Originally posted by telerionWhat ARE you talking about Tel?
[b]I think it is benificial to define evil. Biblically, what is evil? Evil is merely lack of faith in the word of God. It says in the Bible that whatever is not of faith is sin.
First, I see no reason to think that evil is "merely lack of faith in the Word of God." No offense, but that definition seems very contrived. It is completely different ...[text shortened]... ou are using the Creation to constrain the Creator.[/b]
Everyone knows that;
Mint-choc chip = Good,
Rum & Raisin = EVIL!!!!!! 😠(the most satanic smiley I could find)
LOL, Good work, loving it large!
Originally posted by telerionWhew, that was a long one. You brought up some good points though (as I'll discuss in a moment). To conserve space, I've omitted your post.
So if I can summarize your "God out of the box" premise...
God started with nothing and created everything, including the laws that govern everything. Therefore, everything is ultimately God's responsibility/fault. I think I got that right.
The problem with this agrument is that it negates the responsibility that goes along with free will. If my grown son comits a crime should I go to jail? Of course not, because at some point his free will shifts the responsibility for his actions from from me to him. The same is true with the human race. God created Adam, then gave him instructions on what he could and couldn't do. At that point, Adam became responsible for his own actions, not God.
As far as Adam and Eve knowing good and evil, let me try again. They didn't "know" good from evil because they had never experienced evil and therefore had nothing to contrast it with. I think the closest analogy I can make is that it never dawned on them what evil really was. They had been told what they were not allowed to do and they understood. Therefore, they were indeed responsible for their own actions, but didn't understand what evil was (maybe that's a better way to describe it) until they had done it themselves.
> Therefore, one cannot say that God did not create Hell for humans as well as demons. Perfect foresight rules out that defense.
Here you are putting your limits on God's creation. How long did hell exist before God created the world? It is possible that God created the angels and hell and then, at some later point, decided to create us. Hell could have existed for eons before the concept of creating humans ever entered God's mind. Does God having individual thoughts make Him not-omniscient? I don't know, I'll have to think about that one...
As for the rest of your post, you said "Finally, it is clear from the Bible that perfect things and imperfect things can share proximity with each other". You make a good point here, although I'm not sure about the word prximity. Your 2nd and 3rd examples I can dismiss as they were here on Earth. Yes, on Earth, good and evil can exist right next to each other. But your first example I'll have to research. Just how do things exist in heaven? Are they like grains of sand that co-exist to make up a beach? Or are they like salt and water co-exist to make up the ocean? I don't know. I'll have to check into that further. Thanks for the new perspective.
DF
Originally posted by DragonFriend"So if I can summarize your "God out of the box" premise...
Whew, that was a long one. You brought up some good points though (as I'll discuss in a moment). To conserve space, I've omitted your post.
So if I can summarize your "God out of the box" premise...
God started with nothing and created everything, including the laws that govern everything. Therefore, everything is ultimately God's responsibility/fau 'll have to check into that further. Thanks for the new perspective.
DF
God started with nothing and created everything, including the laws that govern everything. Therefore, everything is ultimately God's responsibility/fault. I think I got that right."
No, basically all Tel is saying is that you cannot claim that god is constrained by the rules of the universe if he had ultimate free-will when he created them - he could have created the universe any way he wanted. And since he apparently does have unlimited foresight, knowing everything that can, has and will happen, and he created the rules of the universe the specific way they are ... well, yes, I suppose everything either good or bad does run to his design or omniscience cannot exist.
Originally posted by telerion[/i]First off, whatever the nature of free will, God authored it. He is the designer. He was not constrained by any of it's current characteristics.
First off, whatever the nature of free will, God authored it. He is the designer. He was not constrained by any of it's current characteristics.
To the second part, free will does not necessitate a choice of good and evil actions. Here is a definition of free will.
If an agent chooses action A in the state of nature S, then the agent has free inition above (and its a pretty standard one) the agent in the ice cream shop has free will.
To the second part, free will does not necessitate a choice of good and evil actions. Here is a definition of free will.
If an agent chooses action A in the state of nature S, then the agent has free will if the agent could have chosen a different action A' in the same state S.
Simply put, free will means that the state of nature does not reduce the agents choice set to a singleton set (containing only one element). If the state of nature did constrain the agent to a unique choice, then we would say that his choice is determined, thus determinism.
Now given this more general view of free will, we see a choice over good/evil actions is just a subset of the collection of all possible choice sets.
I'd like to point out that an agent does not need to have an unlimited choice set in order to have free will. If this were not true, then this discussion would be trivial as it is simply evident that every human has a constrained choice set. For example,no one can choose to drink all the water in the ocean or extinguish the stars in the Milky Way.
