Free-will and Atheism

Post Reply New Topic

Just a random example: 1 Samuel 15
How is that different from my example?


So you are only attacking the original formulation.


By circular I mean simply calling whatever god is / commands 'good'. Even if god commands you to shoot everyone in a mosque, you would still call that good by definition. Either that or you are still judging god by 'human prespective'.

Really, you are just fantasizing a 'good reason' exists. You have no basis to think god has or need any reason. You have no basis to say that 'God serves as a perfect moral standard', which is another 'human prespective'.


From the outset I already said such morality is nonsense. I am not measuring anything.


Nope. Hume's law again.
]

OK. So what exactly is the problem here?


The modern formulation is patterned after the original, though to fit a context that it is ill-suited for. The original was fundamentally flawed, as is the modern one.


That's just a baseless assertion, though. You haven't proven anything.


Of course you are. The hidden assumption is that the human perspective on what God is or what morality is is superior to God's view or God Himself. Easy to rationalize if you insist God doesn't exist.


OK, but Hume's law doesn't really do anything but separate morality from naturalism. So I fail to see how this is relevant to the discussion. It just means that if morality exists, it comes from God.

It's simple logic: If A then B, Not B, therefore not A. It says IF A exists and has the characteristics attributed to him by scripture, then B would be reality, however B is not reality, therefore A does not exist.

If I said that there was a being, that would pop out of every can of spaghetti sauce and punch the person who opened the can in the face. Then after people have opened billions of cans filled with delicious spaghetti sauce and nobody who opened one has ever been punched in the face someone says;

"Hey TM, I've opened hundreds of cans of spaghetti sauce, I've never been punched in the face, there is a facebook group with every canned spaghetti sauce eater in the world on facebook and none of them have ever been punched in the face by this being you claim will pop out of spaghetti sauce can,



The thing about free will is that that if we live in a deterministic universe and God is the creator of said universe, there is no leeway. Total knowledge is total knowledge, it means that at the instant of creation, God knew exactly what you would write in this reply to me, exactly what you were thinking when you wrote it and what color underwear you would be wearing while writing it.

My argument isn’t based on man being omniscient, but that IF God is all-knowing and he created the world, then he knowingly created the world with the amount of suffering that he did. He knows EVERYTHING that has happened or will happen. There are no choices we make, we do not get to choose God or Sin, he did that for us at creation. If someone was to crucify Jesus, God decided this at the moment of creation, if someone was to be bullied at school, God decided that at creation.

The whole thing is a house of cards:
If God is the Creator of the Universe.
If God is All Powerful
If God is omniscient.

Then he has created a universe and more specifically an earth where you have to follow his rules or be tortured for eternity, but he has made a huge number of people so that they do not believe in him, which is one of his rules. He's also made a lot of people who were made by him in order to do evil to others. There is no getting around this.

But B in the sense you're talking about is not reality and therefore has nothing to do with A. The reality we're talking about is slightly more nuanced than that.

To be plain: Your conclusion is a non-sequitor. It doesn't necessarily follow that "if B is not reality, then A does not exist." There could be other explanations of why B isn't reality that do not necessarily rule out A's existence. What you're doing is irrationally holding to a single conclusion that doesn't necessarily follow.


There are too many errors here for me to give a fair response. Nowhere is it ever indicated that the purpose of the universe and life on earth is to follow God's rules or be tortured for eternity. Nowhere is it said that God purposefully made a huge number of people to not believe in Him or that it is one of His rules that people don't believe in God. From a Christian and possibly a Hebraic perspective, these "rules" just don't exist. There are rules that DO exist, but your argument here fails because it asserts something that isn't even factual. That's not to say "predestination" isn't Biblical, but some of the ideas you're putting forth here aren't even Calvinist.

Look, even if divine determinism is the rule, and I won't deny the possibility given God's omniscience, man is not excused from the choices he makes. Man cannot make the choice to follow Christ if there was never a choice to begin with. Just because God knows who will make the right choice and who won't, it doesn't mean that mankind knows. Hard determinism, in my view, is just an illusion to sway people from thinking that there can be another path from the one they're own, and it's rationalized hopelessness.

Also, just because God KNOWS what man's choices will be, it doesn't follow that God Himself is the sole determining factor. Given the choice, since man doesn't completely know the mind of God but only what God reveals, it's not inconceivable for man to choose a path away from God. If God knows who will or won't choose Him, then it follows that an optimal number of people will be created to achieve an optimal balance of who will choose to be saved over those who won't.

If you're looking for me to concede that humans are not entirely free, then I don't mind giving you that much. What I take issue with is the idea of there being NO choices at all. Whether God knows what's going to happen or not, the choice STILL EXISTS. So even within a deterministic outlook there remains a degree of freedom, and any stated limits on that freedom are ultimately irrelevant.

Meth lab? I heard it from was grabbing a helicopter out of the sky before it crashed.

