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Author | Topic: Calvinism and Arminianism remix | |||||||||||||||||||
ringo Member (Idle past 443 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Phat writes:
So what's your point?
Perhaps God, being a wise teacher, foreknowingly modeled bad behavior knowing that humans with a conscience would call Him out on it. Just as he expects us to do to each other. Seems Cain didnt listen.
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ringo Member (Idle past 443 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Phat writes:
So which is it: Did He not create everything? Or was He not foreknowing?
Personally, I don't believe that God foreknowingly created evil.... Phat writes:
How is that substantially different from creating it?
... I DO believe that God allowed it and the consequences rippling out from it. Phat writes:
What can we learn from punishment after death?
Allowing humans to choose evil is expected if we are to learn anything after leaving the nest.
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ringo Member (Idle past 443 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Faith writes:
Obviously not true. The whole Bible is the story of people hearing God. The only change after The Apple was that they no longer believed everything He said blindly. He did, after all, lie to them. As grownups, they had to think for themselves.
They lost their original connection with God, they could no longer hear Him as they used to.... Faith writes:
All part of growing up; Daddy doesn't change your diapers any more.
... they now had to deal with a world in which thorns impeded their work of growing food which hadn't existed before, the woman had to suffer pain in childbirth which she hadn't had to before, she was also subject to the domination of her husband which hadn't been the case before... Faith writes:
The Bible doesn't say any such thing.
... they were now subject to physical death too, which wasn't the case before their disobedience. Faith writes:
Because it isn't the "basic theology" that you think it is. You should read the Bible instead of just commentaries.
I don't know why you didn't get at least some inkling of all this basic theology in your church experiences. Faith writes:
God said it: they became more like Him.
If Adam and Eve's disobedience had had the positive consequences you impute to it.... Faith writes:
Maybe you should consider the possibility that your ideas of "the Fall" are wrong. After all, you are directly contradicting God.
...one does have to wonder why there is so much turmoil and bloodshed in life now that didn't exist before their Fall.
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ringo Member (Idle past 443 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Phat writes:
We've been through this before. If He plants landmines in his front yard along with a "Keep Off the Grass" sign, HE IS RESPONSIBLE for the consequences. Our legal system understands that. Why don't you?
Because we chose it. He only allowed it to give us a choice. You seem intent on suing Him for the consequences of what we chose.
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ringo Member (Idle past 443 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Faith writes:
That's a bugos argument. Adam and Eve were the only people in the garden. You can't extrapolate their experience. There were far more people communicating with God after "the Fall' than before, even if it wasn't 100%.
Only selected people whom God chose as prophets, and that is in fact evidence for what I said since the vast majority did not and do not hear God as Adam and Eve did before they disobeyed. Faith writes:
That doesn't say anything about physical death. You can't have it both ways. You can't claim that Paul was talking about physical death and at the same time claim that Adam and Eve died a spiritual death.
... they were now subject to physical death too, which wasn't the case before their disobedience.
ringo writes:
Sure it does:
The Bible doesn't say any such thing.quote: Faith writes:
That is good and evil. It says that they understood good and evil for the first time, not that good and evil didn't exist before that..
In respect of knowing good and evil. But otherwise it was the beginning of all the suffering in the world for man and beast.
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ringo Member (Idle past 443 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Phat writes:
If your dog attacks somebody, are you responsible? Yes. Is the zoo responsible for the consequences? To paraphrase Judge Wopner: You can put up any damn sign that you please. It doesn't absolve you of your responsibility.
Phat writes:
You're missing the point. If you create an attractive nuisance - e.g. inviting people in see the dangerous animals - you have to take responsibility for the consequences. If you're not prepared to be responsible, don't open a zoo.
What alternatives would the legal system insist that the zoo provide?
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ringo Member (Idle past 443 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Phat writes:
I would go so far as to say that: Would you go so far as to say that since God allowed Lucifer to become Satan...in essence allowing evil to become actualized...that Satan himself could be an attractive nuisance?
Phat writes:
So He provides first aid after you step on the land mine? Too little, too late.
Given that, God provided Jesus Christ as an antidote to the nuisance.... Phat writes:
I would scrap the plans for Hell without even applying for the building permit. Tell me what the complications are with that, or give me my doughnut.
Ask any human to come up with a better plan, and dollars will get you doughnuts that other complications will arise because of their plan. Phat writes:
If you really want to give people a choice, let them choose between suffering and character OR no suffering and no character. My guess is you'll get a lot of happy people who get by just fine without much character.
One example that I usually give is the idea that if all suffering were removed, there would be no method in which to build character and strengthen resolve.
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ringo Member (Idle past 443 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
GDR writes:
Show your work.
Your examples are total non-sequiturs. GDR writes:
That's a terrible example - and a self-serving one. Yes, intelligent designs add up to a bigger intelligent design. Big tautological deal. But chemical processes are not intelligent to begin with so they don't add up to intelligent no matter how big the pile is.
