the existence of what it is derived from. Your last statement is beyond retarded.
Id love to know why your divine, perfect and holy god is allowed to drown babies during the flood of Noah and and yet you still consider him moral.
Please read again and tell me if you really believe it.
@ miguel
” The opinion of such a designer, wouldn’t qualify as an opinion, but rather it becomes a standard by definition of the role that a designer fulfills. ”
All of this is speculation, you have no way of knowing any of this. This statement is worse than retarded. Please provide a bases for this reasoning otherwise I ( or anyone else) could make a similar statement with Santa Claus being the designer and morality.
It isn’t good. It’s morally neutral. What it is is evolutionarily successful.
Societies are stronger when individuals work together. This increases the likelihood of survival for a greater number of individuals and thus the society.
Hence the development of sympathy, empathy, and that great fraud altruism.
“Dude why are you playing games, right and wrong are not absolutes. Prove to me that your Invisible Sky Daddy exist. ”
– I’m not playing games, can you logically argue, given your subjective reality, why ‘helping people’ is good and ‘killing people’ is bad, or not?
“Once you have proven the existence of your Invisible Sky Daddy then prove to me that you have picked the correct Sky Daddy. As you know thousands of them have been claimed.”
- Irrelevant to the point of our argument. I was arguing that a “sky daddy” gave us objective purpose and morality, while your “sky daddy(less)” reality, is you, blindly, interpreting a reality that YOU already know is subjective. Why then were you arguing a while ago that ‘lions killing baby elephants’ was ugly? You already agree that your reality is subjective, so logically argue that that was an “ugly/evil” event as you described it earlier. You can’t, can you?
“You haven’t proven objective reality yet, you haven’t even given an explanation for what you mean when you use the term objective reality.”
- You mean you don’t know what the term ‘objective reality’ is? I don’t have to prove it, simply asserting that one exists gives credence to my subjectively trying to interpret it. Its like I say the sun is round, and I *think* its yellow, while you (in your reality) are saying *maybe* there is a sun, and *maybe* I think its yellow.
“Miguel why all of the Intellectual Gymnastics.
Some of your statements are beyond incoherent.”
– English is not my first language, is it? I honestly think I’m explaining myself quite well. There is no mental gymnastics involved. What about this statement don’t you understand? : If we believe objective morality exists, then we are subjectively trying to interpret an objective reality. If we believe it doesn’t exist, why should we even attempt to subjectively make sense of what we already know to be a subjective reality? While I’m trying to learn chess using the chess pieces, knowing that there is a way to play chess, you on the other hand are attempting to play chess without any pieces while simultaneously knowing ‘chess games’ don’t exist!
“Generally speaking I don’t, but when holy rollers such as yourself make absolute and exclusive stating that morality comes from bible god I do feel an urge to point out how ridiculous and without foundation your statement is.”
- Where did I even make that claim?
“What is your point, we (humans) create all kinds social constructs and programs to better organize and make since of our lives.”
- Tell me, why would you like to make since(sense?) of your life?
“How on earth could you possible know that gods opinion is an objective reality.”
- Only designers know the purpose of their creations, others can only speculate. Therefore, if God exists, his opinion is objective since, by definition, we are His creation.
“How can you claim a being you have absolutely no proof for has an opinion and that opinion is in fact objective morality.”
– His opinion is an objective reality because He is our creator. Secondly, I wasn’t trying to give proof for a creator, I was showing you the futility of subjectively making sense of what you already see as a subjective reality – why can’t you get this?
“Basically what your doing is claiming that god exist and that he is morality but not offering a shred of proof for either claim.”
- Lol! No I wasn’t! While I believe all that, that wasn’t what I was initially stating, you pulled that out of the air.
“So far in our back and forth you have offered no rational reason for why you believe your god is objective morality and even after being rebutted on this point you still keep making this claim. How dishonest you are.”
- Its getting tedious explaining to you what I was “claiming”. Maybe you could read my previous posts, it seems your not getting this.
“Also your god can go shove, I don’t get my morality from your bible or god. I do kind and good things in my community because I enjoy working with and helping people. I enjoy it because you don’t have to be rich or smart to volunteer your time and energy.”
