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We were making excellent progress on evolution.

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Better known as:
That noob who crashed the chopper.
That noob who ran over the mine.
That noob who TK'd me with a sniper rifle.
That noob who hit that APC at 300m with light AT! Our APC...

CingularDuality

I'd be an ass to take offense at an accurate description of anything.

Or, I might not.

See, I'm tired of stepping on eggshells in order to avoid offending people. I'm a reasonable person, and I don't intentionally try to offend people, but I'm not going to go to unreasonable lengths to ensure that hypersensitive people don't get their feathers ruffled.

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Axis of Eeevil

*shrieking* What! me?! Hypersensitive?! How DARE you!

I don't think anyone who knows me would call me that, but that's OK. I'm not here to defend myself.

I'm sorry, I have a hard time believing that you'd not take offense, so long as a description is accurate. So that's the end of that.

For the record, I was correcting an error, not telling you to step on eggshells around us touchy Jesus people.

As far as being careful, you can indeed throw caution to the wind when talking about Jesus, or almost any religious figure, if you want. There's little risk.

I needn't mention religions for which the same approach could mean a sentence of death, just that the whole discussion changes if we take the same conversation and replace Christianity with one of those other religions. Suddenly there would be warnings, bans and closed threads galore. Christians are easy to talk about, since they betray their own beliefs if they don't just sit and take it.

PS Sorry for that double-post back there, how embarrassing...

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CingularDuality

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BeSiege82

that was a wierd cartoon...

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lTG-Irrl BeSiege82
A platoon leader in his own right...

"Courage grows strong at the wound."
"Virescit Vulnere Virtus."

"{My grump-o-meter starts to make a high-pitched whine when I point it at your post, though.}" -- Axis

ednos

Weird it may be, but also relevant, and containing frightful amounts of truth.

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The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. ~ Bertrand Russell
I have a tendency to key out three or four things and then let them battle for supremacy while I key, so there's a lot of backspacing as potential statements are slaughtered and eaten by the victors. ~ Magna Centipede

SmokingTarpan

Sorry for not getting back to this sooner; I've been out of town and busy for a bit.

Why wouldn't it be? You've even already labeled it as a task yourself. All that's required for a task to exist is an end-goal, of which either you are or are not able to achieve yourself (this is not the same as saying said goal is inherently able to be achieved or not). The end-goal may seem silly and irrelevant, but so are bunny slippers.

The only response that I believe applies to this is, who are you (or I) to decide what is a meaningless task? Remember, we're human and thus fallible, finite and altogether small. What you or I believe or decide in the end doesn't matter; only what God (in your case, and the case of this argument) does.

I've actually been very decisive and defined quite well what I wanted to ask for: Free Will absent the possibility of evil.

Remember, God is the one in charge. It's not like the Universe has laws, and God must remain within boundaries set for him. God makes the boundaries, the rules. Therefore Free Will is only what God defines it to be. In the case of Christianity today, Free Will has been defined by God as the ability to choose sets of actions that are either good or evil.

But what if God had defined Free Will as the ability to choose sets of actions that are only good? Would that not still be Free Will? Of course it would be, because God defined it as such. To say that it's not actually Free Will would be saying that you either a) disagree with God's rule or b) that there are laws higher than God that must be followed. Neither of these options conform well to the views of Christianity that I'm aware of, or many other major religions for that matter. But, more importantly, would you even know any better to believe otherwise? Remember, it's not like you just haven't been able to achieve other options because you're too stupid or slow- those optional beliefs simply don't exist for you to follow because God never put them into the equation.

Remember that in the grand scheme of things, our logic and definitions here matter for zip. Saying that Free Will (or anything) cannot possibly, in any way have anything other than X definition puts us on level with God. That is, we're now defining something as an absolute rule for the universe and all of creation. Sounds like that would be called blasphemy to me.

So, God had the power to define the universe a certain way, including defining Free Will as the ability to choose only actions that are absent evil. But he didn't do so. Why? Because he didn't have the power to do so in the first place? Or because he's not omnibenevolent as we're lead to believe?

First, if God is not omnipotent, then really, priests need to stop preaching this as gospel. Yet another reason to question Christianity.

Second, if something is Good, then it cannot create something that leads to Evil, correct? However, God created Free Will in a certain way, and this resulted in Evil. So, although not the express intent, God did create Evil. This would make God Evil, and not Good, since Good cannot create Evil and a being cannot be both Good and Evil.

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ednos

A being cannot be both good and evil? This means that all humans are entirely evil, despite the varying amounts of good they contribute. In fact, this means that no beings are good, and everything is evil. If everything is evil, then there's no contrast to define evil, and the concepts are moot.

Is this what you're trying to say?

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The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. ~ Bertrand Russell
I have a tendency to key out three or four things and then let them battle for supremacy while I key, so there's a lot of backspacing as potential statements are slaughtered and eaten by the victors. ~ Magna Centipede

Kerostasis

That was still a thought in progress at the time, I believe the next segment is more applicable. So no comment here.

