By Pastor Stephen Feinstein
In the last two posts, some important ideas were presented.
First, we dealt with personality. Human beings are persons, and there are
mighty implications that come from this. In the second post, the topic of
knowledge was discussed. How do we know things with any kind of certainty? Is
there anything that can unite knowledge? The answer was a resounding yes. Both
personality and knowledge can only be explained by the reality of the Christian
worldview. Fallen humanity will do whatever it can to suppress this truth, but
they cannot live in any other way than to behave with their actions as though
Christianity is true. If you want a review of these ideas, read the last two
posts.
Well, as I continue to summarize chapters of Francis
Schaeffer’s work, The God Who is There,
we get to focus on another crucial topic. We have the task of discussing the
dilemma of man. Truly, the goal is to ask the question, “What is wrong with
man?” Some may object that this question presupposes that something is wrong
with man, but any honest and bright soul can obviously tell that something is
wrong with us. We can rise to great heights, and we can sink to miserable acts
of cruelty such as the Holocaust. We can physically exercise until the point of
being an Olympic athlete, and we can die of cancer soon after. We can demand
and expect that respect be given to us, and on the same day we can gossip about
other people. So then, what is the problem?
Well, there are two possible explanations. Man either has a
metaphysical problem or he has a moral problem instead. All systems of
unbiblical thought in some form or another hold to the metaphysical answer.
They believe that man’s problem is his finitude. He is too small to wrestle
with the many problems of the big world and bigger universe. Thus, man has
always been this way. Death, natural disasters, pestilence, etc., have always
existed as long as life has existed, and thus man has always been fallen in the
biblical sense. This dilemma is part of what being man is.
The second option is the biblical option. This option reveals
to us that man’s dilemma is a moral one rather than a metaphysical one. Adam
and Eve were created by God as non-determined beings. In other words, they had
a free will and were morally good. They were in communion with God. The world
and the universe also were made as good. There was no curse, and there was no
death. Thus, Schaeffer writes, “Man as created in God’s image is therefore a
significant man in a significant history, who can choose to obey the
commandment of God and love Him, or revolt against Him.” Adam was the only man
in this position. His choice to revolt had consequences for the entire race
that came from him. Many modern theorists believe man to be determined by
chemical factors in the brain, and thus free will is declared to be an illusion.
They would reject the idea of Adam having a free will on these grounds, but
their position is erroneous and they do not even live their own lives according
to their presuppositions. More can be said on that at another time. It is true
that in our current fallen condition our will has been affected by sin and the
sin nature. As such, we lack a free will to do what is good since we are now
cursed sinners by nature. That is what explains the horrible things that
humanity does to itself. Yet, we still have a semblance of the image of God within
us, which is what accounts for us rising to great heights.
So then the moral problem of man stems from the fact that the
infinite-personal God called on personal man to act by choice. Choice is
something that was intrinsic to Adam’s status of being made in God’s image.
When people ask why did God not just remove the choice and avoid all of this,
it is because removing the choice would reduce Adam to less than a perfect
human. It would make him closer to being a machine.
At this point, it is important to quickly address a misnomer
about Calvinism or Reformed Theology. People of the non-Reformed camp often
accuse Calvinists of being determinists. In other words, they argue that we
believe God made us like robots with no choice. This is simply not true. The
biblical position is called compatiblism. The idea is that God is totally
sovereign over all things that come to pass, but humans make real choices in
real time with real consequences, and therefore they have real responsibility.
How it all works together is difficult for the finite human mind to grasp, but
it is the clear teaching of Scripture and it makes the most sense out of what
we know of God and yet see in man. The Bible speaks of God predestining and
decreeing history, and yet this somehow happens in a manner consistent with
human choice. This is the Calvinist position.
However, let me be clear that humans do not have a free
will, at least not anymore. We do have a will, but it is tainted by sin. The
sin nature dictates what our will chooses. For example, a lion is by nature a
carnivore. If you put a bowl of cabbage and a bowl of raw meat in front of the
lion, you are giving it a real choice, but it will always choose the meat since
by nature it is a carnivore. The only way to change the choice is to change the
nature. Thus, when the truth of God is presented before fallen, unregenerate
sinners, they suppress the truth in unrighteousness (Romans 1:18-21) and reject
God since it is their nature to choose to do so. Only Adam had a will free from
sin, but once he revolted, he too was changed by the sin and became a fallen
creature. His fall condemned the entire earth since it was under his
stewardship. Now the world is cursed, the animals are violent, the earth
produces toil for man, and natural disasters are the norm. Within this fallen
world is a fallen man choosing to reject God and to blind himself to the truth.
Thus, he declares that our problem is metaphysical. He declares that we have
always been this way. He declares that we need not to be saved for there is no
curse. These errant beliefs are all part of the sin nature. Only an act of
grace from God can change a man’s nature, and when that nature is changed
through regeneration, man can then believe God of his own choice. He can start
living in obedience to God.
So Schaeffer’s biblical conclusion in this chapter is that
man as he is now is completely abnormal. He is separated from his Creator,
which separates him from his reference point. Man’s problem is one of moral
guilt before his Maker. Now only the Maker can fix the problem. Genesis 1-3
offers a comprehensive explanation concerning the problem of man as it explains
perfectly all things that we see in this world. Parts of Genesis 3 and the rest
of the Bible offer the solution to the problem, but that will be covered in the
next post. God bless.
You know, the problem with the Eden story is that it does make your God be evil.
ReplyDeleteLet us admit, for the sake of the argument, that Adam disobeying God, when he "did not know good from evil" was... well, worthy of punishment. For myself, I see it more akin to a parent leaving a loaded gun on the table and leaving his 5-year-old with a "do not touch this" order. Is the five-year-old responsible when there is an accident, or is it the parent?
But let us accept this, for the sake of the argument. Adam eats the apple, he gets a sin nature, and therefore all other humans get a sin nature and get punished for the sin they had no choice not to make.
Why?
Who chose that a "sin nature", the inability not to sin, would be hereditary?
God.
God is punishing the whole of the human race, even the whole of creation for the acts of one person, in your worldview. Even God Himself admits later in your story that punishing one's children for the crimes of one's parents is not justice, see ezekiel 18.
God, being omnipotent, could very well have made adam sterile and started again with another Adam somewhere else, presumably with different results. He could have made Adam's kids free of this sin nature you claim we all have. He could have gone back in time and prevented the snake from entering the garden. He could have "fixd" the fallen creation two minutes after the fall.
All these solutions would have prevented all of the suffering that exists, according to your world-view. God being omnipotent, eternal, and absolute, would not have been changed by this, and therefore it would have cost Him nothing.
So yes, if you insist that your God is all-powerful, then He is responsible for all the suffering that exists. If you also insist that your God punishes sin even though a mechanism He put into place and could lift any time He wants made us unable not to sin, then the God you believe is unjust.
Hello French Engineer. I see that you are dedicating more time to the God that you say you don’t believe in. Well, I’m glad. It only proves Romans 1:18 as far as I am concerned. So I will quickly address your argument.
ReplyDeleteLike your other posts, you demonstrate a lack of knowledge with regard to what we believe. You have bits and pieces, but not the whole. Furthermore, you fail to recognize the limitations of your argument. I will be blunt. I doubt you have even considered the presuppositions necessary for you to argue with me in the first place. If you did, then you would realize that you are in no position to argue. But, I will leave that aside for now and deal with what you wrote, even though you have no epistemic justification for making such arguments to begin with. Either you get this, or you don’t.
First, you claim that the biblical account of Eden makes God to be evil. I am curious as to how an atheist can call anything evil. If all that exists is matter, then there are no universals. There are no absolutes. Standards are meaningless. Thus, nothing is evil. However, you might claim that societies determine the standard as a relative rule. Well, even in such a case it is meaningless. There is still no real standard. Furthermore, you hold to atheistic morals (this is the truest of oxy-morons) in the midst of a society that by-in-large has a Judeo-Christian morality. Would that not then put your moral code on the losing side? By your own standards it would, since the larger society disagrees with you. So, let us assume for just a minute that your position about reality is correct. I can respond by saying the majority of ancient Hebrews were fine with God doing things as He did in Genesis 2-3, and therefore, it was morally right to that society. I could then appeal to modern cultural relativism and say, “Shame on you since everyone knows it is wrong to judge past societies by modern moral standards.” Ha. Even that statement declares something to be wrong, and yet lacks the foundation for a necessary standard by which this can be declared. My point with this is simply to show one thing. Your side can’t even be consistent when they use the argument of evil against us. You somehow believe that if your understanding of the Eden story is true that this makes God objectively evil. Yet, you most likely deny objective standards in the first place. Why do you do behave and think in such an inconsistent manner? Because you know such standards exist. You cannot live without them, even when you claim that you do. The end result is you cannot have a meaningful conversation with me about this, unless you operate off of my presupposition that such a standard exists. Yet that standard only exists if it is founded upon an infinite and absolute and original person. So that being said, you lose by even starting this argument since you need the Christian worldview to make the argument in the first place. This will either go over your head, or you will reject it, but will have a great difficulty justifying your position.
Hello French Engineer. I see that you are dedicating more time to the God that you say you don’t believe in. Well, I’m glad. It only proves Romans 1:18 as far as I am concerned. So I will quickly address your argument.
DeleteHi. I'm dedicating time to you, and I do believe you exist. Are you God? No? Then whyopen on such a childish note?
Like your other posts, you demonstrate a lack of knowledge with regard to what we believe. You have bits and pieces, but not the whole. Furthermore, you fail to recognize the limitations of your argument. I will be blunt. I doubt you have even considered the presuppositions necessary for you to argue with me in the first place. If you did, then you would realize that you are in no position to argue. But, I will leave that aside for now and deal with what you wrote, even though you have no epistemic justification for making such arguments to begin with. Either you get this, or you don’t.
I see you have kept your usual habit of claiming those that disagree with you only do so because they do not understand you. Have you considered how such displays of egotistical arrogance get in the way of people actually listening to what you have to say?
First, you claim that the biblical account of Eden makes God to be evil. I am curious as to how an atheist can call anything evil.
Oh I am sorry. I was actually using “evil” as a shorthand that you would understand for “someone who voluntarily inflicts avoidable and unnecessary pain”
If all that exists is matter, then there are no universals. There are no absolutes. Standards are meaningless.
But I do not believe that all that exists is matter.
Thus, nothing is evil. However, you might claim that societies determine the standard as a relative rule. Well, even in such a case it is meaningless. There is still no real standard. Furthermore, you hold to atheistic morals (this is the truest of oxy-morons) in the midst of a society that by-in-large has a Judeo-Christian morality. Would that not then put your moral code on the losing side? By your own standards it would, since the larger society disagrees with you. So, let us assume for just a minute that your position about reality is correct. I can respond by saying the majority of ancient Hebrews were fine with God doing things as He did in Genesis 2-3, and therefore, it was morally right to that society. I could then appeal to modern cultural relativism and say, “Shame on you since everyone knows it is wrong to judge past societies by modern moral standards.” Ha. Even that statement declares something to be wrong, and yet lacks the foundation for a necessary standard by which this can be declared.
The God you claim to worship as the epitome of all that is Good still unnecessarily made the universe to work on such laws that we would all be born with a compulsion to act in ways God feels He must punish. I have, being neither omniscient not omnipotent, devised in five minutes several solutions that would not have required a multitude of people to incur your God's wrath (and the suffering that entails) without having the possibility not to. I have trouble seeing how being that was both omnipotent and omniscient could fail to devise and implement even one of these solutions.
Yet you start the conversation, not by trying to answer that objection, not by defending the actions of your God, not by proposing a moral standard that would, in fact, propose the actions of your God as moral, but by going on a tangent by attacking my worldview without so much as asking me what that worldview is, and shooting in the dark trying to hit it. You are trying to change the subject, as many people who have no case do.
My point with this is simply to show one thing. Your side can’t even be consistent when they use the argument of evil against us. You somehow believe that if your understanding of the Eden story is true that this makes God objectively evil. Yet, you most likely deny objective standards in the first place. Why do you do behave and think in such an inconsistent manner? Because you know such standards exist. You cannot live without them, even when you claim that you do. The end result is you cannot have a meaningful conversation with me about this, unless you operate off of my presupposition that such a standard exists. Yet that standard only exists if it is founded upon an infinite and absolute and original person. So that being said, you lose by even starting this argument since you need the Christian worldview to make the argument in the first place. This will either go over your head, or you will reject it, but will have a great difficulty justifying your position.
DeleteMy position is that you have failed so far to provide a moral code by which a single definition of “good”, that applies to all beings equally, would fit both the acts of the God character you claim to worship and the common accepted morality. You are trying to deflect the attention of the reader from this fact by instead going after my morality without knowing what its basis is. Let us see how your other posts turn out, bu tI have little hope that you will deviate from the presup script.
“Hi. I'm dedicating time to you, and I do believe you exist. Are you God? No? Then whyopen on such a childish note?”
DeletePardon me. The last time you wrote a comment on one of my posts you were not interested in real argumentation and you issued profanities. You then in a very immature and asinine manner tried to assert that the Bible used profanity. So to be honest, your previous reputation gives me no reason to expect an argument in good faith. Sorry if you were offended by the obvious point I began with. Why do you care that I believe in the God of the Bible? It is a pretty valid question. Don’t you have better things to do?
“I see you have kept your usual habit of claiming those that disagree with you only do so because they do not understand you. Have you considered how such displays of egotistical arrogance get in the way of people actually listening to what you have to say?”
So this is a habit of mine? If you don’t accurately portray the Christian position, what else am I supposed to say? It is not egotistical arrogance to state the truth. You are not a Christian theologian and your caricature did not accurately reflect the Christian position. I find it hypocritical that you called me egotistical for speaking the truth in this regard, but then at the same time you were quick to point out that I was wrong to assume that your position is materialism. Should I call you arrogant when you say that I am not accurately reflecting or understanding the position you are coming from? What is true for the goose is true for the gander. Try to be consistent.
