For Those Who Believe That God DID NOT Create EVIL....

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
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[b]Many theists, particularly Christian theists, make the claim again and again that the Judeo-Christian God is not responsible for the existence of natural and deliberate evil. Biblical statements that God “created everything” do not include evil itself. Evil is a creation of man or the fallen angels before them: natural evils are caused by “nature” outside the influence of God.

This denial of God’s culpability in the existence of evil begs questions in light of God’s role in the creation of man and the extent of God’s sovereignty. Most importantly, questions beg in light of God’s omniscient foreknowledge of all events (if God is indeed omniscient). It is hoped that those who believe that “God did not create evil” will not turn away from the observations made supporting argument that God is indeed responsible for the existence of natural and deliberate evil, at least in consideration of his omnipotence and omniscience:[/b]

[b]• I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things. (Isaiah 45:7 KJV)

• Shall a trumpet be blown in the city, and the people not be afraid? Shall there be evil in a city, and the LORD hath not done it? (Amos 3:6, KJV)

• Out of the mouth of the most High proceedeth not evil and good? (Lamentations 3:38)[/b]

Many Christians typically interpret the “evil” in the above verses (and all biblical verses ascribing “evil” to God) to mean ONLY natural evil, in terms of “acts of God”, disease, and birth abnormality:


They deny that the “evil” in the verses above may refer to the psychological state of malice.

[b]Many Christian apologists also state that evil is not a “thing” in the sense that rocks, flowers, or cars are “things” (in response to biblical verses stating that “God created everything” or every “thing”). Evil is explained to be not a “thing”, but an absence (of good):

Evidence of this is in the response to a letter from a skeptic named “Thomas” by “Lenny” of the Christian Apologetics site: ComeReasonMinistries:[/b]

Response:

[b]Interjection: Lenny is (deliberately?) confusing the “absence of perfection” with a true vacuum, or space filled with “nothing at all”. Evil and sin are not “nothing at all”. Indeed, in the “absence of the perfect which God did make” you do NOT have “NOTHING”, you have IMPERFECTION.

(The term: “perfect” in religious (particularly Christian) context is very ambiguous. It can only be disambiguated if the term “perfect”, used as an opposite of “evil”, means that something that is “perfect” has “perfect goodness”. Aside from this one can only logically claim that something is “perfect” if one means that a thing is absent physical flaw or has precision in movement.)

If we throw out Lenny’s (deliberate?) confusion of “imperfection” with “vacuum” or “emptiness”, we will see that evil is not an absence but a thing: a psychological “thing” in the form of the psychological state of malice (and/or indifference to the suffering of others and the self).[/b]

Interjection: WHY NOT ask why God created us with joints that could be broken?

(ComeReasonMinistries: Convincing Christianity: Letters to Lenny, comereason.org)

[b]Lenny resorts to semantic sleight-of-hand in order to strip away Thomas’ obvious meaning of the term: ‘everything’—to semantically exclude the creation of malice. Given that God’s existence, his creation of the world, and the scope of God’s creative abilities are inaccessible to human perception and knowledge, the disagreement of whether or not God created malice must remain unresolved. Nevertheless, Fundamentalist Christian belief that God did not create evil (malice) creates more questions than answers, and raises serious doubt about the characterization of God in the Bible and the relation of that characterization to the state of the ‘real world’.

For example, if one who does not believe that God created evil in the same breath states that God created ‘everything’, then what does “everything” imply to this person? Did God create only physical things? Do psychological entities qualify as “things”? If not, then why are they disqualified? Did God create only the human body, but none of the thoughts, feelings, and sensations arising within the body?

If, however, one holds that “everything” includes psychological phenomena, belief in free will and the denial of God’s creation of evil is threatened.

But if God did not and does not create psychological phenomena:[/b]

1. How does psychological phenomena come into existence independent of the will and action of God?

(a) Do they pop into existence ex nihilo, wholly independent of pre-existent context and antecedent cause?

(b) Are psychological phenomena created ex nihilo by the existence-creating magic of neurons?

(c) Did the existence of psychological phenomena, including the psychological manifestation of malice, come as a surprise to God? (And does the notion that God can be surprised contradict the notion of omniscience?)

(d) If God created psychological phenomena, did God create every psychological entity save malice? If so, is this failure to include malice due to an inability or unwillingness? If God did not create malice, where did it come from?

2. Why should psychological phenomena (once it magically pops into existence, if one does not believe consciousness arises from physical brains) emerge within human bodies? What prevents psychic phenomena emerging ex nihilo from coming into existence as a floating disembodied mind?

(a) Why is the human body mechanically prepared to express psychological states if God did not create psychology? If God is not responsible for our psychological states (only for our physical states)–then why the mechanical preparation for correspondence between the mental and physical before the fact?

3. Does the Bible state that God can only create physical things? Does it state that God limited himself such that he can only create physical things?

(a) Is God limited to foreknowledge only of the dispositions of physical objects in space and time, having no knowledge of the past, present, and future of mentality?

[b]4. If psychological phenomena are not created by God, how do these self-existent entities pop into existence below the radar of God’s omniscient awareness?

  1. If God’s omniscience allows him to imagine the mental life of all humanity, would not this foreknowledge (omniscience is truly omniscience ONLY if external reality infallibly mimics the imagination or prediction of the omniscient being) compel humans (through an unknown process that forces reality to mimic the predictions of God) to think, feel, and desire that which God knew they would beforehand?[/b]

“If God knows beforehand what you are going to choose, then you must choose what God knows you are going to choose. If you must choose what God knows you are going to choose, then you are not truly choosing; you may deliberate, but eventually you are going to choose exactly as God knew you would. There is only one possible upshot of your deliberating.”

