Seeing Things Differently -DanP the apologist excuse.

[IWMP]

Christianity affects how we see the eternal consequences. Some Christians believe Jesus saved and if you believe you are saved. Some believe your actions determine your judgement. That's where the difference lies.

Earlier in the thread, I gave my reasons for believing the opposite of this. Well, I agree this is the way theologians like Dan frame it, but I think they are wrong. I said that the real difference is between whether you believe in an empty hell or a full hell.

I put a quote by DCP besides a quote by Sam Harris. The quote from Dan was about withholding judgement from Hitler, for all the reasons you discussed earlier about upbringing, environmental factors and the like (all of Sam Harris's reasons), even though he's a radical believer in free will. And that's because I think the idea of "free will" is nonsensical (in terms of a-causality which is how Dan believes it), as when push comes to shove, nobody can talk intelligently about something that isn't conceivable. The world is conceptualized post-hoc in terms of cause and effect. It doesn't matter what experiments show, because there is no way to interpret experiments in terms that contradict cause and effect. So the atheist position (when the bar is a-causality) isn't wrong, but it's circular.

I also gave the example of fire and brimstone preaching that claims Jesus saves the elect, but if they believe in a full hell, they can't avoid personal actions. They say of people who get up on that stage and say the sinners prayer, but then down the road they "backslide", they say these people weren't saved in the first place. And so it becomes a distinction without a difference -- full hell people are effectively saying that your actions determine your judgement.

Absolutely. Your points are valid. If all humans are automatically saved then there is no need for a hell. I didn't know Mormons believed everyone was automatically saved.

I vaguely recall, a third of the pre existence humans are supposed to be in outer darkness and satan declared he would try to take everyone else with him.

One of the YW values is choice and accountability. There is no way Hitler should be released of accountability. I think sometimes in some circumstances we could say some people aren't accountable but generally I think most people are. If a person had brain damage following injury and weren't able to make decisions or choices and lived purely instinctively based on muscle memory and impulsive reactions, would they be considered to have choice? Would they have free will?

I agree that free will is a hard to conceive which is why there are so many disagreements and discussions about it.

[IWMP]

MG isn't going to take the time to understand something, he already has it made up in his mind that nobody can handle his "creator God", and repeats his preconceived objections over and over no matter what anybody says.

Yes, "accidental evil" -- fires, earthquakes, being born in an infested swamp, none of this has anything to do with "free will". God would be accountable for it, not humans with their free will to sin. Even if Adam caused the fall with the apple, all the mechanics were programmed by God, Adam just pushed a button. It would be like leaving an loaded AK out for a kid to pick up and then claiming you had nothing to do with it.

Gadianton, I think both you and IWP both missed what I had hoped to say. Perhaps MG set up expectations. I do not think all the natural dangers and disasters in life are a result of human evil. I realize some people say the earth changed with the fall but that thinking is absurd. It is clear that the dangers of flood, fire, earthquake, and drought--as well as disease and dangerous predators--are part of the basic structure of creation from the beginning.

People have to invent to learn how do deal with those dangers, hunger, cold, etc.

Got you.

I don't imagine that the earth changed. I just imagine that Adam and Eve were cast from their haven.

[Morley]

Take what you want or don’t want for it.

So you and Gadianton are down to the level of calling out “Liar!!” now, huh?

That isn’t necessary is it? Unless as a last resort/retort.

You folks will do just about anything to see free will as a gift given by God as an anathema.

Ha! I’m calling you a liar because telling you that you’re being disingenuous isn’t a strong enough statement for what you're doing.

For you, MG, free will is a buzzword in the same way that you think secular humanism is. You don't understand either concept, other than knowing that you should defend the former and lament the encroachment of the latter.

You're not quite sure of the definitions of either term, but that really doesn't matter. You think definitions are just word traps set by know-it-all secular librarians liberals. Everything worth knowing can be distilled into a couple of paragraphs by an A.I. assistant, anyway.

In your mind, to even question whether we have free will is blasphemy. To make your case, you claim merde like that the CoJCoLDS teaches 'radical free will.' You know that this isn't true, but you can't help yourself.

When I mentioned that you were wrong, and that your religion doesn’t teach radical free will, you looked it up in Church doctrine and realized that I was right. You remembered that in this thread you yourself had maintained that neither you nor your church believes that free will is unconstrained. That didn’t matter. You doubled down anyway, and used a response from an A.I. chat as your authority. You thought that if you worked it right, A.I. would tell the big lie for you.

For you, A.I. is an incredible discovery, because if you don't get the answer you want the first time, you can rephrase the question until you do— or failing that, you can move to a different, more accommodating A.I., one that will deliver what you want. For someone who dislikes reading long articles, but wants to quote a source of authority, A.I. is a godsend.

Telling you that most people on the board have said they don't disregard free will makes hardly a dent in your assertion--because that's not what you want to think. You consider that if someone is not a Mormon, they're probably an atheist. And if they're an atheist, there's no way that they can possibly believe in free will, because, um, Mormons believe in free will. Non-Mormons can make all the declarations they want--but you know what they believe better than they do. It's analogous to your supposition that all morals come from God, so atheists, since they don't believe in God, cannot possibly believe in morals and morality.

You have to lie to yourself and lie to others in order to keep the fiction alive.

[Res Ipsa]

Wow. Who would have thought that a guy who refused to engage in a very simple thought experiment 50 or so pages ago would insist over the course of many pages that everyone else participate in his very disingenuous thought experiment.

Why disingenuous? Because when asked about his purpose in proposing the experiment, he flat out dissembled.