A better example would be a car assembly line. We can observe all of the processes that result in the finished product. Which is the simpler conclusion? Is it that all of the processes just happened due to multiple chance occurrences or that is is all caused by a pre-existing intelligence. GDR writes:
Wrong is still wrong no matter how many times you assert it. Occam's razor points away from the superfluous intelligence. Occam's razor points to our existence being the result of intelligence and not blind chance. If you want to believe in intelligent design, feel free to do so. Just don't abuse poor Occam to do it.
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ringo Member (Idle past 443 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Phat writes:
As you ought to know, evolution doesn't necessarily favour character. Evolution will eventually weed them out. Trump's base is a prime example. The jury is still out on whether Trump's base will win or lose the evolutionary contest. It's just my subjective observation but I can almost see the US getting stupider by the minute.
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ringo Member (Idle past 443 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
GDR writes:
Hydrogen and oxygen have an emergent affinity for each other. They don't need an intelligence to bring them together and tell them what to do.
Sure the chemical processes themselves are mindless but the question is why did the processes happen in the first place. GDR writes:
Actually, it probably was by chance. Somebody noticed that rocks containing copper melted in a fire, so they got the idea of making copper tools. Then somebody found out accidentally that copper with certain impurities were stronger. The processes were there all along and didn't need any intelligence to bring them together. All the intelligence contributed was to use the existing processes for its own purposes. Bronze didn't come into existence by chance but because intelligent beings brought the necessary elements together. If you want to believe that God finally figured out how to Frankenstein life out of existing processes, feel free.
GDR writes:
Actullay, I'm not arguing that in this thread. I'm arguing that that scenario is simpler than one that adds intelligence to the mix. You are arguing for basic elements to come together to form atoms, atoms to single cells, atoms to life, and life to evolve into sentient moral beings and all that by chance. Adding something complex does not simplify anything. A driveway is simpler than a driveway with a car in it. A bottle is simpler than a bottle with a firefly in it. A blank page is simpler than a page with a sonnet written on it. X is simpler than X + Y. Period.
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ringo Member (Idle past 443 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
GDR writes:
That's exactly the problem with your argument: We don't know. Speculating about something we don't know is adding a superfluous proposition, which is directly opposite to Occam.
How do you know that. You just observe what happened but you haven't established whether or not it is by design. GDR writes:
No. I'm arguing that we don't know whether or not there is an "ultimate cause of it all". We do know that hydrogen and oxygen seem to have some kind of affinity for each other but speculating about whether it's leprechauns or space aliens pushing them together doesn't simplify anything. The imaginary pushers are what Occam was against.
You are saying that the natural processes that have resulted in the world as we know it are simply driven by a virtually an infinite number of cases of random chance, and that constitutes the cause of it all. GDR writes:
So a house that's held together by nails is a more complex explanation than a house that's held together by magic? Because there are hundreds of nails and only one magician? Come on. Surely you can see how stupid that argument is. I am arguing for the much simpler explanation that instead of the all the cases where random chance played a part in our existence there is simply one cause; a creation by intelligence. The complexity is the magician.
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ringo Member (Idle past 443 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Faith writes:
Poor helpless god.
God didn't do any of that; that's all the consequences of the Fall.
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ringo Member (Idle past 443 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Faith writes:
So all Christians agree with you and a Christian is defined as somebody who agrees with you. Perfectly circular.
Christians have disagreements but I don't know any who believe in the God you keep describing.My "we" refers to Bible believers.
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ringo Member (Idle past 443 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
New Cat's Eye writes: You're the one providing all this nonsense, not me. I'm not making claims about my God, you are. New Cat's Eye writes:
If all you say is you don't know, it's hard for any of us to tell what you think of your god.
I don't know.
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ringo Member (Idle past 443 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
kbertsche writes:
That isn't my assumption; it's what Christians keep preaching at us, that God is love - until we point out that, "if God does NOT reduce human suffering, He is either evil or impotent."
There seems to be an implicit, unstated assumption behind this (and most) discussions of "the problem of evil": that God's highest priority is to reduce our human suffering. kbertsche writes:
Who gives a damn about the "end of time" even if there was such a thing? Why should people suffer today for some supposed end-of-time benefit?
But what if God's highest priority is something else? Something on a longer and grander scale, like vanquishing ALL evil at the end of time? Phat writes:
As I already said to Phat, a lot of people would probably rather give up the personal growth. If God is so big on choice, why doesn't He give us that one?
What if His priority for us, now, is not to reduce suffering, but to effect personal growth? Phat writes:
That seems like a pretty bad analogy. An injury or sickness is a backward step and pain warns us to fix it - i.e to get back to zero. It isn't about improvement.
Perhaps suffering is needed for our personal growth, just as we know that physical pain is a helpful warning to protect us from physical harm?
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