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