(Swartz, Norman: Lecture Notes On Free Will And Determinism, sfu.ca/philosophy/swartz/fre … resumption)

[size=200]Conclusion[/size]

At the end of the day, those who continue to believe that God is not responsible for the existence of natural and deliberate evil will need to address the questions above. Persuasive, strong arguments (rather than threats of eternal damnation) are needed for the provision of reasonable defense of “no-evil” views of creation. Logical and disambiguated response to the questions above is the only hope for “no-evil” proponents to have plausible say in the ongoing debate over the “Problem of Evil”.

Just a thought,

Jay M. Brewer
blog.myspace.com/superchristianity

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hi, PG i have been waiting for this one. :smiley: :wink:

you are right! …if, god is what Christians think he is, then he creates evil. does anyone know what god is? after exhausting all other possibilities i can find no way to say what god is but that his very nature is beyond definition, perhaps he is omni-dextrous like that lols.

the bible ~ if truth be known, is a collection of works written by people about how they see god and his works in the world. i do believe that they had divine inspiration, yet also that god due to his nature cannot [even if he wants too] say what he is. he knows the creation to be perfect and hence that it doesn’t need to be manipulated, all things will fall according to the way.

‘when one obtains divine inspiration in any context and religion, it is relative to the inquirer!’ [quetz & probably many others] the Jews read it according to their perceptions, hindu’s by theirs.

‘we must concede that even given divine guidance, our acquisition of its truth can only possibly be less than it!’ [quetz & probably many others]

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quetzalcoatl:

Long time no see. :sunglasses:

That’s correct, sir. I think that unless one is willing to admit that God is not omniscient, not omnipotent, that God does not and did not create the psychological aspects of the universe, and that evil somehow came into existence by itself—

(Which, unless on is atheist in which case everything came into existence “by itself” through trial-and-error jigsaw-puzzling of subatomic particles, with the psychological aspect of the universe emerging either through “magic” or Chalmer’s panprotopsychism)

[b]—there is no other conclusion that that God created malice. However, my belief is that God did not deliberately imagine evil, it did, in a sense, “exist by itself” within the mind of God as an aspect of God’s unbidden mental calculation of possible worlds. I believe that God wished to “deal” with this strange mental “imperfection” by giving it external expression in order to evolve it “out of existence”. However, a conscientious God would do this in an ingenious manner in which “no animals are truly harmed during the filming of this picture”.

This would require the creation of World Y (defined in the ILovePhilosophy thread: Can You Handle The Truth?..) rather than World Z (however, the same evolution is possible within World Z).[/b]

[b]You’re right about the differing interpretations of “God’s truth”. (Interesting take on how even God does not know what he truly is! I’ll never forget that one! :slight_smile: )

Good Lord, it’s hard enough to figure oneself out—trying to figure out the deeper mysteries of the universe is perhaps and impossibility. Despite this, some of us are cursed with a werewolf’s hunger to nevertheless try to figure things out. Along the way, it helps if we were honest with ourselves.

I know, personally, that there are things in the cognitive darkness that some of us hate to admit to ourselves (particularly when it comes to knowledge about God according to human logic, which DEMANDS the law of non-contradiction)— but if one furtively touches upon these “forbidden” things, I think that the road opens to further wisdom and truth ahead, rather than closes or dooms one to eternal hellfire. (And no, this further wisdom and knowledge does NOT require one to stupidly become a nihilist—although one can argue that one can wisely become a nihilist—or to go about destroying society and others in a misguided practice of so-called newfound “freedom”)[/b]

Nothing that I have said in the recent threads: (Are We Ruled By An Evil God?, Can You Handle The Truth?, and For Those Who Believe That God DID NOT Create Evil) [b]negates God’s holiness (given that all goodness is an aspect of God, and that all goodness is derived from God and Christ according to my belief). Evil is simply something that is meant to be “weeded out” and evolved: God’s creation of evil, according to this belief, is never something meant to be maliciously applied toward men or to last forever.

Indeed, God is shown to be master of all things by these findings (that God created evil, etc.)[/b]

Hence the dilemma of knowledge.

Once again, good stuff, Q.

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Your whole argument hinges on an absolutist definition of omniscience that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with God. Maybe God doesn’t know what free beings will do. Maybe He does. Maybe sometimes He does, and other times not. In all three cases, we can apply the word ‘omniscient’ to Him just fine. Also, I’m not so sure that even rigorous omniscience is in any conflict with libertarian free will anyway, so that fails too. The connection certainly isn’t logically rigorous, in any event.

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hi, PG, interesting stuff!

god is not omni anything. to be so he would be limiting himself and forming into the specifics of things ~ no matter how grand the scale. is it not wisdom that such ideas are the ideas of man placed upon god, we may say he is omnipresent for example, yet under scrutiny it doesn’t hold up. e.g. the op here…

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=164696

to describe god in any way is to loose everything that he is. …and that what he is is what science and philosophy are missing, …and cannot possibly find. science/man will never know the big picture because they cannot include god in any other way that to concede that god is - like that part of reality - the very thing by which all things cannot be defined [even as omni X’s].

there are only two possibilities in my mind; either creation or eternal existence. the universe could not arrive by itself thus must have always been here. this brings us problems marrying the world to infinity which always results in a paradox. because there are no satisfactory solutions, existence need something by which it can renew, it cannot be reborn without everything becoming almost nothing then becoming again. hence needs a creator which would necessarily be ‘the whole’ at that eternal moment, …or at least that function [?].

lols, damn my impudence. :slight_smile:
there is knowledge and gnossis, god can’t know by collecting ideas together to form knowledge yet he can know because he is the truth of it. just as you cannot know you but it is the only thing you truly know. hence he cannot pass on his knowledge of what he is yet we can ‘know’ him via dare i say it; love [natural intimacy].

