Free-will and Atheism

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This is where I'd take my leave, mainly because its where structurable argument ends and faith begins. As for the conflicts you bring up - its your book.

shepherds tend to slaughter their sheep… that's the whole nature of their business.

if the flock knew… it would follow.

Only when the sheep get to old for shearing. The main value of sheep is their wool and for that they must be fed and cared for.

ruveyn

not entirely correct.

lambs were also sacrificed… and meat from sheep in general has always been common in food in middle east.

being a shepherd is no "philanthropic" business… it's about profit. the sheep don't gain from this. they are enslaved and live in captivity.


btw. a "not" was missing in my post... (if the flock knew… it would not follow)

There were no such people as Adam and Eve. Humans descended from at least 10,000 modern humans.

Evidence, please.

that they are there is a positive assertion, as such the burden of evidence is not on those denying adam and eve.

furthermore the genetic evidence is not in its favour.

That's just intellectual laziness.

Besides, my response to tech had to do with the problem of evil from the Christian theist perspective--a worldview that presupposes God created the universe and placed Adam and Eve as the head stewards of all creation. Tech's contention that there is no God was supported by showing that a good God who is all-powerful and all-knowing couldn't have created the world we know. My refutation of his claim invokes theodicy, which counters that God maintains all those qualities tempered with justice--the world we live in is a result of choices humans made by taking the decision-making over creation out of God's hands. It has nothing to do with arguing for or against the existence of Adam or Eve. If tech is able to effectively disprove God through the problem of evil, then He couldn't have created Adam and Eve if He never existed. I don't believe that tech DID effectively disprove God since the existence of evil is compatible with the existence of God. The irony is that even if God never existed, evolution does not rule out that people like Adam and Eve existed! The reason it's possible and maybe even likely is that one of the guiding principles of evolution is linking related organisms to common ancestors. Adam and Eve COULD have been the first proto-humans that were most like modern humans.

As far as the burden of proof goes, we've been over this quite a few times. If you honestly think that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," what you have to understand is that to the Christian theist a denial of the existence of God and other Biblical claims is itself an extraordinary claim. It's hypocritical for one claimant to hold another to a higher standard than he holds himself. If you're no more willing to substantiate your own claims than that, then I'm afraid there's very little I can do to help you.

and using a two millenia old book of human interpretation is not??

does god know the future?

if yes then the 5 stage sequence above still holds as free will cannot exist,

if no he is not omniscient so why should we put his opinion above others?

also two proto humans are as i understand it quite literally impossible, we would have died from a lack of a healthy gene pool long ago, even 10000 is a very very very small number of ancestors, in the genetic sense humans are quite inbred relative to many animals.

as for your last comment, ordinary is what anyone can learn by looking at the verifiable world, extrordinary is not.

You can think ANYTHING through. Most supposed Biblical difficulties I've ever seen are easily resolvable. Attacks on the Bible based on out-of-order and out-of-context quoting because two separate verses on opposite sides or sourced from different texts happen to contradict each other doesn't show very much depth of thinking on the part of the person making the attacks. It's even possible for texts to be purposefully contradictory, such as Proverbs 26:4 and 26:5. A Bible critic might jump on that contradiction like a monkey on a cupcake without first considering that proverbs often take the form of riddles intended to make the reader think about their meaning. A lot of the supposed "contradictions" aren't really contradictions at all but are often in reference to completely unrelated things. It's difficult to take someone seriously when they attack the same old, tired, easily refutable "errors" the Bible supposedly has. If the Bible makes sense, there's no use picking at it since the text is not going to change. There are more worthwhile things to do. The real laziness is asserting "the Bible is two millennia old, ergo it is WRONG." Will evolution suddenly become wrong after the theory turns 2,000 years old?


Sure.


Not true. Omniscience does not negate free will. If God is omniscient, He knows EVERYTHING, including all possibilities that haven't occurred. He knows just as much about what doesn't happen, in a sense, as He knows what WILL happen. So, as long all possibilities remain open, free will is still possible.

Something else to consider is that while God is omniscient, man is NOT. If we knew everything, we'd be compelled to make choices in line with God's will. A Christian doesn't have a problem subjecting his will in submission to God's will. For us, freedom is more about what we are "free from" rather than what we are free to do--abandoning one master (evil, sin) to serve another (God). Depending on how you define "free will," we may or may not be free. Regardless, we are free to make at least one choice, that being to follow Christ or not.