“Oh I am sorry. I was actually using “evil” as a shorthand that you would understand for “someone who voluntarily inflicts avoidable and unnecessary pain”
You still have the same problem. How can you call this as evil? Let me know what standard you appeal to. If you believe in evolution and see natural selection and blind chance as the mechanism for advancement, then superior creatures have inflicted pain on inferiors for all of history and supposedly life advanced because of this. If you don’t believe in evolution, then I am curious as to what you do believe. I can agree that voluntarily inflicting unnecessary pain is a bad thing for humans to do to one another. But I know why I am repulsed by it. By any other standard, I wonder why you are repulsed by it. This has nothing to do with a presup script. It is simple logic. You do not want to account for your very ability to speak meaningfully about this subject. I get it. If you tried to account for it, you would lose at the beginning. So instead, you smuggle your assumption that you do not have to justify yourself right back into the argument. Anyone with a keen eye can see right through this. I am not impressed.
“But I do not believe that all that exists is matter.”
DeleteThen please pardon my assumption. What else besides matter do you think exists and how do you know about it?
“The God you claim to worship as the epitome of all that is Good still unnecessarily made the universe to work on such laws that we would all be born with a compulsion to act in ways God feels He must punish. I have, being neither omniscient not omnipotent, devised in five minutes several solutions that would not have required a multitude of people to incur your God's wrath (and the suffering that entails) without having the possibility not to. I have trouble seeing how being that was both omnipotent and omniscient could fail to devise and implement even one of these solutions.”
As I said, this is not an argument. This is a personal complaint; one that assumes a lot of things. He is the epitome of all good, and He did make the universe as “very good” (Gen 1:31), and He permitted the Fall of the human race. He, from His position of omniscience and omnipotence, declares that He still will work this for good. You just don’t like the answer. So it is a complaint, not an argument. You assume this was unnecessary, but who are you to know what is unnecessary? You don’t have all the data that God does, and even if you did, your brain could not process it all. Your solutions are not solutions; they are your arbitrary opinion of what you think should have happened because you declare yourself to be in a position to pontificate as to what the greater good would be. Talk about arrogance. God’s wrath is justifiable because all have sinned.
“Yet you start the conversation, not by trying to answer that objection, not by defending the actions of your God, not by proposing a moral standard that would, in fact, propose the actions of your God as moral, but by going on a tangent by attacking my worldview without so much as asking me what that worldview is, and shooting in the dark trying to hit it. You are trying to change the subject, as many people who have no case do.”
I started the conversation by pointing out the woeful inadequacy that you come to this argument with. You come as a human being attempting to impose objective standards upon me and my worldview, but you have no basis to do so. Induction, deduction, morality, and logic are all unintelligible without the Christian worldview, but you want to smuggle these in as assumptions that can exist apart from their transcendental precondition. This is why I do not need to know the details of your worldview since I know it will fail to meet that precondition. The subject was not changed on you, but instead I was letting the readers know that this conversation is not in a vacuum. Presuppositions matter at every level of it. You flee from them because you have no ground on which to lay your argument.
"Pardon me. The last time you wrote a comment on one of my posts you were not interested in real argumentation and you issued profanities. You then in a very immature and asinine manner tried to assert that the Bible used profanity."
DeleteIf my memory serves, I used a three letter word once, and you cut my comments for that use. I then pointed out to you the many instances where that three letter word has been used in the Bible.But hey, if you are more offended by a three letter words than by an entity that condemns people to an eternity of torture, I'd say it shows your priorities. Your joke did not offend me, by the way, but it did... Well, it lowered my expectations of you a bit. Which was, I admit, something of an achievement.
You still have the same problem. How can you call this as evil?
As I said, I use it as a shorthand for a very longer expression, one that I assume you can interpret correctly. Note the absence of moral judgement in said longer expression (“someone who voluntarily inflicts avoidable and unnecessary pain”) which I leave to the reader, and to you. If you want to pass a moral judgment on an entity that behaves in the way described, and call it good, be my guest.
It seems to be what you do anyways.
Then please pardon my assumption. What else besides matter do you think exists and how do you know about it?
That would rather depend on your definition of "exists", would it not? When you look really close, even matter only seems to be a lot of nothing and a litle bit of energy in stable form. So you'd have to add energy to the list. Then the behavior of these entities can be said to "exist" for given values of "exist". Some parts of these behaviors are repeatable enough that patterns of behaviors emerge, and one could say that these patterns (laws, concepts, emotions, processes, etc) also exist, for a given value of exist that is different from the first and second values of exist.The thing is, there are too many different meanings to the word to make a list. For example, let's take, say... The emperor palpatine. Does He exist? In a very real sense, no. There is no evidence that such a being ever existed, even in a galaxy far, far away. In another sense, the concept of the emperor palpatine is something that can be described, you (presumably) know what I am talking about when I say his name, and hearing that name starts similar chains of neurons firing in your brain as in mine.
Tell you what. Give me your definition of existence and I'll try and answer your question more precisely.
As I said, this is not an argument. This is a personal complaint; one that assumes a lot of things. He is the epitome of all good, and He did make the universe as “very good” (Gen 1:31), and He permitted the Fall of the human race. He, from His position of omniscience and omnipotence, declares that He still will work this for good. You just don’t like the answer. So it is a complaint, not an argument. You assume this was unnecessary, but who are you to know what is unnecessary? You don’t have all the data that God does, and even if you did, your brain could not process it all. Your solutions are not solutions; they are your arbitrary opinion of what you think should have happened because you declare yourself to be in a position to pontificate as to what the greater good would be. Talk about arrogance.
DeleteYet you are not able to point to a single thing that would make the solutions I have proposed unworkable, or less desirable than the state of affairs we have now. You claim that it all works for the greater good, or rather you repeat that claim, but you cannot justify this claim, you have to take it on faith, and you reproach me for not doing the same. For someone who wants everything justified, you seem to forget to justify your own arguments beyond blind faith (as in, faith that you cannot justify with words). As for asking who I am to question God, I am not questioning an entity I do not believe exists, I am questioning your statement that the character you describe is good by any moral standard that has any meaning, and your statement that all evil works to the greater good.
And on that subject, I'd remind you that in the story of the naked emperor, it was a small child that first said that the emperor was naked. Trying to dismiss people's arguments on the basis of who these people are, rather than on the basis of the arguments, is both a fallacy and dangerous.
It's not just me not liking the answer, it is you not wanting to answer my valid objections to your unproven assertions.
I started the conversation by pointing out the woeful inadequacy that you come to this argument with. You come as a human being attempting to impose objective standards upon me and my worldview, but you have no basis to do so. Induction, deduction, morality, and logic are all unintelligible without the Christian worldview, but you want to smuggle these in as assumptions that can exist apart from their transcendental precondition.
And you, if the past is any indication, will not try to justify your assumptions (like the fact that your God is a necessary precondition for intelligibility) and not accept any justification except the one you have already presupposed must be true - your God. That, by the way, is the presup script.
“If my memory serves, I used a three letter word once, and you cut my comments for that use. I then pointed out to you the many instances where that three letter word has been used in the Bible. But hey, if you are more offended by a three letter words than by an entity that condemns people to an eternity of torture, I'd say it shows your priorities. Your joke did not offend me, by the way, but it did... Well, it lowered my expectations of you a bit. Which was, I admit, something of an achievement.”
DeleteI love the insult at the end. This is common for people who are obviously losing an argument. Thanks for the indication.
I am astounded by this one. If you are suggesting that a three letter word used in a Middle English document that only meant “donkey” in AD 1611 shows that the Bible cusses, then I do say you are not qualified to speak of anything that pertains to history. In Modern English, that same word refers to the anus. So for you to assume the modern meaning, and then to force that same meaning to a translation from 400 years ago, and from this try to justify your use of it now shows that you are just plain ignorant.
Concerning your judgment about my priorities, wouldn’t you need an objective moral standard for this? Without it, your words are meaningless. Furthermore, your attitude that God is wrong for sentencing people to Hell reminds me of the typical criminal who thinks society is unjust for sentencing him to prison. Many in the prisons see themselves as innocent victims, or they think their actions do not deserve the judgment they received. You sound just like them. But then again this makes sense. All unrepentant sinners are cosmic criminals who have committed cosmic treason. And like regular criminals, they do not think this is a crime worthy of punishment. The judge who sets the standard says otherwise.
“That would rather depend on your definition of "exists", would it not? When you look really close, even matter only seems to be a lot of nothing and a litle bit of energy in stable form. So you'd have to add energy to the list. Then the behavior of these entities can be said to "exist" for given values of "exist". Some parts of these behaviors are repeatable enough that patterns of behaviors emerge, and one could say that these patterns (laws, concepts, emotions, processes, etc) also exist, for a given value of exist that is different from the first and second values of exist.The thing is, there are too many different meanings to the word to make a list. firing in your brain as in mine.”
DeleteSo I was right, you are a materialist. The interesting thing is how arbitrary everything you said was. We are only beginning to learn about the properties of energy and matter as quantum physics is beginning to uncover more information. Concerning your notion that repeating patterns indicate that laws, concepts, etc. exist is interesting. Are these things possible if the ultimate ruling principle is chaotic randomness? I understand that you probably posit an accidental universe that somehow is governed by order, but to me that is a far harder pill to swallow than special creationism. I think Plato would run circles around you on this since you seem to think that time-affected matter creates unchanging laws and principles. The very impossibility of this is why he thought there had to be a world of universals behind the world of particulars. I am curious how you would refute his logic. Everything within time and space is in constant motion and is therefore subject to change, especially when left to its own. Therefore, nothing in material existence can account for unchanging patterns, laws, etc. You are arguing that the universals actually come from the particulars! If you have no idea what I am talking about, then go and study some basic philosophy and read the works of Plato. He was wise for noticing this to be a deathblow for materialism. It is folly to assume changing particulars give rise to universals. Universals are the basis of the particulars, and in order for universals to exist, they cannot be bound in this material universe of changing particulars. If materialism is true (and yes, your answer shows you to be a materialist as I originally suspected), then there can be no true discernible patterns, laws, or even logic. Yet these things exist, and they allow us to navigate through this material world successfully. Therefore, there must be something more than just matter that actually directs and determines much, if not all, that exists within the material universe. This is basic stuff. Since you only believe in the world of particulars, you have absolutely no objective unchanging standards by which you can make any arguments. That is why the moment you started to argue with me, you already lost. Thank you for showing this to all who may read this.
"And you, if the past is any indication, will not try to justify your assumptions (like the fact that your God is a necessary precondition for intelligibility) and not accept any justification except the one you have already presupposed must be true - your God. That, by the way, is the presup script."
DeleteI know you read the debate between myself and Russell Glasser. In the third response, I went to great length to show why a necessary being is in fact necessary. Russell never even came close to refuting the logic there, simply because it is irrefutable. So if you need a refresher on my justifying God as the precondition of all intelligibility, then go back and review that. The presupp script actually accomplishes a lot more than you think. So it either has went over your head, or you have ignored it. Only you know which is true of you.
I wanted to get that out of the way up front. You have no room to talk. Now let me deal with your argument. You liken the scenario to a parent leaving a loaded gun in the presence of an unattended child. Is this a fair and accurate portrayal? No. A child does not understand the responsibility that firearms require. Furthermore, the child has a natural inclination to do what is wrong and disobey the parental command. Therefore, it would be foolish to leave the gun in his midst. Adam was a perfect adult human with no sin nature. With his immortal body, he could reason and process information in ways impossible for us today simply due to the decaying nature of brain tissue and cells. Furthermore, Adam had a personal relationship with God and knew that God was omnipotent and omnipresent and omniscient. Therefore, Adam knew that whatever God said was true by default. Further investigation could lead to no other conclusion. Adam had no natural inclination to do what was evil either. On top of that, God gave Adam every other tree in the Garden to eat from, thus showing great generosity. There was only one prohibition, and there was nothing within Adam making him want to eat that fruit. It is an attribute of the sin nature to want what is prohibited, and Adam did not yet have that nature. Proof of this comes from the fact that Adam thought nothing of that tree until Satan tried to persuade Eve of an opposite conclusion than God’s. Satan baited them with the idea that the fruit could make them like God and they can have their own standards knowing good and evil for themselves. So it was not out of a desire to disobey God, but instead it was out of a desire to do what only God can do. In so making that choice, Adam sinned. That is completely different than how you presented the scenario. I doubt you will accept the Christian understanding of this, but that doesn’t matter. Our story is consistent within itself. Your materialistic story is horridly inconsistent. So the bottom line is God was not responsible for Adam’s willful sin.
ReplyDeleteYour next question attempted to call God’s goodness into doubt by saying it is unjust that we all got a sin nature from Adam’s sin. Once again, you demonstrate that you do not know the Christian position. Within Christian theology, there are two possible views of this: The natural headship view and the federal headship view. The former says that all humans were seminally present in Adam when he committed that sin, so we were there with him doing so. The federal position says that he was our perfect representative, and his choice affected the whole group. It is no different than a president’s decision affecting the whole nation. Whether we were with Adam physically in seminal form, or whether he was our perfect head, it is not as though we are innocent victims in the transmission of the sin nature. Furthermore, there is no punishment for having a sin nature. The punishment is for committing sins. Yes, the sin nature is what is behind the choice to make sins, yet the choice is still made nevertheless.
I wanted to get that out of the way up front. You have no room to talk. Now let me deal with your argument.
DeletePlease do.
You liken the scenario to a parent leaving a loaded gun in the presence of an unattended child. Is this a fair and accurate portrayal? No. A child does not understand the responsibility that firearms require.