evil is only holistic, nothing that comes from god is evil, the universe and all its internal organs [quantum atomic chemical] don’t possess evil. as we cannot ascribe any specific notion to god, then we cannot also say evil is in there in any way whatsoever.
improbability is probably one of the main underlying factors in evil [being an agent of chaos], yet it is also the function by which we gain freedom [and by what life emerges etc].

back to your point… do you believe eden is possible? i don’t mean scientifically, but if god changes everything and the universe turns into eden or heaven, what happens next?
most people would say; why not just create eden, but we can say that truth must be experienced [all part of the natural intimacy thing] in order for eden to be arrived at.

uccisore, hi

can we? if he has all-knowledge then we cannot arrive at the point where; “God doesn’t know what free beings will do”.

true, it is when we add omni-potency to it that free will is lost. by definition we are utterly powerless by that.

i would argue that omnipotency is not possible, power is to each and everything, not to an external entity/notion/aspect. in short power like time is relative.

…and like time, power does not exist.

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To Uccisore:

Thanks for your response.

[b]True, to an extent. You can conceptually decompose “omniscience” into selective ways for one to be “all-knowing”. For example, one can abandon the idea of absolute omniscience and accept that God only possesses an “omniscience of marbles”, in which God knows the whereabouts of every toy marble in the universe, including their chemical composition, color, etc., but is uncertain of everything else.

Or maybe God possesses “electron omniscience”, in which God knows the position and location of every electron in the universe, but for a strange reason remains ignorant of the positions and locations of all the other subatomic particles surrounding the electrons. :astonished:

Then again there’s “happiness omniscience”, “table omniscience”, “tree omniscience”, “party balloon omniscience”, etc.

Perhaps God doesn’t know what free beings will do. Despite the fact that God mechanically prepared the human body to express the goings-on of “free” internal mental life—God’s mind just happens to be blind to human mental life, despite his mechanical preparedness of the human body to express it. Sounds good to me.

Did God blind himself to the psychological aspect of the human being? Or is this an absurd and accidental limitation beyond God’s control that, luckily for us, prevents God from knowing our intentions? If so, then if God is nevertheless “all-knowing”, then what is he “all-knowing” of? Why should this “all-knowing” exclude what beings will do?[/b]

That’s the problem with our ideas about God and the nature of God. They’re non-empirical [b](we cannot know whether or not such ideas are true and false judging through sensory perception—unlike scientific hypotheses—which can be proven or disproven through future sensory experience of the success or failure of a scientific theory).

Given that our ideas about God cannot be proven or disproven, we can make up anything we want about God, his powers, and his limitations. Objective reality, for all we know, might secretly coincide with a particular description of God and secretly falsify all others. Unfortunately, we will not know which conception of God (if God exists) is the objective winner.[/b]

[b]My argument indeed hinges on an absolutist definition of omniscience. It’s what I believe God possesses, and one can argue that it is the most logically obvious meaning of the term “omniscience” or “all-knowing”. One who “knows everything” is implied through simple and uncomplicated logic to possess “a knowledge of what every being will do, think, and feel” as well as knowledge of the location, position, and characteristics of all physical things in space and time.

The Bible itself implies absolute omniscience:
[/b]
You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.

All the days ordained for me
were written in your book
before one of them came to be.

(Psalm 139:2,16 NIV)

The Bible seems to think that God knows what free beings will do. Are we to infer from the verses above that God possesses this intimate knowledge only of the psalmist him/herself? If so, why does God know the past, present, and future of the psalmist, but no one else? Isn’t it more logical to make the induction that God possesses this intimate foreknowledge of EVERYONE?

And now we come to the most unambiguous claims of omniscience in the bible:

Behold, the former things are come to pass, and new things do I declare: before they spring forth I tell you of them.

I am God, and there is none like me. Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure…

I have even from the beginning declared it to thee: before it came to pass I shewed it thee…

(Isaiah 42:9; 46:9; 48:5 KJV)

Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.

(Matthew 6:8 KJV)

[b]How does your “not being sure” that rigorous omniscience conflicts with free will magically cause the argument to fail? Omniscience in the sense of infallible knowledge of the future (implied from the biblical verses above) conflicts with free will, even if God himself does not personally control human thought (God’s control of human thought and will being a staple of theological or theonomous determinism). Omniscience is not omniscience unless external reality is FORCED to mimic the imaginary predictions of the one that is omniscient. If God is rigorously omniscient, then God has knowledge of past, present, and future, and this knowledge is infallible (it cannot be disappointed or proven wrong by future behavior). Thus, following Norman Swartz’ description of Epistemic Determinism in the post above, whatever we choose to do can only be that which God knew we would choose: it cannot be otherwise.

Unless one is willing to believe that this infallible foreknowledge obtains through a continuous chain of unbroken coincidence, it follows that omniscience in this sense requires the existence of a process that forces external reality to re-enact the imaginary events within the mind of one possessing omniscience. This prevents the existence of free will.[/b]

And so it goes,

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Quetzalcoatl:

As I explained to Ussicore above, “therein lies the rub” when it comes to concepts and descriptions of God…any one of them (as long as they are logically possible) might be true for all we can know. God may be indescribable and inconceivable, as you claim him to be…or God is precisely capable of description and conception. I can’t argue against your views, Q. Why? Because they’re inarguable assertions incapable of falsification. An argument against your views will bounce like bullets from Superman’s chest—and there exists no logical or conceivable Kryptonite against them due to their non-empiricality.

[b]One can only achieve an impasse, by agreeing to disagree and maintaining one’s own separate non-empirical point of view. I believe that there IS an “omni”, and that there IS a plausible type of omnipotence perhaps distinct from the one you may envision (would like an explanation of your definition of “omnipotence” in order to judge if there is a difference, if you will).