Certainly, my opinion or your opinion on which particular requests qualify as "meaningless" may well be flawed, and only God would know for sure. But that should not invalidate the general concept of a Meaningless task as opposed to an Impossible task.

I'm going to disagree with you here on the nature of definitions -- God can set all the characteristics of what something IS, but the definition of the LABEL we apply to that something is created by those who use the label.
(disclaimer - Technically speaking, God could control all our thoughts and force us to choose a different label, but since that would defeat the purpose of Free Will to begin with, he normally chooses not to do that. So I'm going to proceed under the assumption that we can control our own language.)

The point of my objection doesn't matter until your next comment, so...
The concept of the ability to choose only among sets of actions that are good is actually a task that is perfectly within God's power -- that is how the Angels are, for example. (At least as far as I know, although descriptions of Angels are very limited in the Bible, so I could be wrong.) However, even if you change the LABEL of "free will" to apply to that scenario, that does not eliminate the concept of the ability to choose sets of actions that are not good. We would need to find a new label for this concept that now has no name, but the concept still exists. It would still be a meaningless task to ask for one intelligence to fall within both mutually exclusive concepts. This of course begs the question of why we want an intelligence to meet the second concept to begin with, which I'll get to a little later, but just to clarify: Are you asking for an intelligence that meets both concepts at once? Or are you satisfied to have an intelligence that meets only the "all good" concept as long as we LABEL it "free will"?

Since I wasn't actually doing that, I don't feel this needs much response. I was trying to discuss the concept commonly labeled as "Free Will" rather than the label itself, so you can give that label any definition you please, but it won't impact the concept I'm trying to discuss.

Now we get to core question number 2 -- God had the power to create all things incapable of evil, lacking in what we commonly label "Free Will", and he chose not to. He chose instead to grant humanity Free Will, making us capable of Evil, even though God himself is the essence of Good and contains no Evil. Why? Why would he do such a thing?

This is a very complicated question in itself, and I can offer only my best speculation. Let us start with an analogy. Suppose you had a fabulously beautiful work of art displayed in a room that could not be reached by sunlight -- it was pitch black. You don't need to change the artwork -- the artwork is already beautiful without any extra help, but with no light to illuminate it, who can appreciate its beauty? So you start installing light sources in the display room. And just one light won't do the job -- you need several different lights arrayed in different places to properly illuminate all the aspects of the work (assume its 3-dimensional).

God is somewhat like this artwork, only instead of relying on someone else to install the lights, he is creating them himself. With nothing else besides himself in existence, he was already perfect -- but there was nothing to illuminate his many aspects, and no one to appreciate them. Rather than creating just one type of thing, God created many different types of works, each of which could illustrate a different aspect of God.

Back to the artwork analogy - suppose one of the impressive properties of the art is the way it reflects red-wavelength light, with just the right amount of shimmer. But none of the lights you have installed so far give off red light -- they are all concentrated towards the blue end of the spectrum. You're not the biggest fan of red light to begin with, but there's still an entire aspect of the art going to waste, so you reluctantly install a red light as well.

One of the aspects of God is Mercy, but of what use is Mercy when there is nothing to be Merciful for? God is a Merciful God, but this Aspect goes unnoticed if there are none capable of leaving him. Further, there is a certain benefit to having once been Apart from God and then drawing close to him, that exceeds the joy of those who have never left him to begin with. As evidence, the parables of Luke 15 lead to this statement by Jesus:
God greatly values those who have left and return, and this would not be possible if none could ever leave. He could force us all to stay, but that would not be as rewarding as being with those who chose of their own will to stay.

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SmokingTarpan

I'm not particularly trying to say anything, merely pointing out what I see as a grand flaw of Requital's argument; perhaps the "only one not both" only applies to deities? He said that if God is Good, then he cannot also be Evil. But if a Good God has introduced something to world that brings Evil, does that God remain all Good?

I contend that it does, since God is ultimately the one who determines the existence of such a thing. I'm not saying take X and modify it, so that both Xa and Xb exist as concepts. I'm saying change X itself to be different, but remain that X is the only thing that has ever existed- no alternative.

Example. Take an orange (well call it "orange modern", for clarity later on). An orange modern is an object that has certain qualities to it; a certain look, taste, feel. Now, imagine that instead of the orange that we know today, some other object- call it "twin orange"-- was the only thing that had ever existed. Twin orange has a different look, taste and feel than modern orange, but we still call it an orange. It isn't new, it hasn't been changed so that both orange modern and twin orange exist, we can't suddenly decide that twin orange isn't actually an orange and we need to give it a new name. Twin orange is the only thing that ever exists and has ever existed as a concept for that particular object; it's not that we don't know about orange modern, just haven't researched it yet- it simply doesn't, has not and will never exist.

