03-19-2007, 08:13 PM | #961 | |||||||
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So, since sin is the opposition of the will to God, or the turning of it from God, God by definition cannot sin, else His will would have to be opposed to itself, or turned away from itself, which is absurd, since opposition and aversion are forms of relation between two things, and God's will is one. Quote:
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Crux fidelis, inter omnes arbor una nobilis. Nulla talem silva profert, fronde, flore, germine. Dulce lignum, dulce clavo, dulce pondus sustinens. 'With a melon?' - Eric Idle Last edited by Gwaimir Windgem : 03-19-2007 at 08:15 PM. |
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03-19-2007, 10:26 PM | #962 | |||
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If the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. ~Oscar Wilde, written from prison Oscar Wilde's last words: "Either the wallpaper goes, or I do." |
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03-19-2007, 10:28 PM | #963 |
Dread Mothy Lord and Halfwitted Apprentice Loremaster
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No, but in that paragraph, you seem to affirm in some way both free will and predestination, which would indicate that they are not mutually exclusive. Or did I misread you?
By the way, Lief, just to let you know, I think over all you're spot on in this thread.
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03-20-2007, 01:44 AM | #964 | ||
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Free will to me (on a low level- I'll talk about the higher level of what free will means later. The low level seems presently to be most pertinent to this discussion) means the ability to make one's own decisions from one's personality. The ability to be oneself. I behave the way I do because it's my personality to behave in that way, and that's freedom to be myself rather than what someone else forces me to be. God's predestination doesn't involve forcing us to be what we aren't. Everything we do and choose, he chose for us first. He planned out everything in advance. Just as the universe is clearly crafted with a craftsman's precise care to mirror God's nature and bring him glory, praising him, so every event on this Earth also is planned out. But if God's design from his personality is fulfilled through our actions, and our designs from our personalities are also fulfilled through our actions, then God's will does not undermine our freedom. God controls our lives and actions according to his personality, and we control our lives according to our personalities simultaneously. God's control doesn't keep us from acting according to who we are, from being ourselves and making exactly whatever decisions we want to make about how we live our lives. Hence, even though God's power is complete and he designed everything the way it is, it simultaneously isn't intrusive and doesn't negate personhood or anything that goes with it. Unless one says freedom from God goes with it, but that carries a big bag of problems and not any significant plus, if the "slavery" to God and "puppet" issues are discarded. The reason those should be discarded, very simply, is that the word choice implies that God is making people do things that they otherwise wouldn't want to do. And I already explained that he doesn't do that. The problems with the Free Will perspective are: If people were to make choices without God making those choices for them first, then God cannot have omniscient foreknowledge. For there has got to be more than one way of creating the universe, and before creating, he will know exactly how it will all turn out. He chose this option of how things will come out, instead of any of the other ways he could have created the universe. Hence, because he chose this way that the universe will turn out, and foreknowing every event chose to bring it into being by creating this universe instead of some other, he is responsible for all that takes place. So an omniscient Creator cannot exist simultaneously with Free Will, as Free Will is currently defined by most people I've heard from in modern times. For omniscience bears with it the same result as you have in predestination, and that is that God responsible for every event. Also, there's a problem with the common definition of Free Will which involves God's nature. The only way that an omniscient God could have not directly chosen every event beforehand is if he instead left events to random chance, to turn out how they would on their own. Which means that he left the eternal fates of human beings to the flip of a die. This doesn't jive with the character of a loving God who cares about his creations- it instead implies one who is quite heartless. I also find it very ironic that the very people who argue so intently for a Free Will that means freedom from God's choices simultaneously seek sanctification, which most people agree means becoming Christ-like and ultimately doing only God's will in one's life. People find that the more they do God's will, the more they are freed from the slavery of the old self, so they seek to become more and more like Christ, to grow in him, to come closer and closer to him, to emanate his personality in the world, and to speak his words in the world. So even as they argue strongly for a Free Will that means freedom from God's will, they strive to live only God's will, and view living according to one's own will, separate from God's will, as slavery. So that's pretty funny to me. The higher level of free will that I said I would talk about is this: The ability to act according to the new self and not the old. And I find that I just described it in the paragraph just before this one, so I'll just stop writing this overly long post now. Butterbeer is sure correct about me, when it comes to verbosity . Quote:
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If the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. ~Oscar Wilde, written from prison Oscar Wilde's last words: "Either the wallpaper goes, or I do." Last edited by Lief Erikson : 03-20-2007 at 01:52 AM. |
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03-20-2007, 11:15 AM | #965 |
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03-20-2007, 11:42 AM | #966 |
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To be predestined is to be decided in advance (American Heritage Dictionary). If something is decided in advance, by an infallible being (say, God), it's pretty damn inevitable, wouldn't you say? In that having God's decision overridden would seem to make God fallible?
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03-20-2007, 11:48 AM | #967 |
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Gwai is a funny guy.
