Date: Mon, 9 Mar 1998 13:34:07 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: anti-theists Dear Craig, I don't recall having an anti-theists page. I certainly have a page or two on the book of Job, but other than linking everything I could find into that title page including some "theodicy material", I can't pinpoint the text you are referring to. If you could reference it I would be more than happy to try and answer your statements. As it is, I have very little context to go on, so I can only say some very general things: > Was just browsing along using an "Ibid" search and ran across your > anti-theists page. I feel that the free-will debate wasn't boiled down > far enough. Just to have my quick say. > 1. God gave man free-will. The ability to make his own choices, > non-predetermined. In some senses of the word "free-will", your statement makes sense. One must, of course, define ones terms carefully. > 2. Free-will is an impossibility. All choices were affected by all > previous actions and your personal make-up. Genetics and your personal > experiences to date. Wether I choose to run a red light or not, is > totally dependant on the surrounding circumstances as well as lessons > learned in the past. In some other senses of the word "free-will" this is also true. However, note that usage #1 and usage #2 don't overlap a whole lot. The big difficulty with Aristotelian deductive logic, is that the conclusions are all contained in the presuppositions. This means one must spend an awful lot of time carefully defining one's terms. The apparent contradiction you are struggling with MOSTLY goes away when terms are defined more carefully. Then the residue left over is basically presuppositions about the nature of God. And that is exactly the problem. That is why Jesus said "unbelief is a sin". Its the belief structure that determines logic, not the other way around. > 3. If God is omniscient and omnipotent, then at the moment of Creation > he knew all about me, the trials I would face and the decisions I would > make. As well as why I made them. It is predetermined. Again, you are using $10 words like omniscient, which lay claim to vast swaths of presuppositions. Explaining these terms will take another 5 chapters, and boil down to belief structure. This isn't intended to be a proof in any sense, but just a monkey wrench thrown into the machinery of logic to illustrate the confusion: Einstein said "nothing travels faster than light". This includes "information" (Claude Shannon 1950 etc.) If God "knows" everything, including the supernovae that exploded yesterday in the Andromeda galaxy but won't be seen on Earth for another million years, then He cannot live in "Einstein space". If God is not in "Einstein space", then He is "outside" of linear time. If God is outside of linear time, then "causality" doesn't apply to God. If causality and linear time don't apply, then "predetermined" has no connotation of "forcing the future". Einstein went to great lengths to show that the idea of "simultaneous" means absolutely nothing outside the "light cone"--two events that are too far apart to communicate by light are outside the light cone in 4-D space and can not influence each other in any way, predetermined or not. > 4. If God doesn't know, he is not omniscient. If he does know, then he > has predetermined my path. If I am an evil sinner, he knew long before I > came into existence. Even if he did exist, as stated above, then I > certainly wouldn't have any respect for him. Now you are applying the "linear time" and "causality" arguments to something that your #3 argument implied was outside of linear time. In philosophy, we would say that such a proposition is neither true nor false, it is just plain meaningless. Let me give you another example: "Can God make a rock too big to lift?" Either a yes or a no answer seems to imply that God is not omnipotent. The philosopher would say that the question was "ill posed", and is essentially meaningless, EVEN THOUGH it might make perfect grammatical sense and apply, say, to construction site engineers. One can make an infinite number of such meaningless questions, "Can God taste the color green?" or "Can God write the value of pi in closed form?" None of which prove God less than omnipotent. So you can see why proper definition of terms is so important to philosophy. In fact, I would argue that language, philosophy, logic, art, and science are FUNDAMENTALLY religious activities. They are self-contradictory in an atheistic world. Pax, rob sheldon