Genesis 1 has the creation of man. Genesis 2 has Adam and Eve. Were there people on the earth before Adam and Eve? If so, then that would resolve your gene pool problem.


Assertion. I could just as easily say that "ordinary" is understanding that everything is the result of God's creation made for His purpose. Extraordinary is a denial of it. You're imposing your view on someone who doesn't see it that way and expecting that person to just abandon his faith on the basis of "because I said so." It's a pseudo-intellectual bully tactic, and I don't find it convincing. If there is no middle-ground to be shared, no equitable distribution of the proof-burden, then there is no point to the discussion.

does he have any control of the future?
does he have any actual real time control of the world,

does he..
does he....
does he......


yet we can all agree that the sky has a certain wavelenght and that the window on your second floor is not a door, that is the verifiable world, something only a delusional lunatic would deny when one shares perspective. ie. same culture and same context, ie not metaphoric, nor rhetoric.

And I could just as easily say that "only a delusional lunatic" would assume the material world is all that there is. None of this is a disproof of God.

Where that liquidity jams up is when people give a said God or that non-material stuff a rigid definition as defined and outlined by 1000+ page books. That's where things get much more falsifiable.

Agreed. Where theistic arguments can sometimes break down is an opponent demands a definition of "god" or "God." How do you define the undefinable? God doesn't exist in that kind of box. The step from generic theism to Christian theism should be a thought-out step, not a giant leap. When we're kids, it's easy to believe in God the same way we believe there's a Santa Claus or a tooth fairy. I look at is as "Yes, I know I believe in God and not other things...now how did I get here?" If you don't recall a time in your life when you didn't believe, then you have the whole of Christian history, philosophy, and theology from which to retrace your steps. It's no accident that any of us are where we are. "If God exists, how do you know he's the right one?" It's something I've had to think about over the years; I just happened to conclude that this is the one my parents actually got right.

The challenge is then (wow how I've over used the next term lately....), the term 'God' becomes vacuous. I

f a God is a God that we'd think of in the traditional sense, to be that powerful it almost by definition makes sense to posit that being outside of time and make it the author of what we know as reality. Its interesting that when we try to think of the beginning or the end of the universe or beginning or ending of everything a lot things start unraveling where, if those were nothing more than bindings of the book and places where we wouldn't find any answers that we can't draw from them now, it could easily be concluded that the whole reality we're experiencing was built by a third party who created us but who we cannot talk to directly as it doesn't exist within our material structure aside from having its identity threaded through everything. The challenge then comes down like this - like a book we're in a fully deterministic universe, determined by the sculpture this 'thing' was making or the book it was writing. If it was building something and didn't know it was building us, like a universe being created by a metalsmith who thought he/she was making art for an office building and essentially was - well, okay. If it was someone essentially starting an antfarm of other-dimensional beings, well, okay. To see a direct rhyme and reason to the way our world works though; its really a bit like, at best, via a lot of pain and suffering as well as lives never lived (ie. lived under such terrible circumstances that they are what Epicurus would have called life more like unlife) ends up in a world of ever-increasing efficiency where life keeps getting easier because of the nature of thermodynamics and the desire of matter to seek greater and greater dynamic efficiency. With that comes technology for us and increasingly improved living. Like that though we'd be more of a crystal or rock farm than something that such an author or gleeful chemistry kit purchaser would directly interact with, perhaps it wouldn't even realize that we exist on an individual level and may have no clue that it even created a universe. From that stand point as well that 'God' may live under a similar universe under similar conditions where you can keep regressing from its universe back to something else that seeded or created its universe by accident.

The best thing is - a God outside of time seems to tie together wonderfully with both being eternal (which in our universe would make sense, our timeline is irrelevant to it's existence anyway) and being omnipotent. Albeit its up for debate whether you'd consider a kid with a crystal farm in a different dimension a 'God' in our traditional sense. Really this outlook is a deistic conclusion, not a theistic one.

