Seeing Things Differently -DanP the apologist excuse.

[MG 2.0]

The Mormon God is not all knowing and omniscient like the traditional God of Christianity is, and that has implications.

The doctrine that God in in and through all things and knows the end from the beginning gives Him the ability to know what is necessary to bring us back into His presence. That is all we really need to know and understand.

It isn’t necessary that we know how the sausage is made.

We need to trust that God knows. So much rests on the trust that God and Jesus Christ have the ability and power to save. To bring us from a state of mortality to a state of continued everlasting life.

And that we’ve been given the gift of agency to choose to believe or disbelieve.

Really, it all comes down to that. This is why I continue to be a bit amazed that this seems to be such a hot topic.

If you don’t believe it…move on!

Regards,
MG

[MG 2.0]

…your compulsive disparagement of non-believers says otherwise.

If my insistence on putting theology into my posts and then pointing out that this is what Mormons believe causes you grief, that’s on you, Res Ipsa.

I’ve made it rather clear here and there that I’m not disparaging you. I do, however, point out that I think certain positions and modes of thinking in regards to reality and whether or not we have free will that are expressed here are not in conformity to what I believe or what the LDS church teaches.

I try to leave it at that.

Let me be clear, I’m not trying to disparage the fact that you are a disbeliever in Mormonism and/or the truth claims of the CofJCofLDS.

You can believe that the moon is made of cheese for all I care. People have all kinds of beliefs and non beliefs. That’s the beauty of a world in which we are free to choose our own adventure. Just as in the children’s book series each book has a plot line that develops as a result of certain choices along the way.

Essentially, that seems to be the way the world works.

Don’t take it personally that I am stating my beliefs and positions and bringing out the fact that they may not run in tandem with yours.

No harm, no foul.

Regards,
MG

[MG 2.0]

Are you claiming that you know enough about God to proclaim his limits? What is your basis for claiming that God's knowledge is limited? Is this one of those objective truths that God has communicated to you?

In God’s recipe book does he have a recipe for making an ice cream sundae out of sand?

If not, why?

Could God make a baseball into a football simply by wishing it so?

Two quick and random examples off the top of my head. God has limits. A whole lot of them. He cannot do what is impossible.

The ‘big deal’ is trying to fathom what might be impossible vs. possible.

Folks have been trying to figure out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin for a long time.

I think it is advantageous, at least in the short term, for agnostics and atheists to take the hard line and insist that God can do ALL things.

Because then when He doesn’t or can’t then well…

Regards,
MG

[MG 2.0]

Suppose God did just that. Suppose God made you such that you always keep the commandments, never make mistakes, and the same goes for everyone else.

Can’t. See previous post.

Regards,
MG

[honorentheos]

The Plan of Salvation never made any sense to me for this very reason. No one fully understanding the consequences of rebelling against God, sides against Him, and what kind of Omniscient God offers 1/3 of his creation the opportunity to make such a decision and its attendant consequences, knowing how they will decide? Of course, this kind of plan makes sense to people who want to claim they control the power of God to seal up eternal blessings or punishments to others.

This is a hard doctrine.

Yet surprisingly simple when one stops trying to shoehorn it into being "objective truth". It's inconsistencies and the historical context that gave rise to the evolution of the ideas behind it paint a picture that makes use of the evidence we have in a fairly straightforward way.

My take is that there is much we do not know and understand in regards to the plan of salvation and exaltation. Yes, I know this sounds like a cop out. I’ve thought about this particular problem associated with LDS theology along with some other theologies that have similarities and you’re right, it doesn’t make sense from where we are ‘in the room’ that we inhabit.

Again, supposing there is some form of reality that is objectively just so independent of our subjective interpretations and crude instrumentation, perhaps the challenge isn't with the form it takes as it is the attempts to reconcile it with prior held beliefs and assumptions?

I trust that God knows more than I and that any plan that does place so much emphasis on free will and choice not just in the here and now, but in the before and after, is a heck of a lot more complex and convoluted than what anyone of us can comprehend.