This ideological invulnerability also applies to your statement concerning the marriage of the world to infinity, the belief that the universe “was always here”, and the concept of God not knowing who he truly is (STILL a very intriguing concept. :sunglasses:), and your notion that evil is somehow a part of the “perfection”. These concepts are inarguable, and can only be “defeated” by disagreement with their truth-value. The alternative view is itself non-empirical and unfalsifiable, so there will always exist a conceptual standoff.[/b]

Eden, I believe, is possible. As the character Jon Osterman remarks in Alan Moore’s DC graphic novel (and upcoming 2009 film): The Watchmen (1986):

[b]That is, that God could construe the causal relations making us what we are to omit evil, hate, etc. and provide us with psychologies that do not necessitate or remember the expression of that psychological aspect of the former world.

Think about a time in your life when you were truly happy and in love with the people that you were with (family, etc.). Now stretch that moment out so that those feelings (and the social interactions giving rise to those positive feelings) existed daily without end—with no darkness of mind (doubt, anger, resentment, irritability, etc.) intruding to interrupt this new type of God-imposed natural happiness (and the interpersonal interactions constantly giving rise to it). It’s simply a matter of God being able to string together momentary positive social interactions (and solitary positive experiences) into plausible chains of connected events.

As long as there (conceivably) exists a God-installed mechanism capable of continuously protecting and maintaining the manufactured paradise, I think that eden can and will always exist.

(There will need to exist an added feature to the afterlife mind: a God-contrived psychic “ambrosia” that prohibits the human mind from tiring or experiencing boredom with the passage of time.)

It’s probably just a staple of the minds that we possess NOW that we can’t imagine life without a little darkness thrown in. As the character Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) admitted to Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne) in the film, The Matrix (1999):[/b]

Agent Smith: Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where no one suffered, where everyone would be happy? It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost.

Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization.

[b]But this is no indication, I posit, of an impossibility of a plausible, continuous existence absent that darkness. God could, conceivably, re-create humans with minds that no longer NEED to define reality through suffering and misery, creating an indestructible populace within an indestructible environment that no longer “insinuates” that things are rotten in Denmark.

In my view, this is done by “splicing” all human minds with the psychology of Jesus Christ.[/b]

Once again, powerful stuff Quetzl.

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Let me address the omniscience/free will bit, because the other stuff I said sort of falls back onto that anyway.

Well, because if the argument had any deductive merit, then I would be sure. But it doesn’t, it’s just a seeming. There’s wiggle room.

So you say, but I don't think you could make the conflict explicit. I think you're relying on an (admittedly strong) intuition or gut-feeling of such.  I think your intuition works, because as I had supposed, you begin with "God knowing", and what you think knowing is like, and then apply that understanding of knowing to a knowledge of people, and of the future.  That's how it's usually done.  But let me take a different spin on it, if you'll permit me. 

Allow me to make a prediction:  Sometime soon, you will make a post on this website concerning religion. 

Suppose that you do so.  Having done so, and reflecting back on my prediction, is your belief in free will (for the sake of argument suppose that you do so believe) defeated, cast into serious doubt? Obviously not. You would think, "Of course Ucci was able to predict that, I do that sort of thing all the time. It has no bearing one way or the other on free will", and I would agree.  Now, suppose I predict further:

Sometime soon, you will make a post on this website concerning religion, that will use three different colors of text and an image file.

Feel determined yet? I bet not, and I would argue that you ought not; again, free will is not jeopardized by that kind of thing. Even though my second prediction was more detailed.

Suppose I knew you very, very well. I could probably add a bunch of other details to my prediction. If the first had a predictive value of 1, and the second 10, your very best friend would be able to make predictions of value 20 or even higher, say.

And none of them impinge on your free will, or at least, we don’t commonly think that they do. The way in which people know us doesn’t hurt those things.

So what about God? What predictive value would His beliefs about your future actions have? 100, 1000, 10,000,000; assign any number you want, I submit that there is only going to be a quantitative difference between what He can predict about you and what I can. He no doubt does it better and about more things, but it’s still the same sort of knowing, the sort that we all see doesn’t infringe upon our free will, only taken to an extreme.

It seems to me we’re at an intuitive impasse; if you begin with God’s knowing the volume of Jupiter, and compare His knowledge of your future actions to that, then it feels like free will is in trouble. If, however, you begin with human knowledge of our fellow man’s future actions, and build up from there to what God’s knowledge of our actions will be, then I submit that there is no such difficulty- or if there is, it’s not deductive or conclusive, since you can’t get from a high possibility to an impossibility from a merely quantitative change in factors.

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Uccisore:

Interesting perspective on how knowledge does nothing to force external reality to mimic the content of knowledge. Norman Swartz in his paper: Lecture Notes on Free Will And Determinism disconnects causal determinism from knowledge in the same way:

Proposal Three: The truth of propositions does not ‘make’ events happen (occur).

Consider: My wearing a short-sleeved shirt today [Oct. 28] is what makes (the proposition expressed by) “Swartz is wearing a short-sleeved shirt on Oct. 28, 1997” true. It is not the other way round. Logical fatalism confuses the semantic (truth-making) order. It makes it appear that the truth of a proposition ‘causes’ an event to occur. It is, rather, that the event’s occurring tomorrow ‘makes’ (but does not cause) the proposition to be true today. This is not ‘backwards causation’: the relation between an event and the truth of the proposition describing that event is not a causal relation whatever. It is a semantic relation.

The logic of the preceding paragraph can perhaps be made apparent by switching the example to one of speaking about the past rather than the future.

John Lennon was shot and killed in 1980. Let’s suppose a group of ten persons is arguing about the year of his death. Alice says that it was 1976; Betty, that it was 1977; Cathy, that it was 1978; Denise, that it was 1979; Edith, that it was 1980; Freda, that it was 1981; etc.