Neither did Adam. If you remember, he did not know good from evil until he ate the fruit. How could he have known disobeying God was bad before he knew what “bad” was?
Furthermore, the child has a natural inclination to do what is wrong and disobey the parental command. Therefore, it would be foolish to leave the gun in his midst. Adam was a perfect adult human with no sin nature. With his immortal body, he could reason and process information in ways impossible for us today simply due to the decaying nature of brain tissue and cells. Furthermore, Adam had a personal relationship with God and knew that God was omnipotent and omnipresent and omniscient.
I'm interrupting you for a bit here because you brought up omnipresence. It actually makes God even worse : by His omnipresence, God actually was there when Adam doomed all of creation and still did not lift a finger to intervene. Note also that God created the serpent, knew what the serpent would want to do to Adam, and let the serpent do it. I won't say God let the serpent lie to Adam and Eve, because if you reread the text, it is God that says “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. “ while the serpent says “in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”
Guess what? They ate of it, knew good from evil, and lived several hundred years afterward. Sooo, which one told the truth?
Therefore, Adam knew that whatever God said was true by default. Further investigation could lead to no other conclusion. Adam had no natural inclination to do what was evil either. On top of that, God gave Adam every other tree in the Garden to eat from, thus showing great generosity. There was only one prohibition, and there was nothing within Adam making him want to eat that fruit. It is an attribute of the sin nature to want what is prohibited, and Adam did not yet have that nature.
You harp on the lack of sin nature, but you forget the very text you are defending : having no knowledge of what “good” and “evil” were, Adam had no incentive either way. Unless, of course, you want to claim that curiosity itself is part of a sin nature (which was a theistic position that held back progress for several decades, but you can espouse it if you want) , Adam even had an incentive to disobey God just to see what would happen.
Proof of this comes from the fact that Adam thought nothing of that tree until Satan tried to persuade Eve of an opposite conclusion than God’s.
You have no idea about this. You claim that adam had a relationship with God, where the text only spends 250 words on the time frame between the time god forbids to eat from the tree and the serpent's temptation. These 250 words covers a period of time long enough for Adam to name all the animals (as an aside, while we are at plumbing what you claim to believe, are you a young-earth creationist? Do you believe the Bible to be a litteral book of facts, including this story?) but do not dwell for a minute on what Adam thought all this time. I submit to you that Adam could have thought about a lot of things during this time that did not make it into the book. Pity. I'd have liked to know what Adam thought when he came across the platypus.
Satan baited them with the idea that the fruit could make them like God and they can have their own standards knowing good and evil for themselves. So it was not out of a desire to disobey God, but instead it was out of a desire to do what only God can do.
DeleteEven if your interpretation is right (which a plain reading of genesis does not support, in my opinion, the desire for wisdom seems more like curiosity to me), they could not have known such a desire was wrong, because they did not know good from evil.
In so making that choice, Adam sinned.
So, Adam had the possibility to sin all along, according to you. You know what? If Adam had the ability to sin, it was only a matter of time before he did. Especially if the was immortal at the time. Eternity is a long time, and at some point, Adam would have sinned. God could of course have prevented it somehow, but He could have done so in Eden too, and He did not bother. Still, betting the well-being of your whole creation on the possibility that a certain event you have taken pain to make possible does not happen ever is either lousy planning or simply wanting the system to fail.
Of course, since God is supposedly omnipotent and the system failed, the only conclusion possible is that God wanted the system to fail.
That is completely different than how you presented the scenario. I doubt you will accept the Christian understanding of this, but that doesn’t matter. Our story is consistent within itself.
So is Harry Potter.
Your materialistic story is horridly inconsistent. So the bottom line is God was not responsible for Adam’s willful sin.
Now you're trying again to shoot at my worldview without bothering to ask what it is. You then decree your conclusion, but your arguments only raise more doubtful points and do not convince me.
Oh well, now that you have thoroughly developped your objections to something I had already granted for the sake of the argument, let's move on, shall we?
Your next question attempted to call God’s goodness into doubt by saying it is unjust that we all got a sin nature from Adam’s sin. Once again, you demonstrate that you do not know the Christian position. Within Christian theology, there are two possible views of this: The natural headship view and the federal headship view. The former says that all humans were seminally present in Adam when he committed that sin, so we were there with him doing so.
Do you suggest, then, that all children born more than nine month after their father commits a crime be jailed with their father?
If I commit a crime, my children will not be legally responsible for that crime. God Himself stopped punishing people for the crimes of their ancestors. Clearly God himself (in your story) does not believe that, so why should you? This reeks of an ad-hoc justification, and a pretty poor one at that. Of course you could always argue that “Adam was different”, but you'd be chipping away at your claim that morality is an absolute.
The federal position says that he was our perfect representative, and his choice affected the whole group. It is no different than a president’s decision affecting the whole nation.
Presidents can be impeached. When presidents commit crimes, the whole nation does not go to jail.
And once again, this interpretation ignores that God Himself decreed that punishing people for the crimes and sins of their ancestors was not to be done. Was God unjust before Ezekiel 18:20, or after? Or did the absolute definition of Justice as laid by an eternal unchanging deity... Change?
Whether we were with Adam physically in seminal form, or whether he was our perfect head, it is not as though we are innocent victims in the transmission of the sin nature.
Actually, it is. If something is inherited, then by definition it is not deserved, for before we acquire our inherited traits, we do not exist, and therefore cannot deserve anything.
Furthermore, there is no punishment for having a sin nature. The punishment is for committing sins.
DeleteThere is no punishment for being black, only for breathing while being black.
If your position is to say that it is impossible not to sin once one is saddled with a sin nature, then punishing someone that has a sin nature for sinning is like punishing an object for falling, or a person for breathing. If you can't not do something, then you are not responsible for doing it.
Yes, the sin nature is what is behind the choice to make sins, yet the choice is still made nevertheless.
Wait, was it not your position, that in the instance of sin, we had no free will, that it was what a sin nature was and the main difference between us and Adam? Now you're telling me there is still a choice? How can there be a choice without free will?
And now it is approaching midnight. I shall read the rest of your answers tomorrow. I must say, I am not very impressed so far.
“My position is that you have failed so far to provide a moral code by which a single definition of “good”, that applies to all beings equally, would fit both the acts of the God character you claim to worship and the common accepted morality. You are trying to deflect the attention of the reader from this fact by instead going after my morality without knowing what its basis is. Let us see how your other posts turn out, bu tI have little hope that you will deviate from the presup script.”
DeleteMorals do not exist independently of God. Something is good because it agrees with God’s nature. Something is evil because it contradicts His nature. Lying is wrong for it is impossible for God to lie (Hebrews 6:18). It is not as though there is a moral code that God Himself obeys. He is the foundation of such a code. God is also good. Therefore, if He deemed that humanity would Fall by Adam’s choice, and that He would then save those who turn to His means of salvation (Jesus the Savior), and He says that this all works for good, then it is so. Each human sins of his own volition, and therefore they deserve the wrath that they will receive. You act as though the sin nature means they still do not make a choice. That is absurd. They still make a choice, but that choice is influenced by their nature.
It goes back to the child molester example. Even if his brain was imbalanced, we still hold him accountable for what he did. He chooses to harm another person, even if brain issues are part of the antecedent cause of it. This is why we lock such people up. Sinners choose to sin. And God owes no one any grace. By definition, grace is an unmerited gift. If I have a million dollars to blow, and I decide to give 10 homeless men $100,000 even though there are 20 homeless men in total, I am not obligated to give anything to other 10. They have not earned it, and they do not deserve it. It is a gift. Likewise, since all have sinned, God owes no one any grace. The fact that He chooses to give it to some is amazing enough. Furthermore, He gives it to all who truly seek Him out and come to Him in good faith. No one will ever be turned away who actually wants God’s grace. His grace comes through Christ alone, and if a person comes, they will receive it. Your issue is that you think God should have prevented the Fall. Once again, you are a mere man that does not have all the data. God says that all things will work for the good of those who love God (Romans 8:28). The fact that God allowed things to happen as they did does not contradict the proposition that He is good. You simply do not like that this is how He did things, but as I said, that is not an argument.
You cringe at my answer, no doubt. But what is the alternative? No objective moral code at all? Without God, there can be no such code. Everything would be reduced down to arbitrary opinion, and we would truly be left with nihilism. Many in the atheist camp ended up here and committed suicide. The only other option is to arbitrarily come up with a moral code that you like. It is still meaningless. So this is our option. We come to the realization that we are all moral people and cannot escape it. Why? No other creature is moral. No other creature thinks in terms of “what ought to be.” They think in terms of “what is.” So if we are moral by default, it means we were made to be so. Morals come from the nature of God, and we are made in His image. This explains why morals exist and why we are moral. So your option is to either accept the fact that morals depend upon God even if you hate the idea of it, or you can reject that they exist and embrace nihilism. Anything else is arbitrary. The fact that we are having a discussion about morals and are assuming they exist and are meaningful, we are living according to option 1.
“Neither did Adam. If you remember, he did not know good from evil until he ate the fruit. How could he have known disobeying God was bad before he knew what “bad” was?”
DeleteThis is a naïve understanding of what it means to not know evil from good. The mere fact that God told Adam in Genesis 2:16-17 that he was not to eat of the tree, Adam knew at least one thing was wrong. Now when it comes to all of the possible sinful matters that may exist (sexual immorality, lying, etc.), Adam did not know of those things. He did not have a sin nature. These matters would not have been conceived in his mind. Those things came as a result of eating of the tree. Prior to the Fall, there was one thing that he knew was wrong, that’s it. So there is a distinction. Adam was created good, but He still had the possibility to choose to disobey God. That was the only evil he knew of. God opened up every other tree to Adam. So everything else was permissible. Why did God allow for this possibility of the Fall? It was all part of His plan, which He declares to be good. Once again, you might not like this, but that is a complaint rather than an argument.
“I'm interrupting you for a bit here because you brought up omnipresence. It actually makes God even worse : by His omnipresence, God actually was there when Adam doomed all of creation and still did not lift a finger to intervene. Note also that God created the serpent, knew what the serpent would want to do to Adam, and let the serpent do it. I won't say God let the serpent lie to Adam and Eve, because if you reread the text, it is God that says “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. “ while the serpent says “in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”
“Guess what? They ate of it, knew good from evil, and lived several hundred years afterward. Sooo, which one told the truth?”
Wow. It is stuff like this that causes me to say that you do not know the Christian position very well at all. First, God’s omnipresence does not make Him any more culpable than omniscience does. God not only knew this was going to happen, but the rest of the Scriptural record says that Christ was slain before the foundation of the world. In other words, in God’s plan, the Fall was permitted to happen so that God could save the elect through the Messiah. Does that make God evil? No. He is the foundation behind moral standards. You are not. You are in no position to call Him evil. You can’t even account for evil apart from Him. You can say that you do not like what He did or permitted. But the bottom line is no one who is condemned is innocent. They still choose to sin. The sin nature does not make them any less culpable than the child molester.
As to who told the truth, you have a pretty weird way of reading things. They did not become like gods. They lost their immortality. If you knew Hebrew, you would know that the Hebrew in Genesis 2:17 literally says that “in dying you shall die.” In other words, there is a double view of death here. You are isolating the text here from the rest of the Scriptures. The Scriptures speak of spiritual death, which is a separation from God, which is evidenced by the sin nature. Adam was separated from God on that day. He was expelled from the Garden, which guaranteed that Adam would die one day. Thus, literally “in dying Adam would die.” By spiritually dying, this led to his eventual physical death. Furthermore, the evidence of that spiritual death was immediately present. In Genesis 3, after Adam and Eve knew they were naked and ashamed, the moment they heard God in the Garden, their response was quite different than before. First, they covered up their sin/shame with fig leaves. Second, they fled. Third, they hid. Fourth, they blame shifted. In that, ultimately Adam blamed God, just like you do. He said, “The woman that YOU gave me …” In other words, why did you create the woman if you did not want this to happen? Never mind the fact that Adam chose to sin of his own volition! I must say, you and the Fallen Adam sound a lot alike. Like father, like son. These changes in Adam demonstrate the spiritual death and the new fallen nature. All of Adam’s kids were born after this alteration, and thus they were born with the same nature. Each reproduces according to its kind. Fallen humans produce fallen humans, who likewise choose to cover up sin, run from God, hide from Him, and like you blame Him. The fact that you did not know these matters, nor see it in the text, nor understand the Hebrew nuance lends further support to my contention that you really don’t know what you are talking about when it comes to biblical theology.
Delete“You harp on the lack of sin nature, but you forget the very text you are defending : having no knowledge of what “good” and “evil” were, Adam had no incentive either way. Unless, of course, you want to claim that curiosity itself is part of a sin nature (which was a theistic position that held back progress for several decades, but you can espouse it if you want) , Adam even had an incentive to disobey God just to see what would happen.”
This is loaded with assumption and arrogance. I already answered the knowing good and evil part. But your claim that the theistic position held back progress for decades is foolish. Do you know nothing of history? Where did the scientific revolution take place? Where did the industrial revolution take place? Where did free democratic ideals reemerge? The answer? Christian Europe. Just about all of the scientific discoveries made in the 1500-1600s were by Christians. These are far different than the atheistic theories promoted by Lyell, Darwin, Huxely, and others. The famous 19th century sociologist Max Weber wrote extensively on the fact that Protestant Christianity and the Protestant Work-Ethic facilitated Europe’s rise to prominence scientifically, economically, politically, and socially. He compared this with the other world religions and noticed that the doctrines of those religions did impede progress. Christianity, in contrast, assumed the world is real, orderly, predictable, and therefore real knowledge could be attained through experimentation. Christianity also taught of the sin nature, the very thing that makes capitalism work so well – this is something both Adam Smith and James Madison understood. Capitalism was driving force behind the technological and industrial revolution.