– Er.. Ok.
“Excuse me. Your case is flawed my friend, how can you prove that something is derived from something else without proving the existence of what it is derived from. Your last statement is beyond retarded.”
– No, my friend, You did not understand a word I just said.
“Id love to know why your divine, perfect and holy god is allowed to drown babies during the flood of Noah and and yet you still consider him moral.”
- I’d like to know why you think this is immoral, especially when you yourself think that morality is ‘subjective’. Who are you say that was an immoral act?
@ miguel
“Dude why are you playing games, right and wrong are not absolutes. Prove to me that your Invisible Sky Daddy exist. ”
- I’m not playing games, can you logically argue, given your subjective reality, why ‘helping people’ is good and ‘killing people’ is bad, or not?
If you kill someone trying to kill your family or harm you, my personal opinion is, this is not a bad or unjust thing. I say this because as a living being if I were attacked or seriously injured that could cause me or damage my life. If I am gone I cannot help and be there for my family and friends.
Helping people is not necessarily a good thing, it can be but not necessarily. I feel great when I do things in the community (especially with kids and teenagers) that help people.
I cannot, will not and will never argue that helping someone or killing someone is always either good or bad. For example helping someone to harm another person is definitely not good in my opinion conversely if I shot and killed my sisters estranged husband who had a knife to her neck and was getting ready to kill her I don’t think that is bad.
” Why then were you arguing a while ago that ‘lions killing baby elephants’ was ugly? You already agree that your reality is subjective, so logically argue that that was an “ugly/evil” event as you described it earlier. You can’t, can you? ”
My statement about lions eating baby elephants alive was in response to your statement below.
“We already see value, the real existence of good, beauty, love, and spiritual aspiration, and see a rational order and morality in the creation. We don’t need the bible to see this, we don’t use the bible to see this. ”
If you want me to define ugly and evil you have to define what beauty and love is, otherwise you are playing word games.
” – You mean you don’t know what the term ‘objective reality’ is? ”
I asked what you meant by objective reality and I asked because of the games you have been playing. Please answer my question that way Ill be much clearer on where you are coming from.
You are the one who keeps talking about objective morality so I asked you to explain what exactly you mean when you say that. This is not an unfair question because you are the one who claimed that god is objective reality.
” While I’m trying to learn chess using the chess pieces, knowing that there is a way to play chess, you on the other hand are attempting to play chess without any pieces while simultaneously knowing ‘chess games’ don’t exist! ”
Once again you are wrong, I don’t know if their is a god or not, I have seen no evidence of any god so I conclude if there is a god he doesnt want me to find him. I conclude this because he is hiding.
I find your chess statement to be so fucking retarded because not only do you assume your interpretation of how to play chess is correct, you assume that without investigating any of the other thousands of ways to play chess that your way is the only way to play chess. If I don’t think the chess pieces exist it is not because I have an inclination to not believe chess exist it is because I have not seen a shred of evidence any chess pieces or board.
The burden of proof for your invisible sky daddy is not on me, it is on you to prove the existence of your Sky Daddy you are the one making the claim of his existence.
The reason why I think drowning babies is immoral and evil is because I have nieces, nephews, lots of cousins and friends all of whom started out as babies and I would hate to see the pain on the faces of parents who children have drowned. Also I would hate to see the pain on the faces of mothes and fathers all over the world if your Invisible Sky Daddy decided to drown his beloved humans again.
“- No, my friend, You did not understand a word I just said. ”
This is your statement which generated my response.
“I would like to stress that the above is not an argument for God’s existence. It is a case that attempts to demonstrate the necessity of God as a basis for any concept of morality, no matter what that morality may entail. ”
My response to this statement was.
Excuse me. Your case is flawed my friend, how can you prove that something is derived from something else without proving the existence of what it is derived from. Your last statement is beyond retarded.
On Exactly what do you base your claim I didn’t understand what you wrote. You have not demonstrated your case that morality comes from god, making that statement doesn’t make it so.
Dude you are playing games, how is it that you can claim you have made a case for god being the basis of morality, but you have not proved gods existence.
