['do you honestly believe in a god whose ego is so fragile that without you conducting daily worship of his exsistence he would punish you? What kind of a god is that']
A just God is a God that tells you how to get out of a deadly situation. If he were unjust, he would force you to yield. But, he has given you the roadmap to eternal bliss and lets you decide which road you want to travel.
Free Will? That is a whole lot better than you have it here on this planet.
18 comments
Just Rick: Actually, no, I don't really see how that follows. Pre-known doesn't necessarily mean pre-determined (i.e. caused, decided, ahead of time). Pre-known doesn't mean forced to happen by the entity that knows about it ahead of time.
glyptodon, Assuming that a psychic can see all (and not be one of those fuzzy seeing, often wrong, television psychics) clearly, once they tell their customer of their future then they must have already seen themselves doing that. They would also be aware of what actions the customer is going to take based on the knowledge told to them. There is no possibility of change from what the psychic sees regardless of who or what they tell if they are truly "all knowing". No matter what they do the things that they see will come to pass (else they are not all knowing). It even strikes me that the psychic themselves are robbed of free will because there is nothing that they can do to change what they see for what they see IS what will happen. To allow for speculation, change, and interference breaks down the very concept of all knowing and free will.
The concept of free will and all knowing only works in a universal conception where every time an action is made, the negation(s) of that action spawn alternative, parallel universes. In that situation, it would be accurate to say that an all-knowing deity knows every POSSIBLE path the future may take, since every path WILL be taken. In that situation, you are but one possibility, and God would know every possibility that may occur. The fact that YOU didn't do something doesn't mean that it didn't happen; it merely means that one of your alternative states did it. And it isn't that God does or doesn't know which "you" is going to do it, since until the choice is made there is only one "you" (insofar as the decision tree is concerned). Of course, this argument is a bit hard to wrap the mind around, but it's the best one I've seen so far to try and explain it.
Glyptodon, your psychic thing isn't the same. AS I UNDERSTAND IT, psychics don't see everything- only snippets of the future, or vague things. And if you see something like a murder- and try to stop it, you could only end up causing it. Or if you see yourself getting money, you could end up acting as if you have the money already- only to cause yourself not to get it.
That is a good point that makes sense ... however ...
Just Rick: This is actually a major theological question, so it makes perfect sense to rationalize it. Omniscience as proof of predestination is an issue that any church espousing both must address (not the laymen, usually, but all the theological scholars that sit around in the Vatican or its equivalent).
A just god would come out from behind the curtain and explain all that to people. He certainly wouldn't send out all those PR teams to do his work for him in churches, especially when they've splintered into thousands of Christian sects, and I dunno how many Muslim sects.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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