“You have no idea about this. You claim that adam had a relationship with God, where the text only spends 250 words on the time frame between the time god forbids to eat from the tree and the serpent's temptation. These 250 words covers a period of time long enough for Adam to name all the animals (as an aside, while we are at plumbing what you claim to believe, are you a young-earth creationist? Do you believe the Bible to be a litteral book of facts, including this story?) but do not dwell for a minute on what Adam thought all this time. I submit to you that Adam could have thought about a lot of things during this time that did not make it into the book. Pity. I'd have liked to know what Adam thought when he came across the platypus.”
DeleteI do have an idea about this. In Genesis 3:6, it was only after Satan persuaded Eve that she looked at the tree and saw that it was “good for food and desirable for knowledge.” So they did not consider the tree prior to that moment. You need to pay attention to the text. Furthermore, you imply that I am reading Adam’s prior relationship with God into the text. God created Adam, placed him in the Garden, verbally spoke to him in Genesis 2, and brought animals to him. The Lord Himself personally presented the woman to Adam in Genesis 2. So how can you look at this text and not see that Adam had a relationship with God? You said it yourself. It is about 250 words, and in that small amount of a text you couldn’t notice obvious signs of a relationship? Furthermore, you couldn’t tell by way of comparison that the relationship was completely different in chapter 3 after the Fall? As I said, Adam ran, hid, made fig leave coverings, and blamed God and others. In Genesis 2, was Adam running from God? Was he blaming God? Was he hiding? Are you really going argue that I and all other orthodox Christian theologians throughout a 2,000 year history have misread this, and that somehow your unbelieving reading is truer to the text? That would be the height of arrogance. No, what you are showing is what normally happens when someone steps out of their field and tries to tell others who are in a different field how they are supposed to interpret things.
Concerning the platypus, maybe he thought that if someone ever came up with a theory as dumb as evolution, this animal would flagrantly defy the theory. Lol. I am a young earth creationist. I believe that Genesis 1-11 is presenting itself as real history. It is not a science text-book, but what it does say that may pertain to science is indeed true. What it does not say is up to free investigation. However, free investigation with the proper presuppositions will only show that all real data only supports the biblical narrative. Old-earth deep time depends on uniformitarian presuppositions which are continuing to be challenged even by secular scientists. I am not implying that such men are rejecting deep time, but they are throwing out the very theory that gave them deep time, and then are simply assuming that deep time is real. I believe there is plenty of evidence for a young earth. I believe that when all uniformitarian assumptions are removed, there is nothing at all to indicate deep time. But I am letting you know up front now that I am not going to debate you on all of this. I don’t have the time. Furthermore, this is a blog about the Christian-worldview. It is not a platform for an unknown atheist to start a long-term debate. If any Christians decide to jump in on this, they can debate you all you want. As long as the comments are clean, I’ll keep publishing them, on the condition that I know someone will continue to respond to you.
“Even if your interpretation is right (which a plain reading of genesis does not support, in my opinion, the desire for wisdom seems more like curiosity to me), they could not have known such a desire was wrong, because they did not know good from evil.”
DeleteI already addressed this. Furthermore, my interpretation was shown to be warranted by textual details. It was not curiosity that drove their rebellion. The commentary given in Genesis 3:6, cross referenced with what Satan said in verse 5, shows that Eve’s desire was to have knowledge that was for God alone. Ultimately, it did not grant her what she wanted, but instead it only brought sin.
“So, Adam had the possibility to sin all along, according to you. You know what? If Adam had the ability to sin, it was only a matter of time before he did. Especially if the was immortal at the time. Eternity is a long time, and at some point, Adam would have sinned. God could of course have prevented it somehow, but He could have done so in Eden too, and He did not bother. Still, betting the well-being of your whole creation on the possibility that a certain event you have taken pain to make possible does not happen ever is either lousy planning or simply wanting the system to fail.
Of course, since God is supposedly omnipotent and the system failed, the only conclusion possible is that God wanted the system to fail.”
Not true. When Christ returns and we live in a new heaven and new earth, all of the redeemed will be immortal, living in the presence of God, and yet for all eternity no one will sin ever again in that redeemed creation. That being said, it was not inevitable that sin would have happened. You are right. God planned for the system to fail. The plan was never for salvation to be in the “First Adam” but instead in the “Last Adam,” which is Christ. He will ultimately and for all eternity get more glory this way. You might not like this answer, but once again, you merely have a complaint, not an argument.
“Now you're trying again to shoot at my worldview without bothering to ask what it is. You then decree your conclusion, but your arguments only raise more doubtful points and do not convince me.”
So what is your worldview?
“Do you suggest, then, that all children born more than nine month after their father commits a crime be jailed with their father?”
Delete“If I commit a crime, my children will not be legally responsible for that crime. God Himself stopped punishing people for the crimes of their ancestors. Clearly God himself (in your story) does not believe that, so why should you? This reeks of an ad-hoc justification, and a pretty poor one at that. Of course you could always argue that “Adam was different”, but you'd be chipping away at your claim that morality is an absolute.”
You are wrong again. First, you said that “God stopped punishing people for the crimes of their ancestors.” You falsely implied that for a time God did punish people in such a way. He never did punish people like this. Deuteronomy 24:16 clearly says that fathers will not be put to death for the sins of their children, and children will not be put to death for the sins of their fathers. This is what Ezekiel was building upon. However, what you fail to understand is that God was in a covenant with Israel of the suzerain vassal type. God was not simply dealing with individuals, but He was dealing with a nation. And the nation as a whole over the course of many generations continually broke the covenant. There were consequences that were promised far in advance. So the people in Ezekiel were claiming that God was punishing them for the sins of the fathers rather than their own sins since He exiled them to Babylon. Exile was the highest point of the consequences listed in Deuteronomy 28 for breaking the covenant with God. God pointed out in Ezekiel that they had enough of their own sins to warrant the exile. They too were covenant breakers. So for both that generation’s sin and the total history of sin on the part of the nation, the exile happened. Yet, the Bible shows that God stalled such judgment on each generation that repented. Hezekiah’s generation repented and so God called off an exile to Assyria. Josiah’s generation repented, and so God held off Babylonian exile. The generation in Ezekiel rebelled and they got what they deserved. The fact that you keep insisting that God changed His mind really shows that you do not understand the Scriptural narrative. Of course, I need to beware. Pointing out this obvious truth will lead you into calling me arrogant again. Either way, this explanation removes your objection. Moral standards did not change. And to some extent, yes Adam was in a different position from the rest of us that is unrepeatable, but had any of us done the same, we would have reaped the same consequence. So the moral standard did not change. It is still absolute.
As to the other things you wrote, if the child goes on to commit the same crimes, then yes the child deserves to be jailed like the father. You picture innocent people being punished for something they did not do. All have sinned and have fallen short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). If the seminal headship theory is correct, then in some mysterious way, we were all accomplices with Adam in his sin.
“Presidents can be impeached. When presidents commit crimes, the whole nation does not go to jail.”
Delete“And once again, this interpretation ignores that God Himself decreed that punishing people for the crimes and sins of their ancestors was not to be done. Was God unjust before Ezekiel 18:20, or after? Or did the absolute definition of Justice as laid by an eternal unchanging deity... Change?”
I understand your objection. I personally hold to the seminal theory. But even the federal view holds up to your scrutiny. Why? We are not talking about Bill Clinton’s misdeeds that simply caused scandal. Instead, we are talking about James Madison declaring war on the British, which got the whole nation invaded thus affecting our whole society. So the federal headship view still works as long as we understand that Adam’s sin was far more serious than any other sin ever committed.
I already answered the Ezekiel 18 point. You simply do not understand the biblical text you are reading. You do not know the theological and historical context of the passage.
“Actually, it is. If something is inherited, then by definition it is not deserved, for before we acquire our inherited traits, we do not exist, and therefore cannot deserve anything.”
Says who? You? Even if I granted you the authority to make this assertion, perhaps you need to think of it this way. If a person inherited AIDs through a blood transfusion, we would feel really bad for that person. But if that person then became angry about this and broke into the hospital to contaminate more of the blood supply to ensure that the vicious cycle continues, we would no longer feel sorry for them. We would consider each new AIDs victim to be a murder victim. We would consider the first victim to be a murderer rather than a victim. It is the same with the sin nature. No one gets condemned because they inherited a sin nature. They are condemned because they live according to that nature and commit trillions of sins that make them guilty. They commit things that all humans know to be intrinsically wrong via our conscience left over from the imago dei within us. This is why we are quick to declare sinful acts done against us to be wrong. We do not care that the person has a sin nature at that point. Instead, we think they deserve the punishment that their crime has earned. The fact that every sinner has a conscience is proof that even with a sin nature all people still know what is right and choose to do what is evil. You might not like the answer, but it accords with human experience.
“There is no punishment for being black, only for breathing while being black.”
Delete“If your position is to say that it is impossible not to sin once one is saddled with a sin nature, then punishing someone that has a sin nature for sinning is like punishing an object for falling, or a person for breathing. If you can't not do something, then you are not responsible for doing it.”
This is simplistic and naïve. Furthermore, to compare evil to gravity is an unfair comparison. Falling and breathing are neutral actions. Adultery and murder are not. No one has to commit adultery and murder, but because all people have a sin nature, all people are capable of it. Some people choose to do so, others choose not to. But in one way or another, all people do choose to sin. Furthermore, you do not really believe your own last line; of that I am sure. I know of a mentally insane man who broke into the house of a former colleague of mine, and he hacked her husband to death with a hand-shovel pick. He went on to hack her until the police showed up. Fortunately, she lived. So let me ask you to apply your last line to this situation. You wrote, “If you can’t not do something, then you are not responsible for doing it.” Do you really think this man was not responsible for murdering a man in a graphic way just because he was mentally insane? What if it was your spouse that he killed? Would you still insist on your naïve and simplistic statement? I doubt it. So do us all a favor. Compare apples to apples, and think through your arbitrary definitions.
“Wait, was it not your position, that in the instance of sin, we had no free will, that it was what a sin nature wasand the main difference between us and Adam? Now you're telling me there is still a choice? How can there be a choice without free will?”
No one has a free will, but choice can exist without free will. Here again your thinking is naïve and simplistic. Finitude limits our will. I cannot jump kick the moon and cause it to explode simply because my mind wills it. So my will is not free to do whatever it wants. However, I can make decisions within the confines of my finite nature. So even though I am limited by my nature, I can still make choices. Well, when we add to this the sin nature, it means that not only is our will limited by finitude, but it is also limited by the sin nature. If I put a bowl of cabbage and a bowl of steak in front of a lion, I am giving the lion a real choice. But since the lion by nature is a carnivore, he will almost always choose the meat. Choice still exists, even if one’s nature highly determines the choice they will make. So, the sinner when presented with good and evil will normally choose to do what is evil. It is still a choice, and yet free will is not necessary.
“And now it is approaching midnight. I shall read the rest of your answers tomorrow. I must say, I am not very impressed so far.”
DeleteI mean no disrespect, but the feeling is mutual. I believe that you have entered a debate about philosophy and theology while not really knowing your stuff. Show me differently.
You probably have a problem with this, but many in your camp think the same way. Many in your camp believe that child molesters cannot change because they have a chemical imbalance in their brains that cause them to be predators. Yet, you would be quick to assert that such people be punished for doing heinous acts against children. You would support them being locked up for life. If it was your kid victimized, you would probably kill the man yourself. So in this case, your people claim this person inherited this tendency, and so it is not his fault. And yet, justice demands that we hold this person accountable. Now, I would like to make it clear that I do not believe that molesters cannot change. The power of gospel can change anyone. My point is that people like you are willing to give society the right to hold sinners accountable in the name of justice, but then you will cry foul when God does the same. The great irony in this is that human notions of justice are intuited from God in the first place. You can’t get your positions straight. Materialism is so schizophrenic. At least the Christian position is consistent across the board.
ReplyDeleteYou argument amounts to nothing more than you not liking what God has done. Yet you cannot on your own worldview declare that He has done anything wrong. You need God to be able to classify something as wrong. If you simply feel He is wrong on your own subjective opinion, why should I care about that? You are a mere mortal with a three-pound brain and a basic knowledge of philosophy. Why should I take your word over that of God’s? So you really don’t have an argument. Instead, you merely have a complaint. I can’t help you with a complaint. It is no different than a school kid complaining about the teacher’s rules. He can complain and choose to not like the rules, or he can realize the teacher has the right to set the rules and therefore obey them.
So getting back to your attempt to find inconsistency in our worldview, you cite Ezekiel 18. Perhaps you should study the difference between what God says there and what He says in Exodus about the general (not specific) consequences of parents sins moving onto their children. These are not in conflict, but harmony. God is saying in Ezekiel that even without the sins of the fathers, that generation had enough of their own sins to warrant exile to Babylon. Yet, added to that is the fathers’ guilt in breaking the covenant. The exile was caused by both groups’ sins. God was perfectly just in this. So there is no incoherence in our worldview.
You probably have a problem with this, but many in your camp think the same way. Many in your camp believe that child molesters cannot change because they have a chemical imbalance in their brains that cause them to be predators. Yet, you would be quick to assert that such people be punished for doing heinous acts against children. You would support them being locked up for life.
DeleteIf such a person was compelled to hurt people, I would advocate keeping them in a medical facility where their compulsion can not force them to hurt others, yes. Not as a punishment, for the point of punishment is to deter both the guilty party and the other people from hurting people, but as a protective measure until whatever impinges on that person's free will is treated.