[/b]What does all this mean? We’re not taking a chemistry exam here. If you could stop trying to talk in a way that sounds deliberately confusing I’d appreciate it.
Just as our choices are constrained by our physical limitations, an agent's choice set could be constrained so that he could not choose actions that have good/evil associations. Really all the agent needs for free will to be possible is a choice set with at least two distinct elements and the freedom to choose either in a given state of nature.
Ok, so an example of free will in which you do not have a choice over good/evil actions. Ice cream. An agent walks into an ice cream shop with 50 flavors available. If the agent can choose any one of those flavors in that state of nature, then he has free will. There is no reason to think that choosing one flavor or another has any good/evil value attached to it. Nevertheless, by the definition above (and its a pretty standard one) the agent in the ice cream shop has free will.
[/b]So what your basically saying is that because people aren’t free to make any kind of choice they want, and because not all choices that are possible necessarily have moral value, God could have limited free will to just this, a bunch of meaningless choices.
Why? If such were the case there could be no good, and as I have said evil must exist in order for there to be good. The idea is not to have just a bunch of meaningless actions, the idea is to eventually have all souls become good. That’s the purpose of life and creation as I understand it, to find God, and all that it means.
Free will simply means that we are free to choose between possible options (see how simply this can be stated). Give me an example of a world where on the one hand the inhabitants have free will, and on the other hand all possible actions have no moral value.
If you tell me that the ice cream parlor is the world, and the inhabitants simply exist for all eternity to choose flavors of ice cream, I’ll ask you what the point is? Would you want an existence like that? There is much more to life. If you agree then you agree that it was necessary for God to make free will the way that he did. He gave us the capacity to choose between good and evil. This doesn’t mean that any law has authority over God, it just means that God created the universe in the best way to achieve the ultimate goal.
Originally posted by scottishinnzOriginally posted by The Chess Express
No, basically all Tel is saying is that you cannot claim that god is constrained by the rules of the universe if he had ultimate free-will when he created them - he could have created the universe any way he wanted. And since he apparently does have unlimited foresight, knowing everything that can, has and will happen, and he created the rules of t ...[text shortened]... yes, I suppose everything either good or bad does run to his design or omniscience cannot exist.[/b]
…This doesn’t mean that any law has authority over God, it just means that God created the universe in the best way to achieve the ultimate goal.
Originally posted by scottishinnzOriginally posted by dottewell
so it's a means to an end then? Or, if he;s not cool with it, why allow it to exist?
The original point you were making was that there could be no heaven without hell (or vice-versa, I forget). This does not follow from the fact that without good there could not be evil, or vice-versa.
Look at it this way. There are only two possible ways that people can do good. 1. They’re forced to. 2. They choose to. Let’s look at both possibilities.
1. If people were forced to do good then is it really good? If God were to force every living creature to do good then the good would be nothing. It would just be an act that has to happen. The idea of good comes from a person choosing not to do evil.
Example: If we take a mindless robot that is programmed to wash our dishes, is this a good act? If we take a human who decides to do his chores then we can say that he is good because he could have chosen not to.
Example: Even the act of sacrificing ones self to save others, say a soldier who throws himself on a grenade, if there is no free will involved what does this act really mean? It means that the soldier who sacrificed himself could not have done anything else, and all those that he saved are just a bunch of mindless robots like he, robots who have no free will. The act is not good or evil.
2. If you accept 1 then you realize that free will has to exist in order for there to be any good or evil. Without it, our actions loose there moral value.
Originally posted by dottewell
Let us go back to our thought-experiment of a world where every act is good. I can accept that the inhabitants might have no word for "evil". They might have no concept of evil. They might have no word for "good", and no concept of good. But WE would know that good acts were done on their world.
Do the inhabitants have free will or not? If not then their actions cannot be judged as good or evil. If they do then they are free to choose evil as well as good, and their actions can be given moral value.
If we assume that they do have free will, and they always choose to do good, then the question is how did they get that way? The best answer based on what we experience here on earth is that at one point they chose to do evil. By doing evil they suffered the consequences of their actions and learned that evil is a poor choice. In this way they have come to know both good and evil. They have come to realize that evil is wrong by its very nature, and good is the only way that can lead to their continuing happiness.
Could such a place exist without any contrasting evil place existing as well? Could Heaven exist without hell? Well, if that were the case then the inhabitants would never have experienced evil and so such a place could not exit. They would never have come to realize that evil is wrong.
