Arcturus Descending wrote:Of course God just adds another layer of complexity here. If God is said to be omniscient then He knows everything. So that must include knowing what each of us as individuals think we know about Him. So how could we not know only what He already knows that we will know?
Is it really important that God know everything? How would your life change, your behavior change, if you could find out, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that God was omniscient?
If God does not know everything that would seem to open up the possibility of committing a sin that escapes God's notice. And how is that different from breaking the law and no one ever finding out? And if I could find out that God was omniscient, an omniscient God would already be privy to this. Just as He would be privy to any and all behaviors that I have deluded myself into thinking that I am making autonomously.
As my ex-wife once pointed out, to the extent that you spend your life pondering seemingly unanswerable questions like this, is the extent that you are not out in the world actually living your life.
Arcturus Descending wrote: Is THIS the way that you see it also? One can seek answers to the hard problems while at the same time striving to find balance between the two.
That was basically my argument to her. Back then though she was in the process of becoming a "radical feminist". And a lesbian. Nothing was more important to her than her political commitment. And that was around the time my own political commitment as a fellow objectivist had already begun to crumble.
From my own frame of mind here and now, "a human being who has both a moral and ethical heart and mind who cares about others and who's focus is 'to do no harm'," is just another existential contraption. It is embodied in a particular "I" out in a particular world. The parts about dasein, conflicting goods and political economy are everywhere here.
Just imagine for example pinning down what it means to have "an ethical heart and mind" re the abortion wars. Or in putting Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court.
Thus to ask what we all ought to do [on this thread] is still entangled in turn in the extent to which what we choose to do either is or is not only that which we ever could have chosen to do.
Arcturus Descending wrote: So, is this question about God being a puppeteer and we the puppets, that no matter what we chose, after much reflection and struggling, let us say after having chosen one intelligent and reasonable option out of five different ways we could have gone, our choice is not based on self-determination and freedom because we would have ultimately made that choice anyway?
There are those who propose arguments that they claim reconcile an omniscient God and the "free will" of mere mortals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_free_will
Arguments of this sort however become entangled in "worlds of words". Words going around and around in circles chasing each other. The assumption always being that there is a God.
Arcturus Descending wrote:What is more important to you? Resolving the above which I do not really see an answer for except by taking a leap into the darkness and choosing one or the other based on how we choose to see ourselves and the world around us ~~ since we cannot ever really be certain ~~ it is just like the God thingy. We can also decide to take the way of the agnostic and realize that perhaps in the final analysis it does not matter.
Here "I" -- my "I" -- quickly becomes embedded in the thick fog that surrounds any attempts to really understand your own motivations and intentions.
Arcturus Descending wrote: Did you mean to say *my* (as in your) own motivation, etc.?
What is that *thick fog* - you standing in your own way?
Here I come back to connecting the dots between what I think I know about all of this here and now and all of Donald Rumsfeld's "unknown unknowns". The knowledge gaps that stand between what I believe is true and everything that one would need to know about the existence of existence itself. And then [somehow] fitting God into that.
So: How "intelligent, reflective and reasonable" are any of us "mere mortals" in the face of a connundrum that gigantic?
Then the part about calibrating just how "fixed in time" we are in the pursuit of this. Given either an omniscient God or laws of matter that are both immutable and applicable to the "dualism" embodied by human brain/mind.
Last night I dreamed I went to the mailbox in a house I once lived in many years ago. I pulled out the mail and there was a letter from my wife. I was reading the letter. It was about our daughter.
Then when I woke up the whole "incident" just blew my fucking mind! How could my brain manufacture this letter "in my head" such that "in the moment" the "I" in the dream was reading it?!!
Arcturus Descending wrote: Dreams are part of a process. Your consciousness, for whatever reason you needed, had already been in the process of creating that letter for some time. It was just the right time for the *mailman* lol to deliver it.
Yes, but these extraordinary dreams are a process such that neurologically and chemically the matter in my brain was able to create a world that I imagined was real. In the moment of "living" in it.
In other words [perhaps] just as in my waking hours I imagine that the world is real. That I am choosing my behaviors with some measure of freedom.
And, indeed, this being the case, "what would the next step for the philosopher be? What would his next question be?"
The one I asked was, "how is this even possible?"