However, since I am not an omnipotent being, I am forced to rely on imperfect solutions. Your God, allegedly, is not, and yet He supposedly chose a solution inferior to the imperfect one I, as an imperfect being, can devise, choosing to punish in a way that is both disproportionate (an eternity in Hell is by definition a disproportionate amount of punishment for a finite amount of sin) and useless for deterrence (since Hell is not verifiable and the punishment uncertain, as evidenced by all the differences of opinion on the conditions to get there, and by the fact that, if you believe one is saved by grace alone, the punishment is not determined by the severity of your crimes).
Punishment should only apply to actions that are the result of a free choice. For example, if someone takes illegal drugs, gets in his car and kills someone, he should be punished. If, however, that same person is drugged by someone else and put into his car and still kills someone, since his free will was altered through no fault of his own, the guilt lies on the person that drugged him and put him in a car, I hope you will agree.
If it was your kid victimized, you would probably kill the man yourself.
And it would not be justice, it would be vengeance. There is a difference. See how you have to invoke cases where my rationality is impaired (in this case by fury and grief) in order to make your points? That is not really a good sign for the soundness of said points.
So in this case, your people claim this person inherited this tendency, and so it is not his fault. And yet, justice demands that we hold this person accountable.
Please stop trying to categorize me. You are not talking to a “side” or a “people” or a “camp”. You are talking to me, and I have already explained how your assumptions about me are false in this case.
Now, I would like to make it clear that I do not believe that molesters cannot change. The power of gospel can change anyone.
As shown by the rousing success of the “ex-gay” camps, the nonexistent teenage pregnancy rate of the purity culture teens, and the total lack of priests and pastors that are found committing crimes or covering them up. Cue the no true Scotsman fallacy in your next answer.
My point is that people like you are willing to give society the right to hold sinners accountable in the name of justice, but then you will cry foul when God does the same.
DeleteOnce again, you are trying to categorize me. The “justice system” we have does not hold people accountable for “sins”, and I am very glad of it, since apparently your God holds thoughtcrimes as “sins” and any government that tries to do that is rightly called tyrannical. The justice system we have is an elaborate, and imperfect, system designed to deter the voluntary harming of others. It is a mechanism of self-preservation on the level of society itself. Your God's system does not do that. Your God's system, if you believe that salvation is by grace alone or by the result of an action of God,not Man, declares everyone guilty and deserving of an eternity of torture on the basis of rules which your God knows very well we are incapable not to break (because of another rule God put into place) and calls not torturing people for all eternity on the basis of whatever you believe God's basis for admitting any person into heaven is, mercy.
Honestly, the fact that you worship such a being is starting to look like Stockholm syndrome.
The great irony in this is that human notions of justice are intuited from God in the first place.
That is what you believe. I don't. I believe the human notions of justice are the result of a part of our brain that evolved alongside the rest of us and flourished because they make living as part of a complex society easier (or even possible in the first place), and large societies that do not self-destruct give each individual a better chance of survival and reproduction.
Moreover, I have evidence that points towards this interpretation. The studies that have shown that babies react to stylized acts of bullying negatively, and to stylized acts of altruism positively, tends to show that morality is innate in its simplest forms.
The fact that other animals have similar notions of “justice” and punishment as we do, especially the great apes, that are closest to us genetically, whose brains resembles ours, and that form societies like we do, tends to confirm that the existence of a notion of justice is correlated with the
existence of complex social interactions and societies.
You can’t get your positions straight. Materialism is so schizophrenic. At least the Christian position is consistent across the board.
You say I can't get my positions straight without having heard my position. As for the Christian position being consistent, I think the mental acrobatics you have just spent several hundreds words performing in order to try to exonerate your standard for Goodness from the plain reading of your sacred text, and the fact that your standard for Goodness's rules change over time (as shown in Ezekiel) pretty much speaks for itself.
You argument amounts to nothing more than you not liking what God has done. Yet you cannot on your own worldview declare that He has done anything wrong. You need God to be able to classify something as wrong.
DeleteCan you actually show how any of the solutions to the problem of original sin I proposed would have been worse than the one your God allegedly chose? Because so far you have not.
You assert that I need God in order to classify something as wrong. I have given you several examples where the God you claim is the source of morality acted in ways that are immoral, such as
punishing someone for acts he could not know were wrong
punishing people by endowing them with a sin nature for actions committed by another person (even if they were present “seminally”, a sperm is not responsible for the actions committed by his father. Even the most die-hard religious fundamentalists argue that life begins at conception, not before)
punishing people for acts they could not avoid committing, because of that sin nature that infringed on their free will on this matter.
Do you deny that these acts were immoral? If so, can you please give me the definition of morality you are working under?
If you simply feel He is wrong on your own subjective opinion, why should I care about that?
I believe I have given arguments to justify this opinion. If you do not want to engage these arguments, if you do not want to care to convince me, it is of course your choice, and an admission that you can't back your own opinions up.
You are a mere mortal with a three-pound brain and a basic knowledge of philosophy.
So are you, and so were the authors of the Bible. I'd even argue that the authors of the bible had a worse grasp of philosophy than I do, if they believed that God killing all the first-born of Egypt was an acceptable way of forcing a head of state to change a political decision that God hardened pharaoh's heart against (hey, another example!). We would call such an action a terrorist act nowadays.
Why should I take your word over that of God’s?
You are not, and you should not. You should evaluate my arguments alongside those of the men who wrote the Bible, and decide on the merits of the arguments, not on the basis of who said what.
So you really don’t have an argument. Instead, you merely have a complaint. I can’t help you with a complaint. It is no different than a school kid complaining about the teacher’s rules. He can complain and choose to not like the rules, or he can realize the teacher has the right to set the rules and therefore obey them.
Ah, your argument is simply “God sets the rules”... Well, either these rules also apply to God, or they are not universal. Since God on numerous occasions perform acts that would be immoral if performed by anyone else, apparently you do not believe morality to be universal, there's always a codicil “unless God wants to” at the end of each rule.
So getting back to your attempt to find inconsistency in our worldview, you cite Ezekiel 18. Perhaps you should study the difference between what God says there and what He says in Exodus about the general (not specific) consequences of parents sins moving onto their children. These are not in conflict, but harmony. God is saying in Ezekiel that even without the sins of the fathers, that generation had enough of their own sins to warrant exile to Babylon. Yet, added to that is the fathers’ guilt in breaking the covenant. The exile was caused by both groups’ sins. God was perfectly just in this. So there is no incoherence in our worldview.
The incoherence is in God punishing all of Adam's descendents for the actions of Adam, while saying in Ezekiel that children would not be punished for the sins of their parents. The rules God set forth on that specific point (should sin and its consequences be inherited?) are inconsistent, since He did exactly the opposite thing on two different occasions.
“However, since I am not an omnipotent being, I am forced to rely on imperfect solutions. Your God, allegedly, is not, and yet He supposedly chose a solution inferior to the imperfect one I, as an imperfect being, can devise, choosing to punish in a way that is both disproportionate (an eternity in Hell is by definition a disproportionate amount of punishment for a finite amount of sin) and useless for deterrence (since Hell is not verifiable and the punishment uncertain, as evidenced by all the differences of opinion on the conditions to get there, and by the fact that, if you believe one is saved by grace alone, the punishment is not determined by the severity of your crimes).”
DeleteSo says you. You say your solution is superior to God’s, but on what basis can you judge this. What standard do you appeal to? Your own? Are you in such a position? You think your solution is better, but you do not have all of the data that God has, and besides, you are the creature, not the creator. How could you possibly be in such a position to judge what God has done? Furthermore, can you show me an objective standard that stands over you, me, and God by which you are making this assessment? If no such standard exists, then everything you just said is meaningless. If you are an atheist, you cannot have such a needed standard. You pretty much wasted words. They have absolutely no meaning since they are nothing more than your arbitrary opinion. Only God can account for such an objective and absolute standard. You assume a standard to make your argument, but then deny one exists when pressed. You seem like you can’t get yourself straight here. If there is a standard, then God exists. By speaking as if you are objectively right, you have forfeited your argument. Otherwise, show me how you the atheist can have an objective standard. You keep ducking this because you know you have lost. A little later, you comment that you are better philosopher than the biblical writers. Obviously not, since you lack the sophistication in your argument to account for your assumed epistemology.
Furthermore, on what basis do you think Hell is a disproportionate punishment? On your own moral standard again? Hmm. The pattern continues. You have failed to understand (yet again) the philosophical implications of justice. Who you sin against matters. If I were to punch you in the stomach and you called the police, I would get either a warning or a small fine. If I were to do the exact same thing to a federal judge, the punishment would be worse. If I were to do the same thing to the president of the United States, I would be imprisoned for a number of years. Why? A punch to a gut is a punch to a gut, right? No. If the dignity of the office of the one being punched is greater or lesser, this determines the punishment for the action. Just about every human justice system presupposes this. Another example of this is how we use word murder when a common person is killed by a premeditated act, but we use the word assassination when it is someone of a dignified office. With that being said, God is the highest and most dignified person we can possibly sin against. Lying to you is of little consequence. After all, who are you? Lying to God, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter. Since God is eternal and infinite, the offense of the sin is also eternal and infinite as God is infinitely and eternally offended. We are finite and we are desensitized to sin since we are all sinners, thus from our perspective various sins do not seem so bad. But to the holy, perfect, just, and righteous God of the universe, every sin seems worse to Him than the Holocaust does to us. Your problem is that you see God as being on the same playing field as us, when by definition He is not. So the eternal offense to the eternal God requires an eternal punishment, and given the dignity of the one sinned against, this is perfectly just and right. Your argument here once again amounted to you having a complaint instead of an argument.
Delete“Punishment should only apply to actions that are the result of a free choice. For example, if someone takes illegal drugs, gets in his car and kills someone, he should be punished. If, however, that same person is drugged by someone else and put into his car and still kills someone, since his free will was altered through no fault of his own, the guilt lies on the person that drugged him and put him in a car, I hope you will agree.”
DeleteSays who? You? I have already showed earlier that free choice does not exist for anyone just by the mere fact that we are finite. Furthermore, your second example of the person drugged is not a fair comparison to us inheriting a sin nature. Besides, I covered all of this in a previous response when I spoke of the conscience and how each sinner still knows what is right and chooses to do what is wrong.
And by the way, you used the word “should,” which once again implies an objective standard that you treat as being self-evident. Please justify this. Otherwise, admit that your worldview is groundless, hopeless, ignorant, and foolish. This way you can stop wasting people’s time.
“And it would not be justice, it would be vengeance. There is a difference. See how you have to invoke cases where my rationality is impaired (in this case by fury and grief) in order to make your points? That is not really a good sign for the soundness of said points.”
Sometimes vengeance and justice are the same. When God holds every sinner accountable for the sins they have committed, it will be both justice and revenge. When Israeli Mossod agents assassinated the Arabs that killed the Israeli Olympians in the 1970s, it was both vengeance and justice. Although this is not always the case, often it is. Your comment reveals a lack of thought in the realm of meta-ethics.
“As shown by the rousing success of the “ex-gay” camps, the nonexistent teenage pregnancy rate of the purity culture teens, and the total lack of priests and pastors that are found committing crimes or covering them up. Cue the no true Scotsman fallacy in your next answer.”
DeleteI am not sure what you are getting at here. If you are denying that there are hundreds of thousands of “ex gays” that gave up the sinful lifestyle after following Christ, then you are as bad as a Holocaust denier. I have met formerly gay people who have given up that lifestyle and embraced biblical heterosexuality. They exist. As far as the other points, I am not a Catholic so molesting priests are not my problem. They are yours since you lack an objective standard by which you can condemn them. I at least have such a standard and can objectively say these priests are monsters. I can’t say much about the teens since you make a valid point. Many “churches” waste time entertaining these kids rather than instructing them. The rampant immorality does not surprise me.
“The “justice system” we have does not hold people accountable for “sins”, and I am very glad of it, since apparently your God holds thoughtcrimes as “sins” and any government that tries to do that is rightly called tyrannical. The justice system we have is an elaborate, and imperfect, system designed to deter the voluntary harming of others. It is a mechanism of self-preservation on the level of society itself. Your God's system does not do that. Your God's system, if you believe that salvation is by grace alone or by the result of an action of God,not Man, declares everyone guilty and deserving of an eternity of torture on the basis of rules which your God knows very well we are incapable not to break (because of another rule God put into place) and calls not torturing people for all eternity on the basis of whatever you believe God's basis for admitting any person into heaven is, mercy.”
DeleteWell, this is pretty convoluted for sure. Humans cannot hold people accountable for thought crimes because we cannot know each other’s thoughts. But if we could display all of your thoughts on a TV screen for all of your friends and family to see, it would be a different matter. If your best friend saw you imagining sleeping with his wife, would he not no longer wish to hang out with you? Would he allow you to ever be alone with his wife? No. You would certainly be held accountable for your thoughts. God knows all thoughts, and our rebellious thoughts are still sins, thus they are justly held accountable. So just because you don’t like the idea of being held accountable for your thoughts, this does not make it an adequate argument against the goodness of the biblical God. Furthermore, you once again fail to make a distinction between a necessary and contingent being. The mere fact that we are contingent and that God is necessary means there will be some things that are appropriate to Him that are at the same time inappropriate to us. This is why governments that arrest people for thoughts are tyrannical. This is inappropriate for humans since we cannot read thoughts. However, for God, the exact same thing is perfectly fine. Your constant insistence on judging God at the same level as you judge humanity really betrays any true understanding of philosophy. And finally, your so-called argument here still requires an objective standard for it to have any meaning. Please show me where you get this standard. Once again, if it is derived from your own subjective and relativistic opinion, then it is meaningless for anyone else.
“I believe the human notions of justice are the result of a part of our brain that evolved alongside the rest of us and flourished because they make living as part of a complex society easier (or even possible in the first place), and large societies that do not self-destruct give each individual a better chance of survival and reproduction.”