You have not offered not one shred of evidence for the existence of that god you claim morality comes from that isn’t circular or subjective.
This last statement of your proves Ty correct you are a knuckle head.
Below is what I said.
“Id love to know why your divine, perfect and holy god is allowed to drown babies during the flood of Noah and and yet you still consider him moral.”
This is your response.
- I’d like to know why you think this is immoral, especially when you yourself think that morality is ’subjective’. Who are you say that was an immoral act?
I think drowning babies is immoral because I think causing unnecessary harm to human beings is immoral.
I find it hard to believe that you would defend a god who makes laws against eating clams but says nothing about selling ones daughter into slavery or slavery in general by asking me why I think drowning babies is wrong.
If you are not a coward please answer why god could drowning thousands of babies and you still consider him moral.
What, the Golden Rule doesn’t work for you?
“Do as you would be done by.”
–Motivation and clear instruction all in one short sentence.
” Instead of assuming the inherent dignity of the human person, you are assuming the inherent dignity of society. ”
This pure and other non sense, society is made up of individuals. My family members and friends have to grow up in this world/society.
I am more than willing to sacrifice some of my time and energy to make a better community/world/society for my young relatives. In fact I am more than willing to do things to help people (even strangers I don’t know) because community service is something I very strongly believe in and am committed to.
“All of this is speculation, you have no way of knowing any of this. This statement is worse than retarded. Please provide a bases for this reasoning otherwise I ( or anyone else)”
I have no way of knowing what role a designer fills, by the definition of the word? Can I not just look at a dictionary or look how the word is used in popular culture?
could make a similar statement with Santa Claus being the designer and morality.
– Well, if thats what you want. You’ll be the first person however to grant such a definition to Santa Claus.
“All of this is speculation, you have no way of knowing any of this. This statement is worse than retarded. Please provide a bases for this reasoning otherwise I ( or anyone else)”
-I have no way of knowing what role a designer fills, by the definition of the word? Can I not just look at a dictionary or look how the word is used in popular culture?
“could make a similar statement with Santa Claus being the designer and morality.”
– Well, if thats what you want. You’ll be the first person however to grant such a definition to Santa Claus.
“Societies are stronger when individuals work together. This increases the likelihood of survival for a greater number of individuals and thus the society. ”
– While we both would love to increase the likelihood of survival for a greater number of individuals, why should we do exactly that? Because we’ve evolved to ‘feel’ that for the perpetuation of our species right?
So we were pre-programmed to feel just that? Well , knowing that, that would make some people care less, even more.
Actually, it works great for me. My point isn’t necessarily what works for me.
I’m trying to ascertain this:
When people deconstruct a faith-based worldview that promotes the inherent value of life and motivates people to seek justice, what do they put in its place?
And beyond that, what do they put in its place that is 1) convincing and 2) rational.
My point has been that appealing to shared human nature/experience does work if the universe is accidental and human life is not inherently meaningful. By extension, a society, i.e. a group of human beings, is not inherently meaningful either. If human life is ultimately accidental, then grouping a whole bunch of them together and asking them to work for the good of the group doesn’t work either. More numbers doesn’t translate into value.
So, in short, if “you” are going to strip the value of human life that is linked with a faith-based worldview while simultaneously calling people to act justly — which the opening post does — then you are obligated to offer something convincing, motivating, and rationally consistent in its stead.
I am asking what that is — not rhetorically, as if I’m trying to demonstrate it cannot be done — but simply because I want to know.
This board is full of comments that call religious people irrational, and this opening post is one of them. This post also calls us to seek justice but does not provide any convincing reason as to why I should. I want to know what fills in the gaps.
“What, the Golden Rule doesn’t work for you?”
Lets just remember that the golden/silver rule predates christianity. It is found in hinduism, for example.
“This pure and other non sense, society is made up of individuals. My family members and friends have to grow up in this world/society.”
You’re making my point for me, actually. My point is that if human life is inherently un-meaningful, then a whole bunch of human beings isn’t meaningful, just because there’s a bunch of them.