Of the ten claims made, only Edith’s is true. The other nine are false. Now ask yourself: Does Edith’s making a true claim today (about the year of Lennon’s death) account for Lennon’s killing? Did Edith’s asserting a truth today about Lennon’s killing somehow or other ‘force’ Mark David Chapman to fire five bullets into Lennon’s chest? Of course not. Now what if the year of the discussion were 1975? Alex says, “Lennon will be killed in 1976.” Bellamy says that it will happen in 1977. Charles, that it will happen in 1978. Damien, that it will happen in 1979. Eduardo, that it will happen in 1980. Frank, that it will happen in 1981. Graham, that it will happen in 1982. Etc. Of the ten discussants, one, namely Eduardo, gets it ‘right’; the other nine make false predictions. Does Eduardo’s true prediction (in 1975) somehow or other ‘force’ Mark David Chapman to fire five bullets into Lennon’s chest five years later, in 1980? Of course not.

Similarly you and I can make all sorts of predictions – some true, some false, some on the basis of excellent evidence (“There will be a lunar eclipse on Sept. 19, 2499”), some on the basis of no evidence whatever (“Simon Fraser University will remove all tuition fees in 1999”) – but those that are true do not ‘force’ the predicted events to occur.

The future will be just what it is going to be. None of us can change the future. But that does not mean that we do not have free will.

(Swartz, Norman: Lecture Notes On Free Will And Determinism, sfu.ca/philosophy/swartz/freewill1.htm)

[b]Rather obvious, isn’t it? Knowledge qua knowledge does not itself “force” external reality to mimic the contents of knowledge. Indeed, in your hypothetical prediction of my posting on this webside concerning religion (and my doing it using three different colors of text and an image file), and Swartz’ hypothetical predictions of wearing a short sleeze shirt on October 28, 1997 or the year of the death of John Lennon, there exists the commonsense notion that simply knowing these things (in the form of their conception within the mind) and transforming the concepts into future predictions does nothing to ‘cause’ the truth of the predictions. According to the pertinent view above, they occur only through coincidence.

The absence of causal determinism in the predictions is negatively implied in the seeming fact that the predictions could be proven wrong, frustrated or disappointed by another’s future actions. Swartz could have worn a long sleeve shirt on 10-28-97, Lennon could have been shot by Yoko Ono rather than Mark David Chapman in 1981 or 1979 rather than 1980, and I could have decided not to post in ILovePhilosophy until next year, rather than today.
[/b]
But this observation of causal disconnect between prediction and future action only works if one accepts the premise that there does not exist a causal power working in tandem with the one making the prediction, forcing reality to fulfill the prediction. [b]This is easy to accept when it comes to humans (it would seem odd to believe that a human being knowingly or unknowingly wields a power that forces others to fulfill the individual’s predictions of the future–although if there is any merit to Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Hypothesis, it cannot be ruled out).

I agree that knowledge, by itself (even the knowledge of God), is unrelated to the future truth of the content of that knowledge—as long as the knowledge does not work in tandem with an unseen mechanism that forces reality to mimic the content of that knowledge.

You (and Swartz) present a basic assumption that knowledge, even the knowledge of God, does not exist in tandem with a power that forces reality to mimic the contents of one’s knowledge. Swartz never applies this restriction to God (hence his warning of the threat to free will posed by theological Epistemic Determinism, which I included in the post far above)—but you have:[/b]

I submit that when it comes to God, it is not the same sort of knowing (knowledge not backed up by an unseen process or power forcing reality to reflect the content of what one knows). In this sense, at least according to my belief and the inferred meaning behind the biblical verses expressing God’s foreknowledge and God’s confidence in the future truths of that foreknowledge:

“Declaring the end from the beginning, from ancient times, that which has yet to be” (Isaiah 46:10)

and:

“I am the Lord, who has made all things…who carries out the words of his servants and fulfills the predictions of his messengers.” (Isaiah 44: 24,26 NIV)—

[b]—there is the intuition that the possibility that God’s predictions could fail by disappointment or upset through human action in the future is out of the question.

This implies that God’s knowledge logically works in tandem with a causal determinant (God’s direct pre-programming of the universe to follow only the path of God’s foreknowledge of future event, an unseen deus ex machina that automatically realizes God’s thoughts, or another unknown process) that forces the future to reflect the contents of God’s knowledge. If not, then God’s confidence (intuited from the sense of certainty within God’s statements in the Bible—if one believes that the statements are in fact those of God written by men) is unfounded and arguably irrational.

As unfounded and irrational, say, as the unrelenting confidence of a human making a prediction in 1996 that Norman Swartz will wear a short-sleeved shirt on Oct. 28, 1997 or a prediction in 1975 that John Lennon will be shot in 1980.[/b]

There is a deeper reason why the intuitive impasse exists: the non-empirical [b]nature of the entire premise and it’s rogue’s-gallery of conflicting conclusions.

Can I prove that there exists an unseen causal mechanism or power that forces reality to fulfill God’s prediction of the future? Can you prove that it does not exist? [/b]

[b]Can you prove that there does not exist a causal power that causes us to feel as if we were free when in fact we are not? Can I prove that such a power exists?

From the perspective of our experience, the truth or falsity of the existence of free will is indiscernible, due to the fact that a world in which free will exists and a world in which it does not is indistinguishable: following David Chalmer’s observation of the difficulty of disproving the existence of epiphenomenalism in his paper: Facing Up To The Problem Of Consciousness, the world will continue to appear and behave as it in fact does if free will does not exist—if the controlling entity contrives the world to contain beings that believe that they are free, behave as if they were free, and philosophically INSIST that they are free, despite the fact that they are not.