Go to my analogy about the Canned Spaghetti sauce puncher,

IF The Canned Spaghetti Sauce Puncher exists then it follows that out of the millions of people who eat canned spaghetti sauce every day a large amount would get punched in the face. If none of them are punched in the face it follows that there is no such thing as the Canned Spaghetti sauce puncher.

If I said, "If there is no oxygen, humans cannot live, humans live, therefore there is oxygen" would you protest?




Proposition A: God is all powerful
Proposition B: God is omniscient (all knowing)

Conclusion: God knows the entire history of everything he creates before actually creating anything. Therefore, he would know that his actions would include creating people who do not believe in him and creating a system that condemns those people to eternal torture. The eternal torture thing is right out of the New Testament.

If you know that something will result in evil and you still do it, was it intentional? Because God knows that something evil will be the result and he still does it. The "rules" are the ones where Jesus says things like "He who calls his brother a fool shall burn in eternal fire" not a direct scripture quote but close enough. These things are in the Bible, literal and clear as day. The arguments are based on the logical conclusions from the premises.




IF there is determinism there cannot be free will, if there is no free will there is no choice whether to do right or wrong. Whether they know or not does not matter. If you want to propose limited determinism you are welcome to do so, but the result is just another slew of problems created. If you propose limited determinism, then how do we know which choices are our own, do we really have free will if we believe we don't, do we really have free will if its limited?

I mean, if you limit freedom of speech you do per definition not have literal freedom of speech.




If god is all knowing and thus know what choices you will make before you make them, and you make different choices then god is not omniscient.

God knows that you will pick box A before you exist, you come into existence and pick box B, did God in this case know your choice in advance?

Wow this is an interesting post. I totally agree with most of what is said here. And also, I cannot help but get angry when people try and bestow their beliefs on me. Hell, I even get angry when people talk about god around me... I really do not know why. I tell them point blank that god does not exist. It is utter and total nonsense. I mean come on, the human soul does not even exist. xD Life after death is fiction. It is sad to know that somewhere around 40% (probably more) of Americans aren't living in the "real world" if you understand my argument.

I don't believe a human soul exists either, yet I believe Jesus Christ is exactly who he said he was.

The Only Begotten Son of God?

ruveyn

This proves it is entire conceivable that god may command you to bring a machine gun and shoot everybody praying in a mosque. You can't say god won't do this simply by nature. Now does that make the command moral?


Strawman. The modern argument does not distinguish monotheism or polytheism.


Evasion noted. It is you who claim there is such god based morality. It is you who have the bundle of proof. What we have seen here is nothing but fantasizing the problem will go away because god is magical.


Another strawman. What superior or inferior?


Nonsense. Hume's law only say morality does not come from hard facts, it does not distinguish natural or supernatural.

Yes. As any person, Jesus was only one of three things:

1- He was insane, so crazy he believed his delusion to the point of being killed over it.

2- Or he was a liar, and so caught up in his web of deceit he killed over it rather than admit he was a liar.

3- Or he is exactly how he says he is, and was murdered as an innocent man.

I believe the third.

The old lunatic, liar or lord one, which implies there are no other options. Sure there are.

4 - He was purely fictional.
5 - He was a real person, but the stories attributed to him are false or exaggerated.
6 - He is a confabulation* of several myths and legends in an attempt to make the religion appeal to as many disenfranchised groups as possible ("your sacred prophet was born in midwinter? So was ours! You've been worshipping Jesus all along!")
7 - He was expressed as a symbol, not a real person, in the same sense that Superman or Harry Potter is not a real person but demonstrates an ideal morality.
8 - He set up the religion as a political movement (modern equivalent - L Ron Hubbard?)
9 - He's really the Devil, out to lure people away from service to God by telling them to stop all the proper rituals. No, I don't believe this myself, but it's a compelling idea for a novel!

There could be many more ideas. I'm just brainstorming. If anyone ever tells you it's either A, B or C, they have no imagination.

[* I just love this word - confusing similar things and merging them into one idea. Confabulation? Confabulous!]

The stated would be from my point of view and my opinion. Your opinion ends where.. oh, I forget, something about a fully loaded photon torpedo bay or something...

We need purpose in life. Nothing more, nothing less.

I truly believe that we need to find purpose in ourself rather than an assumed deity.

But why DO people believe in God? Because they have been told he exists by someone, their parents, or whatever. And because there was someone 2000 years ago who we cannot even say really existed, we have to believe that as well. And maybe that person lied.

We cannot be sure at all that he could EXIST rather than being a construct that people have developed over several thousand years.

There is no actual proof.

And that is the point. You have to believe to believe it. ^^ It doesn't make sense.

Also, Genesis is just straight-forward discrimination. I thought about this a lot during the last months. Because HE created the earth, man first, woman second. The woman deceived the man. She was greedy.

That's the only part of Genesis that seems plausible.