“I am more than willing to sacrifice some of my time and energy to make a better community/world/society for my young relatives. In fact I am more than willing to do things to help people (even strangers I don’t know) because community service is something I very strongly believe in and am committed to.”
I’m glad to hear that, as I am too. I’m actually an AmeriCorps member right now because of that.
My question simply is, what is your motivation? I’m glad you do those things, but why do you do them?
” I’m glad to hear that, as I am too. I’m actually an AmeriCorps member right now because of that. ”
I was in Americorp back in the day. I absolutely loved it.
@ brgulker
” You’re making my point for me, actually. My point is that if human life is inherently un-meaningful, then a whole bunch of human beings isn’t meaningful, just because there’s a bunch of them. ”
Maybe human life is unmeaningful to you, thats not how I see it.
” My question simply is, what is your motivation? I’m glad you do those things, but why do you do them? ”
My motivation is, I would love to see a better world and I enjoy doing things to help people, it brings me great joy thus no more motivation needed.
No if you wanna argue that the motivation comes from god or that god is where morality comes from. I’M willing to listen to you but first you have got to make a coherent argument for the existence of god (which I havent heard yet). Then you must show that morality actually does come from god, which Id love to see someone do.
First of all Markbey, I’m not a knucklehead. I can also call you a knucklehead for complete misunderstanding what I was arguing for, so please.
To make it clearer to you, I WAS NOT TRYING TO PROVE GOD EXISTS and HE IS OBJECTIVE MORALITY!
What I was doing was trying to show you the futility of subjectively trying to interpret your already admitted subjective reality.
You keep asking me to prove God exists, if I could do that, don’t you think there will still be atheists in the world? All you’ve just said a whole lot of ‘nothing’ with regard to my argument.
While you claim you want to do good because it feels ‘good’, you haven’t answered the question at its root. Its not my fault you are unable to comprehend my arguments. When you are unable to formulate counter arguments is it your tactic to say that your opponents are “playing games”? Hilarious.
My ‘chess game analogy’ was perfect. Here let me show you:
I know a standard/morality exists (I know there is a way to play chess). So I subjectively try to interpret the game (I try to play ‘chess’ even if I don’t know the instructions)
While you:
Know a standard/morality does not exist ( you know chess does not exist) yet you try to subjectively interpret morality and apply it to your life. Why would you believe something to be good or bad, if you know that good or bad are simply chemical reactions that occur in your brain? (You know chess doesn’t exist, but you try to play the game)
“Dude you are playing games, how is it that you can claim you have made a case for god being the basis of morality, but you have not proved gods existence.”
How is it that there are many definitions of God, that you can find in the dictionary, have these people met God? I WAS NOT TRYING TO PROVE THE EXISTENCE OF GOD. WHAT WILL IT TAKE FOR YOU TO UNDERSTAND THAT? ARE YOU THIS DENSE?
“If you are not a coward please answer why god could drowning thousands of babies and you still consider him moral.”
– You know, I think your a good guy, and I wouldn’t mind having a beer or two with you. But honestly man, you have to actually learn how to debate. This was not the point of argument.
Again, I was arguing how it was more fruitful to have an objective reality than a subjective one. Yes I cannot prove the objectivity of reality, but the simple ‘acceptance’ of a subjective reality already makes that reality ‘meaningless’ – DO YOU GET IT NOW, friend?
“This all sounds perfectly logical and makes sense BUT why wouldn’t God just create us as eternal beings to begin with? Why dump us on this little ball of dirt for a fleeting blink of time to live a practically worthless, insignificant mortal life of pain and suffering? ”
- I’ve argued this point at another post, I think. It is because God wants to create holy and moral people. Morality is dependent on free-will. In Markbey’s example, the lion eating the baby elephant is not immoral because lions don’t have the ability to ponder on the rightness or wrongness of an action. It is for this reason why we are here, to be able to make the choice to be moral. I’d also like to add that ‘time’ is also important for choosing to be moral, if we knew we would live forever, we could always hold making that ‘choice to be moral’ for another time, hey, we have all eternity. For this reason, we are placed here in this world, time gives us this sense of urgency that we have to make that ‘choice’ now. Jesus taught that those who were last, will be first in heaven, those who are servants, will be masters in heaven (figuratively speaking ofcourse).