And vice versa.
[/b]

10

It’s interesting that in the second quote, it is more easily read in English to mean that God is acting according to the actions of his messengers, and not the other way around.

I don't follow your reasoning here. There seems to me to be two conflicts.

First, you’re proposing a reasoning, aims-driven God who believes, has confidence, runs the risk of being irrational, and I assume makes the world be just-so in order to assure that his aims are played out. He makes it happen. Well and good, but that’s us. We understand God to be that way first and foremost because we ourselves are that way. I don’t have a problem with that per se, I agree with the description. BUT, if we do operate in the way that you describe God (actors, knowers, controllers with aims), then it’s impossible that God should be in control of our actions, just as it would be impossible for us to be in control of God, if He is how you’ve described Him.
Which brings me to my second objection, which is that an Omnipotent being desiring me to do X can be shown to be compatible with free will in precisely the same was as I’ve done with Omniscience. Suppose I have a desire to get you to use the word ‘tree’ in your next reply to me. There’s all sorts of things I could do, from asking leading questions, offering money, threatening your family, whatever, to get you to use that word. Depending on who I am, my skills at rhetoric, my power and influence in the world, I might have a very high chance of getting you to do what I want, or a very low chance. And again, as with Omniscience, we all recognize that state of affairs, and don’t typically see it as a threat to our free will, either. Now sure, it’s possible that God strips our free will away entirely to make sure that we do every little thing that He wants us to for his Grand Design.
1.) There’s no reason to insist that he does.
2.) There are some ‘Grand Designs’ which could not be achieved by doing so.

One last thing,

Well, as confident as I am that you will reply to this thread, and that your response will use the letter ‘e’ at least once, God can be that much more confident. I think it’s a simple matter to recognize that God, being wise, would have just the most perfectly appropriate degree of confidence towards whatever He supposes will happen in the future. I don’t think it’s a stretch to see that that degree of confidence could be fairly expressed in terms of certainty, even if it doesn’t meet the explicit definition of the term ‘certainty’ that we use these days, which is primarily an example of something that can’t exist.

No and no. Difference being, proving that such a mechanism does not exist is not important to my case, assuming that it does is crucial to yours!

11

hi jay, this is going to be a long reply, i am really in two minds between your matrix god and my almost buddhist style infinity/god!

ha, like the superman theme, its kryptonite is perhaps itself…

…or God is precisely capable of description and conception.

interesting! a description of him then is one of many reflections of him, to take any as a particular description is wrong in the context of that specific meaning. yet is absolutely correct if our perspective is not in the meaning of the thing, but in the meaning of what it belongs too.

i think that made sense, :astonished: hmm i suppose we can divide it into two fields of reference. when we are describing phenomenon as itself it is one sphere of meaning, then when we describe it by another it belongs to that. god would be a sphere beyond and individual field, yet to which all may pertain in some way.

sure; each thing has ‘power’ and omnipotence is the collection of that. we cannot have anything external to that, which any given thing/entity/power has the power of, as it already has a possessor [itself] [the all p’s are p thing].

its an argument we hear all the time; things are self motivated [science] or all things are motivated by something? as we cannot have a ‘something’ [p outside of all p’s], we can only have a ‘nothing’ as the universal… unless we make a twist of meaning alluded to above. hmm this means we can scrub ideas like somethings and nothings and be left with that which lies in-between and can be as like either. when we see a thing we know there is no such absolute, just as there is no nothing. hence the only correct description of reality is that it is somewhere between.

things then cannot be perfectly themselves, the only truth and perfection is the whole.

so after re-evaluation, omnipotence is that whole. i can see perfectly now, the idea that everything even our thoughts could be seen as expressions of the whole ~ like a matrix! can we have a possessor or user of it though? i can see how infinity may be expressed as the world, but that isn’t anything as such. it may be omni-X [anything], but not in a way that is making things happen, more that things happen as a result of its ‘processes’. there would necessarily be no prime mover nor any given driving factors. it would truly ‘think’ outside of the box, ~ outside of beginnings and transient expressions.

if he just re-made the universe, everything would be pointless perhaps it would be an insult to our individuality and sentience, to just change everything even our minds [if chopice has anything to do with it]. i am more inclined to the idea that ‘perfection’ is self evolving - so to say, that within the current structure is the means to arrive at some kind of eden.

i do think that we only have to get so close and that is enough ~ a kind of mind rapture thing.

or an environment conducive to such events and further ones like it.

i am inclined to believe that a truer eden is more like the buddhist nirvana? presumably in a formed eden we would have children and they would grow up leaving us barren of their delights/love [as childlike love]. all things would behave with a time arrow and contrasts etc etc, …and we end up with pretty much what we have?

given that we are talking about an eternity, we would keep having children eventually ending up with millions of them. the idea of an eternal eden is a bit like the simpsons ~ an eternal family unit.
no ‘ambrosia’ would keep me interested in infinite repetition, unless entirely forced.

if however eden is more like nirvana, then there are no things to detract from simply being one with the whole. i feel there is an inevitable ‘return to the original self’ [as the mayans would put it] or to innocence ~ as christians may put it? or is that blasphemy; the very idea being that we end up as being one with g?d?

perhaps [nice matrix quotes]. i just think light and dark [fig’ speaking]cannot be separated, we don’t just learn good because bad is there as a contrast, they literally correlate to one another like forces kinda.
in-between and beyond them is the balance, the ma’at [as egyptians called it]. this is a truer bliss than the resultant emotional state of goodness i.e. ‘happiness’. this is the only eternal version, all others are transient by nature, we only have to contrast any idea within a formed eden to know they are not properties of the eternal.

i would question the ethic as i have done the premise; is it wisdom to recreate us as anything?
god always = the greater wisdom. a greater wisdom would be to allow us to grow, knowing that the seeds shall become mighty oaks, that eden will be arrived at naturally.

as a druid i would take time to consider that word; ‘naturally’, as fundamental to the whole discussion. a natural flow will advance as humanity has and as we do in life, i don’t think we un-advance at any point, so where does advancement naturally flow to?.. god/nirvana/infinity/original self. what then is the need for forced change?

then is it a case of; ‘may the road rise with you’, or does god grab hold of you and throw you up to the top of the hill. which is the natural way [as created by god] and the greater wisdom?

thanks for some poignant debate!

quetz.