Jesus would be an example of an inhabitant of Heaven. The scripture tells us that Jesus has free will, and he always chooses good. We also know that he experienced plenty of evil. Jesus tells us that to be like him is the ultimate goal of every Christian. To have free will, to always choose good, and to understand why. As there are still plenty of souls left in creation who have a long way to go, hell is necessary for there to be a Heaven.
This raises the interesting question will hell still be necessary once all of God’s souls have come back to him? Once this happens, the answer may be no. Then again, look at what supposedly happened to Lucifer. He supposedly had reached the final goal that Jesus describes and then he forgot. It may be that evil has to exist as a reminder. Who knows?
Telerion,
When you say that my definition of evil is contrived, it is probably because I am only refering to the Biblical definition. It says in Romans 14:23 that whatever is not of faith is sin. I did not make this up and it is not contrived. You are right in that it can also be refered to as disbelief or even doubt. I therefore conclude that sin is evil. I do not think it such a stretch. How could sin be considered anything but evil?
Your other objections as to how I have chosen to describe evil in the past include the following descriptions:
1. evil is merely lack of faith in the Word of God
2. the absence of God's love in ones heart
3. the absence of good
In fact, all are correct. Let me harmonize the three for you. I realize it can get confusing. Everything that comes from God is good. This includes his love and his Word. Also, if goodness is absent, then it stands to reason that God is not apart of it because everything that is good comes from God. This is also scriptural and is not contrived. It says in the Bible that all good things come from God. I am only talking Biblically here and am not interested in the Wiki definition.
This leads me to the discussion of free will. As I have said earlier, God chose to give us free will. This is because he is a God of love. Love demands a choice to love one back. This implies the need for the option to reject the other party. Here again we see that rejecting God is equal to sin and evil because God is the Biblical definition of goodness. If you reject goodness, what are you accepting? It could only be the opposite of what you are rejecting. If you say that this is not so then why was God's creation in the Bible given the option to rebell?
Let me give you a Biblical example of what I am talking about in regards to good and evil. I am sure you have heard of God's servant David. In the Bible David commits several horrible sins. He sees a woman who he desires very much. In fact, he ends up having an affair with her even though she is married. Her husband has been out fighting battles for David and comes back to his unfaithful wife. At this point David finds out that she is pregnant. If her husband finds out he will know she has been cheating on him and David will more than likely be found out. He therefore tries to get her husband to go sleep with her in order for him to think it is his child. Unfortunatly for David, he is unsuccessful. David then becomes paniced and as a last resort decides to send him to the front lines in order to kill him off. Here we see the sins of David. The sins include adultery and murder. When God confronts David God says a very interesting thing. He asks David why he has shown contempt for his God. God viewed David's rejection of his moral laws as a personal rejection of himself. This can be found in 2 Samuel 12:9. Here we see the rejection of the goodness of God which include his righteous moral laws. You can call it sin, evil, or even disbelief. When I say disbelief, I mean to say that David knew the laws of God. He chose to ignore them and believe that he would be the better for it. God did forgive David for these horrific sins because he repented immediatly after being confronted. However, he paid a horrible price. As a judgement, he lost his unborn son and the sons of his own household turned against him.
To sum up, in this strory we can see that sin is equal to the rejection of God which includes the Word of God. In fact, God and his word are considered equal. In the gospel of John the first chapter it says that in the begining was the Word, the Word was with God and the Word was God. Here we see that God and his word are one in the same. If you reject one, you reject the other. This rejection is considered evil.
Originally posted by whodeyI don't worship any god, yet it is a command that I worship the christian god. Does this therefore make me 'evil', or is that commandment somehow wrong?
Telerion,
When you say that my definition of evil is contrived, it is probably because I am only refering to the Biblical definition. It says in Romans 14:23 that whatever is not of faith is sin. I did not make this up and it is not contrived. You are right in that it can also be refered to as disbelief or even doubt. I therefore conclude that sin is evi ...[text shortened]... e in the same. If you reject one, you reject the other. This rejection is considered evil.
Originally posted by scottishinnzI suppose this is why the Bible is considered so offensive to some. No one likes to be told they are wrong which includes me. With a humble heart, however, I recognize that I am flawed and need redemption. It is not a matter of being better than a nonbeliever. It is about accepting the truth and allowing God to reclaim what is rightfully his. We are after all his creation. From God's perspective you might conclude that part of his creation was stolen from him by willful rebellion. From your perspective you owe him nothing and can't understand why he wants so much as a thank you for giving you your very life. Perspective is such a wonderous thing.
Ah, I was waiting for this. The fundamental divide as stated by whodey. Well, boys, If your not a christian then you are EVIL!!!
Always wondered why it hurts going too close to a church, and now I know....