“It is because God wants to create holy and moral people.”
This is interesting, looking at “His” failure of creation at the beginning of “time”.
I am curious about this teaching in the churches, unless it’s one person’s opinion in christianity.
Miguel: “It is because God wants to create holy and moral people… For this reason, we are placed here in this world, time gives us this sense of urgency that we have to make that ‘choice’ now.”
For a 22 year old you seem to know an awful lot about the purposes and designs of the omnipotent creator of the entire universe. How do you know why we were placed in this world? I’m curious how you just know “God’s perspective”. Isn’t it a bit arrogant to imagine your tiny little brain can comprehend the “perspective” of an all powerful and all knowing being?
“I’d also like to add that ‘time’ is also important for choosing to be moral…gives us this sense of urgency that we have to make that ‘choice’ now”
What of the people that are born into cultures where that ‘choice’ is a variety of hindu gods? What if you live a life of sin and immorality and then conveniently make that ‘choice’ on your death bed, as is perfectly acceptable in your religion? Give your confession, get your last rights, and there ya have it – heaven bound you go! Kinda like winning the ultimate lottery.
As far as time goes we will eventually develop the technology to live to be 1000 years old or more. You and I may see this come to pass our lifetimes. It’s just a matter of time – and who knows if in 100,000 years we won’t be able to live forever? It’s a long time to advance our technology.
“Jesus taught that those who were last, will be first in heaven”
Did you also know that your bible says there will be animals in heaven, including sheep, goats and horses? You seem like a smart guy Miguel, I’m curious, do you believe devils exist in this world?
“This is interesting, looking at “His” failure of creation at the beginning of “time”. ”
– He succeeded in creating a ‘free-willed agent’. Besides, we have yet to see it as a failure, our time isn’t done yet.
“I am curious about this teaching in the churches, unless it’s one person’s opinion in christianity.”
– This isn’t one person’s opinion, theologists argue this all the time. Whether it is taught in churches, I don’t think it is extensively taught – understanding these things requires a bit of a deep understanding of theology and philosophy, so I think they more or less, give general ideas at churches. But surely, it is taught in theology.
It is not a truthful argument that God succeeded(possibility of failures) in creating “free will agents” in that He said His creation of man is a very good man/woman.
Of God’s failure in the beginning? My interest is on what the churches preach from the “bible” and not theologians or a person’s argument about free will determination of humanity on heaven or hell.
“For a 22 year old you seem to know an awful lot about the purposes and designs of the omnipotent creator of the entire universe. How do you know why we were placed in this world? I’m curious how you just know “God’s perspective”. Isn’t it a bit arrogant to imagine your tiny little brain can comprehend the “perspective” of an all powerful and all knowing being? ”
– I don’t “just know”. You think I came up with this myself? No, I just read. I’m a Christian. I want to know about my faith, I want to be able to defend my faith, so I study. Its that simple really. I wasn’t subjected to any divine revelation.
“What of the people that are born into cultures where that ‘choice’ is a variety of hindu gods? What if you live a life of sin and immorality and then conveniently make that ‘choice’ on your death bed, as is perfectly acceptable in your religion? Give your confession, get your last rights, and there ya have it – heaven bound you go! Kinda like winning the ultimate lottery.”
– I’ve also argued this point at another post. Our eternal destiny is not dependent on our circumstance, but of our own volition. It doesn’t matter whether you know the bible or not – which is your circumstance, what matters is that you act morally. God is just and merciful. If you take Jesus’ sacrifice (atonement, which I’ve already explained the importance of at another post) as atonement for your sins – He will be merciful, If you, because of circumstance, do not know anything about Jesus, or are still worshiping Baal – He will be just.
If I am to be judged, I’d rather be judged mercifully than justly.
I won’t pretend to know how God judges people on under these 2 premises.
I wouldn’t know if God forgave us in your hypothetical (people only asking for forgiveness at their deathbeds). But don’t you think God, the creator of the universe, knows who is insincere, pretending or being Hypocritical? Do you think Warren Buffet would believe someone who just met him and says “Please marry me, I really really love you! not your money!” ? – What more the creator of the universe (if He exists).