DeleteYou do realize this is a faith-based explanation? There is no tangible evidence for this, and it is actually impossible to test or falsify. This is typical to people like Dawkins who try to explain all unexplainable phenomenon by saying, “Evolution did it.” They offer explanations, which amount to stories shrouded in scientific vocabulary, but they are no closer to reality than Greek mythology.
“Moreover, I have evidence that points towards this interpretation. The studies that have shown that babies react to stylized acts of bullying negatively, and to stylized acts of altruism positively, tends to show that morality is innate in its simplest forms.”
I hope you are not serious with this. How is this evidence? I could just as easily say that morality is innate in humans because we were made in the image of God. Therefore, prior to such tests being done, I would have every expectation on the basis of my worldview to expect the exact same results. The mere fact that morality is innate does not answer why it is innate. It does not answer how or even why evolution would produce this in us. Any attempt to even try to say, “Evolution saw fit to produce morality in humans for such and such a function,” is actually to commit the fallacy of reification. The fact that you advanced this argument does not surprise me, and I am glad that you did. It is one more point that exposes your arguments for what they are.
“The fact that other animals have similar notions of “justice” and punishment as we do, especially the great apes, that are closest to us genetically, whose brains resembles ours, and that form societies like we do, tends to confirm that the existence of a notion of justice is correlated with the existence of complex social interactions and societies.”
Really? They have societies like ours? They have justice? Of all of the reports I have ever read on this, I have never seen nor heard of anything that resembles what you are talking about here. Human beings are the only creatures that think in terms of “what ought to be.” Justice by its very nature and definition depends on this type of reasoning. Furthermore, for it to have any meaning whatsoever, there must be language to communicate “what ought” over against “what is.” I am telling you, the more I read of your arguments, the more disappointed I am becoming in them. At least you are exposing just how fragile and weak atheistic reasoning truly is.
“Can you actually show how any of the solutions to the problem of original sin I proposed would have been worse than the one your God allegedly chose? Because so far you have not.”
DeleteLet me tell you what I have shown. I have shown that in order for you to declare that your solutions are better than God’s, you would have to point to an objective standard by which such a judgment could be made. You have no such standard. You are simply assuming objectivity because it is impossible for you to live and think apart from the Christian worldview. It is as if you are saying that air does not exist all the while you are breathing in air to form the very words that you use to deny it. Since God is the foundation of objective standards, your appeal to a standard by which you claim that God has done wrong is actually impossible. God, being the foundation of the standard has declared that this all works for good (Romans 8:28). He is omniscient and knows all data. You do not. Therefore, you are not in a position to claim that His ways are wrong and that yours are better. You do not have the information that He has, nor do you have the infinite attributes that He has. So you are operating off of less information and infinitely less intelligence. Furthermore, without Him you cannot meaningfully say something is wrong. With that beings said, you have two options: 1) Deny the existence of an objective standard and thus admit that you wasted your time and mine with this argument, or 2) Realize that God is the foundation of objectivity and thus His own standard when rightly applied cannot show Him to have done anything wrong.
“You assert that I need God in order to classify something as wrong. I have given you several examples where the God you claim is the source of morality acted in ways that are immoral, such as punishing someone for acts he could not know were wrong punishing people by endowing them with a sin nature for actions committed by another person (even if they were present “seminally”, a sperm is not responsible for the actions committed by his father. Even the most die-hard religious fundamentalists argue that life begins at conception, not before) punishing people for acts they could not avoid committing, because of that sin nature that infringed on their free will on this matter.”
DeleteYou have not shown this at all. You simply asserted it while lacking the objective standard to be meaningful in your assertion. All you have shown is that you have either no knowledge of epistemology, or instead you have no respect for it. I have adequately addressed each thing you said here in other parts of my response.
“So are you (a mere mortal with a 3 pound brain), and so were the authors of the Bible. I'd even argue that the authors of the bible had a worse grasp of philosophy than I do, if they believed that God killing all the first-born of Egypt was an acceptable way of forcing a head of state to change a political decision that God hardened pharaoh's heart against (hey, another example!). We would call such an action a terrorist act nowadays.”
I am sorry, but this one is difficult to stomach. The authors of the Bible were divinely inspired to write God’s truth with inerrancy (an easy thing in an open-universe). Your grasp of philosophy is nowhere near what theirs was. Moses was a prince of Egypt. Paul, a philosopher par excellence instructed in the best schools of Judaism and Hellenism. They at least understood the role of presuppositions. They at least understood epistemology. They at least understood what sin is. They at least understood that there are differences between a necessary and contingent being. They understood that the Creator has the right to create His own standard and hold His creation to it. Apparently, they had a much better grasp on philosophy than you do. I dare say even Plato and Aristotle have a better grasp than you do, and they were pagans. Furthermore, the last part of your rant is one more example of you dropping God down to a human level, and it is another example of you not understanding the point of a given biblical text. The plague was not about changing the decision of a head of state. It was punishing a whole nation for its horrid treatment of another nation for 400 years. Even more than that, it was God demonstrating His sovereignty over all nations and reminding all humanity of its obligation to obey all commands of the Creator. These actions are perfectly appropriate for a necessary being to do to contingent beings, since they owe Him allegiance.
“You should evaluate my arguments alongside those of the men who wrote the Bible, and decide on the merits of the arguments, not on the basis of who said what.”
DeleteYour words are not equal to theirs for yours are not inspired. Please show me that you can predict the future hundreds of times in advance with perfect accuracy and maybe I would listen. Please show me that you can describe reality in a way that accounts for all preconditions of intelligibility: Inductive inference, deductive inference, moral absolutes, etc. Please show me that you and 40 other authors from numerous different professions over a period of 1,400 years can write an anthology in three different languages that presents a unified and coherent worldview. Divine inspiration explains this. Do you have the historic credentials to argue against this?
“Ah, your argument is simply “God sets the rules”... Well, either these rules also apply to God, or they are not universal. Since God on numerous occasions perform acts that would be immoral if performed by anyone else, apparently you do not believe morality to be universal, there's always a codicil “unless God wants to” at the end of each rule.”
Once again, you are dropping God to the same level as creatures. This shows that you absolutely do not understand the creator/creature distinction, namely the definitional difference between a necessary and contingent being. This is stuff that Aquinas, and Aristotle before him, had figured out. So what you are showing me is that you are unable to grasp what Aquinas understood 800 years ago, and what Aristotle understood 2,300 years ago. You really should not be boasting of your philosophical skill if ancient men could run circles around you. Furthermore, you act as though moral standards are a standard independent of God. That is not the Christian position. The Christian position is that these things cannot exist apart from God, and as such they are not greater than Him. Instead, these standards exist as a reflection of His character. However, given that He is an infinite being with total sovereignty in the universe, certain exercises of power and dominion that are appropriate to Him are not appropriate to us. For example, it is appropriate for the president of the USA to command the Army to invade a hostile country since he is commander-in-chief. It is not appropriate for me to command the Army to do the very same thing. The U.S. Constitution does not present shifting moral standards in this, but instead it is a single standard that applies to different extents based on the office of the person in question. Likewise, God exercising power and dominion in a way that is appropriate for Him, but inappropriate for us, has nothing to do with shifting moral standards. Instead there is a single standard that is based on the nature and character of God, but that standard applies in different ways to different extents to different beings depending on where they are at on the ontological scale creation.
Your final attempt at a point was that God could have done things differently. He sure could have. But He chose not to. The Bible presents a sovereign God who is in control of all things. Some things are directly controlled and others indirectly. But one truth that Bible makes clear is that God works evil in the world for His ultimate good (Genesis 50:20; Romans 8:28). God did things the way He wanted to for His glory. He is God. He has that right. The creature does not. Romans 9 speaks to people like you. You are clay in the hands of the potter, and you have no ability whatsoever to refute what the potter has done. So once again, it is not that you have an argument. Instead, you have a complaint. You hate that your creator does not give you an equal vote to Him. You hate that He did not do things in a way that you think would be better. I am sorry, but that is not an argument. It is only a rant that shrouds itself as an argument.
ReplyDeleteFinally, God allowing evil and permitting it and letting its consequences play itself out does not make Him evil. He does not personally bear the characteristics of the sins that He permits. If parent decides to allow their 17 year old to go to a friends house for the night, and the kid then goes to a party and fornicates, do we say the parent is guilty of fornication? No. We intrinsically know that the one who does evil is the one who is evil. God never commits sin, for this is impossible. But it is precisely because He is omnipotent that He can allow sin to exist and then use it and direct it in such a way that the greater good that He determines will be accomplished every time. So at the end of the day, it is as I said. You have no argument. You merely have a complaint. Take it up with God. I am just His servant.
If parent decides to allow their 17 year old to go to a friends house for the night, and the kid then goes to a party and fornicates, do we say the parent is guilty of fornication? No.
DeleteLet's take a true crime, since fornication is not one. Murder, for example. If a 17-year-old kills someone outside the purview of his parents, then there are two possibilities, as far as I am aware. The 17-year old can be judged as an adult, in which case your argument does not apply, or he can be judged as a juvenile, in which case the parents bear some responsibility in some states.
Yet see how your own argumentation changes! A few lines earlier you have spent several paragraphs trying to convince me that we were all guilty for Adam eating a fruit, and now you are arguing exactly the opposite!
We intrinsically know that the one who does evil is the one who is evil.
Yes, we do, because it's a part of our brain that has been so useful for such time that it has become “hard-coded” in most of us.
And it is exactly by this standard that the ten plagues, the ordering of all the genocides in the old testament, the leaving a loaded fruit where Adam could reach it an leaving it unsupervised, the writing the rules so that everyone is guilty by default make God evil.
God never commits sin, for this is impossible.
Only because “sin” has an ad hoc definition that says “whatever God does not like”. Which is why when speaking about morality without the confines of our story, the concept of sin is meaningless. You trying to equate “sin” with “evil” is reductive of the concept of evil (the willful harming, commanding to harm or allowing to harm others without necessity) by specifically reducing it to an expression of the will of the character of God, which automatically exonerates that character. It is, however, as simple game of definitions that requires you to accept unspeakable acts of evil (like the eternal and unnecessary torture of entire populations) as not evil.
But it is precisely because He is omnipotent that He can allow sin to exist and then use it and direct it in such a way that the greater good that He determines will be accomplished every time.
And, of course, you have no evidence to present that all evil works towards the greater good, nor even a description of that greater good that would fit any commonly accepted (by anyone regardless of religion, for example) definition of greater good.
So at the end of the day, it is as I said. You have no argument. You merely have a complaint. Take it up with God. I am just His servant.
Ah, an appeal to a non-existent authority as your ultimate trump card. How predictable... and disappointing.
I'll leave you with a little scenario, if you will.
DeleteLet's imagine a universe where gods existed, including trickster gods. If you have to imagine Your God as the ultimate creator, imagine that this story applies to another species, that was not created in the image of the ultimate creator God if it makes you feel better.
Let's imagine that one of these trickster gods, who was not by any means omnipotent nor omnipresent nor omniscient nor omnibenevolent, decided to trick these people into believing he was all these things. Performing a few miracles would not be beyond the power of such a God, especially if he had chosen a species whose understanding of the universe was not far beyond mastery of ironsmithing. Dictating a “holy book” (specifying that the author is omnipotent but unable to lie, for example) would be trivially easy. Even spending a lifetime amongst these beings, preaching for ten percent of that lifetime, and getting crucified would amount to not more than a bad weekend.
How would you differentiate the experiences of that species from the experiences that you claim prove that the Bible is the written word of the creator of the universe?
“The incoherence is in God punishing all of Adam's descendents for the actions of Adam, while saying in Ezekiel that children would not be punished for the sins of their parents. The rules God set forth on that specific point (should sin and its consequences be inherited?) are inconsistent, since He did exactly the opposite thing on two different occasions.”
DeleteGod did not directly punish all of Adam’s descendents for the actions of Adam. He simply allowed the consequence of Adam’s sin to be passed on. In other words, since Adam now had a new nature of mortality, blame shifting, and sin-covering, all of his descendents would be born as he was after this change in condition. Just like your kids inherit your traits, we inherited Adam’s. Your problem with this is you think that God should have made Adam sterile and then started over with new humans. God’s plan was to allow Adam to procreate after the Fall so that God would carry on with His predetermined plan to save His elect. You might not like what God has done, but this is far different from your caricature above. The kids were not punished for Adam’s sin directly, but instead they simply were born as Adam was after the Fall. They will end up being punished for their own sins willfully committed. Your insistence on free will for this to be true is a philosophically weak one.
“We intrinsically know that the one who does evil is the one who is evil. Yes, we do, because it's a part of our brain that has been so useful for such time that it has become “hard-coded” in most of us.”
And you know this, how? What observable experiment done in time and space reveals that this part of our brain was so useful that it somehow got hardcoded into us? Let me see. Oh, I will use the same line of reasoning you do later. You appeal to a non-existent authority (macro-evolution) as your final trump card. How predictable … and disappointing. I hope you do see how entirely ludicrous you sound. I claim that we intrinsically know good and evil since we are made in the image of God, and you then respond that we know it because of evolution made us this way. And for some reason, people in your camp think their blind faith is reasonable. Are you guys really so easily deceived by your arbitrary use of academic language? Please look back over what you wrote, and you should see that when you remove the verbiage all you said is, “we innately know good and evil because evolution made us this way.” In fact, any question we can give your camp that you can’t answer leaves you guys shouting the word “evolution” on blind faith alone. So what makes us different? The Christian worldview explains ALL preconditions of intelligibility, whereas macro-evolution, if true, actually destroys them. The fact that intelligibility exists proves your view wrong.
“And it is exactly by this standard that the ten plagues, the ordering of all the genocides in the old testament, the leaving a loaded fruit where Adam could reach it an leaving it unsupervised, the writing the rules so that everyone is guilty by default make God evil.”