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03-20-2007, 11:57 AM | #968 |
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And your point in saying this is...?
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03-20-2007, 12:04 PM | #969 |
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Who, me?
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03-20-2007, 01:21 PM | #970 | ||||
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If god must do something that appears evil to achieve a greater good, it's perfectly fine to claim that it's jusified. And one could even say, that since humans do not see the "big picture", it's perfectly fine for us to define people as good and evil, because our perspective is much less encompassing than god's. However, it's perfectly illogical to claim that god is somehow not responsible for the evil just because the greater goal is good. At best, you can say that that evil was not really evil, but god is still responsible for it, if you buy the idea that good and evil are predestined by god. In your example you say: Quote:
This angle of discussion began with these statements by Lief: Quote:
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03-20-2007, 01:37 PM | #971 | |
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Doing something "for the good of the story" assumes that someone is actually reading the story. Or that the characters participating in the story have some level of control over the outcome. This is not the case in your predestination scenario, where the only audience is god and the only one with any real level of control is god as well.
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03-20-2007, 02:10 PM | #972 | |||
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Basically, your "free will" is simply a perception of free will. Quote:
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Does the bible say, in plain words, that god is 100% omniscient?
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03-20-2007, 04:23 PM | #973 | |
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Not to mention
that Leif's described behavior
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Authors who bring themselves to tears with the behavior of their own characters need a faceful of cold water, a nice brisk walk, and a swift change of hobbies. Same goes for actors who forget that they're not actually an indecisive Dane, and people on American Idol who think they'd have been a star anyway. I can hardly post in this thread because so little reason peeks out to discuss. What could be more supportive of "moral relativism" than saying sin is defined completely by intent? That's absurd, and not supported by anything real. And it's kinda scary, too, cast in the form of religious fundamentalism. *shivers* |
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03-20-2007, 05:41 PM | #974 | |
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One way out of the conundrum of omniscience and omnipotence vs. free will is that free will is God's greatest gift to creation: God's first decree is that his creation shall have that free will, and all later decrees are subject to that first command (lest God should contradict himself). God can still do all, and knows us better than we know ourselves (thus he can tell what we will do with free will) but chooses as a deliberate, generous act to give us that free will. As a side note, is thinking it stinks a legitimate reason to object to God's intent? I seem to recall being told by you, Lief, that one's opinion of revelation didn't matter.
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03-20-2007, 07:04 PM | #975 | ||||||||||||
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God also is responsible for sin, but when he plans that evil will be done, he does not sin, because his motives and the results of his actions are only good. The people who committed those actions had evil motives, though, and the results of their actions, as far as they controlled and planned them, were evil. God takes those actions the final steps though, and brings good from them. Thus, actions that from humans are motivated by evil and result in evil (as far as humans control and intend them) are good from God. So humans and God alike are responsible for having committed the actions, but humans are the only ones who did evil, for the motives of God's actions were good and his final results will be very good, whereas humans' motives and the final results of their actions, as far as they controlled and planned them, were evil and produced evil. Quote:
We are the person who enters the house where the child is about to be spanked, sees the spanking, and judges the action without waiting to see the explanations or the results. The parent is responsible, but we don't know what he is responsible for. In the same way, humans may commit abusive acts, but if God has planned them, even though he is responsible, they are not evil when coming from him like they are when coming from other humans. He is responsible for these acts, but from him, they are not crimes. Humans, on the other hand, as their motives and the results of their actions were evil as far as the humans controlled and planned those events, are guilty. Quote:
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That isn't quite the same point to evil as God has. God seeks to develop the good characters, which is one objective of most authors in including evil in their stories, though not their primary objective. It is the primary objective for God, though, for he wants an eternal relationship with his creatures, and hence he has a rather different objective in his writing than the rest of us do. Quote:
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Characters do have some control over what happens around them and over what choices they make, but God has complete control. Their control and God's control don't contradict one another- that's my point. The characters make their decisions according to their own personalities, if the author is a good one. And they too are the audience observing the events that are taking place in the book, if they actually have life, and we're assuming that God gives life to his creatures. So in that sense, the analogy fails to work, for characters in books aren't alive. The characters could both be audience of what occurs and be the participants in what occurs, if they were alive. The characters in books can mature and grow, can make decisions, and still turn out in exactly the way the author intended without him interfering with their freedom to be themselves. The characters in the book have many of the characteristics of real people, which makes them my favorite analogy in discussing predestination, though the weakness in the analogy is obviously that they don't have real life or the complexity and depth of existence that real people have. In view of that, it interests me that authors may weep over their characters and feel like the characters they write are their personal friends, and readers can sometimes loathe characters. Readers and writers have strong reactions to created, predestined characters, nonreal though they are. In view of the fact that we are real and alive, and of incalculably greater value and importance than these fictional characters, how much more will God react emotionally to our actions? Quote:
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Being something other than what God plans us to be is being something other than ourselves, and to be something other than ourselves means to have no personality. It comes down to meaninglessness. Quote:
An automaton lacks life, feeling and personality. It lacks all the most important qualities that humans have. So clearly automaton doesn't match what we are. The automaton doesn't choose what the maker chooses from any personality the maker created, for the maker didn't make it any personality. Just mechanical obedience. Since the automaton has no personality, my definition of freedom, which is that it make its own decisions freely according to its personality, cannot apply. But even if it did have a personality, it has no life, and therein lies the biggest problem. Quote:
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If the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. ~Oscar Wilde, written from prison Oscar Wilde's last words: "Either the wallpaper goes, or I do." Last edited by Lief Erikson : 03-20-2007 at 08:20 PM. |
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03-20-2007, 07:47 PM | #976 | |||
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Also, taking the path God offers is not selfishness, for it involves destroying oneself and surrendering one's own life to Christ. We must be willing to give up all that we are and surrender all that we have to him, or else, in his words, we are not worthy of the kingdom of heaven. It involves absolute obedience and service, and involves not following our own way but his. This brings physical and spiritual rewards of far greater worth than what we gave up, but it comes from the destruction of the self, and God may take these rewards away and surrender his disciple to persecution if he chooses, and the disciple must humbly and joyfully obey. No one can reach heaven through greed, but only through the death of selfishness. Only the unselfish will deserve God's reward. Quote:
So even if he decreed that people would have free will (a view that I don't think the scripture supports), he'd still have foreknown everything they'd do and created anyway, so their "freedom" is only to do exactly what he planned they'd do. When I use the word "planned," I use it because of all the options of ways to create, God chose this way, so his foreknowledge translates into massive, very likely complete, control of how he would create and thus how things would turn out. And even if he couldn't make a perfect world where everyone chose him freely, out of all the options, his choice to create in the way he did anyway still makes him completely responsible for every event. They're all his fault because, foreknowing as he did how everything would come out, he created in this way anyway. Quote:
However, all that agreement with your comment being spoken, I don't think that this is an opinion of mine rejecting revelation. I don't think that there is any revelation in the scripture that says man's fate is the flip of a die, or random chance. Rather, I see a scripture that says the flip of the die comes out in the way God intends it to come out, and multiple scriptures which say God is in complete control of people. I find those passages in both the Old and New Testaments, so I don't think that my opinion is going against revelation, but rather that my opinion is going with it.
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If the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. ~Oscar Wilde, written from prison Oscar Wilde's last words: "Either the wallpaper goes, or I do." Last edited by Lief Erikson : 03-20-2007 at 07:49 PM. |
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03-20-2007, 08:02 PM | #977 | |
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03-20-2007, 08:15 PM | #978 | |
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Of course he does.
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I'm not against selfishness per se, a lot of good things come from an appropriate regard for one's self and one's understanding. But certainly man/woman love is a place where selfishness is often farthest from godliness, kwim? |
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03-20-2007, 08:20 PM | #979 | |
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03-20-2007, 08:38 PM | #980 |
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Lief: if "Only the unselfish will deserve God's reward," as you say, doesn't that require free will, and not predestiny? Because "deserving" implies that one had a choice; an ability to do otherwise.
In general, this argument sounds like an attempt to have your cake and eat it too, to say that we are allowed to "act within our personality" and yet both that personality and every single action of ours is dictated by God. Take a specific choice - someone comes to me, hands me a gun, and tells me to shoot him in the head. Do I do it or not? If I am to bear the responsibility for this choice, I have to HAVE a choice; if God has already determined that I will not do it, how can I be said to deserve anything for my refusal to violate his commandments, and conversely, if God has already determined that I will, how can I deserve punishment for violating his commandments? The specific trouble I find is your insistence that God does everything (omnipotence) not that he knows everything (omniscience). I for instance knew how you were going to respond to my comments, despite not having any control over you, because I've argued with you before. How much more must God know how we will act, knowing us perfectly? This does not demand predestiny, only predictability. But your scheme seems to require actual predestiny, with the attribution of responsibility for all acts to God. That's why I addressed the issue of omnipotence. If God has determined that our free will is the first priority, I feel it avoids the problem of why God would cause us to sin, and then blame us for it. Because I feel that's still the gaping problem with your argument - God creates us as we are, and then micromanages our actions, but STILL blames us for actions we take; and not only that, but even those that are necessary for a greater good (as you claim all actions are, taken on God's level) are given punishments for being evil on our own scale. Thus we are punished for actions we "had to" take in two different senses - both "forced to" and "for the greater good." That seems to me to be the essence of injustice. Take the fate of Moses - if God ordered him to talk to the rock instead of striking it, then MADE HIM strike it, then punished him for doing that instead of talking to it... where is the justice? God makes the rules, makes the violation, and then metes out punishment for a violation he orchestrated. Why not just skip the whole action and punish to start with? Why do we need this life if the next is determined and acted out for us with no hope, as brownjenkins has pointed out, of redemptive growth?
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