“As far as time goes we will eventually develop the technology to live to be 1000 years old or more. You and I may see this come to pass our lifetimes. It’s just a matter of time – and who knows if in 100,000 years we won’t be able to live forever? It’s a long time to advance our technology.”
- I really doubt this. Certainly we could develop technology to extend our lives, but live forever? I certainly do not think so.
“Did you also know that your bible says there will be animals in heaven, including sheep, goats and horses? You seem like a smart guy Miguel, I’m curious, do you believe devils exist in this world?”
– Thank you for the compliment (If there was no sarcasm involved). No, I didn’t know animals could go to heaven. I have no reason to believe devils exist, and I find the concept irrelevant to evil. Theologists argue on the figurative nature of this concept, biblically speaking.
Miguel – no sarcasm involved at all! You say: “I have no reason to believe devils exist” I found this quite surprising considering your religion very, very strongly does think they exist and tempt us all the time. I wonder what you think Jesus cast into the pigs that made them jump off the cliff?
“Miguel – no sarcasm involved at all! You say: “I have no reason to believe devils exist” I found this quite surprising considering your religion very, very strongly does think they exist and tempt us all the time. I wonder what you think Jesus cast into the pigs that made them jump off the cliff? ”
– Oh, you meant ‘evil spirits’. I thought you were referring to the ‘lucifer-satan-devil’ character. I honestly never really gave ‘evil spirits’ much thought. The ‘temptations’ could’ve been done by, as some theologists would argue, the conscience or mind if you will. I read somewhere that, during those times, there was only a single word that describes sinful thoughts and devils, so that may be why it has been translated as such (I read that along time ago, I may be wrong or have misunderstood the article, back then I had very hard time understanding english)
Which sects do you think she is arguing from or she is just arguing for the sake of winning an argument or something more personal?
Miguel: “I read somewhere that, during those times, there was only a single word that describes sinful thoughts and devils, so that may be why it has been translated as such”
Um No:
Mark 5:9 “And [Jesus] asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many.”
Ask your priest if he believes in actual devils existing on this earth. You may be surprised by his answer.
btw Miguel – “I don’t “just know”. You think I came up with this myself? No, I just read.”
What you read was written by humans. They cannot know the perspective of god any more than you or I can. All they can do is speculate. And if you blindly believe what you read from these humans, you are only believing reality filtered through their brain, and not your own. Have a good day – was nice debating with ya a little today.
“What you read was written by humans. They cannot know the perspective of god any more than you or I can. All they can do is speculate. And if you blindly believe what you read from these humans, you are only believing reality filtered through their brain, and not your own. Have a good day – was nice debating with ya a little today.”
- I don’t think we can comprehend the mind of God, but surely, we can comprehend some part of it, especially the parts that have to do with us – this is very reasonable, and is not saying that we can comprehend it fully, but well enough to satisfy our “tiny” minds.
You can’t have it both ways. You can’t tell me that My God is immoral and probably not real for this and that, and then when I defend this and that, you say “Oh well, you cannot possibly know that, your mind is tiny compared to the creator of the universe, how can you possibly know that”. The same can be said of you, you cannot possibly know what you say about him either if you agree that we cannot possibly know these things.
Thank you, I’m up for a debate anytime.
Miguel,
“You can’t have it both ways. You can’t tell me that My God is immoral and probably not real for this and that, and then when I defend this and that, you say “Oh well, you cannot possibly know that, your mind is tiny compared to the creator of the universe, how can you possibly know that”. The same can be said of you, you cannot possibly know what you say about him either if you agree that we cannot possibly know these things.”
I don’t see a contradiction here.
What I would say, is that the god character depicted in the OT is immoral. Additionally, our minds are tiny. Both can be true.
Where does our knowledge of morality come from?
Perhaps our limited knowledge of morality forces us to draw a depiction of a god that is lacking in some aspects. This could be a product of our tiny minds.
Miguel: “You can’t have it both ways. You can’t tell me that My God is immoral and probably not real for this and that, and then when I defend this and that, you say “Oh well, you cannot possibly know that, your mind is tiny compared to the creator of the universe…”
Ahh but I never, not once, made any statement regarding the nature or perception of god now have I?