12

here’s an interesting idea from a guy at another forum [we were discussing the matrix god after i brought it up]…
i was saying that we would have to make exceptions to omnipotence if we had our own free will/power:

if we think of everything as gradients of or within the whole then we can have a god as the whole and us as gradients within that! it contradicting when see comparatively, but if we view each thing within its own field then it is not.

make any sense?

13

Uccisore:

Thanks for the cognitive workout:

[b]I interpreted the verse with the perception of a theological determinist (which I am), rather than one who believes in the existence of free will. If one believes that free will exists, the above verse would of course be interpreted to mean that the messengers of God presented the predictions by their own choice independent of God, with God later fulfilling those predictions.

As opposed to the same event occurring within a domain of theological determinism, in which God, the author or puppetmaster, first causes the servants to choose to make the predictions (no different in principle–if not in method—than Stephen King ‘causing’ characters within his latest novel to choose to make a prediction or J.K. Rowling ‘causing’ the divination teacher Sybil Trelawney to choose to make a prediction to Harry Potter)—before fulfilling those predictions before the eyes of other characters within his omniscient “novel” or “play”.[/b]

[b]The very idea that God makes the world to be just-so and assures that his aims are played out is a logical and metaphysical possibility. It is no different than the logical and metaphysical possibility that there exists a mind-independent external world beyond the virtual reality that is conscious experience, the logical and metaphysical possibility of the existence of other universes, and so on. It is a proposition about the possible nature of existence, rather than just a projection of human attitudes and traits upon a conception of God.

Insofar as it is logically coherent and something that, upon further rational reflection, is intuitively known as something that can exist (seeing no coherent natural law or existential state-of-affairs that would prevent it’s possibility), the hypothesis that God controls human will may be something that happens to be true anyway, despite the motivation of the one presenting the hypothesis. This is the implication behind logical and metaphysical possibilities.[/b]

How is it necessarily impossible for God to be in control of our actions just because we are actors, knowers, and controllers? We are, or seem to be, mechanically contrived beings whether or not God exists. What existential law prevents God from exerting mechanical control over human beings, mechanically contrived to be sub-controllers with aims?


[b]Even within secular or atheistic descriptions of the world, humans are ultimately controlled by neurons (and by extension, the summations of the causal relations within the surrounding universe ultimately causing neurons to fire), with human will and choice ultimately determined by the activation and function of it’s corresponding NCC (neural correlate of consciousness). We are “actors and controllers” in atheistic context due to the fact that there happens to exist cerebrums whose individuated neurons fire electrical pulses to other neurons in an overall pattern, giving rise to the subjective experience of a desire to act, to control, etc.

I don’t see why the human trait of control cannot be mechanically contrived by a theological agent or force. There does not seem to be an a priori necessity for the existence of free will, at least not one that is conceivably accessible.[/b]

Or, an Omnipotent being desiring me to do X pre-programs or mechanizes me to do X at a desired (or previsioned) point in time. This is a different story than a being using threats or offering money to get me to do what it wants. The presupposition above is that God, for some reason, is definitely not in control and somehow cannot be in control of our internal selves, while theological determinism presupposes the opposite.

One can reasonably insist that he does due to one’s conviction that he does (as an aspect of philosophical skepticism about the world and how it is commonly believed to operate), even if there is no empirical reason to insist that he does.

Like certain conceivable ‘Grand Designs’ that require free will for their realization.

[b]God’s confidence that whatever he supposes will happen in the future, no matter the power of that confidence and it’s expression as a type of ‘certainty’, is rather odd if God relies solely upon coincidence to bring about the future truth of his predictions. The confidence seems to beg something else beyond a reliance upon coincidence.

A good definiton of ‘certainty’ is expressed by David J. Chalmers in his paper:The Content And Epistemology Of Phenomenal Belief:[/b]

A number of epistemological issues remain. One concerns the strength of the justification of phenomenal beliefs. It is often held that phenomenal beliefs are (or can be) certain, for example. Can the present framework deliver this? It can certainly deliver incorrigibility, but certainty requires something different. I think that the relevant sense of certainty involves something like knowledge beyond skepticism: intuitively, knowledge such that one’s epistemic situation enables one to rule out all skeptical counterpossibilities. There is an intuition that phenomenal belief at least sometimes involves this sort of knowledge beyond skepticism, as the standard construction of skeptical scenarios suggests.

(Chalmers, David J: The Content And Epistemology Of Phenomenal Belief, consc.net/papers/belief.html)

This type of certainty, the one that enables one to rule out all skeptical counterpossibilites, is generally supplied through personal experience, or through one’s direct actions toward the world: if God controls human will and himself pre-programs human choice and human destiny, then God’s “certainty” that his predictions will come true may exist in the form of the Chalmerian certainty mentioned above.

Admittedly, assuming such a mechanism exists is crucial to my case (with said mechanism either being something distinct from God or the actions of God himself—in which God is his own “causal mechanism”). However, the hypothesis finds safety and rests comfortably within it’s unfalsifiable nature. The burden of proof on my part, then, is a pseudo-problem.