Now apply this to Free Will. God makes Free Will absent the possibility of evil. There isn't Free Will A and Free Will B, where in one you can do evil and in the other you can't. There is only Free Will. You wouldn't need a new label because there's no contradicting concept- alternative concepts were never created by God, thus they don't exist. If something isn't introduced by God into the gigantic spectrum of possibilities, then it's NOT a possibility at all, therefore can't be meaningless (such as the concept of a "restricted" or "contradictory" Free Wills).

Well, to base it down, that sounds a lot like the following: "I'm a kind person, but I'm punching you in the face because you wouldn't otherwise truly appreciate my kindness when I'm not punching you in the face." My response to similar arguments is that I don't need to be shot to truly appreciate having not been shot, heh.

To forestall the "if you hadn't been hurt ever, would you truly feel good about not being hurt because you never experienced difference?" question, put numbers to it. Say I'm 100% happy, and then something bad is introduced that lowers my happiness to 80%. Then, the bad thing is removed. Does my happiness then shoot to 110%? No, it shoots back to 100%. I'm just as happy now as I was before the bad thing, so why did that bad thing need to be introduced for anything other than petty reasons?

Now of course, putting percentages to feelings is tricky at best. However, the underlying logic is the same. If your life is good, it's good. Introducing and then removing something bad doesn't suddenly make your life better than it ever was to begin with- it merely returns you to your starting point.

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[squadl]
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Kerostasis

You're getting very hung up on these labels. You've got to remember that "labels" is all they are. We can have labels for things that don't exist and will never exist, and we can fail to create labels for things that do exist. Very frequently, we create ambiguous labels that can describe two or more different things, but the important piece is the thing described, not the label used to describe it.

Taking your Orange example, in the possibility where we have Twin Oranges, no one has ever seen the need to create a label for Modern Orange, since there aren't any. There also won't be any, but that doesn't mean there COULDNT be any. If a geneticist was to create a gene sequence that just happens to match that of our Modern Oranges, and grow it, he would get a Modern Orange too. He wouldn't know what it was, since it would still be unlabeled to him, but there is no reason that particular combination of traits couldn't exist just because it hadn't been created so far.

More importantly, if you and I are discussing how the particular traits of Modern Orange are useful for some purpose, there is no reason for you to mention that our calculations would all be wrong if we were holding Twin Oranges instead of Modern Oranges, because even though the same word "Orange" is used as a shortcut to describe both, we are more interested in the actual properties of the Modern Orange than the potential properties of any object that falls under the label of "Orange". Even if we actually had the means to go GET a Twin Orange if we wanted it, that doesn't help us discover the best application for Modern Oranges, because theyre 2 different things despite the application of the same word to describe them.

For the topic at hand, your two different varieties of "Free Will" remain 2 different concepts regardless of what labels are used to describe them. You could call them "Free Willy" instead and nothing would change. You could even call them "Enslaved Will" if you really want, but the label used does not inherently alter the concepts themselves.

You come to the strange conclusion that anything not created by God yet is not even a possibility. What if he decides to create it tomorrow instead? Something that has never yet been created can still be a possibility to be contemplated. For example, we can ponder the possibility of what would happen if the Gravitational Constant were twice as high as it is now. Its never been done before (as far as I know), but it could be. And even if you suppose we are discussing something so alien to us that we, as humans, could not even contemplate the possibility -- God could still contemplate the possibility, and could still make a decision on whether creating that possible thing would be a good or bad idea.

Bringing this idea back to our topic: Supposing that God created a variety of Free Will that could choose only among Good actions and could never choose Evil actions, and supposing further that those created could not even contemplate the possibility of a Free Will that could choose Evil Actions, God himself could still see the possibility, and God could still see whether that type of Free Will would be beneficial to create or not. If there are, in fact, benefits to creating that sort of Free Will, then the mere fact that other types of Free Will can also be created does not diminish those benefits of this type.

Response to Part 2 reserved for later

Note: I'm really enjoying this conversation, but forgive me if I reply slowly -- it takes some time to write posts worth reading on this topic.

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Requital

God's character is what defines his omnipotence. God could destroy the world again by flooding it, but that would make Him a liar, so He has bound his Omnipotence by His character. God still has the omnipotent nature but lacks the Will to do so. God calls Himself Good, Love, Faithful... and a myriad of other descriptions, and thus Limits his omnipotence to that which He Wills. So yes, God is not Omnipotent in the full sense of the word interpreted as (I can do anything I want to do at any time), but I am glad of that, because it means He can fulfil being Faithful and Just.

God does not describe Free Will. He doesn't even talk about it. What He does talk about is his Soverenty, which leads to the debates inside the Christian churches as to what exactly is Free Will. Somehow it acts like light. It has a complicated Dual nature that isn't fully understood. It is both Free and Enslaved. When Will is talked about it is in both contexts. Somehow both are correct.

Pokerface

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