However, if you try to posit an omniscient, omnipotent, and eternal being 'within' our universe you get all kinds of problems. Determinism still doesn't seem abated, even for them, and to have conflicts between what they create and their desired outcomes means that they clearly aren't omniscient and, if they aren't the sum of all environmental factors themselves, they aren't omnipotent either. In that sense we could have something more like a demi-urge floating around but still, something like that is nearly as hapless and pitiable as we are and one would hope that it would prefer to have us as partners rather than spin in the void of its own loneliness or perceived lack of purpose. It would also mean though that that being would likely not be 'goodness incarnate' in the sense that while it could have traits there's still not enough overlap between itself and the universe to say that its the source, even if it inherited a great deal in that regard into its own attributes. At a given time I figured as well that with this model, a God that was eternal needed a mirror to see itself and in that sense created other entities to fill the void - BUT, that still doesn't solve the problem that it existed for eternity before it created anything; that's another tip that tells me that either a) God's eternal nature is untrue or b) we go back to the first choice - that God exists outside of the universe and hence God's eternal nature is both easily explained and also moot since when we regress infinitely back or forward we're simply hyper-analyzing the bindings of the book or the end pieces of the sculpture.

Regardless though, trying to draw coherent intent out of the human and world condition, if that's done without the bias of a religious book, comes out *almost* as incoherent as the results and contradictions that the religious book would give. Its because of these things that I have a very difficult time engaging a theistic outlook, and while the multi-dimensional deistic outlook may have some intuitive appeal its still a series of guesses based on the premise of and defining a God where the existence of such a God was given in the fundamental premise of the philosophical exercise.

@techstepgenr8tion: So the challenge is...what, exactly? lol

I understand what you're saying. I don't have a problem with the idea of God existing outside of the universe of space and time, and I'd say that the Christian worldview as a whole doesn't have a problem with that. Is that "testable" or "verifiable"? No. But like you said one can look at creation and make a perfectly valid inference that God exists.

The only extra step I'd take is that while God exists outside space and time, He still reserves the right to intervene if He so chooses. If that's possible--if we can allow for at least the possibility that God doesn't have to be relegated to some corner that is non-existent in the material universe--then we shed the anti-supernatural biases we have and the Bible, if unlikely, is at least plausible. If we are truly searching for the answers and feel pulled towards theistic conclusions, then that would be a good step to take in favor of Christianity (before getting into the claims themselves, of course). That would be a challenge you'd face if you were considering ANY form of theism.

Because of my particular life experiences, becoming a Christian at an early age and never abandoning my faith in any meaningful way, it's been a journey looking from the outside in and retracing the paths other people have taken in order to understand it better. Given the inherent conflict of polytheistic system and the chaotic/erratic behavior of the gods at odds with their individual values, and all of those elements being completely at odds with reality, monotheism is preferred. A cohesive reality, in other words, reflects the cohesion and unity of its creator. If there is a God, He is One (and no, I'm not debating unitarianism/trinitarianism here). The next step is deciding which one is THE One. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all make a claim that their God is the right one. Judaism and Christianity share Yahweh, while Islam claims Allah. So the next question is one of God's nature. Allah is closer to the deist model: aloof, "out there," and not apparently all that interested in humanity. Only those who are the cream of the crop even have a chance to impress Allah and enter heaven. So if Allah exists, he doesn't seem to me to be much of a god I really want to spend an eternity seeking. Which leaves Yahweh, who is very much involved and cares about His people. According to Judaism and the OT, Yahweh is reserved for the Jews. Well, I'm not a Jew, so Judaism is out. And that leaves Christianity, in which the whole world can be saved through the atonement of God Incarnate in the person of Jesus the Messiah.

I'm not pretending everyone can come to those conclusions as easily as I have. I'm just saying for all the time I've had to examine my faith and question everything I was taught, I've had plenty of opportunity to change or abandon my faith. By learning about the alternatives out there, my decision to remain steadily in my faith has been an informed one, and I think believers and non-believers alike can come to similar conclusions as I have using similar pathways of discovery. I think sometimes faith may originate within a person as a "blind faith," but I don't think it always HAS to stay blind.

The thing about trusting a 2,000 year old book is it's also understood that not everything in the Bible is going to be comprehensible, especially not for somewhat deeply entrenched in a materialist perspective. It would be safer to focus on simpler ideas--such as God created everything for His own purpose and He can do what He wants with it; He put us in charge of it; we screwed up and rebelled against God; God provided a way to reconcile humanity to Himself through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus. There is no need to debate Biblical inerrancy, evolution vs. creation, literal interpretation vs. non-literal, etc. Hit the basics, and that's all the faith you need. Personally, I love reading and studying the Bible and have no problems believing it. But not even the Bible should stand in the way of someone coming to a saving knowledge of God. The New Testament is not nearly as dramatic as the OT--no seas parting or the earth standing still. Hold off on Revelation if that's too difficult for you. Someone coming from a materialist world view might find limiting Bible study to the gospels and epistles a little easier to digest than including the OT and Revelation.