Could be. Trouble is there is an easier, more logical explanation. Interestingly, the fact we are having this discussion at all is a mark against libertarian free will in my opinion because we can't take something as simple as evidence and draw similar conclusions when our subconscious minds are involved in trying to sort the data. You actually cannot will yourself to come to a conclusion that contradicts your assumptions. Your "choice" is bounded.
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[Gadianton]

Ah, to save free will God can't be all powerful or all knowing.

Interesting. I guess you don't need to make any special qualifications to Res Ipsa anymore about absolute truth since God is in the same boat as us.

In that case how about this: Did Adam have free will in the Garden of Eden?

[drumdude]

Suppose God did just that. Suppose God made you such that you always keep the commandments, never make mistakes, and the same goes for everyone else.

Can’t. See previous post.

Regards,
MG

This isn’t asking God to make a logical impossibility like a married bachelor. In traditional Christianity God is perfectly capable of creating someone such that they always keep the commandments and never make mistakes.

In fact, we humans are able to do the same thing. If you wanted to, you could lobotomize your loved one to the point where they are incapable of sinning. If you take the hypothesis seriously, that sinning in this mortal probation threatens your eternal soul, then lobotomizing your loved one could even be viewed as a moral action for their own good.

None of the God and free will hypothesis makes any logical sense when you examine it closely.

[honorentheos]

Split brain patient experiments have shown our beliefs in our own rationality are suspect.

https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/ ... 51/3892700

To illustrate:

For example, when an object is shown in the right visual field, the visual information travels to the left hemisphere and the patient is effortlessly able to name it (Fig. 3A). When shown to the left visual field, however, the information travels to the right hemisphere, and when asked, the patient will typically answer that no object was seen (Fig. 3B). This phenomenon is easily explained by the fact that most people’s speech centre is located in their left hemisphere. When the hemispheres are separated, the left will be capable of naming an object, while the right hemisphere stays mute. Moreover, the left hemisphere will also eagerly answer the question intended for the right hemisphere. When it hears the question directed to the right hemisphere asking what the object was, the left hemisphere correctly and honestly reports that it did not see anything at all.

Now picture yourself listening to the completely normal looking person sitting in front of you saying that he did not see the object. He sounds absolutely sure about this. One might jump to the conclusion that the right hemisphere did not perceive the stimulus. Yet this interpretation drastically changes when the right hemisphere is asked to communicate non-verbally. For example, when instructed to point out the object from a group of objects with the left hand, patients reliably identify the object that had been presented to the right hemisphere. Not just better than chance. Every time.

From an anatomical perspective, this hardly seems surprising: the right hemisphere perceives and processes the visual input and then uses its loyal henchman, the left hand, to point it out. The left hand does this because it receives its neuronal input from corticospinal fibres that originate from the right hemisphere. Phenomenologically for the onlooker, however, the observation is far more challenging: the left hand is now confidently pointing out the object that the person just categorically and confidently denied seeing. This is where things get really interesting. Ask the person why he is pointing to that object. Since the left hemisphere and its speech centre do not know what the right hemisphere saw and do not know why the left hand is pointing to a particular object, one might think that the person would once again answer correctly and honestly by admitting ignorance with a simple ‘I don’t know’. This never happens. The left hemisphere always comes up with a story about why the left hand is doing what it is doing, ‘It is pointing to the apple because I like red’. The results of this very simple experiment led to numerous questions and more testing of the split-brain patients, resulting in more intriguing answers and inferences which are well summarized by the notion of the ‘left hemisphere interpreter’ (Fig. 4; for a detailed account see Gazzaniga and LeDoux, 1978; Gazzaniga, 2000).

[honorentheos]

The point of the above is to ask MG, how would you know you aren't pre-programmed if your brain is executing the program and your conscious mind is just narrating rationalizations for why you did what you did?

[honorentheos]

We need to trust that God knows. So much rests on the trust that God and Jesus Christ have the ability and power to save. To bring us from a state of mortality to a state of continued everlasting life.

Would you entertain the possibility that whatever you experience here as a need is subjectively your own, not something universal?