DeleteOnce again, justify this by your own worldview. Perhaps one day you will see that comparing God to men is philosophically dishonest. If God is the judge of the universe, and a whole nation of people achieved such a level of wickedness that He deemed it right to remove them, then He is the one with the authority to do so. No human has such authority as we are all ontologically equal with one another. But then again, based on your argumentation so far, I am seeing more and more that you do not understand this.
“You trying to equate “sin” with “evil” is reductive of the concept of evil (the willful harming, commanding to harm or allowing to harm others without necessity)”
Please show me the objective standard that allows you to insist on this definition as though it has any real meaning. More and more you are simply just showing the readers of this that your position is hopeless. You can’t have an objective standard in an atheistic universe, but this crusade of yours centers upon you insisting that your opinion is the objective standard and by your authority and opinion alone, God must be evil since He does not operate within the confines of your arbitrary and meaningless standard. I think if you really believed half of what you say you do, you would realize you wasted everyone’s time. Yet, I know why you act as you do. You cannot escape the imago dei within you, but you seek to suppress it (Romans 1:18-20). In so doing, you need the very worldview preconditions that you claim to reject in order to proceed.
“And, of course, you have no evidence to present that all evil works towards the greater good, nor even a description of that greater good that would fit any commonly accepted (by anyone regardless of religion, for example) definition of greater good.”
In an atheistic universe why should I care what “any commonly accepted definition of greater good” would be? Such definitions would change over time from one culture to the next, and ultimately if we are just molecules in motion with no higher purpose, then any definitions would be nothing other than arbitrary non-sense. Once again, you prove that you cannot argue with me unless the Christian worldview is true, for it alone can provide the preconditions and standards you need to make any argument meaningful. Furthermore, I have all of the evidence I need. God has declared this to be the case, He has inspired a book that predicts the future accurately hundreds of times as verified by history, and I have personally experienced God’s transformative power in my own life and regularly fellowship with many others who have experienced the same power. You are the only one entering this discussion without evidence.
“How would you differentiate the experiences of that species from the experiences that you claim prove that the Bible is the written word of the creator of the universe?”
DeleteRather easily. First, a non-omniscient and non-omnipresent being would be confined to time and would be unable to declare the future. Yet, the God of the Bible declares the future many times. Second, dying on the cross was a lot more than just a crucifixion. Jesus also absorbed and paid for the full eternal wrath of God for each person that would ever believe on Him. This is what the three hours of darkness meant when He was on the cross. Furthermore, your scenario actually has happened. It is called Islam. Muhammad claimed to have an angelic visitor telling him the supposed words of God. Yet the book makes no prophecies, it confines itself to only one genre of human literature (poetry), it contradicts itself left and right with no good theological explanation, and no miracles were performed at all. Furthermore it is filled many verifiable historical errors (of the kind that will not turn out to be overturned at a later date). This type of thing is exactly what you would expect to see in the scenario that you painted. Furthermore, the Qu’ran was the work one man. The Bible was the work of around 40 men over many generations, comprised of many genres. It accurately predicts the future, it provides the preconditions of intelligibility, and numerous undeniable miracles happened. Furthermore, much of its content is corroborated by the contemporary history of its own time, and archeological discoveries of our own. Prior to getting any degree in theology, my degree was in history. So this is something that I know a great deal about. Do you? So the long story short of this is that your scenario does not work as a critique of biblical Christianity. It was simply an unoriginal adaptation of something David Hume once said, and it does not hurt my position at all. It does hurt Islam’s, but for some reason I doubt you go to Islamic blogs to start arguments. If you are so committed to your atheism, then perhaps you should.
Rather easily. First, a non-omniscient and non-omnipresent being would be confined to time and would be unable to declare the future.
DeleteWhat makes you say that? There are many claims of clairvoyance in many religious traditions, and there is no logical bar to entities being clairvoyant without being omniscient. Even we, humans, are able to predict with a certain degree of accuracy the weather a few days from now, without having to rely on an omniscient being to tell us.
Yet, the God of the Bible declares the future many times.
Yeah, about that. Leaving aside that many gods in many religious traditions predict the future, I am not really impressed with your God's so-called predictions. See, they are usually in one of three categories : the predictions from chapter one fulfilled in chapter three, the predictions that are so vaguely-worded and/or trivial that several events could fulfill them, all of these events adding to a virtual certainty that the prophecy would be fulfilled one day whatever happened, and prophecy not yet fulfilled (you know, like Jesus returning before the people listening to the writer were all dead).
All in all, the claims of prophecy from your religion are no more, and maybe a little less, compelling than the claims of prophecy from other religions (that being said, I have not any claim to clarvoyance that I feel is compelling)
Second, dying on the cross was a lot more than just a crucifixion.
So your religion claims. It would be nice if any of you could prove it convincingly.
Jesus also absorbed and paid for the full eternal wrath of God for each person that would ever believe on Him.
And there we have the crux of your belief, and another example of your God exhibiting behavior that you would call unjust on any other being and call just in this case. If one judge condemned a person to death, and an innocent man demanded to be killed in his place, would you call the judge just if he accepted?
Moreover, according to your belief system the punishment for one lifetime of sin is an eternity in Hell. According to that, Jesus (who spent at most three days dead, according to your myth) did not fulfill the punishment for even one sinner, let alone all those that believe in Him. Which makes your God's justice not absolute any more, since different people get different sentences according to who they are, not what they did. Wherever you turn you find incoherence in your belief system, incoherence so deep that you have to revert to epistemological nihilism (“you can't know nor judge anything unless you agree with me”) to try and turn attention away from them.
This is what the three hours of darkness meant when He was on the cross.
According to your interpretation of a book I don't find any more authoritative than any other book.
Furthermore, your scenario actually has happened. It is called Islam. Muhammad claimed to have an angelic visitor telling him the supposed words of God. Yet the book makes no prophecies, it confines itself to only one genre of human literature (poetry), it contradicts itself left and right with no good theological explanation, and no miracles were performed at all.
DeleteMuslims would say that their book makes many prophecies (as a simple “islam prophecies” google search would have shown you, which makes me wonder it you are deliberately lying or just too unconcerned with the truth of your claims that you don't bother to check them), that the Kuran is not confined to poetry, but that it manages to be universal without compromising stylistic integrity as the Bible does, that there are no contradictions in the Kuran (and they use the same kind of logic you use to whisk away the contradiction in the Bible), and that miracles, including prophecies, were performed up to and including Mohammed going to heaven on a winged horse (and then, they wisely say that the Kuran itself is a miracle to end all miracles and don't try, as Christians do, to claim miracles that can't be proven to occur).
Furthermore it is filled many verifiable historical errors (of the kind that will not turn out to be overturned at a later date).
Like a survey that would require people to go back to their cities of birth, but did not leave any documentation in the empire that supposedly demanded that survey? Like a Roman governor demanding all children under a certain age be slaughtered? Like a tribe of Hebrews being held in slavery in Egypt? I love how you imply (without saying it and without bothering to justify it) that all the historical “errors” that disagree with your text will be overturned, while those that disagree with the other texts won't be. Special pleading rarely gets any more blatant than this.
This type of thing is exactly what you would expect to see in the scenario that you painted.
And as I have shown you, it holds no difference from the scenario you believe in.
Furthermore, the Qu’ran was the work one man. The Bible was the work of around 40 men over many generations, comprised of many genres.
DeleteAnd each of them having the texts from the ones before. If JK Rowling's kid were to write a sequel to Harry Potter, or Tolkien's to the Lord of the Rings, would that be a point in favor of the existence of elves and wizards?
It accurately predicts the future,
So far, you have not provided convincing predictions.
it provides the preconditions of intelligibility
The only precondition of intelligibility is self-consistency, and your Bible certainly does not provide that.
and numerous undeniable miracles happened.
Still not convinced of that. So far, I have not seen a single convincing account of a miracle that can't be accounted for by being made up or by science. Will you trot out the faith-healers, any one of whom could simply go to work in a hospital if his or her healing was genuine? The miracles that were allegegly performed by Jesus in a book that claims the stars are pinned to a canopy, and therefore was clearly either wrong or, to be charitable, embellished ? Coincidences that happened right after praying to people who pray all the time? Really, I'd like you to show me one of these miracles. And when you do, I'll go see Randy and claim my million dollars.
Furthermore, much of its content is corroborated by the contemporary history of its own time, and archeological discoveries of our own.
Just like the Dresden files series are corroborated by the existence of Chicago.
Prior to getting any degree in theology, my degree was in history. So this is something that I know a great deal about. Do you?
DeleteHey, another argument from authority!
So the long story short of this is that your scenario does not work as a critique of biblical Christianity.
It does not for you only because you accept, arbitrarily, arguments for Christianity that you reject for other religions (and vice versa), as I have shown.
It was simply an unoriginal adaptation of something David Hume once said, and it does not hurt my position at all. It does hurt Islam’s, but for some reason I doubt you go to Islamic blogs to start arguments. If you are so committed to your atheism, then perhaps you should.
I have several internet personae, so I would be very curious to know what makes you think I do not in fact argue similarily against islam ans I do christianity.
Once again, justify this by your own worldview. Perhaps one day you will see that comparing God to men is philosophically dishonest.If God is the judge of the universe, and a whole nation of people achieved such a level of wickedness that He deemed it right to remove them, then He is the one with the authority to do so.
No human has such authority as we are all ontologically equal with one another. But then again, based on your argumentation so far, I am seeing more and more that you do not understand this.
And here you are, claiming that I only disagree because I do not understand you. The thing is, in order to “justify” your God's actions, you have to define morality in a way that it cannot be applied to your God (ie, all actions can be judged as moral or immoral accirding ot a certain set of rules, except for the actions of your God that are automagically deemed moral without being subject to these rules). It is special pleading, and someone who claims to know anything about philosophy should be able to recognize so blatant a fallacy.
Please show me the objective standard that allows you to insist on this definition as though it has any real meaning
DeleteAs I have predicted, you reject any definition of morality that is not your own. If you want morality to be objective, maybe you should read the definitions of objectivity, and see whether they apply. I went to http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/objective
Not influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or prejudice; based on facts; unbiased: an objective opinion.
Pain being inflicted can be detected, it is not based on opinion. The agency of the person inflicting it can be detected too, or at least inferred.
On the other hand, according to you God makes His judgments based on His wrath and/or mercy, which are personal feelings
intent upon or dealing with things external to the mind rather than with thoughts or feelings, as a person or a book.
I gave you a definition of evil that was based on the inflicting of pain, which is external to the mind. You claimed that morality derived directly from a mind.
being the object of perception or thought; belonging to the object of thought rather than to the thinking subject (opposed to subjective ).
Once again, pain being inflicted is something that the subject suffers, not something that is part of him or her. Your God, however, has so far no evidence of existing outside of the minds of the believers.
of or pertaining to something that can be known, or to something that is an object or a part of an object; existing independent of thought or an observer as part of reality.
I hope that you will concede that pain and the people inflicting it are part of objective reality. However, I still am not convinced that your God is.
In an atheistic universe why should I care what “any commonly accepted definition of greater good” would be? Such definitions would change over time from one culture to the next, and ultimately if we are just molecules in motion with no higher purpose, then any definitions would be nothing other than arbitrary non-sense.
Well, then please continue to believe in your God. If you are unable to find purpose or motivation for altruism without the confines of your religion, please continue to adhere to those. Of course, those of us who recognize that happiness is necessarily dependent on the happiness of others, and that purpose is something you ultimately give yourself (even if you abdicate it by simply conforming yourself to a book you have arbitrarily decided was axiomatically true) wll go on doing just that. It is just a bit sad that you are unable to do so.
Once again, you prove that you cannot argue with me unless the Christian worldview is true, for it alone can provide the preconditions and standards you need to make any argument meaningful. Once again, you reject any “preconditions and standards” that do not agree with you without justifying this rejection.
DeleteFurthermore, I have all of the evidence I need. God has declared this to be the case, He has inspired a book that predicts the future accurately hundreds of times as verified by history, and I have personally experienced God’s transformative power in my own life and regularly fellowship with many others who have experienced the same power. You are the only one entering this discussion without evidence.
Notice how you shift gears here. Now the evidence you claim is no longer good enough to convince any reasonable person, it is just good enough to convince you. God having declared you to have the evidence is clearly begging the question, the Book you claim He inspired is no more supernatural than any other “holy books”, and subjective evidence such as the “transformative power” you claim has been claimed by the followers of every religion (and none) since about the time we have been keeping records (that we know of, of course, it certainly happened before).
Just like your kids inherit your traits, we inherited Adam’s. And here is a perfect example of a decision made by God (who decided that the sinnature would be inheritable) that if it had happened would have been responsible for the suffering of pretty much every being capable of suffering. Ever.
If you want to claim that it was a good and moral decision, have fun.
Your problem with this is you think that God should have made Adam sterile and then started over with new humans.
Or, if you remember, make a sin nature not inheritable, or any dozen of other solutions.
God’s plan was to allow Adam to procreate after the Fall so that God would carry on with His predetermined plan to save His elect.
Which means God's plan necessitated the fall and all the suffering that resulted from it. Not making your case here. Plus, it makes your God look like a kid playing at crashing electric trains together so he can use his superman action figure to “save” the passengers.
You might not like what God has done, but this is far different from your caricature above. The kids were not punished for Adam’s sin directly, but instead they simply were born as Adam was after the Fall. They will end up being punished for their own sins willfully committed. Your insistence on free will for this to be true is a philosophically weak one.
And once again, you are the one insisting that it is not possible for people not to sin, any more than it is possible for people not to breath (as in, it is possible to refrain from doing so for a while, but ultimately you will do it). Punishing people for something they can not refrain from doing might be just in your book, but I don't think I 'm the one on philosophical thin ice her
And you know this, how? What observable experiment done in time and space reveals that this part of our brain was so useful that it somehow got hardcoded into us?