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Quetzalcoatl:

[b]Hmm. Seems to me that the other person is implying that we are gradients of God himself, and that we are fractional (perhaps microscopic) aspects of his power. Sounds good, until you think of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.

Q: Will respond to your larger post soon— I’ve got a long work day ahead tomorrow. But I’ve saved it for this weekend and plan to read it at work.[/b]

15

phenomenal_graffiti

Meh. I don’t even know if I believe that, either. Not sure how I feel about the whole prophecy thing.

Yep, I have no problem with this statement, or the logical coherence of your argument or model as a whole.

You're right, I don't think it's a matter of logical impossibility. It's more like a...intuitive circularity. We suppose that God is a certain way, because WE are that same way.  But then if God is as we have supposed, then we aren't the way we took ourselves to be at all. So what's our reason for presuming that God is a self-driven Being with the power to actualize His own aims that begin with Himself, if, as it turns out, we've no reason to believe there's any such things as those?  It just seems to me that in order for us to grant that God is like that, it's most reasonable to assume we are too, since we are the model we're using to suppose about God, you see? That's pretty convoluted reasoning on my part, I'll withdraw it if you think it's too much of a leaky bucket. :slight_smile:

The rest of your response seems to have to do with defending the logical coherence of your position, which I have no problem with. What I will say, in response to this

is that I took your original post to be a description of an actual problem within standard Christianity, between omniscience and free will, specifically a critique of the few that God didn’t create moral evil. I believe I’ve resolved the problem adequately, and shown that a Christian can indeed believe in both omniscience and libertarian free will just fine. If, however, you want to go on to just suppose theological determinism and build your own model independently of any salient criticism of a more traditional view, then be my guest- it wasn’t really my intention to tear your structure apart for it’s so sake, so much as to show that it’s not a required alternative. :slight_smile:

16

Uccisore:

[b]It becomes a “leaky bucket” only to the extent that one observes that there may not exist an existential necessity for humans to be, essentially, self-driven beings with the power to actualize their own aims (with such aims and the power to realize them beginning with themselves)—and that it is not a necessity for humans to be this way in order for them to have the conception that God is this way (God can, in principle, create mechanical beings who believe that they are self-driven and self-powered–and cause them to think because they are so self-driven, that this fuels the reason one believes that God is self-driven and actualizes aims that begin with Himself).

I concede that humans possess a more or less subconscious habit of projecting themselves into their ideas, using themselves as the model for the character and nature of (particularly) anthropomorphic concepts (such as God). But if theological determinism is true, the reasoning you propose behind the aforementioned concept of God is falsely self-referencing, as there does not exist the relevant essential properties within human beings (self-existence, self-determination, and freedom from external control) to form the template for the concept .

If theological determinism is false, the projection of self-drive and self-origination into descriptions of God is telling of a subconscious narcissism within human beings (that makes constant “Freudian slips” in the form of our conceptions of God—we subconsciously boast of our freedom and power in the form of our description of the powers and abilities of God). It is quite reasonable to suppose that God is described this way because humans are this way, but the reasoning does not go all the way through, given the possibility that freedom and self-power within human beings may not truly exist.
[/b]

[b]I am amenable to settling for the hypothesis of theological determinism to be just a hypothesis and nothing more, given that the nonexistence of free will (like it’s existence) cannot be empirically demonstrated or proven (due to the fact that the world is indistinguishable in terms of appearance and behavior if one or the other were true), but if I do it will be with tongue firmly in cheek, as I am (for my own reasons) convinced of theological determinism. If, however, I am wrong and free will exists, the paradigm of choices available to one’s freedom can be argued to have been smaller (but infallibly positive in their results in theory before the creation of man) before God chose to create an all-good world from, of all places, the starting point of an evil world— callously imposing a new paradigm of choices for man to choose from from the one that might have existed if God chose not to allow evil to exist in the first place.

This continues to beg questions concerning the limit of God’s control over human beings (and which authority, such as the Bible, establishes that limit–or is it simply what one chooses to believe?), questions concerning the nature of free will and it’s definition (the definition given by Swartz is good enough for me), and the question of a plausible demarcation of where man’s freedom begins and God’s control ends, if God created humans (that is, if God created the physical aspects of humanity, where did he choose to stop when it comes to the psychological aspect of the human being?).

Good job, uccisore. Again, an impressive critical analysis that raised a cognitive sweat. [/b]

17

hi, jay

:stuck_out_tongue:
indeed yes, instead of thinking of god as like an impenetrable diamond - so to say, god is also composed of variations/transience which act as a gradient factor.

your matrix god is everything, so paris hilton is part of that too.

the way we view the whole seams to be at the heart of the matter ~ perhaps god is the pure heart, like the emptiness beneath/above the expression [things].

18

Quetzalcoatl:

[b]Hello.

Just joking about Paris Hilton. She’s a part of the GRAND DESIGN as well…and who are we to speak? Have we discerned the true depths of her heart?

However, I’m a bit reticent about the “God is everything” point of view. One can assert that things are this way, but it’s still another non-empirical point of view about a possible state of existence. I’d rather safely file it away in the closet containing all other logical and metaphysical possibilities, until further notice.[/b]

19

jay, hi

further notice… :smiley: :sunglasses:

‘omni’presence/potence/science. such ideas necessarily denote an everythingness,
‘omni, includes all omni’s’ [quetz]

why is that not empirical ~ is empiricism incorrect? :wink:

20

Quetzalcoatl:

[b]Empiricism is the view that all knowledge comes from experience, despite the fact that there are concepts that we can conceive that are not accessible to human sensory perception.

Thus we cannot experience this “everythingness”.

(What I meant by the “God is everything” view is that some think that God is indistinguishable from “everything” or that God is “everything”—rather than an separate anthropomorphic mind. I’ve never been able to get behind this) [/b]