I, with my tiny little brain, would not dare claim to have such knowledge.
You sir, are the one describing the “perception” of god. Now if you read in a book about how some other human being supposedly knew a little bit about the “perception” of god, then you, or that other human author must back it up and explain how they “know” the mind of god right? Simply saying ‘I just know’ is not going to cut it.
As far as human fallibility goes I can point to one great theologian named St. Augustine who conjured up a spiritual realm called Limbo – where unbaptized babies go when they die. You may have heard of it and may have even been taught about it in your religion. This “spiritual realm” has since been discounted by the Catholic church as not existing. Imagine that? A fallible HUMAN being conjures up a spiritual realm, it is taught as true for centuries, then suddenly disappears! Funny huh? Kinda makes you wonder if your Purgatory isn’t just a conjured up realm to? Might make you go do a little research on where the human idea for Purgatory came from huh Miguel?
I suspect you will, in time, become Agnostic. Someone who just doesn’t know if god exists. Of course that is, once you realize that little devils don’t “really” exist, even though your religion is explicit that they do.
“Ahh but I never, not once, made any statement regarding the nature or perception of god now have I?”
-Well ok, But God by definition is ‘omnipotent’. You know this right? Even if you don’t believe he exists, I’m quite sure you know your definitions. So, you’ll have to excuse me for interpreting this particular comment of yours:
“Just want to clarify that an omnipotent being would desire nothing. Absolutely nothing would be more important or interesting or special to such a being. Nothing. ”
as an attempt to comprehend the “nature or perception” of God or an ‘omnipotent being’.
“I, with my tiny little brain, would not dare claim to have such knowledge.”
- But you would dare claim to have “such knowledge” on the “nature and perception” of omnipotent beings, right?
“You sir, are the one describing the “perception” of god. Now if you read in a book about how some other human being supposedly knew a little bit about the “perception” of god, then you, or that other human author must back it up and explain how they “know” the mind of god right? ”
- Our thinking and our discoveries usually rely on the works of a few inspired men; the majority of us, mediocre in our intellect, build upon what was revealed by others. Christianity can logically be argued – this is why it is immensely different from other religions. The bible does not and cannot immediately explain everything because it spanned a long time period that encompassed many cultures – all of which would require different individual explanations – therefore people must logically connect the dots.
“Simply saying ‘I just know’ is not going to cut it.”
- I agree that such a statement would seem flippant. But what I actually said was “I don’t ‘just know’ – slight difference there.
“As far as human fallibility goes I can point to one great theologian named St. Augustine who conjured up a spiritual realm called Limbo – where unbaptized babies go when they die. You may have heard of it and may have even been taught about it in your religion. This “spiritual realm” has since been discounted by the Catholic church as not existing. ”
- When a more logical answer becomes apparent, then it naturally would assume a more accepted position. Do you think this is an illogical method? Come on now, you being as smart and as articulate as you are?
“Imagine that? A fallible HUMAN being conjures up a spiritual realm, it is taught as true for centuries, then suddenly disappears! Funny huh?”
- Is it really so mind boggling? How many concepts in philosophy do you think were taught as true for centuries but now have faded into obscurity because a more logical notion has been put forward?
“Kinda makes you wonder if your Purgatory isn’t just a conjured up realm to?”
- Er.. Not really.
“Might make you go do a little research on where the human idea for Purgatory came from huh Miguel?”
- Well, I’m not really interested in that at the moment, maybe next time huh Vidlord?
“I suspect you will, in time, become Agnostic. Someone who just doesn’t know if god exists.”
-I admit this does not seem impossible. I initially thought that defending my faith will strengthen my faith, but the opposite is holding true. Luckily, I haven’t lost my faith, but if anything, I think it has become weaker having been exposed to numerous logically acceptable opposing views.
“Of course that is, once you realize that little devils don’t “really” exist, even though your religion is explicit that they do.”
- My religion is only explicit in its Dogma. I don’t know if “devils” are included in this or not, but I have a feeling you’re going to let me know.