DeleteDo you dispute that knowledge can, and is, hard-coded in our DNA? Because I can give you a lot of examples of behaviors that are exhibited from birth, before learning has had any time to be done (such as walking in most animals, pain avoidance, swimming for human babies who cannot support their weight, and so on). And these include reacting to acts of bullying negatively, and to acts of kindness positively, or the rudiments of moral behavior.
As for macro-evolution not existing... Well I'm going to be charitable here. I'm going to assume that you simply repeat what people you agree with claim. I'm going to tell you something. You are living in the only developed country where the church has successfully cast any doubts on the veracity of evolution in the minds of the public. Your country's gullibility on this topic is a subject of laughter. The very arbitrary and non-scientific distinction between “micro” and “macro” evolution is a sign that you do not, in fact, understand the theory of evolution you reject. For future reference, here is what the ToE actually says, in a vulgarized form. Feel free to point out which point you object to.
Living beings reproduce
DNA (and the biological machines that read it and produce proteins according to it) constitutes a sort of blueprint for the organism.
The reproduction process entails an imperfect replication of DNA (as well as a recombination in the case of sexual reproduction). The imperfections in the replication process are random and theoretically reversible (insertion, deletion and substitution), but the odds against an error happening exactly in the opposite way on the same gene are about one in 3,234,830,000 (for a human, since it is approximately the number of base pairs in the human genome)).
The imperfections in the replication of DNA may (or may not, since not all genes are expressed) lead to the apparition of new traits, just as if you change the plans, the product will be different.
Such new traits may improve, reduce, or be neutral in regards to the odds of survival and reproduction of the individual in its environmental
Traits that reduce the odds of survival and reproduction tend to be passed less than the others, because the organisms carrying them tend to reproduce less.
Over generations, amongst a given population, the gene pool (as in, the set of genes present in the individuals of this population) varies slowly as a result of these mutations spreading or not.
Sometimes, populations are split for a long time, by geography or by another circumstance.
During that times, different random mutations appear in the two populations (since the odds of the same mutation happening twice is about 1 in 3,234,830,000 too).
Over the generations, the gene pools of the two different populations become more and more different, since they change according to what random mutations happen and the different environments they are subject to.
Two individuals whose DNA are too different cannot produce living, fertile offspring through sexual reproduction (just like you can't produce a car with half the plans of a pinto and half the plans of a school bus)
Once the two populations that are split from the same one are too “far apart” genetically, they interbreed successfully more and more infrequently until they can't do it anymore and form two different species.
This is what the ToE says, simplified a bit. Do you dispute any of these points? Because all of these points have been observed and documented both in the lab and in the field. Do you have any scientific evidence for any other process being involved in the diversity of life as we observe it today? Will you try and shift the goalposts to abiogenesis or cosmology or any other field that has nothing to do with evolution at all?
And now I'm afraid you have allowed me to complete my logical fallacies bingo card. Given that none of your 25 registered readers has seen fit to jump in in your defense and that you have proven you are not in possession of any new or convincing arguments, I'm afraid you have reached the point where you are irrelevant to me again. Feel free to claim victory after the fact, as like for the last debate you will be the only one to consider it meaningful.
DeleteWell, I must say that I am not surprised at the lack of argument that French Engineer had throughout this. I posted his last arguments and chose not to respond to them so that the reader can see that he did not actually answer anything I raised. Instead, he simply declared victory for himself and claimed that I am irrelevant to him. Who cares if a snobbish political liberal finds me relevant? Furthermore, he said I filled his logical fallacies bingo card, but where has he listed these fallacies?
ReplyDeleteAt the end of the day, he raised no real arguments and he offered nothing that could be seen as evidence. Furthermore, he showed an utter lack of philosophical precision and even greater theological ignorance. In terms of his “defense of Islam,” he did not distinguish between the Qu’ran and the Hadith, showing even more ignorance. I wonder if he even realizes there is a surah in the Qur’an that explains why Muhammad could do no miracles. Yet, he ignorantly claimed that the Qu’ran recorded Muhammad doing miracles. What he was referring to were various Hadith written centuries later.
As far as biblical prophecies go, I suppose he is unfamiliar with Daniel’s prophecies, or Jeremiah’s, or Isaiah’s, or Micah’s, or any other that were detailed and spanned many centuries. If French Engineer was serious, he could find resources online that map each of these detailed prophecies out. Some prophecies were similar to what he described (i.e. being predicted and fulfilled within the same book), but there are hundreds that are not this way at all. The clairvoyants of other religions have not produced historically accurate and verifiable concrete predictions of the future. But French Engineer does not really care about this. Thus, I am not going to waste my time on a guy who never entered this discussion in good faith to begin with.
I also find his claim that the Bible has historical errors to be another sign of his unqualified status to comment on these subjects. I would have hoped that he would have known that absence of evidence is not the same as evidence against a particular claim. We have little tangible evidence for the vast majority of the events that we think happened in ancient history. So if he were to be consistent, he would have to say that we know very little about history prior to the Industrial Revolution. He would have to claim all that we think we know about the Greeks, Romans, Sumerians, Chinese, etc., is all hogwash. But I doubt he would say this. He clearly is biased only against Christianity. That was evidenced in his positive portrayal of Islam. Why is he this way? It goes back to Romans 1:18-20. They are all on the same side. They suppress the truth in unrighteousness. Going back to the historical evidences, does he not know that 100 years ago, the experts said that the Bible was wrong on the following accounts: existence of Hittites, evidence of an Exodus, existence of David, existence of Pontus Pilate, and so on? Does he not know that now there is undeniable proof for these events and people? Of course, the Bible was proof enough, but my point is people like French Engineer always make fools out of themselves when they argue that the absence of evidence is actually evidence against the biblical claims. It seems like every month new archeological discoveries in Israel are yielding more corroboration to the biblical account.
Finally, as far as his defense of macro-evolution goes, I simply shake my head. The points he offered are not evidence for macro-evolution. And there clearly is a HUGE difference between change within a species (mirco) and the change of one species into something completely different (macro). I have read more on this than he will give me credit for, and I know if he was actually honest, he would search out some good scientific creationist sites that talk about each of the “evidences” that he mentioned. It was not my purpose to enter a debate with him over history, archeology, and science. He has yet to demonstrate himself qualified to speak in these fields.
ReplyDeleteHe also felt the need to claim that the U.S. is a laughingstock over the issue of evolution. I am guessing that he is from Australia. The funny thing about this is the U.S. is the most productive, wealthy, scientifically advanced, and affluent society the world has ever known. It was built off of the Protestant Work-Ethic and the Judeo-Christian worldview. The nations of Europe (and Australia too) with all achievements combined cannot hold a candle to what the U.S. has accomplished in only two centuries. Why would we ever care if you laugh at us? Furthermore, we hold our view that Darwinian evolution is a scientific theory that is not very scientific and it is a philosophical theory that is riddled with problems. We are the only ones truly free enough to think for ourselves and allow both sides to present evidence. In the end, our free and democratic society demands more proof and evidence. All we get from evolutionists is rhetoric, lawsuits, and slander. These are all signs of the losing side. These are signs of those who are brainwashed.
So with that all said, if anyone wants to jump in and deal with French Engineer’s unsatisfying arguments, then feel free. I am done wasting my time with him.
“Living beings reproduce
ReplyDelete(Why? How did they come to be able to produce? What came first, male or female? How did nature know mankind needed to be male and female to produce? Trial and error? Did a bunch of males evolve first, then were dying out because of a lack of reproductive abilities, then nature noticed this deficiency and began causing mutations to occur to bring about females to help restore and further evolve mankind? Or was it females first? Why did anything come first?)
DNA (and the biological machines that read it and produce proteins according to it) constitutes a sort of blueprint for the organism.
(How does a biological machine have the ability to read? And produce proteins? Did you say blueprint? How does something without the ability to think, create, and articulate ideas and concepts make a blueprint? If it was embedded in its design, how did that happen?)
The reproduction process entails an imperfect replication of DNA (as well as a recombination in the case of sexual reproduction). The imperfections in the replication process are random (that’s right evolution is time + random mutation + chance + matter + energy = everything. I thought you were giving us the “real ToE” ?) and theoretically reversible (insertion, deletion and substitution), (Why are they random?) but the odds against an error happening exactly in the opposite way on the same gene are about one in 3,234,830,000 (for a human, since it is approximately the number of base pairs in the human genome)). The imperfections in the replication of DNA may (or may not, since not all genes are expressed) lead to the apparition of new traits, just as if you change the plans, the product will be different. (the may or may not phrase, which means you have no idea, just speculation)
Such new traits may improve, reduce, or be neutral in regards to the odds of survival and reproduction of the individual in its environmental (There is no definitive answer here; you are just covering you self by saying “may” and giving categories that can happen. Not really scientific, more speculation)
ReplyDeleteTraits that reduce the odds of survival and reproduction tend to be passed less than the others, because the organisms carrying them tend to reproduce less (and this has been observed over millions of years as species have transitioned into new species producing only the best? That’s right, it is speculation again. We have not been around long enough to actually test this theory and actually get it into the fact category.)
Over generations, amongst a given population, the gene pool (as in, the set of genes present in the individuals of this population) varies slowly as a result of these mutations spreading or not. Sometimes, populations are split for a long time, by geography or by another circumstance (What are the other circumstances?)
During that times, different random mutations appear in the two populations (since the odds of the same mutation happening twice is about 1 in 3,234,830,000 too).
(Have these mutations actually occurred in people that we know of and have documented, tagged, and then matched up to see if reproduction was actually possible?
Over the generations, the gene pools of the two different populations become more and more different, since they change according to what random mutations happen and the different environments they are subject to.
(So, is there physical evidence for humans changing from Chinese to Caucasian? Now, if you are referring to a male/female blended couple producing offspring that are mixed is not the same. I am talking about from the beginning of human evolution, has this been observed? If we all came from the same ancestor, why the randomness and change in production leading to different races? You will say adaptation, which I will give you that, for that has been an observable, documented account of trait changes for adaptation. However, a species changing into another species has not been. You cannot start with mankind and say there has been changes based on some unknown circumstance either do to genetics or environment and make your theory as proof of ToE; rather, you must start out at the beginning as your view ultimately posits and explain the evolution from the original primordial soup we supposedly began from to the human race. You cant because everything is just speculation based on probabilities)
Two individuals whose DNA are too different cannot produce living, fertile offspring through sexual reproduction (just like you can't produce a car with half the plans of a pinto and half the plans of a school bus)
ReplyDeleteOnce the two populations that are split from the same one are too “far apart” genetically, they interbreed successfully more and more infrequently until they can't do it anymore and form two different species.”
(Again, in what civilization has this been demonstrated and documented in?)
This is what the ToE says, simplified a bit. Do you dispute any of these points? Because all of these points have been observed and documented both in the lab and in the field. Do you have any scientific evidence for any other process being involved in the diversity of life as we observe it today? Will you try and shift the goalposts to abiogenesis or cosmology or any other field that has nothing to do with evolution at all?"
What you have given is again a theory.... Ok. But the question is why? Why is it the way you have attempted to explain it? So, it has been observed that random mutation exists, which if I recall mutations are never beneficial to an organism, always detrimental (except on a few occasions). You never answer the why question. It’s not hard to list all of the processes we have discovered over the years. It does not prove anything. You are just stating what is there. You want to lean on science as your standard for attaining truth, but science is ultimately the wrong method when it comes to the issues we are discussing. Furthermore, in order to do science you have to have a toolbox containing absolutes that have to be in existence before you can even attempt to do sound science. Laws of logic, uniformity of nature, mathematical universals, and a truthful scientist sticking to the results and not fudging the data to fit the conclusion he wants to find. Absolutes cannot be accounted for in a random-chance, mutating, “may or may not be,” type of universe. That is what you hold to when it comes to origins, but what we see is actually the opposite.
You are still holding to an arbitrary position. You are sitting on God’s lap attempting to slap his face. He hold’s you up while you deny he exists.
Taking into consideration Brian Orr's comments on French Engineer's "smoking gun" of ToE, I would have to say that if one were to read through this whole exchange from start to finish, they would notice a few things. First, every single argument that French Engineer provided was logically answered and in some cases evidentially answered.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, French Engineer simply chose not to address many arguments made against his position. He was philosophically shut down at every turn, and it totally shows throughout this exchange. For anyone reading it for the first time, make special note of all his arguments and then note when they are addressed by myself or Brian. Then look at my arguments and count how many of them French Engineer simply chose to duck. There are a lot of points he did not even address. I guarantee this had nothing to do with him not finding them worthy. No, instead they shut down his arguments. His recourse was simply to ignore them. I find this ironic since he is the one that talked a lot of trash on his way out. Then again, I have seen this happen a lot as a high school teacher when teenagers get in fist fights. As the one who lost is getting pulled away by school proctors, he shouts, "You're lucky they broke us up, because I was about show you what I really can do."
It really comes back down to this. They cannot reason without foundations, but they choose to ignore such foundations because their worldview cannot account for them. Every statement he made required an absolute standard, and yet that is something that his belief system cannot produce. Only the Christian worldview accounts for such things.
Truly, I am glad that he started this exchange because it illustrates what Francis Schaeffer was writing about. French Engineer is a man who is below the line of despair, and he thinks in the terms of someone that lives below this line. However, he cannot come to grips with the true nihilistic consequence of this, and so he embraces a form of mysticism that gives him an absolute standard that shifts to his arbitrary needs and assertions. Whether his mystic absolute standard is scientific theory, humanism, cultural relativity, or logic, these things still need an absolute ground to have any meaning. So a man with no real absolutes tried to make absolute arguments, and he lost because of this. This was a great lesson indeed.