Second, his thought experiment was not set up to explore the question he revealed at the end that he was actually interested in. There is a world of difference between “design your perfect God/God you could worship/God you could believe in” and propose a God that is better than MG’s God. I’ve done that several times in the past, and MG’s response was to place ad hoc restrictions on his God to a ridiculous extent.

Third, the “game” was rigged. He wanted me and others to design a better God, but immediately handicapped him by making him powerless to create a world different than this one. A God in name only. This is just the same argument MG has tried to make fly in the past: God is powerfully enough to twiddle the knobs that make the universe possible, but powerless to change a single detail of earth.

This is logical dilemma from which MG cannot escape. His God created the world, but was powerless to create this world without Guinea worm. The sheer number of absurd ad hoc claims he forces himself to make does nothing other than clearly illustrate that his God is something that he makes up on the fly.

It is trivially easy to create a God that is “better” than MG’s God: create a God who created this world, but minus one less source of human suffering. That’s what gives the argument from evil the power that it has.

in my opinion, this is not a personal flaw of MG’s. It flows from within internal contradictions in the attributes humans assign to God.

[Physics Guy]

It is trivially easy to create a God that is “better” than MG’s God: create a God who created this world, but minus one less source of human suffering.

What if that source of human suffering is also the necessary source of something so wonderful that it is worth the price?

This is why I still listen to an ancient answer to the problem of evil.

Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days; and caused the dayspring to know his place, that it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be shaken out of it?

For me to just assume that everything bad is somehow justified is just facile. If there is an actual God, though, it seems to me not just plausible but likely that omnipotence means that everything is about opportunity costs. So I can hardly presume to justify the ways of God to humans, but for myself, at least, I can bow with Job to the voice from the whirlwind.

We don't know what prices are unavoidable even to omnipotence because they are logically necessary, because we don't know what anything actually is. If we had only a medieval understanding of water, for example, we might think that water could be better by being different in some way that was perfectly compatible with our impression of wetness, but that was not compatible at all with being H2O.

We would be wrong to think that real water could ever have been better that way. And everything is like that, for us. We might imagine that God could have made a non-molecular world in which water was defined by our concepts of wetness, and was not constrained by any molecular dynamics, but that is probably just because, just as medievals didn't understand what water actually is, so perhaps even now we don't understand what reality actually is.

[Gadianton]

create a God who created this world, but minus one less source of human suffering

I don't do a lot of outside reading on the PoE as it's not a very interesting topic for me, but I believe this is the go-to response for the evidential case against God. If we must play favorites on whose free will gets restricted and always allow Ted Bundy to win, then it's easy to move to accidental evil and imagine huge swaths of animal suffering cut out as it's entirely unnecessary to the human story. Certainly, sparing a single deer trapped in a forest fire is good enough to dethrone God, as you say.

propose a God that is better than MG’s God

If only it were merely that. What it ends up being is propose a God that is better than MG's God, such that MG would want to change his worship habits, while at the same time as you pointed out, we can't change things as they are. It's a real headscratcher. I mean, if MG is comfortable as a life-long Mormon who has a decent enough life in material terms, and if your hypothetical God can't change the facts about the world (to conceivably make things better for MG personally), then how is it conceivable that a God other than MG's God would convince him to change religions? His exercise if fully circular. No surprise there.

Where MG's thinking is dangerous is in his attitude that's like, "My life has been pretty good I assume I'm acing the test; seems easy enough; I must have been one of the valiant ones. How do I explain that guy over there who totally got screwed? Meh, the atonement will cover it so don't worry. As long as things are good for me, God's plan makes a great deal of sense."

[Gadianton]

What if that source of human suffering is also the necessary source of something so wonderful that it is worth the price?

Officer Nine says something similar.

“I’ll let you in on a secret,” said the ninth officer.”Moments after Ms. K. flatlined, I had her resuscitated, and flown to a tropical resort where she is now experiencing extraordinary bliss, and her ordeal is just a distant memory. I’m sure you would agree that that’s more than adequate compensation for her suffering, so the fact that I just stood there watching instead of intervening has no bearing at all on my goodness.”

https://infidels.org/library/modern/mark-vuletic-five/

Think about the worst things that have happened to a people, pick the most grotesque to happen to you, and then ask yourself what it would take to compensate you for that? And if you can convince yourself to take the plunge, from there, ask if God just throwing you into the deal without your consent is really the moral thing to do.

[Morley]

https://infidels.org/library/modern/mark-vuletic-five/

Thank you for this, Dean.

[Gadianton]

A homework assignment for you, Morley. After reading the document, which officer do you believe best approximates MG's God?

[Morley]

A homework assignment for you, Morley. After reading the document, which officer do you believe best approximates MG's God?

I know that some will differ, but I've come to believe it's the middle of the three men looking through the window in the center of the composition. As the one who is represented by the tallest, whitest mountain behind him, he seems to be running the show from afar. Being on the outside of the room, he can claim that he was hemmed in by the circumstance of being caught between two of his fellows. It's not like God can control the natural world.



Rene Magritte, The Menaced Assassin (1927)


I think that in this version, all the policemen would complain that if they had stopped the murder, then the music--Liszt's Piano Sonata in B Minor--would also have stopped. Some bad things must happen so that good can manifest. If one naked lady has to be raped, tortured, and murdered for a few minutes, so that we can listen to Beethoven, Mozart, and The Monkees, then the tradeoff is certainly worth it. Besides, who are we to judge God?

We can, however, use our free will to conduct a thought experiment as to who could imagine a better drawing than this one. First a few rules. Everything in your proposed painting must be the same, but must also be different. It must have a creator God watching from somewhere. He must be all powerful, but still somehow unable to act. You can substitute any other music you want, but you'll have a hard time coming up with anything better than Liszt or Judy Collins.